Cotton

• 1. Introduction

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  Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, a protective case wrapped around the seeds of plants in the genus Gossypium. The fiber is almost pure cellulose, with only minor traces of waxes, fats, pectins, and water. Pull a single fiber apart under a microscope and you find a dried, elongated multilayer cell, hollow down its center. In the wild, that fluffy boll exists for one reason. It helps the plant scatter its seeds.

  The word itself carries a strange history. It comes from the Arabic qutn, which traces back to a Hebrew word that, ironically, meant clothing made of linen. Medieval Europeans who saw the imported fiber had no idea where it came from. Some imagined a tree that grew tiny lambs on the ends of its branches, bending down so the lambs could feed.

  How did a shrub from the tropics clothe ancient India, Egypt, and China, then become the most widely used natural fiber in clothing today? Why did it provoke smuggling, a famine in Lancashire, and a dispute settled at the World Trade Organization? And why does a plant prized for cloth carry a toxin in nearly every part of it? The answers run from a Peruvian dig site to the far side of the Moon.

• 2. Domesticated Twice

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  At a site in the Nanchoc District of Peru, the species Gossypium barbadense has been identified and dated to the 7th and 6th millennia BC. Nearby, at Huaca Prieta in Peru, archaeologists found indigo blue dyed textile fragments dated to the 4th and 3rd millennia BC. From a find at Ancon, Peru, cultivation of G. barbadense has been dated to around 4200 BC. That cotton became the backbone of coastal cultures like the Norte Chico, Moche, and Nazca. People grew it upriver, made it into nets, and traded it to fishing villages for large supplies of fish.

  Cotton bolls from a cave near Tehuacan, Mexico, have been dated as early as 5500 BC. The domestication of Gossypium hirsutum in Mexico is placed between roughly 3400 and 2300 BC. People living between the Rio Santiago and the Rio Balsas grew, spun, wove, dyed, and sewed it. What they did not use, they sent to their Aztec rulers as tribute, on a scale of about 116 million pounds a year.

  The oldest Old World evidence is humbler. At the Neolithic site of Mehrgarh, at the foot of the Bolan Pass in Balochistan, Pakistan, a few mineralized cotton fibers survived as thread strung through eight copper beads, dated to the sixth millennium BC. At Mohenjo-daro in Sindh, Pakistan, textile fragments and spindle whorls from the 3rd millennium BCE point to the Bronze Age Indus Valley civilization, a likely site for the first cultivation of Gossypium arboreum. This is the meaning of two separate domestications. The Old World and the New World each tamed cotton without the other's help.

• 3. Trees That Grew Wool

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  Megasthenes told Seleucus I Nicator of trees on which wool grows in India, a report that reached the Greeks through the wars of Alexander the Great. The line likely refers to tree cotton, Gossypium arboreum, native to the Indian subcontinent. The Greeks and Arabs had been unfamiliar with the plant until then. Herodotus had written in his Histories that wild Indian trees produced wool, so Europeans assumed cotton came from a tree rather than a shrub.

  That misunderstanding lodged itself in language. In several Germanic tongues cotton became tree wool, like the German Baumwolle, where Baum means tree and Wolle means wool. Noting its likeness to wool, people imagined cotton must be the product of plant-borne sheep. Writing in 1350, John Mandeville stated as fact that a wonderful tree in India bore tiny lambs on the ends of its branches, with branches pliable enough to bend down and let the lambs feed.

  The fiber spread faster than the facts about it. Cotton manufacture entered Europe during the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula and Sicily, and weaving knowledge reached northern Italy in the 12th century after the Normans conquered Sicily. The spinning wheel, whose earliest clear illustrations come from the eleventh-century Islamic world, reached Europe around 1350 and sped up spinning. By the 15th century, Venice, Antwerp, and Haarlem had become important ports for a cotton trade that was growing very profitable.

• 4. The Calico Wars

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  In the 1660s, around the restoration of the monarchy, the English East India Company introduced Britain to cheap calico and chintz cloth from its Asian spice trading posts. The colorful fabric was first a novelty side line. By the late 17th century it had overtaken the Company's spice trade by value. Weavers, spinners, dyers, shepherds, and farmers objected, and the calico question became a major political issue between the 1680s and the 1730s.

  Parliament responded with bans. The 1700 Calico Act blocked the importation of cotton cloth, but with no punishment for selling it, smuggling became commonplace. In 1721 a stricter act prohibited the sale of most cottons, imported and domestic, exempting only thread Fustian and raw cotton. That exemption mattered enormously. Raw cotton imports began at about 2 thousand bales a year and seeded a new domestic industry, first making Fustian, then triggering a wave of mechanized spinning and weaving.

  By the start of the 1770s, seven thousand bales were imported annually, and new mill owners pressed Parliament to drop the ban on pure cotton cloth. The acts were repealed in 1774. Demand for raw cotton doubled within a couple of years, then doubled again every decade into the 1840s. To compete with Indian textiles, especially those from Bengal, Britain invested in labor-saving machinery while imposing bans and tariffs on Indian imports. The capital amassed from Bengal after its conquest in 1757 was poured into British industries such as textile manufacturing.

