Cotton is indeed a wonderful fiber. Since ancient times, it can be spun, woven and painted and is the most commonly used fiber in the world. It is soft, fluffy and grows in a “bowl” around the cotton plant seeds. It can be converted into almost everything: clothing, bedclothes, furniture and even art.
No one knows exactly how old cotton is. Scientists found cotton that proved to be at least 7000 years old. This cotton is similar to that grown today. It is said that Cleopatra herself dressed in clothes from the finest cotton, as the Egyptians were growing cotton Along the Nile River banks.
The first people in Eurasia to grow cotton to make clothes, sheets and towels were the Harappan people, an early civilization that migrated from Africa to present-day Pakistan and then to Indian subcontinent.
A series of Indian poems provide us our earliest information about cotton. The poems, called “the Rigveda” (one of the most sacred texts of Hinduism), were written in 600 BC. These poems were sung and recited publicly for hundreds of years until they were transcribed into Sanskrit circa 1000 AD.
In 400 BC, Herodotus wrote that in India there were trees growing wild which produced a kind of wool better than sheep’s wool in beauty and quality, which the Indians used for making their clothes.
By the year 200 AD, the Indians were selling cotton as a luxury good to their neighbors in the east and west, the Chinese and the Parthians. Further west, the Romans considered cotton as luxurious and as expensive as silk, which they bought from Arabic or Parthian traders. Like Herodotus, the Roman author and philosopher Pliny wrote that in India there were trees that bear wool, from which expensive clothes are made.
With the establishment of the Islamic Empire in the late 600 AD, cotton production had spread westward, across the Middle East to North Africa and Spain. By the 700s the Eastern Roman Empire also started cultivating cotton. In West Asia and North Africa, poor people began wearing cotton clothing; however, in Europe, cotton was still a very unusual luxury item. By 1000AD, Italian traders brought more cotton to Europe.
Remarkably, very little cotton cloth was imported to England before the 15th century and the small amounts that had been imported were mainly used for candlewicks. By the 1600s, European explorers found cotton plants grown and used in the Americas. These new species were introduced to Africa in the eighteenth century and later spread to India.
The British demand for cotton was about to change in the eighteenth century, when the East India Company began importing rare fabrics from India. With the invention of a machine that separated the seeds from the fiber, in 1793, cotton began to substitute flax and wool during the Industrial Revolution.
American cotton yield doubled each decade after 1800 after the invention of the machine that separated the seeds from the fiber. Demand for cotton increased with the emergence of other innovations of the Industrial Revolution, including weaving machines and the steamboat to transport it.
Between 1815 and 1859, the United Kingdom imported around 77% of American cotton and turned it into cloth. However, the US cotton market began to decline with the start of the Civil War. By then, Americans relied on the labor force of black slaves for cotton production. Slaves had been working on American cotton plantations in appalling conditions.
Thus, Britain was forced to turn to other countries like Brazil, India, Turkey and Egypt for an alternative source of raw material. Cotton production in India was not mechanized, so Indians struggled to compete; instead of exporting finished cotton goods, India became the largest importer of British cotton textiles.
With the rise of Ghandi, the Indian society was encouraged to boycott British goods; Ghandi encouraged Indians to use homespun cotton and purchase only hand-spun Indian cloth. In modern India, the Indian cotton industry could once again compete on the world market.
Most of today’s cotton continues to be grown in India, Uzbekistan, Senegal, Pakistan, China and other developing countries. Cotton has contributed to the development of capitalism and played a crucial role in world history, raising civilizations.
Nowadays, it’s almost impossible not to use at least once a day a product or item containing cotton or cottonseed oil.
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