The empire of cotton is the story of a real epic, which took place, and continues to take place, on a planetary scale. It is the story of how, in a remarkably short period of time, from the last decades of the 18th century onwards, European merchants, entrepreneurs, capitalists, and powerful state officials, exploiting the fruit of an ancient plant as well as the accumulated experience and vast markets of an ancient manufacturing activity in Asia, Africa, North and South America, built a new cotton economy of enormous scope and dynamism. Their vehicles were the power of their states, the combination of overseas expansion and slave labor, the introduction of new machines and the establishment of new forms of wage labor, as well as the development of unprecedented forms of networking and information circulation. And ironically, their stunning success simultaneously awakened those very forces that ultimately, in the 20th century, would marginalize them in the empire they had created.

In the course of this history, millions of people, including many children, spent their lives working in cotton fields and cotton mills, millions of people were enslaved in Africa and transported to the cotton plantations of America, traditional rural societies saw their way of life radically changed, and handicraft production was swept away by the relentless production of machines: the empire of cotton was, from the very beginning, a field of relentless global friction between slaves and plantation owners, merchants and state officials, workers and industrialists. And because it intertwined the continents in new ways, cotton offers the key to understanding the modern world, its immense inequalities, the long history of globalization, and the constantly changing political economy of capitalism.

"The empire of cotton" was honored with the Bancroft Prize, the Philip Taft Prize, won the Cundill Recognition for Excellence, and was one of the finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times included it in the top ten books of 2015.