Half a millennium ago, in a dozen small villages along the Pacific coast of what is today called Mexico, people spent their days growing maize, beans, squash, and chiles. There, between the Río Santiago to the north and the Río Balsas to the south, they fished, gathered oysters and clams, and collected honey and beeswax. Alongside this subsistence agriculture and the modest crafts they produced by hand—small painted ceramic vessels decorated with geometric motifs were their most renowned creation—these men and women also grew a plant that sprouted small tufted white bolls. The plant was inedible. It was also the most valuable thing they grew. They called it ichcatl: cotton.
The cotton plant thrived among the maize, and each fall, after they harvested their food crops, the villagers plucked the soft wads of fiber from the pyramidally shaped, waist-high plants, gathering the numerous bolls in baskets or sacks, then carrying them to their mud-and-wattle huts. There they painstakingly removed the many seeds by hand, then beat the cotton on a palm mat to make it smooth, before combing out the fibers into strands several inches long. Using a thin wooden spindle fitted with a ceramic disk and a spinning bowl to support the spindle as it twirled, they twisted the strands together into fine white thread. Then they created cloth on a backstrap loom, a simple tool consisting of two sticks attached by the warp threads; one stick was hung from a tree, the other on the weaver herself, who stretched the warp with the weight of her own body and then wove the contrasting thread (the weft) in and out between the warps in an unending dance. The result was a cloth as strong as it was supple. They dyed the cloth with indigo and cochineal, creating a rich variety of blue-blacks and crimsons. Some of the cloth they wore themselves, sewn into shirts, skirts, and trousers. The rest they sent to Teotihuacán as part of an annual tribute owed to their distant Aztec rulers. In 1518 alone, the people of these twelve coastal villages provided the emperor Moctezuma II with eight hundred bales of raw cotton (each weighing 115 pounds), thirty-two hundred colored cotton cloths, and forty-eight hundred large white cloths, the product of thousands of hours of backbreaking and highly skilled labor.1
For hundreds of years both before and after, similar scenes unfolded across vast stretches of the world’s inhabited land. From Gujarat to Sulawesi, along the banks of the Upper Volta to the Rio Grande, from the valleys of Nubia to the plains of Yucatán, people on three continents had grown cotton in their fields, and then manufactured cotton textiles in the houses next door, just as their ancestors had done for generations prior. The plant is stubborn, seemingly able to thrive with little help from farmers, given the right natural conditions. It grows in a wide range of environments thanks to its “morphological plasticity,” that is, in the words of plant scientists, its ability to “adapt to diverse growing conditions by shortening, lengthening, or even interrupting its effective bloom period.”2
The many peoples who grew cotton remained for thousands of years unaware that their efforts were being replicated by other peoples around the globe, all of whom lived in a geographic band roughly from 32–35 degrees south to 37 degrees north. These areas offered a climate suitable for the growing of cotton. As a subtropical plant, it needs temperatures not dipping below 50 degrees Fahrenheit during its growth period and usually remaining above 60 degrees. Cotton, we now know, thrives in areas in which no frost occurs for around 200 days, and in which it rains from twenty to twenty-five inches a year, concentrated in the middle of the growing period, a common climate zone that explains its abundance across multiple continents. Seeds are put in trenches about three feet apart and then covered with soil. It takes from 160 to 200 days for the cotton to mature.3
By themselves or through encounters with other peoples, each of these cotton cultivators had discovered that the fluffy white fiber that quelled out of the cotton boll was superbly suited to the production of thread. This thread in turn could be woven into a cloth that was easy to wash, pleasant against the skin, and effective as protection from the sun’s burning rays—and to some degree from the cold. As early as a thousand years ago, the production of cotton textiles in Asia, Africa, and the Americas was the world’s largest manufacturing industry; sophisticated trade networks, mostly local but a few regional, connected growers, spinners, weavers, and consumers.
The history of clothing is difficult to reconstruct, because most cloth has not survived the ravages of time. We know that ever since Homo sapiens moved from the African savanna into colder climes, about one hundred thousand years ago, they had to protect themselves from the elements. The spotty archaeological record that we have tells us that humans first used furs and skins to clothe themselves. There is evidence that they spun and wove flax as early as thirty thousand years ago. Such cloth production expanded significantly about twelve thousand years ago, once humans settled down and began to engage in agriculture and animal husbandry. Then men and women began to experiment more widely with different fibers to spin and to weave cloth for protection against the cold and the sun.4
The methods for transforming plants into cloth were invented independently in various parts of the world. In Europe, people began to weave various grasses and also linen during the Neolithic Era, starting about twelve thousand years ago. About eight thousand years later, during the Bronze Age, they also began to harvest wool from animals. In the Middle East and North Africa, for seven millennia before the Common Era, societies spun and wove various kinds of wool and flax as well. Over the same millennia, Chinese peasants and artisans manufactured clothing from ramie and silk. As societies became more stratified, cloth emerged as an important marker of social rank.5
In this world of linen, wool, ramie, and silk, cotton’s importance gradually grew. About five thousand years ago, on the Indian subcontinent, people, as far as we know, first discovered the possibility of making thread out of cotton fibers. Almost simultaneously, people living on the coast of what today is Peru, ignorant of developments in South Asia, followed suit. A few thousand years later, societies in eastern Africa developed techniques for the spinning and weaving of cotton as well. In each of these regions cotton quickly became the dominant fiber for the spinning of thread, its properties for most uses clearly superior to those of flax and ramie and other fibers. For these first millennia of the plant’s cultivation, the production of cotton goods rarely expanded beyond cotton’s natural growing zone, but all who encountered it saw it as a remarkable material for the production of clothing: soft, durable, and light, easy to dye and easy to clean.
