It was an invitation I couldn’t turn down.

Judge Raymond Abramson of Holly Grove had invited me to join him for a lecture at the Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock.

The lecturer: Sven Beckert, the author of “Empire of Cotton: A Global History.”

Beckert, who lives in Cambridge, Mass., is the Laird Bell Professor of American History at Harvard University. His book, published in 2014, chronicles the rise and fall of cotton and the central role it once played in the world economy.

“This fluffy white fiber is at the center of this book,” Beckert writes. “The plant itself does not make history, but if we listen carefully, it will tell us of people all over the world who spent their lives with cotton: Indian weavers, slaves in Alabama, Greek merchants in the Nile Delta towns, highly organized craft workers in Lancashire. The empire of cotton was built with their labor, imagination and skills. By 1900 about 1.5 percent of the human population — millions of men, women and children — were engaged in the industry, either growing, transporting or manufacturing cotton.

“Edward Atkinson, a mid-19th century Massachusetts cotton manufacturer, was essentially correct when he pointed out that ‘there is no other product that has had so potent and malign an influence in the past upon the history and institutions of the land; and perhaps no other on which its future material welfare may more depend.’ Atkinson was speaking of the United States and its history of slavery, but his argument could be applied to the world as a whole.”

The Abramson family has a long history in the cotton culture of Arkansas. Rue and Venda Abramsom, who in 1921 built the house at Holly Grove were I spent a delightful evening last summer, were Holly Grove natives. Their parents had been among the first people to settle in the area after the Civil War. Raymond Abramson is a grandson of Rue Abramson and part of a rich tradition of Jewish farmers and merchants in the Delta, a tradition that’s rapidly disappearing.

In addition to farming, Rue Abramson operated a bank and several businesses. He opened the town’s first modern garage and service station in 1927. The official listing of the Abramson house on the National Register of Historic Places states: “The Abramsons were active in the commercial life of Holly Grove as merchants, ginners and plantation owners. By 1922, they also founded the First National Bank of Holly Grove. They were active in civic affairs. They were leaders in such organizations as the Crowley’s Ridge Council of the Boy Scouts of America, the Monroe County Fair Association, the Sahara Temple of Pine Bluff, the American Red Cross, B’nai B’rith, Temple Beth El of Helena and various other Jewish organizations.”

Rue Abramson selected a well-known Memphis architect, Estes Mann, to design his home. Mann had a remarkable career, designing more than 1,800 residences across the Mid-South, including some of the finest houses in Memphis. Mann was a Marianna native.

In the city’s commercial district a few blocks away from the Abramson home, Rue Abramson’s R. Abramson Co. owned four buildings. Rue’s son, Ralph, later took over the family’s businesses. Ralph’s wife, Rosemary, was a Memphis native who married Ralph in 1946 and spent the rest of her life in Holly Grove. Rosemary (Raymond’s mother) died in January 2013 at age 93.

Raymond Abramson received his undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia in 1973 and his law degree from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in 1976. He and his wife Mockie, a Virginia native, split their time between Little Rock and Holly Grove but maintain deep ties to Monroe County. I enjoyed sitting with them at the lecture and then talking about the Arkansas cotton culture at dinner later that evening.

I’ll say it again: You can’t understand the history of Arkansas if you don’t understand the history of cotton cultivation in the state.

Beckert wrote this about the spread of cotton into the American South: “Planters brought with them thousands of slaves. In the 1790s, the slave population of the state of Georgia nearly doubled, to 60,000. In South Carolina, the number of slaves in the upcountry cotton-growing districts grew from 21,000 in 1790 to 70,000 two decades later, including 15,000 slaves newly brought from Africa. As cotton plantations spread, the proportion of slaves in four typical South Carolina upcountry counties increased from 18.4 percent in 1790 to 39.5 percent in 1820 and to 61.1 percent in 1860. All the way to the Civil War, cotton and slavery would expand in lockstep, as Great Britain and the United States had become the twin hubs of the emerging empire of cotton.

“The only substantial problem was the land, as the same patch could not be used for more than a few years without either planting legumes on it or applying expensive guano to it. As one Putnam County, Ga., planter lamented, ‘We appear to have but one rule — that is to make as much cotton as we can, and wear out as much land as we can … lands that once produced 1,000 pounds of cotton to the acre will not now bring more than 400 pounds.’

