Behind the original pubication of Montgomery's "Practical Detail" (1840) lay the continuing concern about world markets & international economic & technological leadership. Montgomery's achievement lay in the wealth & reliability of the comparative data he assembled, for the first time, about the Am. & British cotton industries, which were then the high tech of industrializing societies. For the tech. & economics of production of the early 19th century cotton industries, his work remains indispensable. A mss. has recently surfaced in which Montgomery recorded the changes he intended for the 2nd ed. of his classic. The vol. is prefaced by a biog. of Montgomery, tracing his Scottish background & his migration from Glasgow to New England in the 1830s, & an intro. to the 2nd ed., establishing its context. Appended to the Montogmery text are the documents of the "justitia controversy," from the Boston newspapers of 1841, in which the merits & relative costs of steam & water power were debated. Scholarly footnotes, textual & substantive, are provided as appropriate. Illus.

WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE • A Pulitzer Prize finalist that's as unsettling as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist. “Masterly … An astonishing achievement.” —The New York Times The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, workers and factory owners. Sven Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the world of modern capitalism, including the vast wealth and disturbing inequalities that are with us today. In a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful politicians recast the world’s most significant manufacturing industry, combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to make and remake global capitalism.