NYT editorial cites work of Harvard's Sven Beckert and Cornell’s Edward Baptist

The fires and building collapses that killed hundreds of garment workers in countries like Bangladesh in recent years serve as a tragic reminder of the millions in developing countries who labor in wretched conditions. These workers, however, are not the garment or cotton industry’s first victims.

A book published earlier this month — “Empire of Cotton: A Global History” by Sven Beckert, a history professor at Harvard — describes in vivid detail how the industrialization of cotton contributed to slavery, the destruction of American Indian cultures and famines in British India. And while the parallels between the 18th century and 19th century and the present are inexact, the reader can’t help but think that cotton, for all its many uses, still exacts a human cost.

High school history class is good at teaching us the positive elements of this past. Older textbooks described how breakthrough innovations like the cotton gin and the steam engine fueled the industrial revolution and helped make cheap consumer goods widely available for the first time. New books like “Empire of Cotton” and “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism” by Edward Baptist offer gripping and more nuanced stories of economic history.

Mr. Beckert explains how the emergence of a textile industry in England contributed to wars against American Indian tribes in the South and fueled the slave trade. American Indians were forcibly removed from territory their ancestors had long inhabited because those fertile lands were needed to grow cotton to supply mills in Manchester and Liverpool. Hundreds of thousands of slaves were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean and moved within the United States to sow and harvest the plant.

Later, when the Civil War disrupted cotton production in the United States, British and other European capitalists turned to countries like India and Egypt that were already growing the plant along with food crops. Assisted by colonial administrators, industrialists cajoled farmers to switch to growing only cotton, subjecting farmers to trade volatility for which they were ill prepared and greatly diminishing the food supply...