How Did Cotton Shape the Modern World? Slavery, Mills and the Cloth Everyone Wears

Cotton is the seed hair of plants of the genus Gossypium, domesticated independently in India, Africa, Mexico and Peru at least five thousand years ago, and the boll that bursts open with white fibre was being spun and woven into cloth in the Indus valley by 3000 BC. For most of history India was the centre: its spinners and weavers made muslins so fine that a length could be drawn through a ring and calicoes printed in colours that did not run, and they sold them across the Indian Ocean, to Rome, to Africa and, by the seventeenth century, to Europe, where the East India Company's imports were so popular that the wool and silk interests had them banned in England in 1721. The ban did not stop the demand; it redirected it, to making the cloth at home.

Cotton was the raw material on which the Industrial Revolution's first machines were built, because its fibre was strong and uniform enough for a machine to spin and its market was limitless:

• •1733: John Kay's flying shuttle doubles a weaver's output and creates a shortage of yarn
• •1764: James Hargreaves's spinning jenny lets one worker spin eight threads at once, then eighty
• •1769: Richard Arkwright's water frame spins strong yarn by water power, and his mill at Cromford in 1771 is the first factory in the modern sense
• •1779: Samuel Crompton's mule combines both and makes yarn fine enough for muslin
• •1785: Edmund Cartwright's power loom, and from the 1790s steam driving all of it
• •1793: Eli Whitney's cotton gin in Georgia separates the fibre from the seed fifty times faster than by hand, and makes the American short-staple cotton profitable to grow

The mills needed fibre in quantities that no existing source could supply, and the American South supplied it with enslaved labour. The gin removed the bottleneck at the seed, and the land taken from the Creek, Cherokee and Choctaw in the 1810s to 1830s became the cotton belt; a million enslaved people were moved from the old tobacco states of the upper South to the new cotton lands of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana in the internal slave trade, and by 1860 the United States grew two thirds of the world's cotton, the four million enslaved people who grew it were worth more than all the country's factories and railways combined, and cotton was over half of American exports. Every mill in Lancashire, and the banks, insurers and shippers of Liverpool and New York, depended on that labour, and the Civil War that began in 1861 was, at bottom, about whether it would continue and spread.

When the Union blockade cut off Southern cotton in 1861, the Lancashire mills stopped and half a million workers went hungry in the Cotton Famine, and Britain turned to India and Egypt for supply, which is why the Nile delta and the Deccan were planted with cotton for export and why the Indian weaving that had once clothed the world was destroyed by the cloth that Lancashire sent back. India went from exporting cotton cloth to exporting raw cotton and importing the finished article, and the loss of the craft was one of the grievances Gandhi took up when he made hand-spinning the emblem of independence and the spinning wheel the centre of the Congress flag. After emancipation the American South moved to sharecropping, which kept Black farmers in debt on the same fields, and the boll weevil, arriving from Mexico in 1892, ate through the crop over the next thirty years and drove the migration north.

The world grows about 25 million tonnes of cotton a year, in China, India, the United States, Brazil and Pakistan, mostly harvested by machine since the 1950s, and the spinning and weaving that Lancashire took from India went to Japan, then Hong Kong, then Bangladesh and Vietnam, following the cheapest labour as it always has. The crop drinks water, about 10,000 litres for a kilogram of fibre, and the diversion of the rivers that fed the Aral Sea to irrigate Soviet cotton emptied a sea the size of Ireland; it takes a sixth of the world's insecticides; and the picking is still done by hand in Uzbekistan and Xinjiang under conditions that have brought import bans. The cloth remains what made it worth all of that, the most comfortable fibre for clothing that has ever been found, and the history of the last three centuries can be told, with only a little distortion, as the story of getting enough of it.

Cotton, an Indian cloth that Europe could not make until it built machines to spin and weave it, was the raw material of the first factories, and the mills' demand was met by enslaved labour on American land taken from its native peoples, so that the plant tied Manchester to Mississippi and made the Civil War. Britain's turn to Indian and Egyptian cotton destroyed India's weaving and made cotton an emblem of its independence, and the industry has moved ever since to wherever labour is cheapest and water can be found.