According to the traditional narrative of the Industrial Revolution, the rise of factories and wage labor replaced an older system dominated by merchants, artisans, and putting-out systems. While historians acknowledge the violence and coercion at the heart of this earlier system of capitalism—particularly slavery and the expropriation of Indigenous lands—it is generally referred to as “mercantile capitalism,” a phrase that fails to capture the cruelty and inhumanity on which it relied. With Empire of Cotton, Beckert seeks to correct this by applying a new terminology to this era: war capitalism.

He writes, “Slavery, the expropriation of indigenous peoples, imperial expansion, armed trade, and the assertion of sovereignty over people and land by entrepreneurs were at its core. I call this system war capitalism” (xv). In establishing the importance of war capitalism to Europe’s rise as a global economic power, Beckert looks to the example of the early cotton-weaving industries in Southern Germany and Northern Italy during the 15th century. While these regions enjoyed several preconditions for building successful cotton industries, Beckert maintains that they ultimately failed because they did not project power nor utilize violent coercion to control the Ottoman farmers who provided them with raw material.