The history of cotton can be traced from its domestication, through the important role it played in the history of India, the British Empire, and the United States, to its continuing importance as a crop and agricultural commercial product.
The history of the domestication of cotton is very complex and is not known exactly. Several isolated civilizations in both the Old and New World independently domesticated and converted the cotton into fabric. All the same tools were invented to work it also, including combs, bows, hand spindles, and primitive looms.
Cotton has been cultivated and used by humans for thousands of years, with evidence of cotton fabrics dating back to ancient civilizations in India, Egypt, and Peru. The cotton industry played a significant role in the development of the American economy, with the production of cotton being the major source of income for slave owners in the southern United States prior to the Civil War, while the transport of said cotton to mills in the Northern United States and Europe and beyond became a mainstay of American shipping. Today, cotton remains an important crop worldwide, with China and India being the largest producers.
Etymology The word "cotton" has Arabic origins, derived from the Arabic word قطن ( or ). This was the usual word for cotton in medieval Arabic.A number of large dictionaries were written in Arabic during medieval times. Searchable copies of nearly all of the main medieval Arabic dictionaries are online at Baheth.info and/or AlWaraq.net. One of the most esteemed of the dictionaries is Ismail ibn Hammad al-Jawhari's "Al-Sihah" which is dated around and shortly after the year 1000. The biggest is Ibn Manzur's "Lisan Al-Arab" which is dated 1290 but most of its contents were taken from a variety of earlier sources, including 9th- and 10th-century sources. Often Ibn Manzur names his source and then quotes from it. Therefore, if the reader recognizes the name of Ibn Manzur's source, a date considerably earlier than 1290 can often be assigned to what is said. A list giving the year of death of a number of individuals who Ibn Manzur quotes from is in Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon, volume 1, page xxx (the year 1863). Lane's Arabic-English Lexicon contains much of the main contents of the medieval Arabic dictionaries in English translation. At AlWaraq.net, in addition to searchable copies of medieval Arabic dictionaries, there are searchable copies of a large number of medieval Arabic texts on various subjects. The word entered the Romance languages in the mid-12th century,More details at alt.fr Etymologie in French language. Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales (CNRTL) is a division of the French National Centre for Scientific Research. and English a century later. Cotton fabric was known to the ancient Romans as an import but cotton was rare in the Romance-speaking lands until imports from the Arabic-speaking lands in the later medieval era at transformatively lower prices. Chapter I: "Cotton cultivation in the ancient and medieval world" and Chapter II: "The Mediterranean cotton trade 1100–1600".
Early history The oldest cotton textiles were found in graves and city ruins of civilizations from dry climates, where the fabrics did not decay completely.
Americas
The oldest cotton fabric has been found in Huaca Prieta in Peru, dated to about 6000 BCE. It is here that Gossypium barbadense is thought to have been domesticated at its earliest.Splitstoser et al, Early pre-Hispanic use of indigo blue in Peru, 2016 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1501623 Some of the oldest cotton bolls were discovered in a cave in Tehuacán Valley, Mexico, and were dated to approximately 5500 BCE, but some doubt has been cast on these estimates. Seeds and cordage dating to about 2500 BCE have been found in Peru. By 3000 BCE cotton was being grown and processed in Mexico, and Arizona.
Kingdom of Kush Cotton (Gossypium herbaceum Linnaeus) may have been domesticated around 5000 BCE in eastern Sudan near the Middle Nile Basin region, where cotton cloth was being produced. The cultivation of cotton and the knowledge of its spinning and weaving in Meroë reached a high level in the 4th century BC. The export of textiles was one of the sources of wealth for Meroë. Aksumite King Ezana boasted in his inscription that he destroyed large cotton plantations in Meroë during his conquest of the region.
Near East 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. Researches suggest the cotton might come from wild species in South Asia, and trade with the Indus Valley.
Indian subcontinent The earliest archaeological discovery, a number of mineralised cotton threads, recovered from the center of a string of eight copper beads, found in a grave, dated to the first half of the 6th millennium BC, at Mehrgarh, Kachi, Pakistan, demonstrates use of wild or cultivated cotton fibres, was known, millennia before evidence of cotton cultivation, and textiles, in the 4th millennia BC, Indus Valley Civilisation.
