"Economic historian" who flunked out of econ class
A Pulitzer Prize nomination --who are they kidding?!? Just because the author is skilled at writing a flowing prose narrative doesn't mean that any of the snake oil he is selling will cure you.
This just goes to show how peer review in academic history settings is really code for "group think." This is nothing more than warmed-over Marxism in a thin cotton veil. The author knows a ton about cotton itself, but shows a total lack of familiarity with major areas of social-science scholarship (development economics, state formation, political economy, etc.) that make his entire argument about "war capitalism" obviously spurious. This book's popularity among academic historians is itself a scathing indictment of the lack of socially-scientific hypothesis testing in the present delusional "cultural-turn" era in the humanities.
