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Empire of Cotton
- A Global History
- Narrated by: Jim Frangione
- Length: 20 hrs and 15 mins
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Publisher's summary
Sven Beckert's rich, fascinating audiobook tells the story of how, in a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful statesmen recast the world's most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to change the world. 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, combined them with the expropriation of lands in the Americas and the enslavement of African workers to crucially recast the disparate realms of cotton that had existed for millennia. We see how industrial capitalism then reshaped these worlds of cotton into an empire, and how this empire transformed the world. The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, farmers and merchants, workers and factory owners. In this as in so many other ways, 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.
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Born in Blackness vitally reframes the story of medieval and emerging Africa, demonstrating how the economic ascendancy of Europe, the anchoring of democracy in the West, and the fulfillment of so-called Enlightenment ideals all grew out of Europe's dehumanizing engagement with the "dark" continent. In fact, French reveals, the first impetus for the Age of Discovery was not—as we are so often told, even today—Europe's yearning for ties with Asia, but rather its centuries-old desire to forge a trade in gold with legendarily rich Black societies in the heart of West Africa.
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American History World History Our History
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By: Howard W. French
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Open Veins of Latin America
- Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
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Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx. Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation.
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Please up-date the addition
- By fishrock on 02-20-10
By: Eduardo Galeano, and others
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Americana
- A 400-Year History of American Capitalism
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From the days of the Mayflower and the Virginia Company, America has been a place for people to dream, invent, build, tinker, and bet the farm in pursuit of a better life. Americana takes us on a 400-year journey of this spirit of innovation and ambition through a series of Next Big Things - the inventions, techniques, and industries that drove American history forward: from the telegraph, the railroad, guns, radio, and banking, to flight, suburbia, and sneakers, culminating with the Internet and mobile technology at the turn of the 21st century.
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Excellent history!
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By: Bhu Srinivasan
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Behemoth
- A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World
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- Narrated by: Stephen Bowlby
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We live in a factory-made world: modern life is built on three centuries of advances in factory production, efficiency, and technology. But giant factories have also fueled our fears about the future since their beginnings, when William Blake called them "dark Satanic mills". Many factories that operated over the last two centuries - such as Homestead, River Rouge, and Foxconn - were known for the labor exploitation and class warfare they engendered, not to mention the environmental devastation caused by factory production.
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Get rid of the fake accents
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Ramp Hollow
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Appalachia - among the most storied and yet least understood regions in America - has long been associated with poverty and backwardness. But how did this image arise, and what exactly does it mean? In Ramp Hollow, Steven Stoll launches an original investigation into the history of Appalachia and its place in US history, with a special emphasis on how generations of its inhabitants lived, worked, survived, and depended on natural resources held in common.
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Almost unlistenable
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The Wealth and Poverty of Nations
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The Wealth and Poverty of Nations is David S. Landes' acclaimed, best-selling exploration of one of the most contentious and hotly debated questions of our time: Why do some nations achieve economic success while others remain mired in poverty? The answer, as Landes definitively illustrates, is a complex interplay of cultural mores and historical circumstance.
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A detailed explanation
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Connectography
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In Connectography, visionary strategist Parag Khanna travels from Ukraine to Iran, Mongolia to North Korea, Pakistan to Nigeria, and across the Arctic Circle to explain the unprecedented changes affecting every part of the planet. He shows how militaries are deployed to protect supply chains as much as borders, and how nations are less at war over territory than engaged in tugs-of-war over pipelines, railways, shipping lanes, and Internet cables. The new arms race is to connect to the most markets.
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Fluffy and Pretentious
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The Victory of Reason
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In The Victory of Reason, Rodney Stark advances a revolutionary, controversial, and long overdue idea: that Christianity and its related institutions are, in fact, directly responsible for the most significant intellectual, political, scientific, and economic breakthroughs of the past millennium. In Stark's view, what has propelled the West is not the tension between secular and non-secular society, nor the pitting of science and the humanities against religious belief. Christian theology, Stark asserts, is the very font of reason.
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Absolutely incredible history book!
- By Daniel on 01-02-20
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The Great Leveler
- Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
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Are mass violence and catastrophes the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality? To judge by thousands of years of history, the answer is yes. Tracing the global history of inequality from the Stone Age to today, Walter Scheidel shows that inequality never dies peacefully. Inequality declines when carnage and disaster strike and increases when peace and stability return. The Great Leveler is the first book to chart the crucial role of violent shocks in reducing inequality over the full sweep of human history around the world.
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Content is not suitable for an Audiobook
- By Varun on 02-10-18
By: Walter Scheidel
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Late Victorian Holocausts
- El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
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Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China, and Northeastern Brazil.
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Mike Davis on Audible!
- By Nathan D. Backlund on 09-02-17
By: Mike Davis
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Brazil
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Experts believe that Brazil, the world's fifth largest country and its seventh largest economy, will be one of the most important global powers by the year 2030. Yet far more attention has been paid to the other rising behemoths: Russia, India, and China. Often ignored and underappreciated, Brazil, according to renowned, award-winning journalist Michael Reid, has finally begun to live up to its potential but faces important challenges before it becomes a nation of substantial global significance.
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Good short history of Brazil, lame pronunciation
- By Bubu Mungani on 07-21-19
By: Michael Reid
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Threads of Life
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Textile bucket list.
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The transcontinental railroads of the late 19th century were the first corporate behemoths. Their attempts to generate profits from proliferating debt sparked devastating panics in the US economy. Their dependence on public largess drew them into the corridors of power, initiating new forms of corruption. Their operations rearranged space and time, and remade the landscape of the West. As wheel and rail, car and coal, they opened new worlds of work and ways of life.
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Correcting the Myth of the Transcontinentals
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What listeners say about Empire of Cotton
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- B
- 07-17-16
Should be titled "Empire of Slavery"
This book details the beginnings of cotton production very well. A thorough history is given up through the present age. However, when the author reaches the time period where cotton was produced in America by slave labor, he gets really bogged down and loses focus.
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3 people found this helpful
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- jonas
- 10-21-16
Takeaways
Very comprehensive review. If nothing else you could read the first chapter/prologue and epilogue and get an appreciation for how third one plant has changed the world.
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3 people found this helpful
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- ÿsmail H. Horozcu
- 05-22-24
long but not boring
An extremely informative reference book for understanding today's world. I also bought it as a paper book and the notes I kept were as long as a book.
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- Joseph J. Steffen, Jr
- 08-21-16
Too many statistics
I expected more of a story. This read like an Economics 2 treatise. Reader was dry.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 08-12-16
war capitalism, industrial slavery, global markets
technical innovation, profitable endeavors, war capitalism, industrial slavery, global markets, state and corporate collusion, financial empire
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- Debora J. Watson
- 07-04-18
The real History of the Modern world
This book provides s true basis to understand the wealth of the western world and the cruelty, slavery, and dispossession of native peoples that built it.
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- Kelly Wepsiec
- 03-12-22
good work listening
This book was super informative and in depth look at the world cotton industry over time.
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- Robert A. Karlin
- 06-15-15
Thought confirming
A basic text on the underside of capitalism. First rate historical account of the interaction of oppression, industry and nation states.
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7 people found this helpful
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- Landon & Sarah
- 10-27-21
A bit of a capitalist basher
The author clearly had an ax to grind with capitalism and based on what I know from other sources I think that some of his conclusions missed the mark by a good bit. However on the whole I thought it was a good book and I'm glad I listened to it.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Kc
- 04-20-16
history of a mammoth and neglected industry
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
Few know of the power of this empire
Who was your favorite character and why?
no characters here
If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?
The origins of the industrial revolution
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