Empire of Cotton

Sven Beckert is Laird Bell Professor of American History at Harvard University. His last book, Empire of Cotton, was the winner of the 2015 Bancroft Prize and the winner of the 2015 Philip Taft Prize, a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for History and shortlisted for the 2015 Cundhill Prize in Historical Literature.

A masterpiece of the historian's craft: combining a global scope with concern for the nuances of individual experience, Beckert tracks the fortunes of a single commodity, cotton, across six continents and thousands of years. That sweeping project is driven by the attempt to unravel the causes and consequences of one overarching puzzle: "why, after many millennia of slow economic growth, a few strands of humanity in the late eighteenth century suddenly got much richer." On the way to his answer, Beckert uncovers a history he claims "provides the key to understanding the modern world." . . . The belief that discovering the origins of economic growth might unlock modernity's secrets raises questions that are even more tantalizing