Short answers, pulled from the story.
The word cotton comes from the Arabic qutn, which is ultimately derived from a Hebrew word that ironically meant clothing made of linen. It entered the Romance languages in the mid-12th century and English about a century later.
Cotton was independently domesticated in both the Old World and the New World. In Peru, Gossypium barbadense has been dated to the 7th and 6th millennia BC, and at Mehrgarh in Pakistan cotton thread strung through copper beads dates to the sixth millennium BC.
Eli Whitney built his cotton gin in 1793, though he manufactured a prior design by Henry Ogden Holmes. Producing a bale of cotton had required over 600 hours of hand labor, and the gin cut that to roughly a dozen hours per bale.
The Lancashire Cotton Famine was caused by the American Civil War, when a Union blockade of Southern ports and a Confederate decision to cut exports slumped American cotton supply. Britain and France turned to Egyptian cotton in response.
Cotton contains gossypol, a toxin found in all parts of the plant that makes it inedible and is described as a poisonous pigment. Scientists silenced the gene that produces it, and on the 17th of October 2018 the USDA deregulated low-gossypol genetically engineered cotton.
China's Chang'e 4 spacecraft carried cotton seeds to the far side of the Moon, and on the 15th of January 2019 China announced that a seed had sprouted, calling it the first truly otherworldly plant in history. The capsule sits inside the Chang'e 4 lander in the Von Karman Crater.
In 2022, world production of cotton was 69.7 million tonnes, led by China with 26% of the total, followed by India at 22% and the United States at 12%.