Evidence of cotton’s essential role in early societies can be found in the foundational myths and sacred texts of many peoples. In Hindu scripture, cotton appears frequently and prominently. Vishnu, Hindus believe, wove “the rays of the sun into a garment for himself.” People across West Africa attributed their spinning skills to Ananse, a spider deity. In North America, a Hopi spider goddess was believed to spin and weave cotton. The Navajo believed that Begochiddy, one of the four sons of Ray of Sunlight and Daylight, had created and planted cotton after making the mountains and insects. According to a Navajo belief, “When a baby girl is born to your tribe you shall go and find a spider web…and rub it on the baby’s hand and arm. Thus, when she grows up she will weave, and her fingers and arms will not tire from the weaving.” In China, according to a 1637 text from the late Ming dynasty, clothing, including cottons, distinguished humans from beasts, and among humans it “distinguished between the rulers and the ruled.” Moreover, the idea of fate as either spun or woven was central to many diverse cultures, including those, not surprisingly, in which cotton played a dominant role.6
Modern plant scientists have looked beyond cotton as a gift of the gods, but are no less impressed. Biologists think cotton plants have grown on earth for 10 to 20 million years. Four genetically different species of cotton have developed since—the Mesoamerican G. hirsutum, the South American G. barbadense, the African G. herbaceum, and the Asian G. arboretum. These four species, in turn, have sprouted hundreds of further variations, of which only a few would come to dominate commercial cotton production. Today, more than 90 percent of the world’s cotton crop is G. hirsutum cultivars, also known as American upland. Human domestication has changed the plant even further. Over a five-thousand-year period, according to one expert, our forebears transformed it “from undisciplined perennial shrubs and small trees with small impermeable seeds sparsely covered by coarse, poorly differentiated seed hairs, to short, compact, annualized plants with copious amounts of long, white lint borne on large seeds that germinate readily.” Cotton growers carefully experimented with the plant, gradually forging it into something that supported their growing need for cloth. They adapted the plant to particular environmental niches, transported it over long distances, spread its reach, and increased its diversity. As with so many other pieces of the natural world, human cultivation radically accelerated and altered the biological history of cotton—a capacity that would quicken during the nineteenth century and become of great importance to the empire of cotton.7
Farmers in the Indus valley were the first to spin and weave cotton. In 1929, archaeologists recovered fragments of cotton textiles at Mohenjo-Daro, in what is now Pakistan, dating to between 3250 and 2750 BCE. Cottonseeds found at nearby Mehrgarh have been dated to 5000 BCE. Literary references further point to the ancient nature of the subcontinent’s cotton industry. The Vedic scriptures, composed between 1500 and 1200 BCE, allude to cotton spinning and weaving. The very first reports by foreign travelers to South Asia similarly mention cotton: The ancient Greek historian Herodotus (484–425 BCE) was familiar with India’s fine cotton clothing, observing in 445 BCE that in the subcontinent “wild trees bear fleeces for their fruit surpassing those of the sheep in beauty and excellence, and the natives clothe themselves in cloths made therefrom.”8
From the earliest time until well into the nineteenth century—that is, for several millennia—the people of the Indian subcontinent were the world’s leading cotton manufacturers. Peasants in what are today India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh cultivated small quantities of cotton alongside their food crops. They spun and wove cotton for their own use and for sale in local and regional markets. Most regions within South Asia produced all the textiles they consumed well into the nineteenth century. They harvested the crop by hand, employed a roller gin to remove the seeds, removed dirt and knots with the help of a bow (a wooden tool with string attached that vibrates if struck with a piece of wood), spun the fiber on a distaff (a tool holding the unspun cotton) and a spindle into thread, and wove this thread into fabric using looms hung between trees.9
The quality of the top tier of Indian cotton fabrics was legendary: In the thirteenth century, the European traveler Marco Polo elaborated on Herotodus’s observations of nearly nine hundred years earlier, noting on the coast of Coromandel “the finest and most beautiful cottons that are to be found in any part of the world.” Six hundred years later, Edward Baines, a newspaper proprietor and cotton expert from Leeds, reported the best Indian cloth was of “almost incredible perfection…. Some of their muslins might be thought the work of fairies, or of insects, rather than of men.” They were, in effect, “webs of woven wind.”10
The subcontinent, however, was far from alone. Cotton was plentiful and cotton cloth ubiquitous in the Americas, long before Europeans arrived in the New World. In a four-thousand-mile arc through Mesoamerica and the Caribbean to South America, cotton was the most important manufacturing industry. Perhaps the oldest center of cotton manufacture was located in present-day Peru. There, archaeologists have excavated cotton fishing nets dated to 2400 BCE and textile fragments from 1600–1500 BCE. When Francisco Pizarro attacked the Inca Empire in 1532, he marveled at the quality and quantity of cotton fabrics he saw. At the Incan city of Cajamarca, the conquistadores found stores filled with huge quantities of cotton textiles “far superior to any they had seen, for fineness of texture, and the skill with which the various colors were blended.”11
