Sven Beckert’s research on the “cotton empire” has also shown thecrucial importance of slave labor in the extraction of cotton when theBritish and Europeans seized control over worldwide textile pro-duction between 1750 and 1860.

Ken Pomeranz’s study, published in 2000, on the “greatdivergence” between Europe and China in the eighteenth and nine-teenth centuries,1 prob ably the most important and influential bookon the history of the world-economy (économie-monde) since the pub-lication of Fernand Braudel’s Civilisation matérielle, économie etcapitalisme in 1979 and the works of Immanuel Wallerstein on “world-systems analysis.”2 For Pomeranz, the development of Western in-dustrial capitalism is closely linked to systems of the internationaldivision of labor, the frenetic exploitation of natural resources, andthe European powers’ military and colonial domination over the restof the planet. Subsequent studies have largely confirmed that conclu-sion, whether through the research of Prasannan Parthasarathi orthat of Sven Beckert and the recent movement around the “new his-tory of capitalism.”3