Herodotus, an ancient Greek historian, mentions Indian cotton in the 5th century BCE as "a wool exceeding in beauty and goodness that of sheep", which suggests that the fiber was not yet known in Greece at the time. When Alexander the Great invaded India, his troops started wearing cotton clothes that were more comfortable than their previous woolen ones. Strabo, another Greek historian, mentioned the vividness of Indian fabrics, and Arrian told of Indian–Arab trade of cotton fabrics in 130 CE.
Middle Ages Eastern world
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.Baber, Zaheer (1996). The Science of Empire: Scientific Knowledge, Civilization, and Colonial Rule in India. Albany: State University of New York Press. p. 57. .
Western world Cotton entered Europe (the "West") through Africa and the Mediterranean; it had been used in Sudan for thousands of years and Egyptians grew and spun cotton from at least 700 CE onward.
Cotton was not a common fabric in Europe at any point until the 18th century, though it did see occasional import and use during the late Middle Ages, often in blends with other fibers. Confusingly, from the 14th to 19th centuries, "cotton" was also a term used for woolen fabrics of a certain weave or texture, and therefore has confused past generations of scholars.
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 , 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 profitable.
Christopher Columbus, in his explorations of the Bahamas and Cuba, found natives wearing cotton ("the costliest and handsomest... cotton mantles and sleeveless shirts embroidered and painted in different designs and colours"), a fact that may have contributed to his incorrect belief that he had landed on the coast of India.
Early modern period India
Cotton was known to Indian as कर्पास From Pali kappāsa (“cotton”), from Sanskrit कर्पास (karpāsa, “cotton”), India had been an exporter of fine cotton fabrics to other countries since ancient times. Sources such as Marco Polo, who traveled throughout India in the 13th century, Chinese travelers, who traveled to Buddhist pilgrim centers in India even earlier, Vasco Da Gama, who entered Calicut in 1498, and Tavernier, who visited India in the 17th century, praised the superiority of Indian fabrics.
The worm gear roller cotton gin, or churka, came into use in India between the 13th and 17th centuriesIrfan Habib (2011), Economic History of Medieval India, 1200–1500, pages 53-54, Pearson Education and is still used in India in the present day. The incorporation of the crank handle in the churka first appeared in India sometime during the late Delhi Sultanate or the early Mughal Empire. The production of cotton, which may have largely been spun in 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, greatly expanded Indian cotton textile production during the Mughal era. During the 19th century, two people using a churka could produce 28 pounds of cotton per day.Karl Marx (1867). Chapter 16: "Machinery and Large-Scale Industry." Das Kapital.
During 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.John F. Richards (1995), The Mughal Empire, page 190, Cambridge University Press
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.Karl J. Schmidt (2015), An Atlas and Survey of South Asian History, page 100, Routledge India had a 25% share of the global textile trade in the early 18th century.Angus Maddison (1995), Monitoring the World Economy, 1820–1992, OECD, p. 30 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.Richard Maxwell Eaton (1996), The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760, page 202, University of California Press
Bengal accounted for more than 50% of textiles imported by the Dutch from Asia,Om Prakash, "Empire, Mughal", History of World Trade Since 1450, edited by John J. McCusker, vol. 1, Macmillan Reference USA, 2006, pp. 237–240, World History in Context. Retrieved 3 August 2017 Bengali cotton textiles were exported in large quantities to Europe, Indonesia, and Japan,John F. Richards (1995), The Mughal Empire, page 202, Cambridge University Press and Bengali Muslin textiles from Dhaka were sold in Central Asia, where they were known as "daka" textiles. Indian textiles dominated the Indian Ocean trade for centuries, were sold in the Atlantic Ocean trade, and had a 38% share of the West African trade in the early 18th century, while Indian calicos were a major force in Europe, and Indian textiles accounted for 20% of total English trade with Southern Europe in the early 18th century.Jeffrey G. Williamson & David Clingingsmith, India's Deindustrialization in the 18th and 19th Centuries, Global Economic History Network, London School of Economics
Western world