ABSTRACT
The late-eighteenth-century rise of industrialism in Britian was made possible not only by a growing population and technological innovations, but also by raw resources extracted and imported from elsewhere, as coal-powered machines processed cotton grown in the American colonies by enslaved Africans. It was the improbable conjuncture of land-rich colonies and accessible coal that set our modern world system-with its vast political and economic disparities-in motion.11
