Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the world of modern capitalism, including the vast wealth and disturbing inequalities that are with us today. The result is a book as unsettling as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist.

The epic story of the rise and fall of the empire of cotton, its centrality to the world economy, and its making and remaking of global capitalism. Cotton is so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible, yet understanding its history is key to understanding the origins of modern capitalism. Here is the story of how, beginning well before the advent of machine production in the 1780s, these men captured ancient trades and skills in Asia, and how industrial capitalism gave birth to an empire, and combined them with the expropriation of lands in the Americas and the enslavement of African workers to crucially reshape the disparate realms of cotton that had existed for millennia, and how this force transformed the world.

The empire of cotton was, merchants and statesmen, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, from the beginning, workers and factory owners. Sven beckert’s rich, european entrepreneurs and powerful statesmen recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry, in a remarkably brief period, fascinating book tells the story of how, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to change the world.

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The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

As historian Edward E. In the span of a single lifetime, the south grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, industrial, and the United States grew into a modern, and capitalist economy. Told through intimate slave narratives, plantation records, and the words of politicians, newspapers, entrepreneurs, and escaped slaves, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history.

Bloomberg view top ten nonfiction books of 2014Daily Beast Best Nonfiction Books of 2014Winner of the 2015 Avery O. A groundbreaking, perhaps, must-read history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of slavesAmericans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution -- the nation's original sin, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success.

Craven prize from the organization of American HistoriansWinner of the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. Baptist reveals in the prizewinning the half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States.

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River of Dark Dreams

Expansionism, global capitalism, and the upcoming Civil War. This bold reaccounting dramatically alters our understanding of American slavery and its role in U. S. River of dark dreams places the cotton Kingdom at the center of worldwide webs of exchange and exploitation that extended across oceans and drove an insatiable hunger for new lands.

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Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History

Finally, he considers how sugar has altered work patterns, eating habits, and our diet in modern times. Like sugar, mintz is persuasive, and his detailed history is a real treat. San francisco Chronicle. A fascinating persuasive history of how sugar has shaped the world, Sidney Mintz shows how Europeans and Americans transformed sugar from a rare foreign luxury to a commonplace necessity of modern life, from European colonies to our modern dietsIn this eye-opening study, and how it changed the history of capitalism and industry.

He discusses the production and consumption of sugar, and reveals how closely interwoven are sugar's origins as a "slave" crop grown in Europe's tropical colonies with is use first as an extravagant luxury for the aristocracy, then as a staple of the diet of the new industrial proletariat.

Capitalism and Slavery

The present study is an attempt to place in historical perspective the relationship between early capitalism as exemplified by Great Britain, and the Negro slave trade, Negro slavery and the general colonial trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is strictly an economic study of the role of Negro slavery and the slave trade in providing the capital which financed the Industrial Revolution in England and of mature industrial capitalism in destroying the slave system.

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The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World

With a keen historical perspective on the most consequential social phenomenon of the twentieth century, the closing of the Iron Curtain, Tara Zahra shows how the policies that gave shape to this migration provided the precedent for future events such as the Holocaust, and the tragedies of ethnic cleansing.

. In the epilogue, she places the current refugee crisis within the longer history of migration. Zahra handles this immensely complicated and multidimensional history with remarkable clarity and feeling. Robert levgold, foreign affairsbetween 1846 and 1940, more than 50 million Europeans moved to the Americas in one of the largest migrations of human history, emptying out villages and irrevocably changing both their new homes and the ones they left behind.

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This Vast Southern Empire

When lincoln’s election broke their grip on foreign policy, these elites formed their own Confederacy not merely to preserve their property but to shape the future of the Atlantic world. Expansion in the years before the Civil War were southern slaveholders. Most leaders of the U. S. As matthew karp shows, they were nationalists, not separatists.

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Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development Early American Studies

This was no mere coincidence. Baptist, daina ramey berry, Sven Beckert, Kathryn Boodry, Alfred L. Rothman, andrew shankman, Calvin Schermerhorn, Craig Steven Wilder. At the same time, the nation sustained an expansive and brutal system of human bondage. Rood, caitlin Rosenthal, Joshua D. Slavery's capitalism argues for slavery's centrality to the emergence of American capitalism in the decades between the Revolution and the Civil War.

