Books like Forging the Modern World by James Carter

**The Age of Revolution: Europe: 1789–1848** is a book by Eric Hobsbawm, first published in 1962. It is the first in a trilogy of books about "the long 19th century" (coined by Hobsbawm), followed by *The Age of Capital: 1848–1875*, and *The Age of Empire: 1875–1914*. A fourth book, *The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991*, acts as a sequel to the trilogy. (Source: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Revolution:_Europe_1789%E2%80%931848))

The epic story of the rise and fall of the empire of cotton, its centrality in the world economy, and its making and remaking of global capitalism. Sven Beckert's rich, fascinating book tells the story of how, in a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful statesmen recast the world's most significant manufacturing industry combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to change the world. Here is the story of how, beginning well before the advent of machine production in 1780, these men created a potent innovation (Beckert calls it war capitalism, capitalism based on unrestrained actions of private individuals; the domination of masters over slaves, of colonial capitalists over indigenous inhabitants), and crucially affected the disparate realms of cotton that had existed for millennia. We see how this thing called war capitalism shaped the rise of cotton, and then was used as a lever to transform the world. The empire of cotton was, from the beginning, a fulcrum of constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, farmers and merchants, workers and factory owners. In this as in so many other ways, Beckert makes clear how these forces ushered in the modern world. The result is a book as unsettling and disturbing as it is enlightening: a book that brilliantly weaves together the story of cotton with how the present global world came to exist. - Publisher.