(UPDATE: By utter happenstance I just learned that Sven Beckert has a new book out called Capitalism: A Global History. It promises to “[show] us how to look through and beyond [capitalism] to imagine a different and larger world.” Honorable mission, and I will definitely be reading it at some point. However, I swear that my posting this article here, now, had absolutely nothing to do with it and I was not even aware of it when I posted.)
This is going to be a different kind of post for this blog–it’s about history rather than nerd shit.
This is an article I wrote in 2022ish while researching for my Master’s thesis in History. My thesis was about American abolitionist John Brown (you can read it here), and in the course of research for it I read quite a bit about the political economy of the antebellum United States.
This article was originally going to be a chapter in the thesis, but it didn’t really fit with what I was trying to do in that thesis, so I cut it and tried to reformulate it as its own separate article.
The article takes a look at some criticisms of Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2014) by a trio of economic historians named Gavin Wright, Alan L. Olmstead, and Paul W. Rhode. To spoil the whole thing upfront, their criticisms are terrible.
Now, this is a fraught topic. Empire of Cotton is part of a loosely-defined movement originating in the 2010s called the New History of Capitalism (NHC), in which some historians worked to identify and highlight the links between American slavery and the capitalist system. Their work was influential on, for example, the 1619 Project; this New YorKKK Times article from the 1619 Project gives you a sense of the kinds of arguments that come out of the NHC.
The NHC is emphatically not a Marxist analysis, although it sometimes draws on Marxism. In fact, a lot of Marxists have been highly critical of the NHC, sometimes using variations of the same arguments used by Wright, Olmstead, and Rhode.
I’m not going to get into Marxist criticisms of the NHC right now; that’s a much bigger and more complex topic. Instead, this article takes a look at the criticisms of Empire of Cotton by three mainstream economic historians who have written extensively about Beckert and the NHC as a whole.
One reason that I think I was not able to get this published in an academic journal is that it is inherently confrontational. I tried to smooth over the polemical edges in the version that I submitted to some journals, but there really is no getting around how I view their work–it’s a hatchet job based on intentionally obfuscated and misrepresented evidence. You’ll see what I mean.
In a stuffy academic paper it’s considered bad form to be too…aggressive, when criticizing other scholars. It’s also bad form to question their motives for why they argue the things they argue.
I don’t have to write this as a stuffy academic paper anymore, though, and this is my blog, so I’ll say that some of the things these historians do with the primary sources they analyze are so egregious that I can’t imagine they were unintentional.
But you can judge that for yourself.
Without further ado, here’s the article I wrote, edited in a few places to be (slightly) more blog-friendly. I’ll also put some paranthetical asides in various places to explain parts that I think might be a little complicated for a casual reader.
Economic Historians Butcher Beckert: Some Bad Criticisms of the New History of Capitalism
ABSTRACT: Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2014) has come under fire from economic historians for its supposed misuse of economic data in constructing its arguments about American slavery, cotton, and capitalism. Many of these criticisms evidence a fundamental misunderstanding of Beckert’s arguments and the arguments of the New History of Capitalism broadly; other criticisms rely on obfuscation and the misuse of historical sources, in several cases selectively citing primary and secondary sources against Beckert that when read in full actually support Beckert’s argument. Economic historians wishing to advance critiques of the New History of Capitalism must demonstrate a more careful and respectful use of sources, and a willingness to engage such arguments on their own terms rather than through irrelevant speculation and counterfactuals.
In recent years some economic historians have been harshly critical of works in the New History of Capitalism (NHC) which attempt to draw explicit connections between antebellum America’s slave-based cotton economy and the development of modern industrial capitalism, such as Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told (2014)1 and Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton (2014).2 This paper examines some of the criticisms of Beckert specifically by three economic historians: Gavin Wright,3 and the duo of Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode.4 While attempting to debunk, contextualize, or counter Beckert’s claims in Empire of Cotton, all three of these economic historians make numerous serious factual errors, obfuscate or ignore Beckert’s actual arguments in favor of straw-men, and generally demonstrate an unwillingness or inability to engage with Beckert’s arguments on their own terms, instead favoring reductive economic analysis that in most cases 1.) is not relevant to the historical points Beckert is actually making; 2.) is not convincing as a counterpoint to Beckert’s arguments, and in a few cases, 3.) actually supports Beckert’s arguments despite their authors’ misleading misapplication of primary sources.
Some of the critiques of the NHC works advanced by these economic historians are inarguable, but the ways in which Wright, Olmstead, and Rhode respond to the larger claims of the NHC reveal a disingenuous and often beside-the-point attitude towards the NHC’s central conceits about capitalism. Gavin Wright’s article attempting to dispute slavery’s role in American economic growth is paradigmatic of this misguided approach. He characterizes Beckert’s argument as involving an “underlying assumption…that cotton required slavery,”5 and quotes Beckert:
Cotton demanded quite literally a hunt for labor and a perpetual struggle for its control. Slave traders, slave pens, slave auctions, and the attendant physical and psychological violence of holding millions in bondage were of central importance to the expansion of cotton production in the United States and of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain.6
Wright’s objection is that “It is far from clear, however, that the antebellum South produced more cotton than the region would have, had slavery been abolished at the time of adoption of the US Constitution.”7 Why he responds this way is difficult to ascertain, because nowhere does Beckert actually say any such thing.
