Early history Americas The presence of the indigenous species
Gossypium barbadense has been identified at a site in
Nanchoc District,
Peru, and dated to the 7th–6th millennia BC, while
indigo blue dyed textile fragments, dated to the 4th–3rd millennia BC, having been found at
Huaca Prieta, Peru. and was the backbone of the development of coastal cultures such as the
Norte Chico,
Moche, and
Nazca. Cotton was grown upriver, made into nets, and traded with fishing villages along the coast for large supplies of fish. The Spanish who came to Mexico and Peru in the early 16th century found the people growing cotton and wearing clothing made of it. Cotton bolls from in a cave near
Tehuacán, Mexico, have been dated to as early as 5500 BC. The domestication of
Gossypium hirsutum, in Mexico, is dated to between around 3400 and 2300 BC. During this time, people between the Río Santiago and the Río Balsas grew, spun, wove, dyed, and sewed cotton. What they did not use themselves, they sent to their Aztec rulers as tribute, on the scale of ~ annually.
South Asia The earliest evidence of the use of cotton in the
Old World, in the form of a few fibres of mineralised cotton thread, was found in a string of eight copper beads at the
Neolithic site of
Mehrgarh, at the foot of the
Bolan Pass,
Balochistan, Pakistan. Fragments of cotton textiles and
spindle whorls, dated to the 3rd millennium BCE, have also been found at
Mohenjo-daro, in Sindh, Pakistan, and other sites of the
Bronze Age Indus Valley civilization, which is a likely site for the first cultivation of
Gossypium arboreum,
Levant Microremains of cotton fibers, some dyed, have been found at
Tel Tsaf in the
Jordan Valley dated 5,200 BCE. They may be the remnants of ancient clothing, fabric containers, or cordage. Research suggest the cotton might come from wild species in South Asia, and traded with the
Indus Valley Civilisation.
Iran In Iran (
Persia), the history of cotton dates back to the
Achaemenid era (5th century BC); however, there are few sources about the planting of cotton in pre-Islamic Iran. Cotton cultivation was common in
Merv,
Ray and
Pars. In
Persian poems, especially
Ferdowsi's
Shahname, there are references to cotton ("panbe" in
Persian).
Marco Polo (13th century) refers to the major products of Persia, including cotton.
John Chardin, a French traveler of the 17th century who visited
Safavid Persia, spoke approvingly of the vast cotton farms of Persia.
Arabia The Greeks and the Arabs were not familiar with cotton until the
wars of Alexander the Great, as his contemporary
Megasthenes told
Seleucus I Nicator of "there being trees on which wool grows" in "Indica". This may be a reference to "tree cotton",
Gossypium arboreum, which is native to the Indian subcontinent. According to the
Columbia Encyclopedia:
Kingdom of Kush Cotton (
Gossypium herbaceum Linnaeus) may have been domesticated 5000 BC in eastern
Sudan near the Middle Nile Basin region, where cotton cloth was being produced. Around the 4th century BC, the cultivation of cotton and the knowledge of its spinning and weaving in
Meroë reached a high level. The export of textiles was one of the sources of wealth for Meroë. Ancient Nubia had a "culture of cotton" of sorts, evidenced by physical evidence of cotton processing tools and the presence of cattle in certain areas. Some researchers propose that cotton was important to the Nubian economy for its use in contact with the neighboring Egyptians.
Aksumite King
Ezana boasted in his inscription that he destroyed large cotton plantations in Meroë during his conquest of the region. In the Meroitic Period (beginning 3rd century BCE), many cotton textiles have been recovered, preserved due to favorable arid conditions. In the first to third centuries CE, recovered cotton fragments all began to mirror the same style and production method, as seen from the direction of spun cotton and technique of weaving.
Middle Ages Eastern world Egyptians grew and spun cotton in the first seven centuries of the Christian era. Handheld roller
cotton gins had been used in India since the 6th century, and was then introduced to other countries from there. Between the 12th and 14th centuries, dual-roller gins appeared in India and China. The Indian version of the dual-roller gin was prevalent throughout the Mediterranean cotton trade by the 16th century. This mechanical device was, in some areas, driven by water power. The earliest clear illustrations of the
spinning wheel come from the
Islamic world in the eleventh century. The earliest unambiguous reference to a spinning wheel in India is dated to 1350, suggesting that the spinning wheel was likely introduced from Iran to India during the
Delhi Sultanate.
