How the Empire of Cotton Transformed Workers from Enslaved to Exploited

In his magisterial work Empire of Cotton: A Global History, Harvard historian Sven Beckert weaves a sweeping narrative that places cotton at the very heart of modern capitalism's emergence. More than a commodity history, Beckert's Bancroft Prize-winning book reveals how the seemingly mundane fiber in our clothing created the template for global exploitation—first through slavery, then through wage labor—that continues to shape our world today.

War Capitalism and the Cotton Empire

Beckert introduces the concept of "war capitalism"—a system in which European entrepreneurs and powerful states combined imperial expansion, slave labor, new machines, and emerging wage labor to fundamentally reshape the global economy. Cotton wasn't simply another commodity; it was the launchpad for the Industrial Revolution and the first truly global industry.

The numbers are staggering. By the eve of the Civil War, cotton represented 60% of all American exports. The United States had risen from producing virtually no cotton at all to dominating global markets in just 70 years. This explosive growth rested on a brutal foundation: the forced labor of enslaved African Americans in the fields of the South, whose cotton fed the mills of Manchester, Lowell, and Fall River.

From Slavery to Wage Labor: A Transformation, Not Liberation

One of Beckert's most powerful insights concerns the transition from slave labor to wage labor. The end of slavery in America didn't represent capitalism's moral evolution, but rather its adaptation. The cotton empire had demonstrated that labor could be mobilized on an unprecedented scale—the question was how to maintain that mobilization without chattel bondage.

In the fields, sharecropping and debt peonage replaced slavery, creating systems of control that were economically similar even if legally distinct. In the factories, a new industrial working class emerged—ostensibly free, but subjected to conditions that were, in many ways, equally dehumanizing.

Beckert documents how this shift required the creation of an entirely new relationship between workers and work. For millennia, most people worked because they were compelled as slaves, served as feudal dependents, or produced their own subsistence on land to which they had rights. The cotton mills demanded something unprecedented: masses of people who would exchange their labor power for wages and submit to the relentless, machine-driven rhythm of industrial production.

Fall River: Cotton's Northern Capital and Its Discontents

By 1875, Fall River, Massachusetts, had emerged as the leading textile center in the United States, its mills fed by Southern cotton and powered by immigrant labor. The city embodied the contradictions of industrial capitalism that Beckert chronicles: tremendous wealth concentrated in the hands of mill owners, who built grand mansions overlooking a workforce living in tenement squalor.

The conditions were brutal. Workers—including significant numbers of children—labored in dangerous, deafening environments for wages that barely sustained life. Fall River had one of the highest child mortality rates in Massachusetts, alongside other mill towns like Lowell, Worcester, and Holyoke. In Lawrence, just up the coast, one-third of textile workers died before age 25.

The 1904 Fall River textile strike crystallized these tensions. When the Fall River Cotton Manufacturers' Association announced a 12.5% wage cut in July 1904, workers across the city walked out. The strike highlighted a pattern Beckert identifies throughout the empire of cotton: workers were not passive victims but active agents in challenging the system that exploited them.

The Bourne Mill, situated literally on the Massachusetts-Rhode Island border, became a symbol of the geographic mobility capital would use to escape worker demands. When faced with strikes and labor organizing in the North, mill owners increasingly looked to the South, where lower wages, newer equipment, and proximity to raw cotton promised higher profits.

Labor Mobilization and the Fight for Rights

Beckert argues that labor mobilization became the ultimate threat to the cotton empire's dominance in the West. As workers organized and demanded better conditions, higher wages, and basic safety protections, production costs rose. This wasn't simply an economic calculation—it represented a fundamental challenge to the exploitation that had driven cotton capitalism from its inception.

The significant strikes of the early 20th century—including Fall River in 1904, Lawrence in 1912, and the national textile strike of 1934—were part of this broader pattern. Workers demanded recognition that they were human beings, not merely factors of production. They fought for:

• The right to organize and bargain collectively

• Safe working conditions in mills where machinery maimed and killed with regularity

• Wages sufficient to support families without sending children into the mills

• Reasonable hours instead of the punishing schedules that destroyed bodies and spirits

• Compensation and support when workplace accidents occur

These movements eventually led to landmark reforms. Wisconsin passed the first state workers' compensation law in 1911, the same year as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that killed 146 garment workers. By 1949, every state had enacted workers' compensation programs. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 established minimum wages and maximum hours. The right to organize was protected, however imperfectly, by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.

The Race to the Bottom Continues

Yet Beckert's history doesn't offer easy comfort. The empire of cotton's logic—seeking ever-cheaper labor and escaping worker protections—didn't end with the decline of New England mills. It simply went global.

As American workers won better conditions in the mid-20th century, production moved to the South, then to Latin America, then to Asia. Today's global supply chains represent the latest iteration of cotton capitalism's geographic flexibility. The Bangladeshi garment worker, the Chinese textile operative, the Vietnamese seamstress—they are the latest in a centuries-long chain of people whose labor has been mobilized to feed the empire of cotton.

The 2013 Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, which killed 1,134 garment workers, echoes the Triangle Shirtwaist fire more than a century earlier. The multinational corporations that dominate today's fashion industry operate with a mobility that would astound even the most aggressive 19th-century mill owner, pitting governments against each other in what Beckert calls a "giant race to the bottom."

The Thread That Binds

Empire of Cotton forces us to see the connections between the enslaved cotton picker in 1850s Mississippi, the mill operative in 1904 Fall River, and the garment worker in contemporary Dhaka. These are not separate stories but a continuous thread—the thread of cotton itself, and the thread of resistance to exploitation.

Beckert shows that every advance in workers' rights has been won through struggle, not granted from benevolence. The transformation from slavery to wage labor was not a natural evolution toward freedom but a hard-fought battle that continues today. The laws protecting workers, ensuring safer workplaces, and providing compensation for injuries exist because people—often at great personal cost—demanded them.

As we wear our cotton clothing today, Beckert invites us to trace its threads backward through time and outward across space. Those threads connect us to a history of exploitation, yes, but also to a history of resistance and the ongoing struggle for dignity in work. Understanding that history, Beckert suggests, is essential for anyone seeking to build a more just and equitable future.

The empire of cotton may have transformed over the centuries, but the fundamental question it poses remains urgent: In whose interest does the global economy operate, and who pays the price for the clothes on our backs?