“Yet even soil exhaustion did not slow the cotton barons; they simply moved farther west and farther south. Newly emptied lands, portable slave labor and the new ginning technology allowed cotton to be easily transferred to new territories. After 1815, cotton planters moved westward into the rich lands of upland South Carolina and Georgia. Their migration to Alabama and Louisiana, and eventually to Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas, was choreographed to the movement of cotton prices.

“While the price of cotton gradually declined over the first half of the 19th century, sharp price upswings — such as in the first half of the 1810s, between 1832 and 1837, and again after the mid-1840s — produced expansionist bursts. In 1811, one-sixteenth of all cotton grown in the United States came from states and territories west of South Carolina and Georgia. By 1820, that share had reached one-third, and in 1860 three-fourths. New cotton fields sprouted in the sediment-rich lands along the banks of the Mississippi, the upcountry of Alabama and the black prairie of Arkansas. So rapid was this move westward that by the end of the 1830s, Mississippi already produced more cotton than any other Southern state.”

Beckert points out that “the entry of the United States into the empire of cotton was so forceful that cotton cultivation in the American South quickly began to reshape the global cotton markets.

Consider these facts:

— In 1790, three years before Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, the United States produced 1.5 millions pounds of cotton.

— By 1800, the United States produced 36.5 million pounds of cotton.

— By 1820, the United States produced 167.5 million pounds of cotton.

— By 1802, the United States had become the most important supplier of cotton to the British market.

— By 1857, the United States was producing almost as much cotton as China.

“American upland cotton, which Whitney’s gin worked up so efficiently, was exceedingly well suited to the requirements of British manufacturers,” Beckert writes. “While the gin damaged the fiber, the cotton remained suitable for the production of cheaper, coarser yarns and fabrics in high demand among the lower classes in Europe and elsewhere. But for American supplies, the miracle of mass production of yarn and cloth, and the ability of new consumers to buy these cheap goods, would have foundered on old realities of the traditional cotton market. The much-vaunted consumer revolution in textiles stemmed from a dramatic transformation in the structure of plantation slavery.”

You will notice that Beckert mentioned blackland prairies when talking about Arkansas. He was referring to lands in southwest Arkansas that were the center of cotton production in the state before the Civil War, making Washington in Hempstead County a key trading center.

It wasn’t until well after the Civil War that most of the swamps were drained and the timber was cut from the vast bottomland hardwood forests of east Arkansas. Once that occurred, the Arkansas Delta became an integral part of the empire of cotton. At one point in the early 1900s, the Wilson Plantation in northeast Arkansas was one of the largest cotton plantations in the country and Mississippi County claimed to grow more cotton than any other U.S. county.

Beckert explains the westward expansion of the empire of cotton this way: “In the United States, the expansion of land under cotton occurred in two distinct ways. Cotton production expanded into the remoter hinterlands of older American cotton states such as Georgia and the Carolinas, now made accessible by railroads, where white upcountry farmers began growing much larger quantities. In the South Atlantic states, annual production, for example, increased by a factor of 3.1 between 1860 and 1920.

“In Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi, by contrast, annual cotton production stayed level until the end of the century and declined by about 25 percent in 1920 due to the exhaustion of cotton soils and the emergence of more productive cotton-growing areas farther west. Yes even despite the tired soil, cotton production dramatically expanded in some areas, such as in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, where large numbers of African-Americans cultivated cotton, enabled by new railroads, canals and levees. As a result, by 1900, one of the most highly specialized cotton-producing areas in the world emerged.

“The most dramatic expansion of cotton agriculture, however, occurred farther to the west. In Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas, the production of cotton exploded from 1,576,594 bales in 1860 to 7,283,000 bales in 1920 — a factor of 4.6 in the half century after the Civil War. By far, the most important expansion took place in Texas, a state whose farmers had only produced 431,463 bales of cotton in 1860 but produced 10 times as many — 4,345,000 bales — in 1920. Indeed, the cotton growth of 1920 in Texas alone equaled about 80 percent of that of the entire South in 1860. And by the late 1910s and early 1920s, vast investments in irrigation infrastructure by the federal government enabled a further extension of cotton agriculture in the arid lands of Arizona and California.”