Several thousand miles to the north and a decade earlier, Europeans were just as surprised when they penetrated the Aztec Empire and encountered extraordinary cottons. In addition to gold and other treasure, Hernán Cortés sent to Charles V cotton cloth brilliantly dyed with indigo and cochineal. The Mesoamerican cotton industry, like its South American counterpart, had a long history. Cotton was planted throughout what is today central Mexico as early as 3400 BCE, and the earliest thread found in archaeological excavations has been dated to between 1200 and 1500 BCE. Cotton use by the Mayas has been documented as early as 632 BCE, and in the lowlands of modern-day Veracruz, a cotton industry probably emerged between 100 BCE and 300 CE. As the wearing of cotton spread from elites to commoners, production increased, especially with the rise of the Aztecs’ military and economic empire after 1350. And as more people wore cotton, its processing became ever more important. Techniques in weaving and dying all became more and more refined, not least to display social difference through distinctive clothing.12
Indigenous production continued after the conquest of Central America by Spanish colonists in the sixteenth century. One late-seventeenth-century colonial Spanish administrator, Don Juan de Villagutierre Soto-Mayor, praised the Indian women of the former realm of the Maya who “spin cotton and weave their cloths with energy and ability, giving them perfect colors.” In addition to clothing, cotton was used for religious offerings, as gifts, a medium of exchange, for decorative hangings, for wrapping mummies, as armor, and even for medicinal uses. An estimated 116 million pounds of cotton were produced annually in pre-Columbian Mexico, equaling the cotton crop of the United States in 1816. As the rulers of Teotihuacán expanded the reach of their power, they drew tribute and trade from cotton-growing and -manufacturing regions. Places within the Aztec Empire that were particularly prominent growers of cotton had Nahuatl names that meant “on the cotton temple,” “in the river of cotton,” and “on the hill of cotton.”13
Mexico and Peru were the centers of the pre-Columbian cotton industry, but the production of cotton textiles also spread to other parts of the continent. In what is today Brazil, cotton fibers gathered from wild plants were used to manufacture cloth. In what later became the southwestern United States, Native Americans became avid cotton producers, especially the Navajos and Hopi, perhaps as early as 300 BCE. Knowledge about cotton had traveled up the west coast of Mexico from Central America. When Spanish settlers came into contact with Indians north of the Rio Grande, they noticed that “the Indians spin cotton and weave cloth” and that they “wear Campeche-type cotton blankets for they have large cotton fields.” For some Native Americans, cotton also had important religious uses: The Hopi utilized it to symbolize clouds in ceremonies in which they prayed for rain, and placed it over the faces of the dead “with the idea of making the spiritual body light, like a cloud.” In the Caribbean, as well, cotton growing was widespread. Indeed, one of the reasons why Christopher Columbus believed that he had reached India was that he encountered great quantities of cotton in the Caribbean; he recounted islands “full of…cotton.”14
Cotton growing and manufacturing also has a long history in Africa. It was probably first cultivated by Nubians in what today is eastern Sudan. Some claim that the fiber was cultivated, spun, and woven there as early as 5000 BCE, though archaeological finds at Meroë, a former city on the east bank of the Nile, confirm the presence of cotton textiles only for the years between 500 BCE and 300 CE. From Sudan, cotton spread north to Egypt. While cotton textiles played no significant role in ancient Egyptian civilizations, we know that cottonseed was used as animal fodder as early as 2600–2400 BCE, and depictions on the Karnak Temple in Luxor show cotton bushes. Yet cotton cultivation and the manufacturing of cotton textiles only took off in Egypt between 332 BCE and 395 CE. In 70 CE, Pliny the Elder observed that “the upper part of Egypt, in the vicinity of Arabia, produces a shrub, known by some as gossypium. The shrub is small, and bears a fruit similar in appearance to a nut with a beard, and containing in the inside a silky substance, the down of which is spun into threads. There is no tissue known that is superior to those made from this thread, either for whiteness, softness, or dressing…” After 800 CE, the spread of cotton, and its attendant production, accelerated further on the wings of Islam.15
Knowledge about how to grow and process cotton then traveled to western Africa. How exactly cotton came there is still unclear, but it is possible that itinerant weavers and merchants brought it from East Africa sometime around the beginning of the Common Era. With the arrival of Islam in the eighth century CE, the cotton industry expanded significantly, as Islamic teachers taught girls to spin and boys to weave, while advocating a previously unimagined modesty of dress to peoples whose environmental conditions demanded little clothing. Excavations have found cotton cloth dated to the tenth century. Literary sources and archaeological finds testify to cotton spinning and weaving in West Africa in the late eleventh century, by which time it had spread as far south as present-day Togo. By the early fifteenth century, Leo Africanus reported on the “great abundance” of cotton in the “kingdome of Melli” and the wealth of cotton merchants in the “kingdome of Tombuto,” meaning the great West African empires of Mali and Timbuktu.16
The domestication, spinning, and weaving of cotton, to the best of our knowledge, evolved independently in these three regions of the world.17 From South Asia, Central America, and eastern Africa, however, knowledge spread rapidly along existing trade and migration routes—from Mesoamerica to the north, for example, and from East Africa to the west. Central to these movements of the cotton industry was India. From there, cotton growing and manufacturing skills moved west, east, and south, placing Asia at the center of the global cotton industry, where it would remain until well into the nineteenth century, and return again in the late twentieth century. India’s location, and skill with cotton, was most consequential to the plant’s prominent role in our world, since a group of Europeans, clothed no doubt in fur, wool, and linen, was most impressed when they stumbled more than two thousand years ago upon these wondrous new fabrics arriving from a mythical “East.”
