Cotton clothes make the man
Kamal Lodaya, The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai

Cotton has been grown in Asia, {Gossypium arboreum}, as well as in Peru, {Gossypium barbadense}, for more than 5,000 years. It was grown in Mohenjodaro, Pakistan, around 3000 BCE. The Vedas from around 1500 BCE talk about spinning and weaving. Cotton fishing nets in Peru date to 2400 BCE.
Cotton seeds were used as fodder in Egypt in 2500 BCE, and in Mehrgarh, Pakistan, are dated to as far back as 4500 BCE. Cotton was planted in Mexico, {Gossypium hirsutum}, in 3400 BCE. Another species, {Gossypium herbaceum}, comes from Sudan in Africa.
Cotton grows in tropical climates. The humans who settled in colder climates would have worn animal skins or fur. Dyed flax, 30,000 years old, is found in a cave in Georgia, Asia, which suggests clothes were made from it then. Clothes were also made from grasses and linen, known for 12,000 years. Ramie (sometimes called China grass) and silk are known in China for 9,000 years. Sheep have been reared for their wool for 4,000 years.

Until the 19th century, the leading manufacturer of cotton textiles was the Indian subcontinent. Cotton was harvested by hand. Then a roller gin was used to remove seeds, and a bow was used to remove dirt and knots from the ginned cotton. Then a spindle was used to make thread out of the cotton, and this was woven into fabric with a {charkha} or spinning wheel. 
This technology was recorded in India around 750 CE, but was known much before that, perhaps a thousand years before. Wheels were used in China to spin silk in the 3rd century. Later looms were hung between trees to weave the cloth.
Arab and Turkish traders took Indian textiles westwards. Europeans marvelled at the fineness of the fabric. Their imagination of the plant was that something like sheep grew out of the earth, which seems funny to us today.
There was a huge demand for Indian cloth in Africa, and Gujarati traders supplied the East African markets.
What may surprise you is to know how much of the Industrial Revolution revolved around cotton textiles. Why then did it take place in Europe and not in India?

Europe as the centre of the world
Christopher Columbus reached the Caribbean in 1492, and the Spanish empire soon destroyed the native populations living in Central and South America. They were greedy for the gold and silver from there, this loot also financed their expeditions to other parts of the world.
Meanwhile cotton from Peru and central America also started moving to Europe. Once the local people were decimated, the Europeans set up plantations where "cash crops" like sugar, rice, tobacco and indigo were grown for Europe. But who was to grow these crops?
Vasco da Gama reached Calicut in 1498. The Portuguese destroyed the Arab and Gujarati cloth trade in the Indian Ocean, between Malabar and the Middle East and East Africa, and also the spice trade between the Coromandel and Southeast Asia. They wanted to make do without these "middlemen" and directly get to the fabled cotton textiles and spices of Asia. They were later joined by the Dutch, English and French.
With the money plundered earlier, the Europeans purchased textiles from India. Some of these were traded for spices in Southeast Asia. Textiles were also traded in the African market, and African slaves were bought. These slaves were sold to plantations in the "New World", to grow cash crops and again make money for the Europeans. Between 1500 and 1800 CE 80 lakh slaves were transported from Africa, more than half of them in the last hundred years. Each slave was bought against colourful Indian cloth designs which were popular in Africa.
Indian clothes also reached Europe. The writer Daniel Defoe, no friend of India, talked disparagingly about British closets, bed chambers, curtains, cushions, chairs and beds all of "calicoes" (the word comes from Calicut, the port), that is, made of Indian cottons.
European traders had warehouses (then called "factories") in Indian ports, where agents of European companies placed orders with {bania} merchants for cloth. They advanced cash to several middlemen, some of whom travelled through Indian villages, advancing funds to weavers and contracting the finished cloth.
These traders belonged to chartered companies, like the East India Company. They had cannon-filled boats to dominate the seas, and soldier-traders and armed private militias to manage the land conflicts. They were not directly connected to European governments.
Soon they realized that to increase profits they would have to monopolize weavers, who would only work for them and not for others. Increasingly these companies began to get into political control of Indian territories. By the 18th century Europeans had entered Indian credit networks, using Indian agents hired by the company. Disobedience was punished with violence. Even then, the Europeans did not get much control over Indian cotton production. They had to continually engage with local rulers, power structures, landowners and ways.
The heart of the transformation to a unipolar Eurocentric world was the slavery in the Americas, for slaves could be controlled exactly as required for crop production. Of course, before slavery came the elimination of the native population, so land was available for free.

America comes in
Raw Indian cotton came to London in the 1690s. But not much reached Europe. Indian agriculture was never export-oriented. India's largest exports were to China. Their technology continued to be to gin their cotton by footroller or by {charkha}.
Around the 1760s Caribbean planters, who had slaves arriving almost daily from Africa and easy availability of land, started growing cotton in the West Indies as a cash crop. They quickly outcompeted Turkey and India. By the 1780s the Caribbean and South America produced most of the cotton sold on world markets. The newly independent United States in 1776 realized this was a good market to get into. With plentiful land and plentiful slaves it became the dominant cotton producer in the world. The most commonly used phrase to describe the growth of the American economy in the 1830s was "cotton is king". New Orleans became the leading cotton-exporting port in the world.