The evils of segregation and the loss of work due to the mechanization of cotton farming made Arkansas a participant in the Great Migration of blacks from the rural South to cities in the upper Midwest.

Drought and low cotton prices also drove a lot of whites from the state. John Steinbeck made the Okies famous in “The Grapes of Wrath,” but there were just as many white Arkies headed west. That trend continued for years.

Between the whites (and some blacks) heading west and the blacks heading north, Arkansas lost a larger percentage of its population between 1940 and 1960 than any other state.

Nationally, about 6 million blacks fled the South from 1915-70.

In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration,” Isabel Wilkerson writes: “The Great Migration ran along three main tributaries and emptied into reservoirs all over the North and West. One stream carried people from the coastal states of Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia up the Eastern seaboard to Washington, Philadelphia, New York, Boston and their satellites. A second current traced the central spine of the continent, paralleling the Father of Waters, from Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas to the industrial cities of Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh. A third and later stream carried people from Louisiana and Texas to the entire West Coast, with some black Southerners traveling farther than many modern-day immigrants.”

Wilkerson notes that by the mid-1930s, some grade-school classrooms for blacks in Milwaukee had almost “every child from Mississippi, Tennessee or Arkansas.”

The outmigration continues to this day in a number of Arkansas Delta counties.

Raymond Abramson’s native Monroe County lost a larger percentage of its residents — more than 20 percent — between the 2000 census and the 2010 census than any other Arkansas county.

The irony is that the land in these Delta counties is more valuable than ever, producing bumper crops most years of soybeans, rice, cotton, corn, wheat and grain sorghum. Arkansas farmers are among the best in the world at what they do. They’re so efficient that they need few employees. Land that once required hundreds of sharecroppers to chop and pick cotton can now be farmed with just a handful of laborers.

Left behind in the Arkansas Delta are the landowners — whose wives may drive Mercedes and BMWs and whose kids may attend Ivy League schools — and the poorest of the poor, those who couldn’t escape.

I’m reminded of how Sven Beckert closes “Empire of Cotton”: “A world that seems stable and permanent in one moment can be radically transformed in the next. The capitalist revolution, after all, perpetually re-creates our world, just as the world’s looms perpetually manufacture new materials.”

The Southern Cotton Ginners Association is holding its summer meeting in Little Rock next month, and I’ve been invited to speak.

That invitation has given me a reason to research the fascinating history of cotton cultivation in the South, a subject that already interested me. As I stated in the previous post, you can’t really understand the history of Arkansas without fully understanding the history of cotton cultivation in the state.

Cotton is still grown in Arkansas, though the acreage is a fraction of what it once was.

In an article last fall, the Delta Farm Press focused on the harvest season at the Rabbit Ridge Gin near Lepanto.

David Bennett wrote: “As tufts of cottonseed debris swirl in the late October air, Tri Watkins walks across the Rabbit Ridge Gin yard warmly greeting employees. This is northeast Arkansas — Lepanto is a few miles west of here and Dyess, where Johnny Cash was raised, is a few miles south — and the gin is one of a shrinking number. Watkins — who is the incoming president of the Southern Cotton Ginners Association — is in business with his cousin, Ernest Portis. The pair are distant cousins of acclaimed Arkansas writer Charles Portis, author of ‘True Grit’ and ‘The Dog of the South.'”

Watkins explained: “Ernest’s father and my grandfather were brothers, and their father actually began the business in 1911.”

Watkins’ great-grandfather had worked for northeast Arkansas cotton king R.E.L. Wilson.

Of his own involvement in ginning, Watkins told Bennett: “We ginned together in Lepanto at two small gins for years. In the early 1970s, after Ernest graduated from college, he and his brother came out here and built the gin. Meanwhile, my side of the family continued to run the gins in town. By the early 1990s, they had become too old and difficult to maintain. So at that time we bought back in with Ernest. He had already been out here for 20 years and was looking for a partner.”

Watkins explained that Rabbit Ridge is “the local name. Around here, a ridge can be two feet high running through a field.”

