by Sven Beckert
The many peoples who grew cotton remained for thousands of years unaware that their efforts were being replicated by other peoples around the globe, all of whom lived in a geographic band roughly from 32–35 degrees south to 37 degrees north. These areas offered a climate suitable for the growing of cotton. As a subtropical plant, it needs temperatures not dipping below 50 degrees Fahrenheit during its growth period and usually remaining above 60 degrees. Cotton, we now know, thrives in areas in which no frost occurs for around 200 days, and in which it rains from twenty to twenty-five inches a year, concentrated in the middle of the growing period, a common climate zone that explains its abundance across multiple continents. Seeds are put in trenches about three feet apart and then covered with soil. It takes from 160 to 200 days for the cotton to mature.3
By themselves or through encounters with other peoples, each of these cotton cultivators had discovered that the fluffy white fiber that quelled out of the cotton boll was superbly suited to the production of thread. This thread in turn could be woven into a cloth that was easy to wash, pleasant against the skin, and effective as protection from the sun’s burning rays—and to some degree from the cold. As early as a thousand years ago, the production of cotton textiles in Asia, Africa, and the Americas was the world’s largest manufacturing industry; sophisticated trade networks, mostly local but a few regional, connected growers, spinners, weavers, and consumers.
The history of clothing is difficult to reconstruct, because most cloth has not survived the ravages of time. We know that ever since Homo sapiens moved from the African savanna into colder climes, about one hundred thousand years ago, they had to protect themselves from the elements. The spotty archaeological record that we have tells us that humans first used furs and skins to clothe themselves. There is evidence that they spun and wove flax as early as thirty thousand years ago. Such cloth production expanded significantly about twelve thousand years ago, once humans settled down and began to engage in agriculture and animal husbandry. Then men and women began to experiment more widely with different fibers to spin and to weave cloth for protection against the cold and the sun.4
The methods for transforming plants into cloth were invented independently in various parts of the world. In Europe, people began to weave various grasses and also linen during the Neolithic Era, starting about twelve thousand years ago. About eight thousand years later, during the Bronze Age, they also began to harvest wool from animals. In the Middle East and North Africa, for seven millennia before the Common Era, societies spun and wove various kinds of wool and flax as well. Over the same millennia, Chinese peasants and artisans manufactured clothing from ramie and silk. As societies became more stratified, cloth emerged as an important marker of social rank.5
In this world of linen, wool, ramie, and silk, cotton’s importance gradually grew. About five thousand years ago, on the Indian subcontinent, people, as far as we know, first discovered the possibility of making thread out of cotton fibers. Almost simultaneously, people living on the coast of what today is Peru, ignorant of developments in South Asia, followed suit. A few thousand years later, societies in eastern Africa developed techniques for the spinning and weaving of cotton as well. In each of these regions cotton quickly became the dominant fiber for the spinning of thread, its properties for most uses clearly superior to those of flax and ramie and other fibers. For these first millennia of the plant’s cultivation, the production of cotton goods rarely expanded beyond cotton’s natural growing zone, but all who encountered it saw it as a remarkable material for the production of clothing: soft, durable, and light, easy to dye and easy to clean.
