How long does it take to read Empire of Cotton?
Sven Beckert
Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert takes about 11 hours 44 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 11 hours 44 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2004. 640 pages, about 176,000 words.
24 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 19 hours 33 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 11 hours 44 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 7 hours 20 minutes |
The page count is the median across 11 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
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. - Publisher.
Subjects: HISTORY / World, Cotton plantation workers, HISTORY / Social History, Cotton trade, Slavery, Textile workers
