4 Quotes by Sven Beckert

Strong European states had simultaneously created barriers to the import of foreign textiles just as they built a system for the appropriation of foreign technology. By orchestrating economic processes in Asia, Africa, and the Americas as well as in Europe, Europeans gained the paradoxical ability to direct the global trade in Indian textiles while at the same time keeping Asian cloth increasingly out of Europe, instead trading the products in Africa and elsewhere beyond Europe’s shores.

The empire of cotton has continued to facilitate a giant race to the bottom, limited only by the spatial constraints of the planet.

Ironically, their shocking success also awakened the very forces that eventually would marginalize them within the empire they had created.

When we think of capitalism, we think of wage workers, yet this prior phase of capitalism was based not on free labor but on slavery.