Evidence of cotton’s essential role in early societies can be found in the foundational myths and sacred texts of many peoples. In Hindu scripture, cotton appears frequently and prominently. Vishnu, Hindus believe, wove “the rays of the sun into a garment for himself.” People across West Africa attributed their spinning skills to Ananse, a spider deity. In North America, a Hopi spider goddess was believed to spin and weave cotton. The Navajo believed that Begochiddy, one of the four sons of Ray of Sunlight and Daylight, had created and planted cotton after making the mountains and insects. According to a Navajo belief, “When a baby girl is born to your tribe you shall go and find a spider web…and rub it on the baby’s hand and arm. Thus, when she grows up she will weave, and her fingers and arms will not tire from the weaving.” In China, according to a 1637 text from the late Ming dynasty, clothing, including cottons, distinguished humans from beasts, and among humans it “distinguished between the rulers and the ruled.” Moreover, the idea of fate as either spun or woven was central to many diverse cultures, including those, not surprisingly, in which cotton played a dominant role.6
Modern plant scientists have looked beyond cotton as a gift of the gods, but are no less impressed. Biologists think cotton plants have grown on earth for 10 to 20 million years. Four genetically different species of cotton have developed since—the Mesoamerican G. hirsutum, the South American G. barbadense, the African G. herbaceum, and the Asian G. arboretum. These four species, in turn, have sprouted hundreds of further variations, of which only a few would come to dominate commercial cotton production. Today, more than 90 percent of the world’s cotton crop is G. hirsutum cultivars, also known as American upland. Human domestication has changed the plant even further. Over a five-thousand-year period, according to one expert, our forebears transformed it “from undisciplined perennial shrubs and small trees with small impermeable seeds sparsely covered by coarse, poorly differentiated seed hairs, to short, compact, annualized plants with copious amounts of long, white lint borne on large seeds that germinate readily.” Cotton growers carefully experimented with the plant, gradually forging it into something that supported their growing need for cloth. They adapted the plant to particular environmental niches, transported it over long distances, spread its reach, and increased its diversity. As with so many other pieces of the natural world, human cultivation radically accelerated and altered the biological history of cotton—a capacity that would quicken during the nineteenth century and become of great importance to the empire of cotton.7
Farmers in the Indus valley were the first to spin and weave cotton. In 1929, archaeologists recovered fragments of cotton textiles at Mohenjo-Daro, in what is now Pakistan, dating to between 3250 and 2750 BCE. Cottonseeds found at nearby Mehrgarh have been dated to 5000 BCE. Literary references further point to the ancient nature of the subcontinent’s cotton industry. The Vedic scriptures, composed between 1500 and 1200 BCE, allude to cotton spinning and weaving. The very first reports by foreign travelers to South Asia similarly mention cotton: The ancient Greek historian Herodotus (484–425 BCE) was familiar with India’s fine cotton clothing, observing in 445 BCE that in the subcontinent “wild trees bear fleeces for their fruit surpassing those of the sheep in beauty and excellence, and the natives clothe themselves in cloths made therefrom.”8
From the earliest time until well into the nineteenth century—that is, for several millennia—the people of the Indian subcontinent were the world’s leading cotton manufacturers. Peasants in what are today India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh cultivated small quantities of cotton alongside their food crops. They spun and wove cotton for their own use and for sale in local and regional markets. Most regions within South Asia produced all the textiles they consumed well into the nineteenth century. They harvested the crop by hand, employed a roller gin to remove the seeds, removed dirt and knots with the help of a bow (a wooden tool with string attached that vibrates if struck with a piece of wood), spun the fiber on a distaff (a tool holding the unspun cotton) and a spindle into thread, and wove this thread into fabric using looms hung between trees.9
The quality of the top tier of Indian cotton fabrics was legendary: In the thirteenth century, the European traveler Marco Polo elaborated on Herotodus’s observations of nearly nine hundred years earlier, noting on the coast of Coromandel “the finest and most beautiful cottons that are to be f
ound in any part of the world.” Six hundred years later, Edward Baines, a newspaper proprietor and cotton expert from Leeds, reported the best Indian cloth was of “almost incredible perfection…. Some of their muslins might be thought the work of fairies, or of insects, rather than of men.” They were, in effect, “webs of woven wind.”10