• 5. Machines And Mills

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  In 1738, Lewis Paul and John Wyatt of Birmingham patented a roller spinning machine and a flyer-and-bobbin system that drew cotton to an even thickness using two sets of rollers moving at different speeds. James Hargreaves' spinning jenny followed in 1764, Richard Arkwright's spinning frame in 1769, and Samuel Crompton's spinning mule in 1775. Together they let British spinners produce yarn at far higher rates. Manchester earned the nickname Cottonopolis for the industry's omnipresence and its place at the heart of the global cotton trade.

  Eli Whitney built his cotton gin in 1793, and the numbers tell the story. Producing a bale of cotton had required over 600 hours of human labor, pulling fibers from seeds by hand. Whitney's machine cut that to roughly a dozen hours per bale. He patented his own design but manufactured a prior one by Henry Ogden Holmes, who had filed a patent in 1796. By the mid-19th century, King Cotton had become the backbone of the southern American economy.

  The gin had a much older ancestry. Handheld roller cotton gins were used in India from the 6th century. Dual-roller gins appeared in India and China between the 12th and 14th centuries. The worm gear roller gin, invented in India during the Delhi Sultanate of the 13th and 14th centuries, came into use in the Mughal Empire around the 16th century and is still used in India today. With one Indian gin, one man and one woman could clean 28 pounds of cotton a day; a modified Forbes version let a man and a boy produce 250 pounds.

• 6. King Cotton And Famine

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  In 1860 the slogan Cotton is king summed up how Southern leaders saw their monocrop, betting that Europe would back an independent Confederacy in 1861 to protect the cotton its large textile industry needed. Before 1865, Southern cotton was largely produced through the labor of enslaved African Americans. It enriched Southern landowners and the textile mills of the Northeastern United States and northwestern Europe alike.

  The American Civil War broke that supply. American cotton exports slumped under a Union blockade of Southern ports and a Confederate decision to cut exports, hoping to force Britain to recognize the Confederacy or join the war. The resulting Lancashire Cotton Famine pushed Britain and France toward Egyptian cotton, and their traders invested heavily in Egyptian plantations. The government of Viceroy Isma'il took out substantial loans from European bankers.

  The reversal was brutal. After the war ended in 1865, British and French traders abandoned Egyptian cotton and returned to cheap American exports. Egypt slid into a deficit spiral, declared bankruptcy in 1876, and that collapse became a key factor behind Britain's occupation of Egypt in 1882. Mahatma Gandhi later described the colonial cycle plainly. English buyers purchased Indian cotton picked by labor at seven cents a day, shipped it to Lancashire on British ships, turned it into cloth at shilling wages, then sold the finished product back to the kings and landlords of India.

• 7. Egypt's Long Staple

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  Early in the 19th century, a Frenchman named M. Jumel proposed to Mohamed Ali Pasha, the ruler of Egypt, that growing extra-long staple Maho cotton, a variety of Gossypium barbadense, in Lower Egypt could earn a substantial income for the French market. Mohamed Ali Pasha accepted, granted himself a monopoly on the sale and export of cotton, and later ordered that cotton be grown in preference to other crops. Strikingly, Jumel's cotton had started as an ornamental.

  Under Muhammad Ali, Egypt held the fifth most productive cotton industry in the world, measured in spindles per capita. It first ran on traditional power sources like slave labor, animal power, water wheels, and windmills, the same sources used across Western Europe until around 1870. Steam engines entered the Egyptian cotton industry under his rule.

  The export figures climbed steeply. By the American Civil War, annual exports had reached $16 million, about 120,000 bales. They rose to $56 million by 1864, driven largely by the loss of Confederate supply on the world market. Even after United States cotton returned, now from a paid workforce, Egyptian exports kept growing to 1.2 million bales a year by 1903. The name Egyptian cotton now refers more to how the cotton is treated and the threads produced than to where it is grown.

• 8. Toxin, Genome, And Moon

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  Cotton carries gossypol, a toxin that the source calls a poisonous pigment, found in all parts of the plant and making it inedible. It is toxic to monogastric animals, appears to inhibit or restrict the mobility of sperm, and is thought to interfere with the menstrual cycle. During the American slavery period, cotton root bark was used in folk remedies as an abortifacient. Scientists later silenced the gene that produces the toxin, and on the 17th of October 2018 the USDA deregulated genetically engineered low-gossypol cotton, opening cotton as a potential food crop.

  Genetic modification reshaped the field in other ways. The gene for Bt toxin, from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, was inserted into cotton so the plant makes its own insecticide against lepidopteran larvae. A 2012 Chinese study found Bt cotton halved pesticide use and doubled the level of ladybirds, lacewings, and spiders. By 2011, GM cotton covered 25 million hectares worldwide, 69% of all cotton land, with India growing it on 88% of its cotton area.

  Meanwhile, researchers have worked since 2007 to sequence the genome of cultivated tetraploid cotton, whose nucleus holds two separate genomes called A and D. The consortium chose to sequence the small D-genome relative G. raimondii first, then the larger A genome of G. arboreum. The plant has even left Earth. 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. Inside the Von Karman Crater, the capsule and seeds still sit within the Chang'e 4 lander.