How War Capitalism Forged Modern Industrial Capitalism

The Empire of Cotton: How War Capitalism Forged Modern Industrial Capitalism

Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History revolutionizes our understanding of capitalism by revealing cotton not as a mere commodity but as the central thread weaving together the violent birth of the modern global economy. Beckert argues that modern capitalism did not emerge from peaceful market exchanges or spontaneous technological innovation alone. Instead, it was forged through what he terms “war capitalism”—a brutal system of state-backed expropriation, imperial conquest, and racialized labor exploitation that predated and enabled the Industrial Revolution. From the 16th to the 19th centuries, European states leveraged military power to seize land in the Americas, enslave millions of Africans, and dismantle thriving textile industries in India and China, all to secure a cheap, relentless supply of raw cotton for nascent factories in Manchester and beyond. Slavery was not peripheral but foundational; enslaved labor on Southern plantations produced the raw material that powered Europe’s industrial takeoff. Beckert demonstrates how the fusion of coerced labor, state coercion, colonial infrastructure, and financial innovation created a new global commodity chain—one that integrated continents into a single, profit-driven system. This integration birthed not only industrial capitalism but also modern institutions like banks, insurance markets, and wage labor. The legacy of this cotton empire persists in today’s global inequalities, shaped by a capitalist logic that commodified human beings and ecosystems for profit. By exposing the violent origins of modern markets, Beckert challenges romanticized narratives of free enterprise and reveals capitalism as a deeply political, state-constructed, and coercive system from its inception.

 

The Empire of Cotton:

In the annals of economic history, few commodities have wielded as much transformative power as cotton. While often dismissed as a humble fabric, cotton, in the hands of European empires, became the linchpin of a revolutionary economic order—modern industrial capitalism. Sven Beckert, in his magisterial work Empire of Cotton: A Global History, dismantles the myth of capitalism as a natural evolution of free markets and instead presents a chillingly coherent narrative: that capitalism was born not in boardrooms but on battlefields, plantations, and in the coerced rhythms of enslaved labor. “Cotton,” Beckert declares, “was the world’s first truly global commodity—and the industrial capitalism it helped create remade the world.” At the heart of his thesis lies the concept of “war capitalism”—a term he coins to describe a system of violent, state-directed extraction that laid the groundwork for everything we now associate with modern economic life.

War capitalism, as Beckert defines it, emerged in the wake of Europe’s “Great Connecting”—the age of exploration beginning in the 15th century. European powers, particularly Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands, used naval dominance, colonial conquest, and mercantilist policies to restructure global economic flows. Unlike earlier forms of trade that involved the exchange of finished goods—such as the exquisite cotton textiles from India that once adorned European elites—war capitalism inverted this model. It destroyed existing centers of production and replaced them with a raw material supply chain engineered to feed European factories. “The British did not merely trade with India,” Beckert explains; “they systematically dismantled its textile industry through tariffs, military force, and deindustrialization policies.” Indian weavers, once the world’s premier cotton artisans, were reduced to poverty or forced into raw cotton cultivation under colonial coercion.

This transition was not organic—it was engineered. And at its core was the Atlantic slave trade. Beckert insists that slavery was not an aberration but “at the very core of capitalist development.” Between 1780 and 1860, the United States became the world’s leading cotton exporter, with over 1.6 million enslaved people producing nearly 75% of global raw cotton by 1860. This unprecedented scale was not accidental. “The whip was the tuning fork of industrial capitalism,” writes historian Edward Baptist, echoing Beckert’s point that the brutality of the plantation system was calibrated to meet the insatiable demands of factories in Lancashire. Slave labor was not merely exploited—it was industrialized. Enslaved people were subjected to the “pushing system,” a regime of calculated terror that extracted maximum output through daily quotas enforced by whippings, sexual violence, and the ever-present threat of family separation.

Crucially, Beckert emphasizes that this was chattel slavery of a new kind—one integrated into global financial systems. Enslaved people were not just workers but assets: “Slaves were collateral, mortgageable property,” notes economist Daina Ramey Berry. Banks in London and New York accepted enslaved bodies as security for loans that financed railroads, factories, and insurance policies. The profitability of cotton created a feedback loop: more cotton demanded more slaves, more slaves demanded more credit, and more credit demanded more state protection of the slave system. As Beckert puts it, “The factory and the plantation were two sides of the same coin.”

