Cotton: A Soft but Prickly Story

My hunch would be that I experienced cotton even before my very first memory.  Probably as an infant, I experienced the soft touch of sterilized cotton, or the careful cleaning of my ears with a cotton swab.  I can make that assumption because those items were regular residents in our medicine cabinet.  By the time I was taught the song about Peter Cottontail, I had the basis for knowing what a cottony tail would be like.  I now know, however, that there is a lot of rough, impure history behind that white substance.

Just to begin with, cotton (from plants of the genus Gossypium) is never that pure in the natural world.  Although humans' use of it dates back maybe 7,000 years, the cottony material begins as seedy fibers packed within a seed capsule called a "boll."  Both picking cotton from the plants and extracting seeds from the cotton-fiber are laborious tasks.

Despite that challenge, a cotton industry flourished in India from 2000 to 1000 B.C.E., having gotten its roots in the Indus Valley of northern India and eastern Pakistan. Ancient people of Egypt and China also harvested and converted the plant's cotton into clothes. Late medieval Germans, who could only imagine the plants that cotton came from, named it baumwolle, or "tree wool."  (Fancifully, some people imagined that in other countries lambs must grow on trees.)

It is when we follow the story of cotton into an English-speaking country, Britain, that the story at times becomes more painful.  By the 1800's, British colonialism had enforced policies on India that favored the new industrial looms in England.  As a result, the native cotton-weaving enterprise in India was undone, and the people of India were forced to buy more costly fabrics from the looms of colonial Britain -- even when the cotton was grown in India.  This is why Gandhi's encouraging the people of India to spin their own cotton thread at home was part of a political revolt.

"The Cotton Pickers"
by Winslow Homer

The U.S. was another source of cotton for the rapidly industrializing Britain, and the American side of the story is even more painful.  By 1790, slavery was actually on the decline in the U.S. because it was not economically sustainable.  But that changed with the invention of the cotton gin by the ingenious Eli Whitney in Savannah. The climate in the U.S. South allowed the cultivation of only a "green seed" variety of cotton, which demanded an inordinate amount of time for extracting the cotton fibers from the seeds.  With Whitney's machine, a person could extract in one hour what would have previously required several days.  Once the word about the invention was out, farmers planted green seed cotton in mass -- and an economic place for slave-labor was ensured.

In hot weather, I enjoy the cool comfort of cotton shirts.  I am not that comfortable with some of the history behind the fiber in my shirt.  Hopefully, we humans will do better by each other in the future.  After all, the cotton plant offers us lots of good possibilities even beyond textiles: Material from that genus of plants provides salad oil, soap, stems for paper-making, and maybe even a drug for preventing HIV.

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What thoughts or memories has this story of cotton evoked in you?

(Both the photo of Gandhi and the painting by Homer are in the Public Domain

because their copyrights have expired.)