The subcontinent, however, was far from alone. Cotton was plentiful and cotton cloth ubiquitous in the Americas, long before Europeans arrived in the New World. In a four-thousand-mile arc through Mesoamerica and the Caribbean to South America, cotton was the most important manufacturing industry. Perhaps the oldest center of cotton manufacture was located in present-day Peru. There, archaeologists have excavated cotton fishing nets dated to 2400 BCE and textile fragments from 1600–1500 BCE. When Francisco Pizarro attacked the Inca Empire in 1532, he marveled at the quality and quantity of cotton fabrics he saw. At the Incan city of Cajamarca, the conquistadores found stores filled with huge quantities of cotton textiles “far superior to any they had seen, for fineness of texture, and the skill with which the various colors were blended.”11
Several thousand miles to the north and a decade earlier, Europeans were just as surprised when they penetrated the Aztec Empire and encountered extraordinary cottons. In addition to gold and other treasure, Hernán Cortés sent to Charles V cotton cloth brilliantly dyed with indigo and cochineal. The Mesoamerican cotton industry, like its South American counterpart, had a long history. Cotton was planted throughout what is today central Mexico as early as 3400 BCE, and the earliest thread found in archaeological excavations has been dated to between 1200 and 1500 BCE. Cotton use by the Mayas has been documented as early as 632 BCE, and in the lowlands of modern-day Veracruz, a cotton industry probably emerged between 100 BCE and 300 CE. As the wearing of cotton spread from elites to commoners, production increased, especially with the rise of the Aztecs’ military and economic empire after 1350. And as more people wore cotton, its processing became ever more important. Techniques in weaving and dying all became more and more refined, not least to display social difference through distinctive clothing.12
Indigenous production continued after the conquest of Central America by Spanish colonists in the sixteenth century. One late-seventeenth-century colonial Spanish administrator, Don Juan de Villagutierre Soto-Mayor, praised the Indian women of the former realm of the Maya who “spin cotton and weave their cloths with energy and ability, giving them perfect colors.” In addition to clothing, cotton was used for religious offerings, as gifts, a medium of exchange, for decorative hangings, for wrapping mummies, as armor, and even for medicinal uses. An estimated 116 million pounds of cotton were produced annually in pre-Columbian Mexico, equaling the cotton crop of the United States in 1816. As the rulers of Teotihuacán expanded the reach of their power, they drew tribute and trade from cotton-growing and -manufacturing regions. Places within the Aztec Empire that were particularly prominent growers of cotton had Nahuatl names that meant “on the cotton temple,” “in the river of cotton,” and “on the hill of cotton.”13
Mexico and Peru were the centers of the pre-Columbian cotton industry, but the production of cotton textiles also spread to other parts of the continent. In what is today Brazil, cotton fibers gathered from wild plants were used to manufacture cloth. In what later became the southwestern United States, Native Americans became avid cotton producers, especially the Navajos and Hopi, perhaps as early as 300 BCE. Knowledge about cotton had traveled up the west coast of Mexico from Central America. When Spanish settlers came into contact with Indians north of the Rio Grande, they noticed that “the Indians spin cotton and weave cloth” and that they “wear Campeche-type cotton blankets for they have large cotton fields.” For some Native Americans, cotton also had important religious uses: The Hopi utilized it to symbolize clouds in ceremonies in which they prayed for rain, and placed it over the faces of the dead “with the idea of making the spiritual body light, like a cloud.” In the Caribbean, as well, cotton growing was widespread. Indeed, one of the reasons why Christopher Columbus believed that he had reached India was that he encountered great quantities of cotton in the Caribbean; he recounted islands “full of…cotton.”14
Cotton growing and manufacturing also has a long history in Africa. It was probably first cultivated by Nubians in what today is eastern Sudan. Some claim that the fiber was cultivated, spun, and woven there as early as 5000 BCE, though archaeological finds at Meroë, a former city on the east bank of the Nile, confirm the presence of cotton textiles only for the years between 500 BCE and 300 CE. From Sudan, cotton spread north to Egypt. While cotton textiles played no significant role in ancient Egyptian civilizations, we know that cottonseed was used as animal fodder as early as 2600–2400 BCE, and depictions on the Karnak Temple in Luxor show cotton bushes. Yet cotton cultivation and the manufacturing of cotton textiles only took off in Egypt between 332 BCE and 395 CE. In 70 CE, Pliny the Elder observed that “the upper part of Egypt, in the vicinity of Arabia, produces a shrub, known by some as gossypium. The shrub is small, and bears a fruit similar in appearance to a nut with a beard, and containing in the inside a silky substance, the down of which is spun into threads. There is no tissue known that is superior to those made from this thread, either for whiteness, softness, or dressing…” After 800 CE, the spread of cotton, and its attendant production, accelerated further on the wings of Islam.15