Europe in the 14th century During the late medieval period, cotton became known as an imported fiber in northern Europe, without any knowledge of how it was derived, other than that it was a plant. Because
Herodotus had written in his
Histories, Book III, 106, that in India trees grew in the wild producing wool, it was assumed that the plant was a tree, rather than a shrub. This aspect is retained in the name for cotton in several Germanic languages, such as German
Baumwolle, which translates as "tree wool" (
Baum means "tree";
Wolle means "wool"). Noting its similarities to wool, people in the region could only imagine that cotton must be produced by plant-borne sheep.
John Mandeville, writing in 1350, stated as fact that "There grew there [India] a wonderful tree which bore tiny lambs on the endes of its branches. These branches were so pliable that they bent down to allow the lambs to feed when they are hungry." (See
Vegetable Lamb of Tartary.) Cotton manufacture was introduced to Europe during the
Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula and Sicily. The knowledge of cotton weaving was spread to northern Italy in the 12th century, when
Sicily was conquered by the Normans, and consequently to the rest of Europe. The
spinning wheel, introduced to Europe circa 1350, improved the speed of cotton spinning. By the 15th century,
Venice,
Antwerp, and
Haarlem were important ports for cotton trade, and the sale and transportation of cotton fabrics had become very profitable.
Early modern period Mughal India clad in fine
Bengali muslin, 18th century Under the
Mughal Empire, which ruled in the
Indian subcontinent from the early 16th century to the early 18th century, Indian cotton production increased, in terms of both raw cotton and cotton textiles. The Mughals introduced
agrarian reforms such as a new revenue system that was biased in favour of higher value
cash crops such as cotton and
indigo, providing state incentives to grow cash crops, in addition to rising market demand. The largest
manufacturing industry in the Mughal Empire was cotton
textile manufacturing, which included the production of
piece goods,
calicos, and
muslins, available unbleached and in a variety of colours. The cotton
textile industry was responsible for a large part of the empire's international trade. India had a 25% share of the global textile trade in the early 18th century. Indian cotton
textiles were the most important
manufactured goods in world trade in the 18th century, consumed across the world from the
Americas to
Japan. The most important center of cotton production was the
Bengal Subah province, particularly around its capital city of
Dhaka. The
worm gear roller
cotton gin, which was invented in India during the early
Delhi Sultanate era of the 13th–14th centuries, came into use in the Mughal Empire some time around the 16th century, and is still used in India through to the present day. The production of cotton, which may have largely been spun in the villages and then taken to towns in the form of yarn to be woven into cloth textiles, was advanced by the diffusion of the
spinning wheel across India shortly before the Mughal era, lowering the costs of yarn and helping to increase demand for cotton. The diffusion of the spinning wheel, and the incorporation of the worm gear and crank handle into the roller cotton gin, led to greatly expanded Indian cotton textile production during the Mughal era. It was reported that, with an Indian cotton gin, which is half machine and half tool, one man and one woman could clean of cotton per day. With a modified Forbes version, one man and a boy could produce per day. If oxen were used to power 16 of these machines, and a few people's labour was used to feed them, they could produce as much work as 750 people did formerly.
Egypt s picking cotton by hand In the early 19th century, a Frenchman named M. Jumel proposed to the great ruler of Egypt,
Mohamed Ali Pasha, that he could earn a substantial income by growing an extra-long staple Maho (
Gossypium barbadense) cotton, in
Lower Egypt, for the French market. Mohamed Ali Pasha accepted the proposition and granted himself the monopoly on the sale and export of cotton in
Egypt; and later dictated cotton should be grown in preference to other crops.
Egypt under Muhammad Ali in the early 19th century had the fifth most productive cotton industry in the world, in terms of the number of
spindles per capita. The industry was initially driven by machinery that relied on traditional energy sources, such as
slave labour,
animal power,
water wheels, and
windmills, which were also the principal energy sources in Western Europe up until around 1870. It was under Muhammad Ali in the early 19th century that
steam engines were introduced to the Egyptian cotton industry. At the same time, the East India Company's
rule in India contributed to its
deindustrialization, opening up a new market for British goods, British colonization also forced open the large Indian market to British goods, which could be sold in India without tariffs or
duties, compared to local Indian producers who were heavily
taxed, while raw cotton was imported from India without tariffs to British factories which manufactured textiles from Indian cotton, giving Britain a monopoly over India's large market and cotton resources. India served as both a significant supplier of raw goods to British manufacturers and a large
captive market for British manufactured goods. Britain eventually surpassed India as the world's leading cotton textile manufacturer in the 19th century.
