@Book{ beckert2014,
    author = {Sven Beckert},
    title = {Empire of Cotton: A Global History},
    address = {New York},
    publisher = {Alfred A. Knopf},
    year = 2014,
}

Chapter 5

• presents Yazoo-Mississippi Delta as “the chief grower of the industrial world’s most important commodity—a kind of Saudi Arabia of the early nineteenth century” (113)
• plantations there were “highly capitalized businesses” (113) in which exploitation of labor was the chief way of increasing productivity
• “The all-encompassing control of workers—a core characteristic of capitalism—experienced its first great success on the cotton plantations of the American South” (115), which also pioneered modern methods of industrial discipline

p. 121:

The world of cotton, which before 1780 had consisted mostly of scattered regional and local networks, now increasingly became one global matrix with a single nexus. And slavery in the United States was its foundation.

p. 135:

In the first half of the nineteenth century, war capitalism seemed a vast and impenetrable machine, a painfully efficient mechanism for profit and power.

Chapter 6

Beckert argues that cotton industrialization depended on states able to protect it, and also that states which relied most exclusively on “war capitalism” (like Egypt) were the least successful at promoting industrialization. The issue for Beckert is not only whether slaves could be used in factories, but whether such a system would have led to sustained growth of industrial capitalism (p. 171).

Chapter 8

In the global merchant networks that undergirded cotton empire, p. 204:

The challenges of forging these ties were as vast as the potential profits. Consider just one chain of links. For a planter in Mississippi to provide cotton to a Manchester manufacturer, a local Mississippi merchant, a so-called factor, had to first provide the planter with credit to acquire slaves, land, and implements. This factor probably drew on London or New York bankers for these resources. Once the cotton had ripened, the factor would offer the cotton for sale to exporting merchants in the port of New Orleans, who would sell it to importing merchants in Liverpool, who would also provide insurance on the bales and organize their shipment to Europe. Once in Liverpool, the importing merchant would ask a selling broker, another type of merchant, to dispose of the cotton. As soon as buying broker found the cotton to his liking, he would forward it to a manufacturer. The manufacturer would work up the cotton, and then provide it to a merchant who would organize its shipping to a representative in a distant port, for example in Calcutta. Once there, the yarn would be sold to Indian merchants, who would distribute it into the countryside, where it would eventually be bought by an Indian weaver, who would sell it yet again to other traders who would deliver it to the retail merchants in villages and towns. Thus slave-grown Mississippi cotton manufactured into yarn in Lancashire might be woven into a shirt somewhere in the Indian countryside. The empire of cotton consisted of tens of thousands of such ties.