Cotton

Abstract

Cotton is one of the catalyst commodities in world history. This fiber was at the center of manufacturing and international trade in pre-modern times, and it became the first industrialized commodity by 1800, with mills and factories spreading from Britain to America and then to all parts of the world by the 20th century. Cotton factories and cotton clothing came to epitomize modernizing societies. This singular history sparked intensive study, yielding a wealth of scholarship on different regions and themes. The Indian subcontinent was the birthplace of the first important cotton culture. Unique Indian technologies of spinning, weaving, dyeing, and printing were developed, resulting in myriad varieties of cloth suited to markets around the world from ancient times onwards. These fabrics became an important medium for design, with products devised for many cultures, animating a dynamic international trading system. After 1500, following European direct contact with India, cotton textiles became increasingly accepted in Western regions, growing in popularity over the 1600s. Dutch and English trading companies followed Portuguese merchants into Asia after 1600, and growing cargoes of cottons returned to European ports. Western consumers of almost every rank embraced the fashion and utility of these fabrics, and designs were modified in India to suit European tastes, even while other world markets continued to be supplied by Indian textiles. By the late 1600s, tensions arose in Europe because of the success of these imports, and many European nations banned Indian cottons outright, in part for this reason. Legislators aimed to protect local textile manufacturing from foreign competition. Most of Europe still lived under regimes of sumptuary regulation that legislated non-elite consumer behavior. Indian textiles disrupted old cultural systems and challenged local textile industries. However, even as legislators moved to ban Indian textiles, European artisans worked to replicate Indian fabrics and claim home and international markets for themselves. Manufacturers in many locales recognized the profits to be gained by producing their own cotton textiles, based on Indian models. Demand for this fabric rose in Western trading networks. The introduction of new cotton spinning technologies in Britain after the 1760s, followed by water- and then steam-powered spinning mills shortly after, launched a new era of industrial production. The spread of power looms in the 1800s consolidated the new systems of manufacturing and fed rising levels of consumption, both unmatched in human history. The ramifications were widespread, including the increasing number of cotton plantations in the Americas and the massive growth of enslavement of African peoples. At the same time, new systems of factory labor and the widespread diffusion of factory technology transformed working lives, introducing men, women, and children to new patterns of labor and the possibility of new patterns of consumption. British colonial power in India grew from the late 1700s; yet the production of cotton textiles persisted in India even while facing new challenges. By the 19th century, cotton epitomized a world of new materials, new technologies, and new inequalities.