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 may contain minor percentages of waxes, fats, pectins, and water. Under natural conditions, cotton bolls facilitate the dispersal of the seeds.
The plant is a shrub native to tropical and subtropical regions around the world, including the Americas, Africa (including Egypt) and India. The greatest diversity of wild cotton species is found in Mexico, followed by Australia and Africa.The Biology of Gossypium hirsutum L. and Gossypium barbadense L. (cotton). ogtr.gov.au 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, have been found at Mehrgarh, Kachi, Pakistan. Quote: "The metallurgical analysis of a copper bead from a Neolithic burial (6th millennium BC) at Mehrgarh, Pakistan, allowed the recovery of several threads, preserved by mineralization. They were characterized according to new procedure, combining the use of a reflected-light microscope and a scanning electron microscope, and identified as cotton (Gossypium sp.). The Mehrgarh fibres constitute the earliest known example of cotton in the Old World and put the date of the first use of this textile plant back by more than a millennium. Even though it is not possible to ascertain that the fibres came from an already domesticated species, the evidence suggests an early origin, possibly in the Kachi Plain, of one of the Old World cottons. 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 (90% of world production) Gossypium barbadense – known as extra-long staple cotton, native to tropical South America (over 5% of world production) Gossypium arboreum – tree cotton, native to India and Pakistan (less than 2%) Gossypium herbaceum – Levant cotton, native to southern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula (less than 2%)
Hybrid varieties are also cultivated. The two New World cotton species account for the vast majority of modern cotton production, but the two Old World species were widely used before the 1900s. While cotton fibers occur naturally in colors of white, brown, pink and green, fears of contaminating the genetics of white cotton have led many cotton-growing locations to ban the growing of colored cotton varieties.
Etymology The word 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.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 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 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 (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. 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,More details at CNRTL.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 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 , in 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.Jonathan D. Sauer, Historical Geography of Crop Plants: A Select Roster, Routledge (2017), p. 115 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.Beckert, S. (2014). Chapter one: The Rise of a Global Community. In Empire of Cotton: A global history. essay, Vintage Books.
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. Quote: "One of the funerary chambers, dating to around 5500 BC, had contained an adult male lying on his side with legs flexed backward and a young child, approximately one or two years old, at his feet. Next to the adult's left wrist were eight copper beads which had once formed a bracelet. As such metal beads were only found in one other Neolithic burial at Mehrgarh, he must have been an extraordinarily wealthy and important person. Microscopic analysis showed that each bead had been made by beating and heating copper ore into a thin sheet which had then been rolled around a narrow rod. Substantial corrosion prevented a detailed technological study of the beads; yet this turned out to be a blessing as the corrosion had led to the preservation of something quite remarkable inside one of the beads – a piece of cotton. ... After further microscopic study, the fibres were unquestionably identified as cotton; it was, in fact, a bundle of both unripe and ripe fibres that had been wound together to make a thread, these being differentiated by the thickness of their cell walls. As such, this copper bead contained the earliest known use of cotton in the world by at least a thousand years. The next earliest was also found at Mehrgarh: a collection of cotton seeds discovered amidst charred wheat and barley grains outside one of its mud-brick rooms." Fragments of cotton textiles and spindle whorls, dated to the 3rd millennium BCE, 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 (Persia), the history of cotton dates back to the Achaemenid era (5th century BC); 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 Shahnameh, there are references to cotton ("panbe" in Persian). Marco Polo (13th century) 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.Encyclopaedia Islamica Foundation , Retrieved on 28 February 2009.
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:"cotton" in The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001–07.
Kingdom of Kush Cotton (Gossypium herbaceum Linnaeus) 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 (beginning 3rd century BCE), 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 (207 BC - 220 AD), cotton was grown by Chinese peoples in the southern Chinese province of Yunnan.
Middle Ages