Wright seems to take statements of Beckert’s such as “The expansion of cotton manufacturing in Great Britain depended on violence across the Atlantic”8 as normative statements, saying something about the “expansion of cotton manufacturing” that would be true in any possible world. In reality they are descriptive statements; neither Beckert nor other NHC writers are interested in constructing fantasy alternate universes where slavery never existed. Beckert is saying in this example that, in the material world and in actual history, cotton manufacturing in Great Britain did depend on the violence of slavery.
Wright’s objections turn on the lack of what he calls “counterfactuals” in the arguments of Beckert and other NHC writers. Counterfactuals are hypothetical alternate histories that “might have been,” but Wright’s use of them is strange and seems to add nothing to the discussion other than muddying it. He even recognizes that “historians” (as opposed to “economic historians”) “often object to counterfactuals, saying that they prefer to write about the history that actually happened rather than hypothetical histories that might have been.”9 This is correct, and Wright’s own example of a “counterfactual” in this paper should serve as a useful case study in why historians are reluctant to engage in such speculation. In defense of his assertion that small yeoman farmers “could have” evolved in the South along similar lines as they did in the North to meet a hypothetical demand for cotton without slaves (because of his misunderstanding of Beckert’s statements about the necessity of slavery as normative rather than descriptive), Wright says that “What we do know is that small southern farmers moved into cotton production quickly after the Civil War, bringing cotton prices down to pre-war levels within a decade…”10 However, Wright has already undermined his own point. Just a few pages earlier he notes that growth in global demand for U.S. cotton plummeted to less than a third of its pre-war levels for the remainder of the 19th century.11 This is not mentioned in his “counterfactual,” nor is the performance of overseas cotton producers such as India in the post-bellum world; Indian cotton production had exploded during the U.S. Civil War and cotton production in Asia, South America, and Africa also grew during this time period, undoubtedly contributing to the drop in prices.12 That Wright’s “counterfactual” must ignore such rudimentary economic concepts as “the effects of supply and demand on prices” in order to retroject the performance of post-bellum “small southern farmers” onto an alternate antebellum South without slavery should explain why regular historians tend to avoid thought experiments such as these. Wright had admitted in 2020 that “To be sure, US cotton did indeed rise ‘on the backs of slaves’, and no cliometric counterfactual can gainsay that brute fact of history.”13 If he understands this point, then it is puzzling that he is still deploying this counterfactual against Beckert in 2022, and still treating Beckert’s argument as normative rather than descriptive.
(To simplify Wright’s argument and its problems–he wants to argue that slavery wasn’t actually necessary to achieve the economic successes of the 19th-century cotton economy. He implies that cotton could have been just as profitable, if not more, if slavery had been abolished in 1776 and cotton agriculture based on yeoman farmers like in the North. His evidence is that after slavery was abolished, cotton prices went back down to their pre-war rates. He ignores that there were external factors affecting cotton prices, such as drastic increases in cotton production in India, and plummeting demand. So comparing cotton prices after the war to what they were before the war is incredibly misleading.)
Wright spends the rest of his paper making his own arguments rather than trying to debunk Beckert’s.14 Olmstead and Rhode, on the other hand, are concerned primarily with taking aim at Beckert, Edward Baptist, and the work of Walter Johnson.
To start off, not all of their points are wrong or unfair. Most devastating is their evaluation of Edward Baptist’s use of sources in The Half Has Never Been Told. Olmstead and Rhode demonstrate persuasively that Baptist consistently misrepresents his own sources and makes spurious arguments based on this misuse of historical evidence, and their debunking of his “pushing system” and “torture-led growth thesis” is convincing.15
(Troubled by the stuff that comes later and hoping to find more juicy examples of scholarly malpractice, I did dig into the primary sources underlying Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told, which I’d already read. Unfortunately, Olmstead and Rhode were correct on this one. Baptist’s book is, unfortunately, rubbish. But Olmstead and Rhode misuse sources just as egregiously, as we’ll soon see. I suspect that after debunking Baptist, they got “drunk on their own power” (so to speak) and went looking for other NHC/NHC-adjacent books to debunk the same way, which led them to Beckert. Beckert’s book isn’t nearly as sloppy, however, so they had to stretch and contort themselves to “debunk” it.)
It is all the more strange, then, that their attempt to debunk Beckert in the same way is riddled with so many errors of fact, their own misuse of sources, and specious, misguided attempts to counter Beckert’s historical narrative, that it unfortunately tarnishes their much-better work debunking Baptist.