But prior to its discovery by Europeans, cotton was busy altering the lives of others. Cotton moved westward, from India via Turkestan into the Middle East and later into the Mediterranean. Even before the Common Era, we have evidence of cotton being grown in Persia, Mesopotamia, and Palestine. Cotton clothing dated to around 1100 BCE was found in Nineveh (in present-day Iraq), and an Assyrian cylinder dated to the seventh century BCE speaks of a tree that bears wool. A few hundred years later, during the first centuries of the Common Era, Anatolian peasants had taken up cotton cultivation. Just as in Africa, the spread of Islam played a major role in transmitting the skills to grow, spin, and weave cotton across the Middle East, as religious demands for modesty made cotton an “ordinary article of clothing.” Ninth- and tenth-century Iran saw a “cotton boom” to supply urban markets, especially at Baghdad. In the thirteenth century, Marco Polo encountered cotton and cotton cloth everywhere from Armenia to Persia, and the “abundance” of cotton across Asia became a major motif of his reporting.18
Just as cotton cultivation moved farther west, the knowledge of cotton also spread from India east through Asia, and especially into China. While China eventually became one of the most significant producers of cotton and cotton textiles worldwide, and is the center of the world’s cotton industry today, the plant is not indigenous there. Indeed, the Chinese word for cotton and cotton fiber is borrowed from Sanskrit and other Indian languages.19 By 200 BCE, cotton was known in China, but for the next millennium it did not spread much beyond the southwestern border regions where it had originally been introduced.
Cotton became a major presence in the Chinese countryside during the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). During those years, it effectively replaced ramie, which, with silk, had traditionally served the Chinese as a fiber for making cloth. By 1433, Chinese subjects could pay taxes in cotton, which enabled the state to clothe its soldiers and officials in the fiber. As we will see, the connection between the crop and taxation was one of many instances of political authorities taking an interest in the cotton industry. During the expansionary Ming dynasty (1368–1644), cotton production spread throughout China’s new conquests. At the end of the Ming, the Chinese produced an estimated 20 million cotton cloth bales annually. A geographical division of labor had emerged in which northern farmers shipped raw cotton south to the lower Yangtze, where farmers used it, along with their own homegrown cotton, to manufacture textiles, some of which they sold back to the north. So vibrant was this interregional trade that cotton cloth accounted for one-fourth of the empire’s commerce. By the seventeenth century, nearly all Chinese men, women, and children wore cotton clothing. Not surprisingly, when China’s population doubled over the course of the eighteenth century, to 400 million people, its cotton industry became the second largest in the world after India’s, growing an estimated 1.5 billion pounds of cotton in 1750, roughly equal to U.S. production as its planters ramped up production in the decade prior to the Civil War.20
Indian cotton technology also spread into Southeast Asia. As production skills advanced, cotton cloth emerged as the region’s most valuable manufactured product after foodstuffs. Buddhist monks brought it to Java sometime between the third and fifth centuries CE. Much later, between 1525 and 1550, cotton cultivation expanded into Japan. By the seventeenth century it had become an important commercial crop there, as small farmers grew cotton to earn extra income for tax payments, often in rotation with rice.21 With cotton’s arrival in Japan, the original Indian cotton culture had now spread over most of Asia.
Fashioned by African, American, and Asian peasants, spinners, weavers, and merchants over at least five millennia, this cotton world was vibrant and expanding. Despite its diversity across three continents, the centers of this huge manufacturing industry had many things in common. Most important, cotton growing and manufacturing almost always remained small-scale and focused on households. While some growers sold their raw cotton into markets, including long-distance markets, and many rulers forced cultivators to part with some of their crop as tribute, no growers depended on their cotton crops alone; instead they diversified their economic opportunities, hoping to lessen risk to the best of their ability. In a large swath of Africa, and parts of South Asia and Central America, such patterns persisted until well into the twentieth century.
For millennia, then, households planted cotton in a delicate equilibrium with other crops. Families grew cotton alongside their food crops, balancing their own and their community’s need for food and fiber with their rulers’ demands for tribute. In Veracruz, for example, double cropping of food grains and cotton was common, providing subsistence both for those who grew cotton and those who spun and wove. In the Yucatán, Mayan peasants grew cotton in fields that also produced maize and beans. In West Africa, cotton was “interplanted with food crops,” such as sorghum, in present-day Ivory Coast, or with yams, as in the area that is now Togo. In Gujarat, “the [cotton] shrubs are planted between the rows of rice.” In the cotton-growing areas of Central Asia, peasants grew the fiber alongside not only rice, but also wheat and millet, and in Korea alongside beans. No significant cotton monoculture emerged before the eighteenth century, and yet when that monoculture appeared so too did the hunger for ever more land and labor.22
Like cotton growing, cotton manufacturing throughout the world began in households, and, with few exceptions, stayed there until the nineteenth century. In areas controlled by the Aztecs, for example, all cotton manufacturing was organized within households. In Africa as well, “in many cases the production of cotton goods was purely a family industry, each social unit being entirely self-sufficient.” We have similar testimony for India, China, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and the Ottoman Empire. Household production enabled a family to produce the cloth they needed, but it also allowed production for markets. Since labor needs in most agricultural societies varied enormously by the season, and since picked cotton could be stored for months, peasants could focus on textile production intermittently and seasonally, during slack times. This was especially the case for women, whose activities focused on the house, with some of their labor available for the homebound production of yarn and cloth.23
In every society a definite gender division of labor emerged, with a particularly strong association between women and textile production. Indeed, there was a premodern saying in China that “men till the soil and women weave.” Except among the Navajo, Hopi, and some peoples in Southeast Asia, women throughout the world have had a virtual monopoly on spinning. Because spinning can be done intermittently, and enables a simultaneous commitment to other activities, such as watching young children and cooking, women’s roles within households usually led them to be in charge of spinning as well. So close was the association of women and cloth production that in some cultures women were buried with their spinning tools. With weaving, on the other hand, no such stark gender divisions emerged. While men tended to dominate the weaving industry in places such as India and southeast Africa, there were many cultures in which women wove as well, such as in Southeast Asia, China, and North and West Africa. Yet even in societies in which both women and men wove, they usually specialized in different designs, produced distinct qualities, and worked on different types of looms. This gendered division of labor was reproduced in the emerging factory system as well, making gender relations in the household an important factor in the emergence of factory production.24
Embedded within households and their particular strategies for survival, this premodern cotton industry was also characterized by slow technological change in ginning, spinning, or weaving. As late as the eighteenth century, a woman in Southeast Asia, for example, needed a month to spin a pound of cotton and another month to weave a piece of cloth ten yards long.25 This enormous time requirement was partly the result of what economists call “low opportunity costs” for the labor that went into spinning and weaving, and partly of a world in which rulers taxed their subjects’ production to the maximum extent possible. Moreover, since many households were self-sufficient in textiles, markets were of a limited scale, again reducing incentives to improve production techniques.
