This essay focuses mainly on war capitalism, the expansion of Europeans to Africa, Asia and America, protectionist policies, Asian knowledge transfer and the new global economic order.
War capitalism created a new global economic order, firstly in order for us to understand how
war capitalism caused an economic order globally we will have to closely examine the cotton
textile trade. This essay will highlight war capitalism, expansion of Europeans to Africa, Asia
and America, protectionist policies, Asian knowledge transfer and the new global economic
order.
In order to grasp the concept of war capitalism we need, firstly to know what it exactly can be
described as, it was a concept whereby in the global economic markets there was intervention
by private actors with its emphasis being on labour force enslavement, land expropriation and
violent dominance of global production. Slavery was at the core of this new system, the
deportation of millions of Africans to the America heightened ties to India by increasing
pressure to obtain more cotton textiles, due to this, mercantile presence was significantly
established in Africa.1 The ability of affluent and powerful Europeans to split the world into
an 'inside' and an 'outside' was crucial to war capitalism.2 The mother country's laws,
institutions, and customs constituted the 'inside' where state-enforced order reigned supreme.3
The 'outside' on the other hand, was marked by imperial dominance, expropriation of
enormous areas of land, annihilation of indigenous peoples, plunder of their resources,
enslavement, and private capitalist dominance of enormous swaths of territory with no
effective monitoring by distant European powers.4 The 'inside' laws did not apply in these
imperial dependencies, here, masters overruled states, violence defied the law, and private
actors changed markets through forceful physical coercion.5 According to the Beckert, war
capitalism had exceptional transformative potential, power that had previously been
distributed over various continents and across different networks began to be concentrated
through a master network and cotton was at the centre of this transformation when multiple
and varied regions of this commodity's production and distribution gave way to a hierarchical
empire structured on a worldwide scale.6 This shows the role war capitalism played in paving
the road for new global economic order.
1
Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014), 9.
2
Ibid, 10
3
Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 10
4
Ibid, 10
5
Ibid, 10
6
Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 10
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