The problems begin when Olmstead and Rhode take Beckert to task over bungling the names of one of the participants in the political machinations around the Louisiana Purchase.16
On its own this is fair; Beckert seems to have confused British banker Thomas Baring with his grandfather Francis Baring, a mistake Beckert admitted to and corrected. But Olmstead and Rhode go further in trying to “correct” Beckert’s supposed mistake, honing in on his claim that the Barings contacted British Prime Minister Henry Addington “before” (emphasis Olmstead’s and Rhode’s) “negotiating and selling the bonds that sealed the deal with the French government.”17
Olmstead and Rhode take affront to this claim, noting that the negotiations had been taking place since January of 1803, while the meeting with Addington took place in June. This is all well and good, but Beckert’s point remains that Baring did not start selling the bonds until 1804, because that is when the United States Congress issued them.18
The only reason the meeting with Addington is even relevant is because Beckert uses it to show the alliance between international finance, cotton merchants like the Barings, and the British government in the expansion of cotton; Addington reportedly “thought it would have been wise for this country [the United Kingdom] to pay a million sterling for the transfer of Louisiana from France to America…He appears to consider Louisiana in the hands of America as an additional means for the vent of our manufacturers & Co. in preference to France…”19 The actual date when Francis Baring met with Addington is irrelevant to this point and Olmstead and Rhode only mention it to add persuasive force to their attempt to discredit Beckert’s narrative–see, he was vague about the chronology, therefore the whole point is suspect!
Olmstead and Rhode mention that by the end of 1803 Addington had asked Baring to back out of his involvement in the Louisiana Purchase, again to give the impression that Beckert’s primary argument (that the British government saw the Louisiana Purchase as conducive to their manufacturing export interests) is unsound; in reality Addington’s motivations were entirely political (he was afraid Napoleon would use the funds to invade Britain).
In fact, Olmstead and Rhode make the same kind of minor chronological error they accuse Beckert of by writing that Baring “continued to sell the bonds” when in reality the United States government had not even issued the bonds yet and would not do so for another month. They muster one last feeble objection to Beckert’s argument, which is that Addington mentioned the value of the Louisiana Purchase for British exports, “but he did not mention increasing supplies of raw cotton.”20 Beckert never claims that he does.
(To clarify that last point: Olmstead and Rhode know that it would have been great for Beckert’s argument if Addington had come right out and said that the point of the Louisiana Purchase was to increase cotton production. He didn’t, but it’s not as if Beckert ever claims that he did, so…why does this matter? The point is to imply that Beckert was making that argument, because the majority of readers are not going to go carefully read through Empire of Cotton to see for themselves. Olnstead and Rhode are intentionally misrepresenting Beckert, but doing so in a way that gives them plausible deniability.)
All of that is not nearly as bad as their attempt to counter Beckert’s argument that the Louisiana Purchase facilitated the expansion of cotton production. Beckert writes that “by 1850, 67 percent of U.S. cotton grew on land that had not been part of the United States half a century earlier;”21 Olmstead and Rhode “correct” this claim by writing “In fact, the cotton-producing states and territories added after 1800, namely Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Texas, and Florida, grew less than 15 percent of American cotton in 1850.”22 They are conveniently leaving out Mississippi and Alabama, two absolutely crucial cotton-producing states which were admitted to the Union in 1817 and 1819, respectively; granted these were already “Territories” before 1800,23 but Beckert’s argument, which also deals with the increasing displacement of Native Americans in these territories, is referring to them too, as the surrounding context makes clear. “So rapid was this move westward that by the end of the 1830s, Mississippi already produced more cotton than any other southern state.”24
(To simplify: Beckert claims that the Louisiana Purchase helped cotton production increase. Elsewhere, he makes the same point, but about westward expansion more broadly. Olmstead and Rhode focus only on the states added by the Louisiana Purchase to point out that well, actually, they weren’t the biggest cotton-producing states. But if you go read the sections in Empire of Cotton that they’re citing, Beckert is very clearly not only talking about the Louisiana Purchase states. He literally mentions Mississippi specifically. Olmstead and Rhode just fucking ignore Mississippi and Alabama. This is so absurd that it makes me feel insane…and it’s not even the worst example of them doing something like this.)
Worse for them, Olmstead’s and Rhode’s own earlier research on the increasing productivity of southern cotton plantations only strengthens Beckert’s argument.25 They locate the rapid increase in cotton productivity throughout the first half of the 19th century in new varieties of cotton that were developed during this period; these new varieties were much easier for slaves to pick. But, as Gavin Wright noted (Wright and Olmstead/Rhode cite each other often), this innovation “had greater impact on the already-superior soils of the southwest.”26 “Southwest” here means the states in the southwest of the country at that time; Olmstead and Rhode make it abundantly clear that the new cotton varieties “were developed in the Mississippi Valley and were better suited for the geoclimatic conditions found there than for the conditions common to much of Georgia and the Carolinas.”27 Their own research makes it clear that Beckert is correct that westward expansion (including, but not limited to, the Louisiana Purchase) was an indispensable driver of the expansion of cotton production, because it allowed for these new variations of cotton to be developed: “throughout the antebellum period southeastern planters relied on the Southwest for most breeding improvements.”28 This technological increase in productivity then dialectically furthered greater westward expansion, in part because “the ability of large planters to capitalize (and borrow against) the enhanced value of their slaves’ labor helped to finance migration and the purchase of large tracts of the most fertile western lands.”29 Their 2011 conclusion directly supports Beckert’s point: “The spatial pattern of the productivity advances help [sic] explain why regional shifts in the location of production were far more important than previously thought in explaining the overall growth in southern cotton production…”30 Yet through rhetorical sleight of hand they conflate Beckert’s argument about “the importance of post-1800 territorial expansion” with an argument about only the Louisiana Purchase, and misleadingly dispute his figures by ignoring two important states, Alabama and Mississippi, which their own earlier research makes clear were both deeply affected by the technological increases that caused cotton productivity to jump.