Knowledge about how to grow and process cotton then traveled to western Africa. How exactly cotton came there is still unclear, but it is possible that itinerant weavers and merchants brought it from East Africa sometime around the beginning of the Common Era. With the arrival of Islam in the eighth century CE, the cotton industry expanded significantly, as Islamic teachers taught girls to spin and boys to weave, while advocating a previously unimagined modesty of dress to peoples whose environmental conditions demanded little clothing. Excavations have found cotton cloth dated to the tenth century. Literary sources and archaeological finds testify to cotton spinning and weaving in West Africa in the late eleventh century, by which time it had spread as far south as present-day Togo. By the early fifteenth century, Leo Africanus reported on the “great abundance” of cotton in the “kingdome of Melli” and the wealth of cotton merchants in the “kingdome of Tombuto,” meaning the great West African empires of Mali and Timbuktu.16
The domestication, spinning, and weaving of cotton, to the best of our knowledge, evolved independently in these three regions of the world.17 From South Asia, Central America, and eastern Africa, however, knowledge spread rapidly along existing trade and migration routes—from Mesoamerica to the north, for example, and from East Africa to the west. Central to these movements of the cotton industry was India. From there, cotton growing and manufacturing skills moved west, east, and south, placing Asia at the center of the global cotton industry, where it would remain until well into the nineteenth century, and return again in the late twentieth century. India’s location, and skill with cotton, was most consequential to the plant’s prominent role in our world, since a group of Europeans, clothed no doubt in fur, wool, and linen, was most impressed when they stumbled more than two thousand years ago upon these wondrous new fabrics arriving from a mythical “East.”
But prior to its discovery by Europeans, cotton was busy altering the lives of others. Cotton moved westward, from India via Turkestan into the Middle East and later into the Mediterranean. Even before the Common Era, we have evidence of cotton being grown in Persia, Mesopotamia, and Palestine. Cotton clothing dated to around 1100 BCE was found in Nineveh (in present-day Iraq), and an Assyrian cylinder dated to the seventh century BCE speaks of a tree that bears wool. A few hundred years later, during the first centuries of the Common Era, Anatolian peasants had taken up cotton cultivation. Just as in Africa, the spread of Islam played a major role in transmitting the skills to grow, spin, and weave cotton across the Middle East, as religious demands for modesty made cotton an “ordinary article of clothing.” Ninth- and tenth-cent
ury Iran saw a “cotton boom” to supply urban markets, especially at Baghdad. In the thirteenth century, Marco Polo encountered cotton and cotton cloth everywhere from Armenia to Persia, and the “abundance” of cotton across Asia became a major motif of his reporting.18
Just as cotton cultivation moved farther west, the knowledge of cotton also spread from India east through Asia, and especially into China. While China eventually became one of the most significant producers of cotton and cotton textiles worldwide, and is the center of the world’s cotton industry today, the plant is not indigenous there. Indeed, the Chinese word for cotton and cotton fiber is borrowed from Sanskrit and other Indian languages.19 By 200 BCE, cotton was known in China, but for the next millennium it did not spread much beyond the southwestern border regions where it had originally been introduced.
Cotton became a major presence in the Chinese countryside during the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). During those years, it effectively replaced ramie, which, with silk, had traditionally served the Chinese as a fiber for making cloth. By 1433, Chinese subjects could pay taxes in cotton, which enabled the state to clothe its soldiers and officials in the fiber. As we will see, the connection between the crop and taxation was one of many instances of political authorities taking an interest in the cotton industry. During the expansionary Ming dynasty (1368–1644), cotton production spread throughout China’s new conquests. At the end of the Ming, the Chinese produced an estimated 20 million cotton cloth bales annually. A geographical division of labor had emerged in which northern farmers shipped raw cotton south to the lower Yangtze, where farmers used it, along with their own homegrown cotton, to manufacture textiles, some of which they sold back to the north. So vibrant was this interregional trade that cotton cloth accounted for one-fourth of the empire’s commerce. By the seventeenth century, nearly all Chinese men, women, and children wore cotton clothing. Not surprisingly, when China’s population doubled over the course of the eighteenth century, to 400 million people, its cotton industry became the second largest in the world after India’s, growing an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of cotton in 1750, roughly equal to U.S. production as its planters ramped up production in the decade prior to the Civil War.20