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Recent & Popular Posts
- Critiques of Edward Baptist
- Critiques of The History Manifesto
- Did inequality cause the First World War?
- Did the "Invisible Blockade" against Allende work?
- Economic growth in ancient Greece
- Fascism was not left-wing!!!
- Greece from Post-war orthodoxy to "Democratic Peronism"
- Ideology & Human Development (on Cuba's social development)
- Labour repression & the Indo-Japanese divergence
- Markets & famines: Amartya Sen is not the last word!
- Nazi political economy
- Random Thoughts on Robert Allen's theory of the Industrial Revolution
- State Capacity & the Sino-Japanese Divergence
- Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton: A Reductionist Summary
- The Bairoch conjecture & the "tariff-growth paradox" of the late 19th century
- The Calico Acts: Was British cotton made possible by infant industry protection from Indian competition?
- The Napoleonic Blockade & the Infant Industry Argument
- Various posts on slavery
- Was slavery necessary for the Industrial Revolution?
- Where do pro-social institutions come from?
Language Posts
Category Archives: cotton
Labour repression & the Indo-Japanese divergence
There used to be more research and debate on the negative effects of labour resistance on early industrialisation, but that topic has been crowded out by the intense focus on inequality of recent years. There now prevails a quiet presumption … Continue reading
The Calico Acts: Was British cotton made possible by infant industry protection from Indian competition?
Many “global historians” argue that the British cotton industry was the product of (unintentional) infant industry protection from Indian competition in the 18th century. The various Calico Acts created an import-substitution industry by banning Indian cloths and reserving the home market for British producers. This … Continue reading
The Napoleonic blockade & the infant industry argument: caveats, limitations, reservations
Some caveats and reservations about the Napoleonic blockade paper on the infant industry argument that’s making waves. My caveat: protection persisted for decades after the blockade and may have helped keep the French cotton industry backward relative to Britain.
Posted in cotton, cotton textiles, France, import substitution industrialization, industrial policy, Industrial Revolution, Infant industry argument, protectionism, trade & development
Tagged agglomeration, cotton, Infant industry argument, John Nye, Napoleonic blockade, Reka Juhasz, rent-seeking
16 Comments
Tariff Protection of British cotton 1774-1820s
British Tariff Protection after 1774: Competition, Innovation, & Misallocation, plus a note on Weaving This is an addendum to a post about the Calico Acts, which had prohibited within Britain the consumption of cotton cloths both foreign and domestic. But even after … Continue reading
Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Reductionist Summary
Historian Sven Beckert’s widely acclaimed book, Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism, is a good agrarian, business, and labour history of a single commodity. But as economic history it’s not so good.
Posted in cotton, cotton textiles, Empire of Cotton, global history, historians of capitalism, Sven Beckert
Tagged cotton, deindustrialization, Economic Development, Empire of Cotton, global history, great divergence, historians of capitalism, Industrial Revolution, Rise of the West, Sven Beckert
40 Comments
Baptism by Blood Cotton
The underlying claim in Edward Baptist’s “oral economic history” of slavery, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, is that slave owners, through the scientific “calibration” of torture, intensified the work of slaves in order to increase labour productivity by … Continue reading
Plant breeding, not working slaves harder, drove cotton productivity gains in the US South
Summary : New cultivars of cotton led to an unprecedented rise in the productivity of US southern cotton in the 60 years before the American Civil War. The Economist magazine may have said some stupid things about the subject in its review of Edward Baptist’s book … Continue reading
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