Excerpts from The Empire of Cotton, Sven Beckert

...Why was it that the part of the world that had the least to do with cotton production - Europe - created and came to dominate the empire of Cotton? Any reasonable observer in, say, 1700, would have expected the world's cotton production to remain centered in India, or perhaps in China. And  indeed, until 1780 these countries produced vastly more raw cotton and cotton textiles than Europe and North America. But then things changed. European capitalists and states, with startling swiftness, moved to the center of the cotton industry They used their new position to ignite an Industrial Revolution. China and India, along with many other parts of the world, became ever more subservient to the Europe-centered empire of cotton. These Europeans then used their dynamic cotton industry as a platform to create other industries; indeed, cotton became the launching pad for the broader Industrial Revolution...
...Following cotton, as we shall see, will lead us to the origins of the modern world, industrialization, rapid and continuous economic growth, enormous productivity increase, and staggering social inequality. Historians, social scientists, policy makers, and ideologues of all stripes have tried to disentangle these origins. Particularly vexing is the question of why, after many millennia of slow economic growth, a few strands of humanity in the late eighteenth century suddenly got much richer. Scholars now refer to these few decades as the “great divergence”— the beginning of the vast divides that still structure today’s world, the divide between those countries that industrialized and those that did not, between colonizers and colonized, between the global North and the global South...For a very long time, in this remarkably diverse, fabulously vibrant, and economically important world of cotton, Europe was nowhere to be found. Europeans had remained marginal to networks of cotton growing, manufacturing, and consumption...
...The growth of cotton manufacturing soon made it the center of the British economy. In 1770, cotton manufacturing had made up just 2.6 percent of the value added in the economy as a whole. By 1801 it accounted for 17 percent, and by 1831, 22.4 percent. This compared to the iron industry’s share of 6.7 percent, coal’s 7 percent, and woolens’ 14.1 percent. In Britain, as early as 1795, 340,000 people worked in the spinning industry By 1830, one in six workers in Britain labored in cottons. At the same time, the industry itself became centered on a small part of the British Isles: Lancashire. Seventy percent of all British cotton workers would eventually labor there, while 80.3 percent of all owners of cotton factories originated in that same county.
   The explosion of the cotton industry was not a flash in the pan. Instead, as we will see, other industries would be made possible by the rise of cotton: a railroad network, the iron industry, and later in the nineteenth century a new set of industries that would amount to a second industrial revolution. But cotton was the vanguard. As historian Fernand Braudel has argued, the Industrial Revolution in cottons affected the “entire national economy.” As late as the mid-nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution was still, numerically, the story of cotton....
   ...At the core of all these networks was the flow of cotton from the United States to Europe and of capital in the opposite direction...In similar ways, South Carolina indigo planter Peter Gaillard saw his fortunes revive thanks to the cotton boom. By 1790 Gaillard’s indigo business had all but collapsed...In 1796, however, he began growing cotton—"a brilliant prospect now opened to the eyes of the desponding planters"—a crop so profitable that four years later he had paid back all his debts and in 1803 constructed a new mansion on his property. Coerced labor meant rapid profits; by 1824 he owned five hundred slaves...Fortified by their wealth, confident of their slave-aided ability to squeeze ever more cotton from the land, American cotton planters came to dominate British markets by 1802...The world of cotton, which before 1780 had consisted mostly of scattered regional and local networks, now increasingly became one global matrix with a single nexus. And slavery in the United States was its foundation...
   ...As early as the 1810s, British manufacturers in particular began to worry that they had become too dependent on a single supplier for their valuable raw materials...Cotton manufacturers understood that their prosperity was entirely dependent on the labor of slaves...By 1850 one British observer estimated that 3.5 million people in the United Kingdom were employed by the country's cotton industry - all subject to the whims of American planters and their tenuous hold on their nation's policies.