Globalization doesn’t result from a few bad decisions by Democratic politicians in the mold of a Bill Clinton or a Tony Blair. Anyone with a clue about how the world works can see that competition compels firms to search for raw materials, cheap labor, and lucrative markets beyond national boundaries. Globalization is something more deeply rooted and driven than all the debates over Brexit, NAFTA, or the Great Wall of Trump can possibly convey. Expansion and growth toward a global horizon are the core dynamic of capitalism. Yet it’s one thing to say this and something altogether different to grasp globalization as concretely as we might a hurricane or a war: catastrophic events that we can fix more neatly in time and visualize more clearly in their effects. Globalization can best be visualized pars pro toto, that is by focusing on a central actor or on some vivid and significant example.
Here are two books that I found quite helpful: Sven Berkert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (NY: Vintage, 2014) and Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (U of Chicago Press, 2021). Both sustain the global qualifier with globe-spanning accounts. Both reveal that the global trade in cotton cloth or spice extended back centuries, well before the emergence of the mercantile nation-state. The main focus, in either case, is the interaction of European capitalism with the remote socio-economic systems which were colonized by an aggressive European capitalism.
Many of us have taken for granted that European capitalism gave the world all the material gifts of modernity. We might concede that, unfortunately, this involved exploiting “backward” countries as sources of raw materials and export markets. Perhaps this was unfair, we concede; but in the long run, it meant progress; and once the colonies were set free and granted some foreign aid, we were all more or less even Steven. Right? For many people, you could add this corollary: those countries wanted to be rid of us as colonists and rulers. So that’s what they got, and now their people should damned well stay put. They didn’t accept us; so why should we accept them? They screamed “Asia for the Asians!,” or “Africa for the Africans!” So what’s wrong with, “Europe for the Europeans!” or “America for us English-speaking Americans!”
Berkert’s Empire of Cotton documents and recounts a different story, a global story that transcends the narratives of nation-states. In the restricted climate zone where cotton could flourish, agrarian peoples independently of one another discovered the use of cotton cultivation. Cotton could flourish alongside other staples. Cotton fiber could then be harvested, combed, spun to thread, and woven into a cloth that was easy to clean, dye, sew, and transport. Lightweight, it could be traded over long distances. Arab and Ottoman traders had introduced cotton fabrics from India and China at a time when Europeans still went about in garments of wool or linen. As the appeal of cotton fabrics grew, Europeans depended on imports first of the fabric, then of the raw cotton, and finally of the spinning and weaving technology from the East when they made their first tentative steps toward a domestic textile production. But even after European producers had begun to supply local markets and the knowledge and appreciation of cotton fabric had begun to spread in the West, the East still dominated the international trade. India stood for the highest quality of cotton merchandise.
Imperial expansion, not industrial technology or even capitalism as such, laid the groundwork for the reversal of the relationship of “the West to the Rest.” Imperial domination set the conditions for a restructuring of international commercial relations (in the same way that the armed cavalryman, not the skilled plowman or hardy cowboy, opened up the American West for farming and grazing). The technical inventions and advances of English industry required raw cotton. Much of it was cultivated and harvested by the enslaved toilers of the American South. Similarly, the English domination of the once-ascendant Indian market and supply network required the imperial power and authority of the Raj. This—not simply the superiority of English factory production—led to the rapid ascendancy of the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution did not arise out of nowhere to dominate colonized lands. Metropolis and colonies were equally essential to the industrial transformation of the world. However, the former benefited in roughly the same measure as the latter declined. Eventually, industrially produced and cheaper commodities exported from Europe and the United States would outstrip every indigenous production. Indians, once famed for their cotton cloth, would import clothing from England. Africans would abandon the cultivation of the traditional grains better adapted to their soil and instead import wheat bread from Europe.
What is impressive in Beckert’s book is the central focus on a constellation of forces as cohesive as a hurricane or an invasion. The pre-history and rise of the cotton textile industry is the driving force of a triumphant capitalism whose development is global from the very beginning. Without this global dimension of raw materials and markets, it could not have flourished. What is perhaps most original in Beckert’s presentation is his insistence on the threshold phase which he calls “war capitalism”: the creation by violent means of the conditions of production; the enslaved workers who were believed to be vital to an industry many thousands of miles away, and the administration and transformation of the competing producers and nascent markets many miles further around the globe. Of course, we weren’t unaware of the dependence of British industrialists on cotton from the American South; and we had heard also about the brutality of the British suppression of Indian resistance. But as long as these facts were subordinated to the narratives of national history, they lacked context. Beckert’s global history reveals them to be central to a larger narrative that is as close to our experience as the shirt on our back.
Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse offers a microcosm of the same story. Europeans had imported nutmeg from their Indonesian source through various agents of trade for millennia. With the advent of European exploration, the Dutch were determined to dominate the trade in nutmeg by controlling the small archipelago which was the only natural habitat of the nutmeg tree, the tiny Banda Islands. When enforcing their monopoly upon the indigenous population failed, a Dutch fleet carrying Dutch soldiers and Japanese samurai mercenaries wiped out the entire native population. A similar pattern is repeated by the Belgians in the Congo Free State which was once the sole source of raw rubber for newly invented tires (see Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost). Almost genocidal measures were undertaken in order to force the Congolese to harvest rubber sap in the trackless forests. Now other minerals are mined there, causing much suffering to the Congolese population.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 