Tying up with governments
It was only in the 17th century that cotton manufacturing started in Lancashire in England. Many manufacturers were prosperous with the money acquired during the earlier trade. The port of Liverpool became a huge centre of imports of cotton and exports of textiles.
The main tool used to expand the European industry was to "protect" their products. Duties (taxes) were put on calicoes, these taxes were later doubled. Then import of printed cotton was banned. Then printed calicoes were banned if they came from India. These protections were meant to help the domestic wool and linen industry, which suffered from the competition with cotton. But instead they spurred domestic cotton manufacturing in Britain.
By 1780, cotton textile manufacturers in Glasgow in Scotland were pressurizing the British government to allow them to gain access to export markets in Africa, America and Asia.
Meanwhile Europeans were studying and producing reports, for example on woodblock printing techniques in Ahmedabad, on how the artisans of Pondicherry produced chintz (glazed textile with designs), on how silk and cotton were dyed in Bangalore. This knowledge was used by entrepreneurs in Britain.
Then came some splendid inventions. The inventors were not very renowned at that time, but their inventions spread fast. In 1733 John Kay invented the flying shuttle, which doubled how much yarn a weaver could produce. In 1769 Richard Arkwright's water frame was invented, and in 1779 Samuel Crompton's mule. By 1784 Samuel Greg set up the first textile mill with his water-powered spinning machines. Later the mills would become steam-powered. British cotton manufacture mushroomed. By 1830 one out of six workers was in cotton texiles, and 70 per cent of these workers were in Lancashire. The success of this industry made possible the railway network, the iron industries and later other industries. But who were the workers in these mills? 
Britain replaced Indian cotton clothes on the world markets. Centres like Dhaka, Bangladesh, known for its fine muslin cloth, went into decline. A French observer said that more than the capture of the trade, more than the industrial revolution, "England has arrived at the summit of prosperity by persisting for centuries in the system of protection and prohibition." Cotton textile manufacturers fought off competing interests, like the East India Company or aristocratic landowners, to lobby for the attention of the state, its politicians and its bureaucrats.

Return of Asia
In the United States, cotton mills and manufacturing came up mostly in New England, in the northeast. The tension between these states and those in the south led to the American civil war in 1861. It soon brought an end to slavery. This led to panic among the European manufacturers. Where were they to get their cotton? Now they started developing other centres of production.
The British acquired Berar (Varhaad in Maharashtra) in 1853 from the Nizam of Hyderabad. Its lands were devoted to cotton for export to Britain. The railway line from Bombay reached Khamgaon in 1870. Along came the telegraph. Now a manufacturer in Liverpool could place an order and in about six weeks get delivery of his cotton.
British mills used a staggering number of child workers. As in America the struggle for better conditions for industrial workers led to a decline of British industry. 
In 1861 Ranchhodlal Chhotalal's Shahpur mill used steam-powered spinning machines imported from Britain in Ahmedabad. Rich Ahmedabadis, mainly Vaishnav and Jain banias, turned to this lucrative new industry. Around the same time, people in Brazil, China and Japan had the same ideas. As colonial empires collapsed and the countries of the South regained their independence, many of them put their faith in getting their place in the cotton economy. Cotton production has grown sevenfold since 1920.
By the 1960s Britain only had about 3 per cent of the world's cotton cloth exports. Only about 30,000 workers remained. Today there are 25,000 highly subsidised cotton farmers in the United States. Brazil even argued successfully at the World Trade Organization that the cotton subsidies violated the U.S.'s own previous trade commitments.
Today only 14 per cent of the world's cotton is grown in North America. China is the leader with 29 per cent, followed by India and Pakistan. China, India, Pakistan and Turkey spin and weave the most cotton yarn and fabric. China supplies the United States with 40 per cent of its garments, followed by Vietnam, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Honduras, Cambodia, Mexico, El Salvador ...
Uzbekistan is one of the top ten cotton exporters in the world. This is in spite of the fact that the irrigation required for the crop has drained a large part of the Aral Sea, one of the world's largest lakes, and much of its land has become salt flats. Its record of using child labour is not enviable. Tajiki cotton farmers are locked into cycles of debt and forced cotton production. Hundreds of cotton farmers in Maharashtra have killed themselves after their crops failed.
From the 1990s modern merchants source and organize production globally. Cotton grown in Togo, Africa, might make its way through a textile mill in Hong Kong, then to a Vietnamese sewing shop, and then be sold by a mass retailer in the United States. Merchants focus their attention on creating brands, such as the American Gap, the German Adidas, or the Chinese Bonwe, and also with the development of retail chains such as the American Walmart, the Brazilian Lojas Americanas and the French Carrefour.
As earlier these merchants rely on governments, but now less on any one specific government. They foster competition among nations to get their products. Workers are increasingly at the mercy of corporations which can shift any form of production from one part of the world to another. To understand the history and the world of cotton, always look at the constantly shifting geographical rearrangement of labour, production and manufacturing.
Based on
{Empire of cotton},
by Sven Beckert