This brings us to the indispensable role of the state. Modern capitalism, Beckert argues, could never have emerged without sustained, aggressive state intervention. “Free markets are not natural,” he insists; “they are created.” During the era of war capitalism (c. 1500–1800), states acted as conquerors and enforcers—securing land through genocide, labor through kidnapping, and markets through naval gunboats. The British Navigation Acts, Spanish encomienda system, and French colonial monopolies were not barriers to capitalism but its incubators. Even in the 19th century, as classical economists like Adam Smith championed laissez-faire, states remained deeply involved. The British Parliament passed the Enclosure Acts, which privatized millions of acres of communal land, creating a landless proletariat eager for factory work. In the U.S., Alexander Hamilton’s financial plan—including a national bank, protective tariffs, and federal assumption of state debts—was, as historian Eric Hobsbawm noted, “a deliberate act of state-led capitalist construction.”

The transition to industrial capitalism (c. 1780–1860) did not replace war capitalism but absorbed it. Steam engines and spinning jennies were revolutionary, yes—but they were useless without a steady flow of cheap cotton, which only slave plantations could provide at scale. The factory system in Manchester, hailed as the birthplace of modern industry, was thus “built atop the foundation of the slave plantation,” as Beckert starkly puts it. The synergy between coercion and mechanization created a new economic logic: one that valued efficiency, scale, and continuous accumulation above all else. This logic extended beyond production into finance. Cotton merchants pioneered modern instruments like futures contracts, marine insurance, and global credit networks. “The cotton trade was the laboratory of modern capitalism,” writes financial historian Niall Ferguson, “where risk was quantified, time was monetized, and human life was discounted.”

The global interconnectivity of this system was unprecedented. Beckert meticulously traces how African labor, stolen American land, European capital, and Asian technologies converged in a single circuit of accumulation. Indian techniques of spinning and weaving were appropriated and mechanized in Britain. Chinese cotton markets were penetrated through opium-fueled imperialism. Brazilian and Egyptian cotton filled the gap during the U.S. Civil War, revealing the system’s adaptability—and its dependence on coercion wherever it spread. “Capitalism,” Beckert concludes, “is not a European invention imposed on the world. It is a global process co-created through violence, adaptation, and resistance.”

Indeed, resistance was constant. Enslaved people rebelled—from the Haitian Revolution to Nat Turner’s uprising. Indian weavers sabotaged British-imposed looms. British workers, newly proletarianized by the destruction of cottage industry, organized the first labor movements. Yet the system proved resilient, constantly reinventing itself. After emancipation, planters in the U.S. South turned to sharecropping and convict leasing—forms of coerced labor that maintained racialized economic hierarchies. In India, colonial “free trade” policies kept the subcontinent as a raw material supplier, stunting its industrial development for over a century.

The legacy of this cotton empire is visible in today’s global economy. The same patterns of resource extraction, labor exploitation, and financial speculation persist—now cloaked in the language of globalization and free trade. As economist Ha-Joon Chang observes, “What we call the free market is always someone else’s regulated market.” The myth of the self-regulating market, Beckert shows, obscures the state’s enduring role as capitalism’s silent partner. From the British East India Company to the U.S. Interstate Highway System, the state has always picked winners, built infrastructure, and protected capital.

In fact, as the 20th century proved, even liberal democracies rely on state intervention. The New Deal, postwar nationalizations in Britain, and Cold War military spending all demonstrate that capitalism thrives not in spite of the state but because of it. Economist Mariana Mazzucato calls this the “entrepreneurial state”—a force that takes risks, builds knowledge, and creates markets that private enterprise later monetizes. “The internet, GPS, touchscreen displays—none of these would exist without government investment,” she argues. The same was true for cotton: without state violence, there would have been no Industrial Revolution.

