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"The epic story of the rise and fall of the empire of cotton, its centrality in the world economy, and its making and remaking of global capitalism. Sven Beckert's rich, fascinating book tells the story of how, in a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful statesmen recast the world's most significant manufacturing industry combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to change the world. Here is the story of how, beginning well before the advent of machine production in 1780, these men created a potent innovation (Beckert calls it war capitalism, capitalism based on unrestrained actions of private individuals; the domination of masters over slaves, of colonial capitalists over indigenous inhabitants), and crucially affected the disparate realms of cotton that had existed for millennia. We see how this thing called war capitalism shaped the rise of cotton, and then was used as a lever to transform the world. The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, farmers and merchants, workers and factory owners. In this as in so many other ways, Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the modern world. The result is a book as unsettling and disturbing as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist"..

Series foreword -- Introduction -- The history of capitalism -- Debates -- Perspectives -- Bibliography

Abstract
This article reviews how historians and economists have thought about the economic history of Europe. It notes that internal explanations that paid little attention to the non-European world have been dominant for more than a century, and reviews some of the reasons for that Eurocentrism. Such navel-gazing, however, has also been increasingly challenged for some time now, at first especially by non-European scholars and activists. The latter parts of the article explore current debates within the discipline and its increasing acknowledgment of the interactions between European and non-European economies. Two areas of discussion that have played a crucial role in this evolution are detailed in particular: the question of the role of slavery in European economic development and the rich debates taking place in the relatively new field of global labor history. Overall, efforts to write the economic history of Europe confined to its own ill-defined boundaries might serve particular political needs, but they are, in fact, historically inaccurate.

La fabrique économique de l'Europe Les origines extra-européennes de l'Ancien MondeCet article s'intéresse à la manière dont les historiens et les économistes ont pensé l'histoire économique de l'Europe. Il remarque que les explications internes qui accordent peu d'attention au monde non européen ont dominé pendant plus d'un siècle, et passe en revue certaines des raisons de cet eurocentrisme. Cependant, un tel nombrilisme a également été de plus en plus contesté depuis un certain temps, d'abord principalement par des universitaires et des militants non européens. L'article explore enfin les débats actuels au sein de la discipline et sa reconnaissance croissante des interactions entre les économies européennes et non européennes. Deux sujets de discussion ayant joué un rôle crucial dans cette évolution sont particulièrement détaillés : la question du rôle de l'esclavage dans le développement économique européen et les riches débats qui ont lieu dans le domaine relativement nouveau de l'histoire globale du travail. Finalement, si les efforts visant à écrire l'histoire économique de l'Europe en la confinant à ses propres frontières mal définies peuvent répondre à des besoins politiques particuliers, ils sont, dans les faits, historiquement trompeurs.

Résumé Tout le travail fait en dehors de l'Amérique du Nord et de l'Europe n'était pas marginal mais central dans la grande histoire de la montée du capitalisme. Il recouvrait une forte diversité de régimes de travail étroitement liés. Dès lors nous voilà face à un puzzle : comment expliquer la diversité des systèmes de travail face à ce qui pourrait apparaître comme la logique universelle du capital et du pouvoir d'État ? Telle est la question essentielle pour les historiens du travail qui s'engagent dans la voie d'une histoire mondiale. Cet article explore ce problème fondamental en faisant l'histoire d'un important produit de base : le coton. Celui-ci est associé à l'esclavage, au métayage et au travail salarié « libre » dans des combinatoires qui changent sans cesse, et qui sont modelées par les employeurs, les États et les luttes des paysans.

The United States has long epitomized capitalism. From its enterprising shopkeepers, wildcat banks, violent slave plantations, and raucous commodities trade to its world-spanning multinationals, its massive factories, and the centripetal power of New York in the world of finance, America has shaped political economy for two centuries and more. But an understanding of "capitalism" is as elusive as it is urgent. What does it mean to make capitalism a subject of historical inquiry? What is its potential across multiple disciplines, alongside different methodologies, and in a range of geographic and chronological settings? And how does a focus on capitalism change our understanding of American history?American Capitalism collects cutting-edge research from prominent scholars, sampling the latest work in the field. Rather than a monolithic perspective, these broad-minded and rigorous essays venture new angles on finance and debt, women's rights, slavery and political economy, labor, and regulation, among other topics. Together, the essays suggest emerging themes in the field: a fascination with capitalism as it is made by public authority, how it is experienced in the detail of daily life, how it spreads across the globe, and how it can be reconceptualized as a discrete and quantified object. A major statement for a wide-open field, this book demonstrates the breadth and scope of the work the history of capitalism can provoke

"In recent years historians in many different parts of the world have sought to transnationalize and globalize their perspectives on the past. Despite all these efforts to gain new global historical visions, however, the debates surrounding this movement have remained rather provincial in scope. Global History, Globally addresses this lacuna by surveying the state of global history in different world regions. Divided into three distinct but tightly interweaved sections, the book's chapters provide regional surveys of the practice of global history on all continents, review some of the research in four core fields of global history and consider a number of problems that global historians have contended with in their work. The authors hail from various world regions and are themselves leading global historians. Collectively, they provide an unprecedented survey of what today is the most dynamic field in the discipline of history. As one of the first books to systematically discuss the international dimensions of global historical scholarship and address a wealth of questions emanating from them, Global History, Globally is a must-read book for all students and scholars of global history."--Bloomsbury Publishing

AbstractEstimating the contribution of enslaved workers to output and growth in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century is a crucial building block to better understand the contours of nineteenth‐century US economic history, and more generally, the connection between slavery and capitalism. Existing estimates only present a partial picture and are potentially problematic. In this paper, we use data on enslaved person valuations to calculate the contribution made by enslaved workers to regional and national gross national product (GNP) in 1839 and 1859 and to the growth in per capita output in the 20 years before the Civil War. We find that in the United States, enslaved workers were responsible for somewhere between 12.49 per cent and 18.0 per cent of the increase in output per capita between 1839 and 1859.