When running 24 hours a day, Rabbit Ridge can gin 30 bales per hour. The record year was 36,000 bales ginned. Last year, fewer than 10,000 bales were ginned.

Watkins came back to northeast Arkansas to farm with his grandfather after graduation from law school in 1986.

He told Delta Farm Press: “At the time, we had basically a land-only operation, a couple of gins, a farm store — now shut down — and a small bank. I came back and got involved with all of those facets of the business and still am to some degree. I knew I would be back when I was in law school. I graduated college and wasn’t quite ready to come home. My father said, ‘Go to law school. Even if you never practice, you’ll at least have that to fall back on if you decide agriculture isn’t for you. If you do like it, though, given our banking interests, a law degree would be very useful.’

“Our primary business at Portis Mercantile Co. is managing and renting out land. My family has 20,000 acres, and Ernest has about 10,000 acres that he and his son, Bradsher, own and manage. Some of that is in timber. This year, we grew about 1,500 acres of cotton with Ernest growing about the same. The most cotton we’ve grown on Portis Mercantile ground was about 6,500 acres. Obviously price is critical to cotton remaining viable. You’ve got to have a good price for lint. You’ve also got to have a good price for cottonseed. The price of cottonseed is what’s helping keep gins open. We have two seed houses. One has a capacity of 2,000 tons, and the other is just under that.”

Much of the cottonseed is sold to the dairy market, where it’s blended with rations to increase milk’s butterfat content.

Nearby Lepanto is where the made-for-television movie “A Painted House,” based on John Grisham’s best-selling novel of the same name, was filmed in 2002. The 2001 book is a fictionalized account of Grisham’s early days on a cotton farm. The farmhouse used in the filming is still there.

The movie was first screened in April 2003 on the Arkansas State University campus at Jonesboro at an event that raised $170,000 for ASU’s nationally recognized program in heritage studies. Grisham and his novel were presented the Arkansiana Award by the Arkansas Library Association. That award recognizes authors and books that make a significant contribution to Arkansas heritage and culture.

Grisham was born at Jonesboro in February 1955. His parents were helping relatives on a cotton farm at Black Oak in Craighead County at the time (there’s also a Black Oak farther south that’s roughly on the Crittenden County-Poinsett County line). His family left the area when Grisham was four as his father worked in various construction jobs. The family eventually settled in Southaven, Miss., but Grisham spent large parts of each summer on the Black Oak farm with his grandparents.

People began settling in the Lepanto area after the Civil War. It was in the northeast Arkansas Sunken Lands, and most of the area consisted of swamps and thick bottomland hardwood forests. Growth began in the early 1900s as lumber companies started harvesting the virgin timber in the area. Tree stumps then were burned, swamps were drained and the land was plowed for cotton.

Cotton: The common theme in the region’s history.

“In 1902, Steve Ralph and Henry S. Portis built a cotton gin in Lepanto so that harvested cotton would not have to be shipped downriver to Memphis,” Steve Teske writes for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture. “The next year, Chris Bryan Greenwood, who had recently moved into the area from Harrisburg, commissioned four engineers to plat the city. The five main streets of the city were named for Greenwood and the engineers. William C. Dawson built the city’s first sawmill in 1905, and a new logging camp was built between Lepanto and Marked Tree.

“The city grew rapidly. Improved drainage was completed by 1907, and the city was officially incorporated in 1909. A bank and a telephone company were established in 1910 and a railroad depot was built in 1912. … Houses and stores were also being built, and a new school building was erected in 1913. The Portis Mercantile building was constructed in 1915, and a volunteer fire department was organized by 1919.”

As the timber was cut, cotton became king.

Tenant farmers and sharecroppers would pack communities such as Lepanto and Marked Tree as they came to town on Saturdays to shop and seek entertainment.

Van Hawkins explains the system this way for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture: “The most common lease arrangement in Arkansas called for crop rent, requiring a tenant to pay usually 25 percent to 50 percent of the crops harvested. These percentages vary from year to year, farm to farm and crop to crop. To guarantee crop loan repayment, lenders and sometimes suppliers took a first lien on the tenant’s share of crops and equipment used to produce them. Such liens meant that holders had a legal right to crop proceeds until loans were paid in full. Should proceeds not be sufficient to pay off the lender, a foreclosure could occur with collateral (the equipment and any other asset used to secure the loan) seized and sold to pay off the debt.