Industrial Revolution '', 1869 depicting late 18th-century America. The advent of the
Industrial Revolution in Britain provided a great boost to cotton manufacture, as textiles emerged as Britain's leading export. In 1738,
Lewis Paul and
John Wyatt, of
Birmingham, England, patented the roller spinning machine, as well as the flyer-and-bobbin system for drawing cotton to a more even thickness using two sets of rollers that traveled at different speeds. Later, the invention of the
James Hargreaves'
spinning jenny in 1764,
Richard Arkwright's
spinning frame in 1769 and
Samuel Crompton's
spinning mule in 1775 enabled British spinners to produce cotton yarn at much higher rates. From the late 18th century on, the British city of
Manchester acquired the nickname
"Cottonopolis" due to the cotton industry's omnipresence within the city, and Manchester's role as the heart of the global cotton trade. Production capacity in Britain and the United States was improved by the invention of the modern
cotton gin by the American
Eli Whitney in 1793. Before the development of cotton gins, the cotton fibers had to be pulled from the seeds tediously by hand. By the late 1700s, a number of crude ginning machines had been developed. However, to produce a bale of cotton required over 600 hours of human labor, making large-scale production uneconomical in the United States, even with the use of humans as slave labor. The gin that Whitney manufactured (the Holmes design) reduced the hours down to just a dozen or so per bale. Although Whitney patented his own design for a cotton gin, he manufactured a prior design from Henry Odgen Holmes, for which Holmes filed a patent in 1796. sending Egypt into a deficit spiral that led to the country declaring
bankruptcy in 1876, a key factor behind Egypt's
occupation by the British Empire in 1882. During this time, cotton cultivation in the
British Empire, especially Australia and India, greatly increased to replace the lost production of the American South. Through tariffs and other restrictions, the British government discouraged the production of cotton cloth in India; rather, the raw fiber was sent to England for processing. The Indian
Mahatma Gandhi described the process: • English people buy Indian cotton in the field, picked by Indian labor at seven cents a day, through an optional monopoly. • This cotton is shipped on British ships, a three-week journey across the Indian Ocean, down the Red Sea, across the Mediterranean, through Gibraltar, across the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic Ocean to London. One hundred per cent profit on this freight is regarded as small. • The cotton is turned into cloth in Lancashire. You pay shilling wages instead of Indian pennies to your workers. The English worker not only has the advantage of better wages, but the steel companies of England get the profit of building the factories and machines. Wages; profits; all these are spent in England. • The finished product is sent back to India at European shipping rates, once again on British ships. The captains, officers, sailors of these ships, whose wages must be paid, are English. The only Indians who profit are a few
lascars who do the dirty work on the boats for a few cents a day. • The cloth is finally sold back to the kings and landlords of India who got the money to buy this expensive cloth out of the poor peasants of India who worked at seven cents a day.
United States In the United States, growing Southern cotton generated significant wealth and capital for the antebellum South, as well as raw material for Northern textile industries. Before 1865 the cotton was largely produced through the labor of enslaved African Americans. It enriched both the Southern landowners and the new textile industries of the Northeastern United States and northwestern Europe. In 1860 the slogan "
Cotton is king" characterized the attitude of Southern leaders toward this
monocrop in that Europe would support an independent
Confederate States of America in 1861 in order to protect the supply of cotton it needed for its very large textile industry. Russell Griffin of California was a farmer who farmed one of the biggest cotton operations. He produced over sixty thousand bales. Cotton remained a key crop in the Southern economy after slavery ended in 1865. Across the South,
sharecropping evolved, in which landless farmers worked land owned by others in return for a share of the profits. Some farmers rented the land and bore the production costs themselves. Until mechanical
cotton pickers were developed, cotton farmers needed additional labor to hand-pick cotton. Picking cotton was a source of income for families across the South. Rural and small town school systems had split vacations so children could work in the fields during "cotton-picking." During the middle 20th century, employment in cotton farming fell, as machines began to replace laborers and the South's rural labor force dwindled during the World Wars. Cotton remains a major export of the United States, with large farms in California, Arizona and the
Deep South. ==Cultivation==