(This section is genuinely unhinged. Olmstead and Rhode published a (very good!) analysis of how westward expansion helped create new varieties of cotton that dramatically increased production. They outright state that these productivity gains couldn’t have been achieved without expansion into these states. And they directly tie it not only to increased value of slave labor, but also how that increase fueled capital accumulation. It could not possibly be more harmonious with Beckert’s argument! Beckert should have cited them directly! But because they don’t like the implications their own work has about capitalism more broadly, Olmstead and Rhode just…ignore it! Their own groundbreaking work! I feel insane! This should be illegal!)
Olmstead’s and Rhode’s errors and puzzling objections continue into the next sections, on “American cotton supplies and British policies” and “Cheap labor?”31 They mention the disruption in American cotton exports to Britain between 1807 and 1815, and suggest that “If cotton capitalists were dictating British foreign policy, it seems strange that they would have allowed relations to deteriorate so precipitously with what was now their principal supplier of raw cotton.”32 This is an unfair placing of the goalposts; Beckert’s argument is not so reductive as to claim that any single group “dictated” British foreign policy.
Even so, Beckert directly deals with this objection, arguing that it was only after 1815 that “manufacturers had gained sufficient political clout to pressure their governments to protect the emerging industry from being ‘driven out’ and provided states with an interest in and an ability to further develop industries.”33 They ask other rhetorical questions, such as why Britain became “the pioneer in world abolitionist movement [sic]?” and “Why did Britain maintain its distance during the American Civil War rather than intervene to maintain its vital raw cotton imports?”34 These are well-tread historical inquiries and are all dealt with to one degree or another in Beckert’s work, but Olmstead and Rhode are not interested in exploring them; they are used rhetorically, to give the impression that the strawman version of Beckert’s argument that they are attacking has holes in it.
(So, to rephrase–it’s not that these aren’t questions worth asking. But to use them the way Olmstead and Rhode do–as if the questions themselves disprove Beckert’s argument–shows not a curiosity, but a desire to disprove. They aren’t interested in answers, and they only make sense if you assume that Beckert’s argument is as simplistic as “cotton capitalism was the sole economic motivator for the entire 19th century.” Even still, they’re also just wrong–see footnote 34.)
The section on “Cheap labor?”35 well illustrates the differences between the approaches taken by historians like Beckert and economic historians like Olmstead and Rhode. They judge “inexplicable” Beckert’s claim that slave labor was cheap, “what the American Cotton Planter would call ‘the cheapest and most available labor in the world.’”36 Beckert’s source does indeed say this, so why exactly this claim is “inexplicable” is puzzling.
American cotton planters certainly believed that their slave labor was cheap, as the 1853 article from the American Cotton Planter testifies. Olmstead and Rhode accuse Beckert of taking this quote out of context, noting that the article is broadly “antithetical to the NHC’s theme of a prosperous South” in that it deals with the South’s failure to take advantage of that cheap labor as well as an abundance of natural resources in not industrializing.37 While their characterization of the New History of Capitalism here—as centering on claims of “a prosperous South”–is debatable, it is irrelevant to the point actually being made by Beckert.
Olmstead and Rhode muster economic data suggesting that Indian (as in, the Asian country of India) wage labor was in fact cheaper than American slave labor, but they are arguing with Beckert’s source, not with Beckert himself. Beckert has presented a relevant primary source demonstrating that American slave labor was seen as remarkably cheap by American slave owners; they may have been technically wrong on the facts, but that is not the point.
(This section reminds me of the “vibecession” arguments that we’ve seen crop up since about 2023. American slave owners said that slave labor was cheap, and Olmstead and Rhode are over here like “nooooo, according to my graph, in aggregate wage laborers in India are actually slightly cheaper! Thus your whole understanding of your own economic conditions is wrong!” Truly the Will Stancil of economic historians.)
Olmstead and Rhode then quote a later article in that same paper, which they absolutely should not have done, because it allows people like me to go and check what it actually says and expose them as liars. In the same note where they attempt to put Beckert’s quote in its “broader context,” they write “Another article published in the same volume, American Cotton Planter 1 (Aug. 1853), p. 229, touts the ‘superior cheapness of Hindoo labor.’”38 At first glance this seems to support their point, but they have cut that quote off—the full quote reads: “As to the superior cheapness of Hindoo labor, that appears only on paper. For one well-fed slave with us, managed by the intelligence of our planters, will do more effectual work than five uncertain Hindoos, with their poor diet, and still poorer skill—independent of the extreme vicissitudes of their parching climate.”39
Much more inexplicable than anything in Beckert’s book is why Olmstead and Rhode decided to quote a line that, when read in full, says the exact opposite of what they claim it does. Olmstead and Rhode may be entirely correct that it would cost less to hire an Indian wage laborer—in India—for a year than to purchase and maintain an American slave for the same length of time, but this is utterly irrelevant to Beckert’s point and detached from any recognizable reality—there were no Indian ryots competing for wages with American slaves in the antebellum South, and such a concept is absurd on its face. Beckert argues only that slave labor was “cheap,” which is a relative term and must take productivity as well as local markets and conditions into account; the existence of less costly labor on the opposite side of the planet could not possibly be more irrelevant to the question at hand.
