A room full of men, most of them wearing sombre-coloured suits, hats and ties, captures the capitalist world of the nineteenth century. In 1872 the famous painter Degas visited his maternal family in New Orleans, the world's busiest cotton trading port, and painted one of the offices of the local cotton exchange (Figure 12.1). The artist's brother appears as the man leaning against the window and his uncle as the older man cleaning his glasses. The homage to Degas’ family does not detract, however, from the precision of observation: at the centre of the composition dealers are inspecting the quality of cotton; on the right, a busy clerk and his helper are scribbling on large books. This is not the world of the plantation, nor that of a factory and not even the buzzing port of New Orleans, much represented in early photography in the second half of the nineteenth century. Degas takes us instead into the confined space of an office where bureaucracy and expertise embody business. A scene like this would not have been different from scenes of the cotton exchange of Liverpool or the sorting office of Mumbai. We would have found western men dressed in black and wearing hats carrying out similar activities. Degas captures the essence of capitalism: it is not the world of the ocean or the adventurous merchant, but that of the bureaucrat recording figures, assessing information and checking commodities. From a room in New Orleans, decisions could be taken that had global repercussions. Behind the veneer of a carefully constructed sense of boredom, Degas reveals the true nature of nineteenth-century global capitalism in which cotton became king.