Yet slow technological change was also related to constraints on the supply of raw materials. In most regions of the world, raw cotton could not be transported efficiently very far. Beasts of burden or humans sometimes carried raw cotton over relatively short distances. In the Aztec Empire, raw cotton was transported into highland areas to be manufactured, at distances of perhaps a hundred miles. More efficient and common was the waterborne cotton trade. In the second millennium CE, for example, observers reported hundreds if not thousands of boats floating cotton down the Yangtze to the region of Jiangnan. Gujarati and central Indian cotton was similarly shipped on the Ganges and along the coast to South India and Bengal. Nonetheless, until the nineteenth century the overwhelming bulk of raw cotton was spun and woven within a few miles from where it was grown.26
So many people in so many parts of the world grew cotton, spun it, and wove it into fabrics that it was very likely the world’s most important manufacturing industry. And while household production for household consumption would remain until the nineteenth century its most important sector, there was significant change before the Industrial Revolution of the 1780s. Most importantly, cotton goods—partly because they were so labor-intensive to produce—became an important store of value and a medium of exchange. Rulers everywhere demanded cotton cloth as tribute or taxes, and indeed it might be said that cotton was present at the birth of political economy as such. Among the Aztecs, for example, it was the most important medium for tribute payments. In China, beginning in the fifteenth century, households were required to pay some of their taxes in cotton cloth. And in Africa the payment of tribute in cloth was common. Practical as a means to pay taxes, cotton cloth was also used as currency in China, throughout Africa, in Southeast Asia, and in Mesoamerica. Cloth was an ideal medium of exchange because unlike raw cotton it could be easily transported over long distances, was not perishable, and was valuable. Nearly everywhere in the premodern world, a piece of cotton cloth could buy needed things: food, manufactured goods, even protection.27
Cotton’s use as proto-money illuminates the fact that not all cotton textiles, with their favorable ratio of value to weight, were used in the immediate vicinity of their production. Indeed, the cotton centers that had emerged separately in the Americas, Africa, and Asia all developed increasingly sophisticated networks of trade, connecting growers, manufacturers, and consumers over long, eventually even transcontinental distances. In Iran, the ninth- and tenth-century cotton industry led to significant urbanization, drawing raw cotton from the surrounding countryside, spinning, weaving, and tailoring it to sell into long-distance markets, especially in what is today Iraq. In precolonial Burkina Faso one author finds that “cotton was at the center of trade.” Gujarati cotton cloth, as early as the fourth century BCE, came to play a very significant role in the trade between the various lands bordered by the Indian Ocean, and large quantities were sold along the East African coast, to be traded far into the African hinterland. In all of these exchanges, traders, especially if far removed from the polities they originated from, had to adjust to local tastes, and had to offer their products at prices attractive to local consumers.28
In Mesoamerica, cloth was traded over many hundreds of miles, including to neighboring states, as, for example, when merchants brought cloth from Teotitlán (in modern-day Oaxaca) to Guatemala. In the Southwest of what is now the United States, yarn and cloth were also important trade items. Cotton goods have been found in excavations far from regions in which cotton could grow. Since the thirteenth century, Chinese merchants imported cotton yarn and cloth to supplement domestic production from as far away as Vietnam, Luzon, and Java. In similar ways, African merchants traded cotton textiles over long distances, as for example when they exchanged Malinese cotton cloth for salt brought in by desert nomads. Ottoman cotton textiles found their way to places as distant as western Europe, while cotton goods were already being imported into Japan in the thirteenth century.29
India, at the center of this increasingly global reach, traded with the Roman Empire, Southeast Asia, China, the Arab world, North Africa, and East Africa. Indian cottons crisscrossed South Asia on the backs of people and bullocks. They crossed the seas in Arab dhows, traversed the great Arabian Desert to Aleppo on the backs of camels, moved down the Nile to the great cotton mart of Cairo, and filled the bottoms of junks on their way to Java. Already in the sixth century BCE Indian cotton was traded to Egypt, as merchants brought Indian cotton to Red Sea and Persian Gulf ports. Greek merchants then took it from Egypt and also Persia to Europe. Roman merchants eventually participated in this trade as well, making cotton a coveted luxury good among the imperial elites. Throughout eastern Africa, Indian cottons were an important presence as well. And throughout the Arab world and Europe, India remained a major supplier until the nineteenth century, with Gujarati merchants, among others, unloading huge quantities of cloth. As an Ottoman official complained in 1647, “So much cash treasury goes for Indian merchandise that…the world’s wealth accumulates in India.”30
Indian cloth also traded eastwards into other parts of Asia. Merchants sold it in the marts of China in very ancient times. Huge quantities of Indian cloth also found their way to Southeast Asia to clothe the local elite: Imports to Malacca in the early sixteenth century, it has been estimated, filled the holds of fifteen ships that arrived annually from Gujarat, Coromandel, and Bengal. So dominant was Indian cloth on world markets that around 1503 the Italian merchant Lodovico de Varthema observed about the Gujarati port town of Cambay, “This city supplies all Persia, Tartary, Turkey, Syria, Barbary, i.e., Arabia Felix, Africa, Ethiopia, India and a multitude of inhabited islands, with silk and cotton stuff.” The Sanskrit word for cotton goods (karpasi) entered into Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Persian, Arabic, Armenian, Malay, Uigur, Mongolian, and Chinese. Even the names of particular fabrics became global brand names—chintz and jackonet, for example, are corruptions of terms in Indian languages that eventually came to describe a particular style throughout the world. Beginning in the seventeenth century, Indian cottons, in fact, were what historian Beverly Lemire has called the “first global consumer commodity.”31