(This is another one where I feel like Olmstead and Rhode are gaslighting me. I know that very few readers go and check the primary sources, but…seriously? Why would you lie about what a publicly-available document says? And I waffled for a while on this but I feel that I have to call them liars. The alternative is that they’re too incompetent to have finished reading the sentence they were citing in their academic paper.)
What would bear on this question is the performance of non-slave cotton in the antebellum United States, or a comparison between the cost of slave labor and northern wage/agricultural labor. Olmstead and Rhode do not provide anything like this analysis, probably because once again, one of their own sources which actually does provide this analysis only strengthens Beckert’s argument.40 Instead of comparing the cost of American slave labor with the cost of East Indian agricultural laborers, Stanley Lebergott compares it with that of free American agricultural workers in the North, which is actually a relevant and useful comparison. Lebergott estimates that productivity between free Northern agricultural workers and slaves was roughly equal, but that slave owners profited more than northern agricultural employers “by forcing the slave to subsist on about one-third of what the market yielded to a northern farmworker.”41 Put otherwise, American slave labor was cheap in comparison to free agricultural labor. Olmstead and Rhode are happy to cite Lebergott’s estimate of the cost of American slave labor, in the same section of The Americans, so they must be familiar with it; its omission here and substitution with a bizarre comparison to Indian labor can only be intentional.
British policy in India during the U.S. Civil War is the next topic that Olmstead and Rhode examine in a section which unfortunately continues to rely on obfuscation and misrepresentation. Beckert, to be fair, writes sloppily of British efforts to impose new contract laws on India that would facilitate British investment in Indian cotton production; these efforts did not bear fruit until 1872, and by including them with other British efforts during the 1860s in this discussion, Beckert gives the false impression that the Indian Contract Act was passed much earlier than it was. But Olmstead and Rhode go much further in trying to “correct” this mistake, and in so doing make numerous mistakes of their own.
They introduce this section by misrepresenting Beckert’s argument. According to Olmstead and Rhode, Beckert claims that “during the American Civil War cotton famine of 1861-1865, the British could increase cotton production in their Indian Empire only by a significantly increasing labor coercion [sic].”42 This is not Beckert’s argument, and it is difficult to identify where Olmstead and Rhode think Beckert is making it.
In the section of Empire of Cotton dealing with this period, and quoted by Olmstead and Rhode, Beckert identifies the mechanisms through which the British tried to increase cotton production as “massive infrastructure investments, changes in criminal codes to make the adulteration of cotton a crime, and new property laws to create clearly defined and easily marketable property in land.”43 Olmstead and Rhode identify Beckert, Empire of Cotton, pp. 251-253 as the section they are responding to; nowhere in these pages nor in the succeeding ones dealing with India is “labor coercion” mentioned at all.
Beckert does indeed make a mistake when he writes of the attempt to reform contract laws in favor of landowners and merchants that “Eventually this pressure succeeded; new contract laws were imposed. In 1863, moreover, criminal laws were enacted that made the adulteration of cotton a crime punishable by imprisonment at hard labor.”44 The mistake is that the “new contract laws,” as mentioned above, were not passed until 1872, nearly a decade after the period that Beckert is discussing. By leaving this part out, and beginning the next sentence with “In 1863, moreover…” Beckert gives the false impression that the contract laws were implemented around that time. This is a genuine error.
But Olmstead’s and Rhode’s criticism hinges on Beckert’s argument crediting the new contract law for increased Indian cotton production in the early 1860’s. They explicitly accuse Beckert of stating that “the coercive legislation led to an expansion of Indian cotton exports in the early 1860s.”45
But this is not what Beckert claims. Olmstead and Rhode cite correctly that the price of Indian cotton exploded after the onset of the U.S. Civil War; this was the primary source of the increase in production and exports back to Britain. Beckert acknowledges this, in both of the works they cite: “The effectiveness of government interventions was furthered by rapidly rising prices that lubricated the often balky transition to world market production,” he writes in Empire of Cotton;46 earlier, in 2004, he had written “As a result [of the increase in cotton prices], Indian cultivators began planting cotton on new land as well as on land once devoted to food crops. This unprecedented dedication to export agriculture paid off handsomely for them…”47 In both cases, the increase in cotton exports is identified explicitly and directly with a rise in prices.
Olmstead and Rhode take the greatest issue in this section with Beckert’s error regarding the Indian Contract Act. But they go much further in “correcting” him than is warranted—instead of pointing out the chronological obfuscation, they treat it as a factual error, as if Beckert had explicitly stated that the Act had been implemented in the early 1860s. It is this misreading of Beckert that they take pains to debunk, and they unfortunately do not even get that right.