Thus, Beckert’s work is not merely a history of cotton but a redefinition of capitalism itself. It is a system rooted not in freedom but in domination; not in innovation alone but in expropriation; not in individual enterprise but in collective coercion. “Capitalism,” he writes, “has always been a project of empire.” By centering slavery, colonialism, and state power, Beckert aligns with the “New History of Capitalism” school, which includes scholars like Walter Johnson, Caitlin Rosenthal, and Stephanie Smallwood. Their collective work dismantles the sanitized textbook version of economic progress and replaces it with a more honest, if disturbing, account.

As we confront climate collapse, rising inequality, and corporate power in the 21st century, Beckert’s insights are urgently relevant. The logic of infinite accumulation that drove cotton planters now drives fossil fuel executives and tech monopolies. The same disregard for human and ecological limits persists. “We cannot understand our present without confronting the violence of our past,” Beckerd insists. Only by acknowledging that capitalism was built on war, not peace; on slavery, not freedom; and on statecraft, not markets—can we imagine a more just economic future.

Reflection

Beckert’s Empire of Cotton is more than a historical account—it is a moral reckoning. By exposing the violent scaffolding of modern capitalism, he forces us to confront uncomfortable truths about the origins of our economic world. The prosperity of the West was not earned through ingenuity alone but extracted through centuries of racialized violence, ecological plunder, and imperial domination. This reorientation is essential: if we believe capitalism emerged from free individuals trading in open markets, we are less likely to challenge its injustices today. But if we recognize it as a state-constructed system built on coercion, we see that it can be restructured—or replaced. Beckert’s work also restores agency to the global South and enslaved peoples, not as passive victims but as co-creators of this history, whose resistance shaped the system’s evolution. The factory in Manchester and the plantation in Mississippi were two nodes in a single machine, and both were sustained by legal, military, and financial power. Today, as global supply chains replicate similar patterns—sweatshops in Bangladesh, cobalt mines in Congo—we see the enduring logic of war capitalism in new forms. Beckert’s thesis warns against technological utopianism: innovation alone cannot liberate us if it remains embedded in exploitative structures. Instead, we need democratic control over economic life, just as 19th-century abolitionists demanded moral accountability for slavery. The “free market” has always been a myth, but a powerful one—used to justify inequality as natural and inevitable. By deconstructing this myth, Beckert opens space for alternatives. As climate crisis and inequality intensify, his call to reimagine capitalism—not as a force of nature but as a human project—feels not just scholarly, but revolutionary. The empire of cotton may have faded, but its lessons remain vital for building a more humane economy.

Epilogue

The empire of cotton never truly fell—it merely changed costumes. Its railroads became container ships; its auction blocks, algorithmic labor platforms; its plantations, global supply chains stitched together by exploited hands in Dhaka, Shenzhen, and Ciudad Juárez. Beckert’s revelation is not merely historical—it is prophetic. Modern capitalism still runs on coercion disguised as choice, extraction rebranded as innovation, and state power masquerading as market freedom. The same logic that whipped enslaved hands to meet cotton quotas now drives gig workers to exhaustion through digital surveillance, all in the name of efficiency and growth. We are told this system is natural, inevitable—even benevolent. But Empire of Cotton shatters that delusion. Capitalism was not born of genius or grit; it was forged in blood, protected by law, and expanded by empire. To honor the millions whose lives were commodified in its rise is not to dwell in guilt, but to reclaim agency: if capitalism was built, it can be unbuilt. Its structures are human-made, not divine. And in that truth lies our most radical power—not to reform the machine, but to imagine a world beyond it, where value is measured not in profit, but in dignity, sustainability, and justice. The cotton fields are silent now, but their legacy screams a warning—and an invitation.

 

References

1. Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. Knopf, 2014.
2. Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism. Basic Books, 2014.
3. Chang, Ha-Joon. Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective. Anthem Press, 2002.
4. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848. Vintage, 1996.
5. Mazzucato, Mariana. The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. Anthem Press, 2013.
6. Rosenthal, Caitlin. Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management. Harvard University Press, 2018.
7. Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Harvard University Press, 2013.
8. Ferguson, Niall. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. Penguin, 2008.
9. Smallwood, Stephanie E. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Harvard University Press, 2008.
10. Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. Bloomsbury, 2023.