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In this book, Abramitzky and Boustan systematically exorcise most myths and complaints about immigration in the US - that modern immigrants don't integrate into US society like previous waves of immigrants, that immigrants take jobs from native born US workers, that immigrants and their descendants are fiscal drains on the government, and so on.

There's a lot of time spent on the children of immigrants, as they show that this group has very positive economic outcomes relative to their parents. These sections are insightful, and the hypotheses posed about the causes of this success - namely that immigrants tend to take jobs below their true skill level and that they tend to move to economically growing regions - is convincing.

Some major omissions here, however, prevent this book from being a complete home run. Native Americans and colonialism in North America, for example, is literally never mentioned or examined. Most analyses here compare immigrants to white Americans, explicitly because Black Americans have poor economic mobility. This coupled with the nearly complete avoidance of any discussion of the effects of racism (there's only one section that spends time on this), is especially galling. While a consideration of these issues would frankly only make the conclusions of the book stronger, they stain an otherwise solid contribution to the scholarly literature.

Beckert uses the developments of the cotton industry - from small scale production based in the Ottoman Empire and India disseminated through trade networks to slavery and colonialism-fueled mechanized production to the modern industry - to examine the evolution of state power and capital-driven private industry through the centuries. The bulk of this book focuses on the period immediately prior to the industrial revolution until the end of 1800s, and for good reason - this was arguably one of the most important eras in history through the lens of industrial and political realignment. Beckert illustrates how modern supply chains, futures markets, and waged labor all emerged from this turbulent period, as well as how many of the inequities that were imposed on different groups and regions are a direct result of the relentless push of states and industrialists to extract ever more value out of this fantastically profitable enterprise.

I particularly liked how this book combines history with a statistical accounting of changes over time, providing a much more concrete sense of the scale of economic and political changes the world over. This book could certainly be longer - the modern clothing and cotton industry is scarcely examined - but given that this work is concerned with many more unique innovations of business and politics (and the modern clothing industry is probably more similar today to a number of other large scale manufacturing industries than it was in the past) that's a reasonable tradeoff.

Overall, this book is a must read if you're at all interested in global economic history. Highly recommend

Gerald Horne gives a breathless run through of a formative time in world history - the start of systematized slavery, white supremacy, and colonialism. While the 16th century often escapes strong historical consideration since these issues weren't as widespread, Horne catalogs numerous trial runs of these systems, from Jewish persecution in Spain and England to colonial actions on the west coast of Africa and Ireland. The influence of the Ottoman Empire on this enterprise is nicely emphasized here as well.

Unfortunately I did find that this book lacks a coherent narrative, going back and forth in time and often simply listing events one after another without any in-depth analysis of their import. If you're unfamiliar with some of these events it'll be hard to fully grasp their meaning, and even then Horne proceeds with such speed that it's hard to fully internalize the threads that are exposed here.

That being said, this is still an excellent review of a critical era, and for those looking for pointers to further reading this will make a good reference.