Beckert mentions that the Secretary of State for India at the time, Charles Wood, who all sources agree was normally a supporter of laissez faire capitalism, had “come to believe that the operation of the ‘laws of supply and demand’ would not suffice to bring more cotton from India to Britain, despite his fractious relations with the louder elements of the cotton interests.”48 Olmstead and Rhode cite the very next line in Beckert, but then they try to “correct” him by writing “But in fact, Wood repeatedly blocked the demands to revise Indian contract law during the cotton famine and more generally was on poor terms with cotton manufacturers.”49 The second clause of their sentence merely restates what Beckert had written in the sentence preceding the one they are citing, but they act as if Beckert is ignoring it.
Worse, the first clause, about Wood and contract law, once again simply gets Beckert’s argument wrong. This section comes several paragraphs after the one focusing on contract laws, and nowhere does Beckert link Wood’s limited belief in greater state intervention with contract law. It is actually linked with increasing expenditures on public works such as railroads, something that Wood wholeheartedly supported. This topic is how the paragraph where Beckert mentions Wood’s recognition of the need for some state intervention begins, and it is confirmed in Robin Moore’s 1966 book on Wood, which Olmstead and Rhode cite to counter the claim that they think Beckert is making about the Indian Contract Act.
Government investment in public works “did violate the doctrine of laissez-faire” which Wood believed in, Moore writes, but “in the month after his interview with the cotton deputation, [Wood’s] comments began to reflect…a growing concern for the lines that passed through the cotton-producing areas of Berar, Surat and Gujarat. ‘In the present anxiety about cotton,’ he told [Charles] Canning in March, ‘I would not delay anything which opens a cotton field.’”50 Wood did indeed block efforts to revise contract law during his tenure as the Secretary of State for India, which ended in 1866, but this is clearly not what Beckert has in mind when he writes of Wood’s embrace of some interventionist measures.
(I don’t know what it is with Olmstead and Rhode citing sources that directly and unequivocally support Beckert’s argument. They must have very little faith that their readers will check any of their work.)
Olmstead and Rhode end by taking aim at Beckert’s conclusions about post-bellum cotton production and sharecropping. They contend that Beckert constructs a false “world-wide top-down design to what in fact were myriad local experiments” in reorganizing cotton labor after slavery.51
Their entire criticism hinges on this characterization of Beckert’s argument, which they luridly describe as comprising “puppeteers operating in board rooms in London, Manchester, and Liverpool pull[ing] strings in faraway lands to manage day-to-day events.”52 They argue that the actual construction of the postwar cotton economy was decentralized and driven primarily by local market forces.
As with so many of the points they make in their short analysis of Beckert’s work, they are responding to something that he does not actually argue. Beckert furnishes numerous primary sources backing up his historical claim that powerful merchants and bureaucrats were concerned in the years following the Civil War with how to reorganize cotton labor to get cotton production back on track.53 Olmstead and Rhode read centralization and “puppeteers” into this history, for no discernible reason. (I was being diplomatic. The reason is very discernible. They just don’t like what Beckert has to say about capitalism.) They ignore the primary sources and simply advance a parallel argument that may add nuance and context to Beckert’s contentions, but does not fundamentally challenge them in any way.
And they still mangle basic arguments, implying that Beckert conflates sharecropping with slavery even though Beckert, once again, does no such thing. They do not quote Beckert actually saying anything like this, because Beckert literally never says anything like this.
Olmstead and Rhode cite the increase of white laborers in cotton production after the Civil War as evidence against Beckert’s supposed “centrally directed economy,”54 when Beckert himself recognizes and analyzes this exact trend, attributing it to increasing investments in transportation and commerce in the South after the war rather than anything even remotely resembling central planning.55 Beckert also directly acknowledges the diversity and decentralization characteristic of these attempts at labor reforms: “Yet, as in the American South…the precise ways in which rural cultivators became growers of cotton for world markets varied widely and were the outcome of drawn-out conflicts among labor, landowners, providers of capital, and imperial bureaucrats.”56 Olmstead and Rhode’s objections in this section, which are fundamentally their objections to his entire book, are completely unmoored from any arguments that Beckert actually makes.
Olmstead’s and Rhode’s entire issue with Beckert is perhaps summed up best in the end of their section on his work when they decry his “emphasis on the necessity of coercion and the impotency of market forces…And to justify his claims that slavery was essential to produce cotton he invents a new and misguided history of post-bellum labor relations.”57 This is indicative of the limited view that economic historians like Wright, Olmstead, and Rhode have of history; their view of “market forces” and “coercion” as somehow mutually-exclusive, unable to exist alongside one another, is underpinned by the same presuppositions that lead them to assume that Beckert is suggesting a “centrally directed economy” and shadowy puppet masters in boardrooms when he writes of “the diligent effort of cotton industrialists, merchants, landowners, and state bureaucrats.”58
For them “market forces” seem limited only to supply and demand, and the concerted efforts of capital owners and the State (sometimes in tandem, sometimes not) can only be a conscious, intentional conspiracy of individual power brokers and never the result of classes of people acting generally according to their economic self-interest.