As demand grew, cotton took its first tentative steps out of the home. During the second millennium CE, production in cotton workshops became more common, especially in Asia. Professional weavers emerged in India; they focused on supplying the long-distance trade, providing rulers and wealthy merchants both at home and abroad with cotton cloth. In Dhaka, weavers labored under tight supervision to produce muslins for the Mughal court, “forced to work only for the Government which paid them ill and kept them in a sort of captivity.” Workshops containing more than one loom are also reported to have been located in Alamkonda, in modern-day Andhra Pradesh, as early as the fifteenth century. In contrast to the subsistence weavers, the long-distance tradesmen were geographically concentrated: Bengal was known for its fine muslins, the Coromandel coast for its chintzes and calicoes, and Surat for its strong but inexpensive fabrics of every kind. Though weavers could occupy very different positions within India’s caste system, in some parts of the subcontinent they found themselves in the upper reaches of social hierarchies, prosperous enough to be among the leading donors to local temples. Groups of full-time cotton manufacturers emerged in other parts of the world as well: In fourteenth-century Ming China, for example, higher-quality textiles were worked up in “urban loom houses,” which collectively employed many thousands of workers. In the Ottoman city of Tokat, highly skilled weavers produced significant quantities of cotton textiles. Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra, among other cities in the Islamic world, had large cotton workshops, and indeed the word muslin for fine cottons derives from Musil, the Kurdish name for Mosul. In Bamako, the capital of present-day Mali, up to six hundred weavers plied their trade, while in Kano, the “Manchester of West Africa,” a large weaving industry arose, supplying the people of the Sahara with cloth. In Timbuktu, already in the 1590s twenty-six cotton-producing workshops plied their trade, each with fifty or more workers. In Osaka as well, thousands of workers wove cotton textiles; workshops spread throughout the region employing thirty to forty thousand people by the early eighteenth century.32
As the workshop became more common, so too did a new type of weaver: an individual, usually male, who produced specifically for sale in a market. Yet even as workshops emerged, this specialized production for markets typically took place in the countryside, not towns, and in homes, not workshops. What set these rural market producers apart from those who produced for subsistence only was their reliance on an emerging force in global commerce: putting-out networks held together by merchant capital. In these networks, which would form the nuclei of nineteenth-century mechanized cotton production, spinners and weavers worked up cotton thread and cloth for urban merchants who would collect the products of the spinners and weavers and then sell them on distant markets. The particular ways merchant capitalists and producers related to one another varied widely. On the Indian subcontinent, for example, rural weavers relied on merchants for the capital needed to purchase sufficient yarn, and for the food they needed to subsist while weaving, yet these weavers generally owned their own tools, worked without supervision, and enjoyed some control over the disposal of their products. In other parts of the world, rural weavers enjoyed considerably less power. In the Ottoman Empire, for example, merchants advanced cotton and yarn to peasants, who spun and wove it, then returned the product to the merchants for a small profit. Unlike weavers in India, they did not have any control over disposal of the product. In China merchants also enjoyed great control over production. “They bought up raw cotton, put it out at local markets for peasant women to spin and to weave, had the cloth dyed and calendared in town or city workshops and then exported it all over China for sale.” Merchants, in fact, controlled every stage of production, foreshadowing their central role in the nineteenth-century construction of a globe-spanning empire of cotton.33
With expanding markets, cotton technology changed as well. While the basic principles of cotton processing were quite similar throughout the world, and productivity was dramatically lower before the invention of the novel gins, spinning machines, and looms of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there were some significant innovations. In Mesoamerica, for example, spinning was improved by the introduction of “specially formed ceramic spindle whorls.” After 1200 CE, Mesoamericans also used specifically designed spinning bowls, which increased the productivity of spinners, enabling them, among other things, to feed the voracious appetite for tribute of their rulers. The center of technological innovation, however, was Asia: The roller gin (to remove seeds), the bow (to clean and disentangle ginned cotton), the spinning wheel, and new kinds of looms, including the upright warper, all originated in Asia. The spinning wheel, invented in the eleventh century, was an especially significant innovation as it allowed peasants to spin cotton much faster. Weavers in the same regions also invented a novel kind of loom—the treadle loom. While its exact origins are uncertain, it was introduced into India sometime between 500 BCE and 750 CE, and into China (where it was first used in silk manufacturing) in the third century CE.34
The greatest innovations occurred in the domestication of the cotton plant itself, indeed so much so that the cotton picked by slaves in the nineteenth century would be nearly unrecognizable to Indian farmers of two thousand years earlier. Human selection made cotton compatible with highly varied environmental conditions and rendered its fiber ever more applicable to the production of textiles. Rural cultivators in China, Japan, Southeast Asia, North and South America, western Africa, and Anatolia brought cottonseeds from adjacent territories and added cotton to their crop mix. Through the centuries, this process of domestication drastically altered the physical properties of cotton, creating plants that produced longer and brighter fibers (later-day cotton experts would refer to the length of the fiber as “staple”), ever more plentiful and easier to remove from the filbertlike shell. Moreover, advances in irrigation techniques and agronomy allowed for the expansion of production into new regions. Through seed selection and improved technology, the cotton plant flourished in drier and colder parts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas, including the mostly arid soils of the Islamic world. In Iran, for example, investments in irrigation systems as early as the ninth century enabled a significant extension of cotton agriculture. Nonetheless, compared to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century changes, overall productivity increases in the two thousand years prior to the Industrial Revolution were small. For much of its history, the world’s cotton industry expanded primarily because ever-increasing numbers of people spent ever more time growing, spinning, and weaving cotton.35
These manufacturing networks connecting rural spinners and weavers with urban merchant capital, especially in Asia, created a gradual but significant expansion of output for markets. They did so, however, largely without exploding older social structures, without altering production as it had been organized for centuries. The household, and the technology associated with it, remained at their center. This premodern world was safe behind two bulkheads: first, the markets for finished goods, which were growing but, compared to the world after 1780, only at a modest pace, and second, the great obstacles to sourcing raw cotton across long distances. A great countervailing force would be needed to break through those ancient constraints.
