In the early twentieth century, the global cotton industry entered a new development phase. The dominant manufacturing center, Lancashire, was increasingly vulnerable to supply shortages of American cotton and market manipulations. In response, industry representatives and associations sought new sources of cotton cultivation. For the British Cotton Growing Association, whose story is documented in Jonathan Robins's Cotton and Race across the Atlantic: Britain, Africa and America, 1900–1920, this meant African cultivation projects. In its relatively short history, the association had an impact on cotton supply and markets, but it also attracted criticism and competition from rival projects.

These rivalries form part Robins's larger story, whose key themes are the histories of American and British capitalism, the imperial project in Africa, and the roles of political power and violence in creating markets. Building on recent global histories of textiles, Robins focuses not merely on the commodity, but on a wider system of interdependencies between agriculture, manufacturing and consumption, and the political power relations that underlay them. By concentrating on the British empire of cotton in Africa, Robins has provided a book that compliments recent studies examining the colonial practices of Portugal, France, and Germany.

One strong appeal of global history, as Robins demonstrates, is the triangulation of powerful themes from diverse individual perspectives. These include Daniel J. Sully, the New York speculator, whose market manipulations encouraged Lancashire to seek new overseas sources of supply; J. Arthur Hutton, the Manchester merchant and driving force behind the British Cotton Growing Association; journalist and humanitarian campaigner Edmund Dene Morel, who saw in the association an opportunity for the free and independent economic development of Africa; John Wesley Hoffman, the African American Tuskegee Institute scientist employed by the association to promote cotton cultivation, and with it, the “scientific redemption of Africa” (186); and local ruler Alake Gbadebo I of Abeokuta, recruited by the association at an agricultural show in Lagos in 1903, as a champion of cotton cultivation.

Viewed from these multiple perspectives, the British Cotton Growing Association offers a thought-provoking case study of colonial development. Ideologically, it was rooted in the notions of free markets and economic rationality and thus engaged wide support from significant sections of Lancashire mill owners, especially the main spinning centers of Oldham and Bolton, and their industry associations. Notwithstanding this approach, the association attracted additional support from trade unionists and cooperative societies. All parties had a collective interest in promoting a stable and sustainable supply of cotton. The association was also semi-philanthropic and aimed to provide economic opportunities to African farmers. By supplying free seeds, it would encourage African production and bring stability to Lancashire, while avoiding the exploitation of colonial labor. At the same time, its success would vindicate the superiority of the market approach vis-á-vis state-backed initiatives in other European empires.

In the event, the outcomes were mixed. The better projects in Africa, notably in Uganda, were typically based on local initiatives and sustainable systems of production. However, many of the association's projects lacked direction and parallel investments in infrastructure, revealing a dependency on colonial politics and administration. Significantly, the association raised insufficient finance in Lancashire. Some industry representatives believed that the African schemes were doomed to failure, that Lancashire's future depended on the quality and scale of the American crop, and that only working through transatlantic networks would achieve the desired outcomes. In the United States, meanwhile, state-backed investment supported wealthier southern farmers, ensuring that cotton remained a “white man's crop.”

To relate this multidimensional story from primary records is no easy task. Nonetheless, Robins methodically researched the subject, using multiple sources. These feature contemporary accounts, previously unexplored archives, regional newspapers, and colonial office records. From the British Cotton Growing Association's perspective, they include the association's own records, Hutton's diaries, and the journals of William Himbury, the association's main agent in West Africa. Recording African American and African perspectives, without equivalent sources, is a challenge to any historian, but Robins deals with it by using scholarly collections of oral histories and, in the case of West Africa, local newspaper accounts.

In chapter 1, “The Cotton Crisis,” Robins outlines the vulnerability of Lancashire to American crop yields and Sully's market manipulations, as a backdrop to the organization and development of the British Cotton Growing Association. Robins explains the association's backers attracted significant support, and the consequent diversion of investment away from elsewhere in the empire, including India, in chapter 2, “The Black Man's Crop.” These developments, however, reflected the sectional interests of the association's leaders, prominent Liverpool and Manchester merchants, rather than the wider Lancashire manufacturing interests. In chapter 3, “The Scientific Redemption of Africa,” robins examines strategies adopted by the association to encourage cotton cultivation, ranging from outright coercion to scientifically supported “improvement projects.” Market prices demanded by Lancashire were insufficient to induce African farmers to cultivate cotton, leading to a greater emphasis on the application of US scientific approaches and state-backed initiatives. In the US cotton-growing states, meanwhile, the focus of chapter 4, “King Cotton's Impoverished Retinue”—the farmers who had long suffered low prices and instability—now became the focus of a populist movement. For wealthier farmers at least, the result was a reassertion of the economic integrity and independence of the South. Finally, in chapter 5, Robins examines the First World War's impact, drawing together the themes of cotton, development, and the “imperial burden.” The consequences were the emergence of state-backed capital-intensive farming in the United States, and, in the British Empire, the rejection of the prewar liberal model in favor of state-backed and science-led colonial state building.

The British Cotton Growing Association's short history reveals an absorbing interplay of economics and politics straddling three continents at the height of the age of imperialism. As such, Robins provides a valuable contribution to the history of cotton, not just of the commodity, but also of the social relations surrounding its cultivation and production. He provides additional perspective on the traditional focuses of the American South and Lancashire, and, from Africa, new insight into cotton's role in the pre-1914 globalization project and its aftermath. It is noteworthy that success stories in African cotton mostly occurred despite, not because of, such wider colonial influences, and were sustained instead by local systems and practices.