Cotton
Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective case, around the seeds of the cotton plants of the genus Gossypium in the mallow family Malvaceae. The fiber is almost pure cellulose, and can contain minor percentages of waxes, fats, pectins, and water. Under natural conditions, the cotton bolls will increase the dispersal of the seeds.
The plant is a shrub native to tropical and subtropical regions around the world, including the Americas, Africa, Egypt and India. The greatest diversity of wild cotton species is found in Mexico, followed by Australia and Africa. Cotton was independently domesticated in the Old and New Worlds.
The fiber is most often spun into yarn or thread and used to make a soft, breathable, and durable textile. The use of cotton for fabric is known to date to prehistoric times; the presence of 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, in Peru. Fragments of a cotton thread, used to connect a string of eight copper beads, and dated to the sixth millennium BC has been found at Mehrgarh, Kachi, Pakistan.
Although cultivated since antiquity, it was the invention of the cotton gin that lowered the cost of production and led to its widespread use, and it is the most widely used natural fiber cloth in clothing today.
Current estimates for world production are about 25 million tonnes or 110 million bales annually, accounting for 2.5% of the world's arable land. India is the world's largest producer of cotton. The United States has been the largest exporter for many years.
Types
There are four commercially grown species of cotton, all domesticated in antiquity:- Gossypium hirsutum – upland cotton, native to Central America, Mexico, the Caribbean and southern Florida
- Gossypium barbadense – known as extra-long staple cotton, native to tropical South America
- Gossypium arboreum – tree cotton, native to India and Pakistan
- Gossypium herbaceum – Levant cotton, native to southern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula
Etymology
The word "cotton" has Arabic origins, derived from the Arabic word قطن which is ultimately derived from the Hebrew כֻּתֹּנֶת kuttṓnĕṯ, ironically meaning a clothing made of linen. This was the usual word for cotton in medieval Arabic. Marco Polo in chapter 2 in his book, describes a province he calls Khotan in Turkestan, today's Xinjiang, where cotton was grown in abundance. The word entered the Romance languages in the mid-12th century, 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 lowered prices.History
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. Cultivation of the indigenous cotton species G. barbadense from a find in Ancon, Peru has been dated to, 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 millennia BC, 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, and cotton may have been an important export from it.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, the history of cotton dates back to the Achaemenid era ; 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. Marco Polo 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 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, many cotton textiles have been recovered, preserved due to favorable arid conditions. Most of these fabric fragments come from Lower Nubia, and the cotton textiles account for 85% of the archaeological textiles from Classic/Late Meroitic sites. Due to these arid conditions, cotton, a plant that usually thrives moderate rainfall and richer soils, requires extra irrigation and labor in Sudanese climate conditions. Therefore, a great deal of resources would have been required, likely restricting its cultivation to the elite. 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. Cotton textiles also appear in places of high regard, such as on funerary stelae and statues.
China
During the Han dynasty, cotton was grown by Chinese peoples in the southern Chinese province of Yunnan.Middle Ages
Eastern world
ians 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
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". 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 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."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.