For a very long time, in this remarkably diverse, fabulously vibrant, and economically important world of cotton, Europe was nowhere to be found. Europeans had remained marginal to networks of cotton growing, manufacturing, and consumption. Even after they began importing small quantities of cotton cloth during Greek and Roman times, they remained of little importance to the global cotton industry as a whole. People dressed, as they had since the Bronze Age, in clothing made from flax and wool. As Mahatma Gandhi put it, while India supplied Europe with cottons, Europeans themselves “were submerged in barbarism, ignorance and a state of wilderness.”36
Cotton, quite simply, was exotic to Europe. The fiber grew in faraway lands, and many Europeans reportedly imagined cotton as a mixture of a plant and an animal—a “vegetable lamb.” Stories circulated in medieval Europe about little sheep growing on plants, and bending down at night to drink water; other fables told of sheep attached to the ground by low stems.37
Cotton’s first serious incursion into Europe, as in West Africa, was the result of the spread of Islam. By 950 CE, cotton was manufactured in such Islamic cities as Seville, Córdoba, Granada, and Barcelona, as well as Sicily; some of those textiles were exported to the rest of Europe. During the twelfth century, the Seville botanist Abu Zacaria Ebn el Awam published a treatise on agriculture that included a detailed description of how to cultivate cotton.38 So tight was the association between Islam and cotton that most western European languages borrowed their words for the fiber from the Arabic qutun. French coton, English cotton, Spanish algodón, Portugese algodão, Dutch katoen, and Italian cotone all derive from the Arabic root. (The German Baumwolle and the Czech bavlna—translated roughly as “tree wool”—are the exceptions that prove the rule.) While the Christian Reconquista of Iberia in the first half of the second millennium seriously contracted the region’s cotton production, the centuries-long exposure to Arab technology and culture left behind a familiarity with and appreciation for cotton textiles in large areas of Europe.
By the twelfth century, small pockets of Europe—particularly northern Italy—returned to the world of cotton production, and this time to stay. While Europe’s climate was largely unsuited for cotton growing, the Crusaders had extended European power into the Arab world, and thereby into areas where cotton grew naturally.39 The first endeavors to manufacture cotton were modest, but the beginning of a trend that would alter the continent’s history, and the world’s economy.
The first center of a non-Islamic cotton industry in Europe emerged in northern Italy, in cities such as Milan, Arezzo, Bologna, Venice, and Verona. The industry grew quickly, starting in the late twelfth century, and came to play a vital role in these urban economies. In Milan, for example, by 1450 the cotton industry employed a full six thousand workers making fustians, fabrics using both cotton and linen.40 These northern Italians became the dominant producers in Europe, and they retained their position for about three centuries.41
Cotton manufacturing blossomed in northern Italy for two reasons. First, these cities looked back on a long history of still vibrant wool production, which had left them with skilled workers, capital-rich merchants, and expertise in long-distance trade. Once entrepreneurs decided to engage in cotton manufacturing, they could draw on those resources. They advanced raw cotton to women in the surrounding countryside to have it spun. They contracted with urban artisans, organized in guilds, to weave the yarn. They branded and standardized their goods, and drew upon their long-distance trade networks to export goods to foreign markets throughout the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary.42
Second, northern Italy had easy access to raw cotton. Indeed, the northern Italian industry was from the beginning entirely dependent on eastern Mediterranean cotton from such places as western Anatolia and what today is Syria. Already in the eleventh century, cotton yarn and cotton cloth had been imported into the ports of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, giving people a taste for cottons. Raw cotton imports followed in the wake of the Crusades, with the first such trade documented for the year 1125.43
As improvements in shipping allowed for the cheaper transportation of bulk commodities, Venice became Europe’s first cotton entrepôt, the Liverpool of the twelfth century. Some traders became dedicated cotton merchants, buying low-grade raw cotton from Anatolia, while procuring better-quality fiber from Syria. This supply was supplemented by Genovese imports from Anatolia, Sicily, and Egypt. But despite importing large quantities, European merchants had little if any impact on the specific ways in which raw cotton was grown in the Levant: They bought cotton from local merchants, loaded it on their ships, and transported it across the sea. Nevertheless, Venice’s ability to insert itself into and eventually dominate Mediterranean trade was crucial to the success of the northern Italian cotton industry. Moreover, it was a harbinger of the wedge that European states and capitalists would later drive into the heart of the ancient cotton centers.44
Not only did the Mediterranean networks give Italian manufacturers relatively easy access to raw cotton, but they also provided them with access to “Eastern” technologies. Northern Italian entrepreneurs appropriated technologies from the Islamic world—some of which had in turn come from India and China. The twelfth century witnessed a “massive infusion of outside technology into the European textile industry”—most importantly the spinning wheel. Before the spinning wheel was introduced into Europe in the middle of the thirteenth century, Europeans, like Americans and Africans, had spun with hand spindles. It was a slow process: A skilled spinner produced about 120 meters of thread per hour. At that rate, it took about eleven hours to spin enough yarn for one blouse. The spinning wheel increased the output of European spinners tremendously, tripling productivity. Thus the availability of a new material—cotton—led to the embrace of the new manufacturing technique, which is why in medieval Europe the spinning wheel was also called the “cotton wheel.” If less dramatic than the spinning wheel, improvement also came to weaving with the horizontal treadle loom. First used in Europe in the eleventh century, it enabled the weaver to change the sheds—the device that separates some of the warp threads to allow the shuttle to pass through—with his feet, freeing the hands to insert the weft, and thus allowing for the production of finer-quality textiles. It came to Europe from India or China via the Islamic world.45
