The Empire of Cotton is the recounting of a real epic that took place, and continues to take place, on a planetary scale. It is the story of how, within a remarkably short period of time, from the last decades of the 18th century onward, European traders, entrepreneurs, capitalists, and powerful state officials exploited the fruit of an ancient plant as well as the accumulated experience and vast markets of an ancient manufacturing activity in Asia, Africa, North and South America, and built a new cotton economy of enormous breadth and dynamism.

Their vehicle was the power of their states, the combination of overseas expansionism and slave labor, the introduction of new machines, and the establishment of new forms of wage labor, as well as the development of unprecedented forms of networking and information exchange. And ironically, their staggering success simultaneously awakened those very forces that would ultimately, in the 20th century, marginalize them from the empire they had created.

Along the way of this story, millions of people, including many children, spent their lives working on cotton fields and in cotton mills. Millions of people were enslaved in Africa and transported to the cotton plantations of America, traditional agrarian societies saw their way of life change drastically. Handcrafted production was swept away by the relentless production of machines: the Empire of Cotton has, from the very beginning, been a field of an unending global friction between slaves and plantation owners, traders and state officials, workers and industrialists.

And because it intertwined the continents in new ways, cotton offers the key to understanding the modern world, its immense inequalities, the long history of globalization, and the ever-changing political economy of capitalism. The Empire of Cotton was honored with the Bancroft Prize, the Philip Taft Prize, received the Cundill Recognition for Excellence, and was one of the finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times included it in its ten best books of 2015.