Empire Of Cotton Analysis

In Empire of Cotton, we can observe that the industrialized cotton production, once linked metropole and colonies together, propelled nationalist independence movements in the 20th century. Facing the labor unions demanding high wages, European and North American cotton manufacturers relocated their factories to the Global South to acquire cheap labors. The relocation was accompanied by the ideology of industrial capitalism, modern cotton manufacturing technology, managerial skills in factories, and the manipulation of local markets. Learning the profitability of cotton production and trade, the indigenous capital holders built up their own plants and took advantage of the low-cost workers who had mastered the cotton manufacturing skills in the relocated factories of the empires. The local plant owners believed that their survival and prosperity depended on a strong central government and state-protected markets, which were the key to the earlier success of the empires. Their wish coincided with the calls of local nationalists and accelerated the independence …show more content…
Overdependence on the digital sources creates many blind-spots in the exploration of primary sources. As Putnam described in her article, the digitalization of documents currently focuses primarily on the ones written in English and western languages. The overrepresentation of documents written in western languages might isolate the eastern countries from the vision of transnational historians in the digital era. The trend of document digitalization also isolates sources from their geographical and cultural context. She suggests that historians who want to study grain prices or prostitutions in one region may also read the political movements and state-building from the same documents in archives. However, this link may be ignored during a search within electronic