“Crop rent came from crops at harvest, and cotton or grain hauled to gins and elevators was split according to contract percentages. Tenants and landowners each received their respective shares of the crop. If a lien existed on the tenant share, checks for crop sale proceeds usually had both the lienholder’s and the farmer’s name so neither could cash the check without both endorsements. By this means, lenders helped enforce their legal rights and protected themselves from conversion of crop proceeds.”

Hawkins notes that many of the plantations “required sharecroppers to purchase business and personal supplies from commissary stores as a condition to farm the land. Farmers received doodlum books (vouchers) for credit at the company store. Prices there sometimes were well in excess of those charged at town stores. The March 1935 edition of Today magazine reported markups in the 25 percent range at Southern plantation commissaries. For example, company stories priced potatoes at $2.25 when they were $1.75 in town. Abusive practices such as these generated ongoing tensions between Arkansas tenants and landowners since many tenants never got out of debt. Some farmers sought to organize better treatment, forming groups such as the Agricultural Wheel for this purpose. An organizational meeting of one union was at the center of violence that erupted in Elaine in 1919.”

Grif Stockley, the author of the 2001 book “Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919,” called what happened in the Elaine area “by far the deadliest racial confrontation in Arkansas history and possibly the bloodiest racial conflict in the history of the United States. While its deepest roots lay in the state’s commitment to white supremacy, the events in Elaine stemmed from tense race relations and growing concerns about labor unions. A shooting incident that occurred at a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America escalated into mob violence on the part of the white people in Elaine and surrounding areas. Although the exact number is unknown, estimates of the number of African-Americans killed by whites range into the hundreds. Five white people lost their lives.”

The union meeting, attended by almost 100 black sharecroppers, occurred on the evening of Sept. 30, 1919, at a church in Hoop Spur, a small settlement three miles north of Elaine. The sharecroppers were seeking better prices for their cotton crops. A shootout in front of the church resulted in the death of a white security officer for the Missouri-Pacific Railroad and the wounding of a white deputy from the Phillips County Sheriff’s Office.

Stockley writes: “The next morning, the Phillips County sheriff sent out a posse to arrest those suspected of being involved in the shooting. Although the posse encountered minimal resistance from the black residents of the area around Elaine, the fear of African-Americans, who outnumbered whites in this area of Phillips County by a ratio of 10 to 1, led an estimated 500 to 1,000 armed white people — mostly from surrounding Arkansas counties but also from across the river in Mississippi — to travel to Elaine to put down what was characterized by them as an insurrection.”

More than 500 federal troops from Camp Pike arrived in Elaine on Oct. 2, 1919, and hundreds of blacks were placed in makeshift stockades.

An Arkansas Gazette employee named Sharpe Dunaway later would allege that the solders “committed one murder after another with all the calm deliberation in the world, either too heartless to realize the enormity of their crimes or too drunk on moonshine to give a continental darn.”

The commander of the troops at Elaine reported that only two blacks were killed by his troops.

As I said, you can’t understand the history of Arkansas without understanding the history of cotton.

“Tenant difficulties increased in the early 1930s when the Great Depression decimated agriculture along with the rest of the economy,” Hawkins writes. “Arkansas farmers faced nickel cotton (a market price of five cents per lint pound, which was the low end of its historic market range) and the locked doors of banks that become insolvent. Unable to borrow money to make crops, many tenant farmers joined the exodus made famous by John Steinbeck’s ‘Grapes of Wrath.’

“The administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt created federal programs to help prop up cotton prices, including a plan to compensate farmers who agreed to forego planting acreage in exchange for parity payments from the federal government. Though the program stipulated that landowners share parity payments with tenants, some owners kept all of the money, and U.S. Department of Agriculture compliance efforts proved ineffectual. Additionally, owners evicted tenants since acreage reduction made them unnecessary, another violation of regulations. … The USDA financial assistance, developed initially as a temporary fix for Depression-era problems, became ingrained in agricultural economics and grew into a major source of income for state farmers.”