# Empire of Cotton

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![Empire of Cotton](https://quivercdn.com/covers/penguin/sven-beckert/empire-of-cotton_978-01-4197-998-4.jpg?v=2026-04-24%2004%3A50%3A44)

- Book: [Empire of Cotton](https://www.bookquiver.com/sven-beckert/empire-of-cotton) ([Empire of Cotton.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/sven-beckert/empire-of-cotton.md))
- Authors: [Sven Beckert](https://www.bookquiver.com/sven-beckert)
- Publisher: Penguin
- ISBN: 978-01-4197-998-4
- Pages: 640
- Published: 2015-10-29
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Softcover

## Description

For about 900 years, from 1000 to 1900, cotton was the world's most important manufacturing industry. It remains a vast business - if all the cotton bales produced in 2013 had been stacked on top of each other they would have made a somewhat unstable tower 40,000 miles high. Sven Beckert's superb new book is a history of the overwhelming role played by cotton in dictating the shape of our world. It is both a gripping narrative and a brilliant case history of how the world works.