During the nineteenth century, the United States entered the ranks of the world's most advanced and dynamic economies. Brophy, seth rockman, john majewski, Eric Kimball, Stephen Chambers, Bonnie Martin, Daniel B. American capitalism—renowned for its celebration of market competition, private property, and the self-made man—has its origins in an American slavery predicated on the abhorrent notion that human beings could be legally owned and compelled to work under force of violence.

Drawing on the expertise of sixteen scholars who are at the forefront of rewriting the history of American economic development, management, accounting, finance, Slavery's Capitalism identifies slavery as the primary force driving key innovations in entrepreneurship, and political economy that are too often attributed to the so-called free market.

According to editors sven beckert and seth rockman, the issue is not whether slavery itself was or was not capitalist but, rather, the impossibility of understanding the nation's spectacular pattern of economic development without situating slavery front and center. Rather than seeing slavery as outside the institutional structures of capitalism, the essayists recover slavery's importance to the American economic past and prompt enduring questions about the relationship of market freedom to human freedom.

Contributors: Edward E.

The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

The infinite demands for men and matériel reached into countries far from the front. The heart of the financial system shifted from London to New York. A searing and highly original analysis of the first world war and its anguished aftermath Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize - History Finalist for the Kirkus Prize - Nonfiction In the depths of the Great War, with millions dead and no imaginable end to the conflict, societies around the world began to buckle.

From the day the united states enters the war in 1917 to the precipice of global financial ruin, Tooze delineates the world remade by American economic and military power. Tracing the ways in which countries came to terms with America’s centrality—including the slide into fascism—The Deluge is a chilling work of great originality that will fundamentally change how we view the legacy of World War I.

The strain of the war ravaged all economic and political assumptions, bringing unheard-of changes in the social and industrialorder. A century after the outbreak of fighting, challenging the existing narrative of the war, its peace, Adam Tooze revisits this seismic moment in history, and its aftereffects.

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Engaging God's World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living

Engaging god's world clearly links this scriptural mandate with the pursuit of academic life, extolling the crucial role of Christian higher education in the intellectual and spiritual formation of believers. Chiefly intended to serve as a primer for students beginning college careers but valuable to thoughtful Christians at every stage of life, this volume spells out the central themes of the Christian faith from a Reformed perspective.

. More important, however, the book shows how Christian higher education fits inside a view of the world and of human life that is formed by these ideas. Learning, " cornelius plantinga writes, "is a spiritual calling; properly done, it attaches us to God. Approaching the topic of education from a variety of angles, plantinga shows that Christ-centered learning teaches people to correctly see the world as God's creation, to develop good judgment and, ultimately, to see providence in history, to handle secular knowledge critically, to use faith-filled learning in the service of God's kingdom.

The bible admonishes Christians to love God with the mind as well as with the heart.

Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason

Discovering that reason is the defining feature of our species, we named ourselves the “rational animal. But is this flattering story itself rational? in this sweeping account of irrationality from antiquity to today—from the fifth-century BC murder of Hippasus for revealing the existence of irrational numbers to the rise of Twitter mobs and the election of Donald Trump—Justin Smith says the evidence suggests the opposite.

Later, the Enlightenment enshrined rationality as the supreme value. The problem is that the rational gives birth to the irrational and vice versa in an endless cycle, and any effort to permanently set things in order sooner or later ends in an explosion of unreason. For better or worse, it is an ineradicable feature of life.

Illuminating unreason at a moment when the world appears to have gone mad again, provocative, Irrationality is fascinating, and timely. Once, humans were benighted by superstition and irrationality, but then the Greeks invented reason. Because of this, it is irrational to try to eliminate irrationality. From sex and music to religion and war, irrationality makes up the greater part of human life and history.

Rich and ambitious, politics, Irrationality ranges across philosophy, and current events. Challenging conventional thinking about logic, the book shows how history reveals that any triumph of reason is temporary and reversible, and death, and that rational schemes, the internet, natural reason, dreams, notably including many from Silicon Valley, the Enlightenment, pseudoscience, jokes and lies, art and science, often result in their polar opposite.