Suchergebnisse

<div class="bookreview">Sven Beckert, <em>Empire of Cotton: A Global History </em>(New York: Knopf, 2014), 640 pages, $35, hardback.</div>For four years following the 2008 mortgage crisis, I worked as a cotton merchant for one of the "big four" trading firms&mdash;ADM, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus. These shadowy giants, two of them privately held, maintain oligopoly control of agricultural commodity markets. From desks in Memphis, my colleagues and I purchased mountains of cotton in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, warehoused it, speculated on it, and sold it back to mills on those same continents.&hellip; We sat at the pinnacle of a web of political and economic forces that funneled cotton into facilities we owned and cash into our accounts, but nowhere in the office was there a visible sign of the violence that made it all possible.&hellip; Too often liberal histories focus on a single period, territory, or class perspective, and end up obscuring the truth, severing the threads that tie a moment to its historical roots. Sven Beckert's <em>Empire of Cotton </em>is different. Although a liberal historian, Beckert refuses to limit his scope in the traditional way. Instead, he follows the movement of cotton across time, space, and class, bringing forward the threads that bind the objects of an otherwise distorted past.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-6" title="Vol. 67, No. 6: November 2015" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

"This book brings together contributors from a wide range of disciplines to explore the importance of cotton as a major resource for US fashion businesses. It is rooted in a lengthy investigative research project that deployed undergraduate and graduate students and faculty researchers to US fashion businesses that rely on cotton to make their garments—with the goal of better understanding how such a key resource is sourced, priced, transported, manipulated, and, ultimately, sold on to the consumer as a stylish garment. The contributors focus in particular on the role of brands in the marketing of cotton goods, and the way that brand marketing creates distinctions, valuable in the marketplace, between various versions of what are at base similar items of clothing, like t-shirts and underclothes. The book also explores the importance of the "Made in the USA" campaign, with its appeal to consumers concerned about local manufacturing employment, reduced resource use, and social responsibility."--