They rely on numeric comparisons, like the labor costs of American slaves vs. Indian peasant wage-workers, and hypothetical “counterfactuals” which have little to no bearing on reality. This type of historical inquiry can be useful, and indeed they are not wrong that historians such as Beckert should strive to better incorporate economic data into their historical analysis, and avoid the errors such as the few identified here that actually are valid (such as being misleading about the chronology of the Indian Contract Act). But given their constant strawman arguments, misrepresentations of sources, and obfuscations of key arguments, it is impossible to escape the sense that something else is at work in the hostility of economic historians like Olmstead, Rhode, and Wright towards the so-called “New History of Capitalism.”
Wright, Olmstead, and Rhode want to argue that because the U.S. economy could have grown to its eventual industrial heights without slavery, then slavery was therefore not essential to its eventual economic ascendancy or that of capitalism’s. The reality, however, is that slavery did exert enormous influence in the way that modern capitalism developed, as the works of historians like Beckert demonstrate (and which Wright, at least, concurs with).
In some cases, Wright, Olmstead, and Rhode are absolutely correct and justified in correcting sloppy history on the part of the New Historians of Capitalism, but they consistently fail to take account of the beams in their own eyes when they employ argumentative sleight-of-hand, deceptive use of sources, and meaningless conjecture to make the problems with the NHC, and with Sven Beckert specifically, seem bigger than they are. Olmstead and Rhode blame these problems on “some economists [who] produced increasingly technical work that was sometimes beyond the comprehension of many historians.”59 Reversing this schema, could it be that their narrow focus on economic data and inability to properly engage with the “social and political institutions which shape and give meaning to economic forces such as technological innovation”60 is a result of the arguments of the NHC school being beyond their comprehension? That does not seem fair. In the future, economic historians wishing to engage with the New History of Capitalism should make efforts to engage with those arguments on their own terms, and demonstrate how their field can be used to modify, extend, or counter specific historical claims.
(I tried to write a constructive conclusion, but in reality I simply don’t believe Olmstead and Rhode were writing in good faith. The crack about historians being too stupid to understand the “technical” work of economic historians was simultaneously hilarious and infuriating, and deeply unprofessional and polemical despite how they couch it. This is also why I don’t feel bad taking the tone I have in my edits, and these little asides.
This really exposed to me the odious nature of these kinds of academic debates. I don’t think Olmstead and Rhode are stupid; they have produced some genuinely important and valuable work. But they are supporters of capitalism, and perhaps subconsciously, they are part of the academic project of normalizing and defending capitalism. They know their work debunking Beckert is shoddy. It is literally impossible for them to not know.
But hack-jobs like this don’t have to stand up to scrutiny. They just have to be published. It’s enough that when you look up Beckert on Wikipedia, there’s a sentence, linking to their horse-shit article, reading “Other economic historians have criticized the book.” It means that anyone looking up the book to learn more about capitalism will have doubts; it means that people criticizing capitalism after having read Beckert’s book can be met with the rejoinder, “Well, don’t you know that some economic historians have criticized the book?”
For my part, I don’t even think Empire of Cotton is particularly great–good, but not great. I’d certainly recommend it if you have an interest, especially for people who aren’t ready for a more structured, Marxist critique of capitalism. But it and its peers in the New History of Capitalism are fundamentally flawed. They deserve engagement and criticism…just not this way.)
Footnotes:
1 Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
2 Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).
3 Gavin Wright, “Slavery and the Rise of the Nineteenth-Century American Economy” in Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 36, No. 2, (Spring 2022), pp. 123-148.
4 Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, “Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism” in Explorations in Economic History, Vol. 67 (January 2018), pp. 1-17.
5 Wright, “Slavery and the Rise of the nineteenth-century economy,” 137.
6 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 110.
7 Wright, “Slavery and the Rise of the nineteenth-century economy,” 137.
8 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 110.
9 Wright, “Slavery and the Rise of the nineteenth-century economy,” 137.
10 Wright, “Slavery and the Rise of the nineteenth-century economy,” 137.
11 Wright, “Slavery and the Rise of the nineteenth-century economy,” 134.
12 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 294.
13 Gavin Wright, “Slavery and Anglo-American capitalism revisited” in Economic History Review Vol. 73, No. 2 (February 2020), 2.
14 Even here, there are some glaring mistakes and omissions, such as dismissing the idea that cotton textiles were “vital” to the US industrial revolution by noting that although they were “the largest antebellum manufacturing industry” cotton textiles only accounted for “less than 10 percent of employment and 6 percent of value-added in 1860” (Wright, “Slavery and the Rise of the nineteenth-century economy,” 137). This does not account for the value dependent on British exports to the United States, which were heavily reliant on U.S. cotton; to get around this he deploys another “counterfactual” (despite saying that he would abstain from them) arguing Britain could have gotten its cotton from a different country-of-origin, which is far from clear based on the actual evidence (not that Wright offers any).
15 See Olmstead and Rhode, “Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism,” pp. 8-11.
16 Olmstead and Rhode, “Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism,” pp. 2-3. 17 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 106.
18 “The Louisiana Purchase” in The Baring Archive (London). Available online at
https://baringarchive.org.uk/exhibition/the-louisiana-purchase/ . Accessed 4/26/2023.
19 Quoted in Olmstead and Rhode, “Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism,” 3.
20 Olmstead and Rhode, “Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism,” 3.
21 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 105-106.
22 Olmstead and Rhode, “Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism,” 3.
23 Although they were claimed by the state of Georgia, not the federal government, before 1802, which further diminishes the force of Olmstead and Rhode’s objection.
24 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 104.
25 A.L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, “Productivity growth and the regional dynamics of Antebellum Southern development” in Rhode, P.W., Rosenbloom, Joshua, Weiman, David (Eds.), Economic Evolution and Revolution in Historical Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press: 2011), pp. 180-213.
26 Wright, “Slavery and the Rise of the nineteenth-century economy,” 134.
27 Olmstead and Rhode, “Productivity growth and the regional dynamics,” 181.
28 Olmstead and Rhode, “Productivity growth and the regional dynamics,” 204.
29 Olmstead and Rhode, “Productivity growth and the regional dynamics,” 203.
30 Olmstead and Rhode, “Productivity growth and the regional dynamics,” 206.
31 Olmstead and Rhode, “Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism,” 3-5.
32 Olmstead and Rhode, “Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism,” 3.
33 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 158.
34 Olmstead and Rhode, “Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism,” 3. On this last point, Olmstead and Rhode should have consulted a source that they later cite against Beckert, Dwijendra Tripathi, “Opportunism of Free Trade: Lancashire Cotton Famine and Indian Cotton Cultivation” in Indian Economic & Social History Review Vol. 4, No. 3 (July 1967), pp. 255-263. Tripathi writes that indeed “a strong section of British public favoured the recognition of the Southern confederacy.” The British Government’s actions to increase cotton production in India followed from this need, else there was a real risk that “the pro-confederate sentiments should gain momentum and force the government to abandon its neutrality.” Tripathi, “Opportunism of Free Trade,” 263. This accords with Beckert’s analysis of India and against Olmstead and Rhode’s (see below).
35 Olmstead and Rhode, “Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism,” 5.
36 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 108.
37 Olmstead and Rhode, “Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism,” 5, note 13.
38 Olmstead and Rhode, “Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism,” 5, note 13.
39 “Cotton and its Prospects” in American Cotton Planter Vol. 1, No. 8 (August 1853), 229. Emphasis added.
40 Stanley Lebergott, The Americans: An Economic Record (New York: Norton, 1984). 41 Lebergott, The Americans, 220.
42 Olmstead and Rhode, “Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism,” 5.
43 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 252.
44 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 252.
45 Olmstead and Rhode, “Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism,” 5. 46 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 255.
47 Sven Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War” in The American Historical Review Vol. 109, No. 5 (December 2004), 1413.
48 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 255.
49 Olmstead and Rhode, “Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism,” 6.
50 R.J. Moore, Sir Charles Wood’s Indian Policy 1853-66 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1966), 137, 139.
51 Olmstead and Rhode, “Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism,” 6.
52 Olmstead and Rhode, “Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism,” 6.
53 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 274-284 contains numerous examples.
54 Olmstead and Rhode, “Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism,” 6.
55 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 289.
56 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 294.
57 Olmstead and Rhode, “Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism,” 7.
58 Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 279.
59 Olmstead and Rhode, “Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism,” 14.
60 Knick Harley, “Growth Theory and Industrial Revolutions in Britain and America” in The Canadian Journal of Economics, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Nov. 2003), 828.
Bibliography
Primary
The Baring Archive. April 26, 2023. https://baringarchive.org.uk/
“Cotton and its Prospects” in American Cotton Planter Vol. 1, No. 8 (August 1853), 229.
Secondary
Baptist, Edward E. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
Beckert, Sven. “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War” in The American Historical Review Vol. 109, No. 5 (December 2004), pp. 1405-1438.
___________. Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).
Harley, Knick. “Growth Theory and Industrial Revolutions in Britain and America,” in The Canadian Journal of Economics, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Nov. 2003), pp. 809-831.
Lebergott, Stanley. The Americans: An Economic Record (New York: Norton, 1984).
Moore, R.J. Sir Charles Wood’s Indian Policy 1853-66 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1966).
Olmstead, A.L., Rhode, Paul W. “Productivity growth and the regional dynamics of Antebellum Southern development” in Rhode, P.W., Rosenbloom, Joshua, Weiman, David (Eds.), Economic Evolution and Revolution in Historical Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press: 2011), pp. 180-213.
__________________________. “Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism” in Explorations in Economic History Vol. 67 (January 2018), pp. 1-17.
Tripathi, Dwijendra. “Opportunism of Free Trade: Lancashire Cotton Famine and Indian Cotton Cultivation” in Indian Economic & Social History Review Vol. 4, No. 3 (July 1967), pp. 255-263.
Wright, Gavin.“Slavery and Anglo-American capitalism revisited” in Economic History Review Vol. 73, No. 2 (February 2020), pp. 1-31.
___________. “Slavery and the Rise of the Nineteenth Century American Economy” in Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Spring 2022), pp. 123-148
Christian Chiakulas 
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