The growth of the northern Italian cotton industry rested principally on its access to raw cotton and manufacturing technology from the Islamic world. Yet these linkages and dependencies would become Italy’s principal vulnerabilities; the industry remained distant from the sources of raw materials, and lacked control over the growing of cotton. Northern Italy’s industry eventually suffered both from the strengthening of the Islamic cotton industry and the marginalization of its own trade networks with the Islamic world.46
Yet even before the disruption of these crucial networks, the Italian industry faced another challenge: the rise of nimbler competitors north of the Alps, in the cities of southern Germany. They drew, like their Italian counterparts, on cotton from the Levant. But while Italian manufacturers faced high taxes, high wages, well-organized urban weavers, and guild restrictions, German producers enjoyed the advantage of the more tractable German countryside, where they gained access to cheap labor. By the early fifteenth century, German manufacturers had used this cost differential not only to capture many of the Italian export markets, including eastern and northern Europe, Spain, the Baltic region, the Netherlands, and England, but to make inroads even into the Italian market itself.47
One such enterprising manufacturer arrived in the southern German town of Augsburg in 1367. The young weaver Hans Fugger at first tried to sell his father’s cotton fabrics, but in due course set up as a master weaver himself. In the next decades, he expanded his investments, eventually employing a hundred weavers in Augsburg to supply the long-distance trade. By the time of his death, he was among the fifty wealthiest citizens of Augsburg, and had laid the foundation for the rise of one of the wealthiest merchant and banking families of medieval Europe.48
Hans Fugger furthered the rapid establishment of a dynamic cotton industry in southern Germany in the span of just one generation. Between 1363 and 1383, the output of German weavers effectively supplanted Lombardy fustians on European markets. Fugger and others like him succeeded because they had access to skilled textile workers, capital, and trade networks. With its long history of linen production, southern Germany had powerful long-distance traders with sufficient capital to fund a new industry. But these traders also had access to cheap labor, northern European markets, and the ability to enforce regulations guaranteeing the quality of their products. As a result, cities such as Ulm, Augsburg, Memmingen, and Nuremberg became major centers of fustian production. The industry eventually spread east along the Danube and south to Switzerland.49
The control of a rural workforce was crucial. In Ulm, for example, one of the most important manufacturing centers, only about two thousand people were busy with cotton production in the city itself, while eighteen thousand workers labored on cottons in the hinterland. Indeed, most of the weaving was done in the countryside, not the city, as merchants provided money, raw materials, and even tools to spinners and weavers—another putting-out network like the ones that characterized the Indian countryside. This organization of production was much more flexible than urban production, since no guilds regulated it and since rural weavers continued to have access to their own land and thus grew their own food.50
With the emergence of a cotton industry in northern Italy and southern Germany, small regions of Europe for the first time became a minor part of the global cotton economy. Yet within Europe, the industry was not yet particularly prominent. Europeans still largely dressed in linen and woolens, not cottons. And hardly any European cotton goods were consumed outside the continent itself. Moreover, after the early sixteenth century, the Venice-dependent European industry declined, as the Thirty Years War disrupted the industry and trade shifted away from the Mediterranean and toward the Atlantic. In the sixteenth century, indeed, Venice lost control over the Mediterranean trade to a strengthened Ottoman Empire, which was encouraging domestic industries and restricted the export of raw cotton. When Ottoman troops consolidated their hold on the realm in the 1560s, the effects were felt in distant German cotton textile towns. The rise of the Ottoman Empire, a powerful state capable of controlling raw and manufactured cotton flows, ruined the northern Italian and German cotton industries. To make matters worse for the once dominant Venetians, by the end of the sixteenth century British ships called ever more frequently in ports such as Izmir (Ottoman Smyrna); in 1589 the sultan granted the English merchants far-reaching trading privileges.51
Some shrewd observers surely noted that the first European cotton producers, both the northern Italians and the southern Germans, failed at least in part because they had not subjugated those people who supplied them with cotton. It was a lesson that would not be forgotten. As the sixteenth century came to a close, an entirely new cotton industry arose that focused on the Atlantic, not the Mediterranean. Europeans took for granted that only the projection of state power would ensure success in these new trade zones.52
Notes
1. The cotton grown in these towns was most probably G. hirsutum Palmeri, a kind of cotton known to have grown in what is today the Mexican states of Oaxaca and Guerrero. The description of the plant is from C. Wayne Smith and J. Tom Cothren, eds., Cotton: Origin, History, Technology, and Production (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999), 11; Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: Development Centre of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2001), 263; Frances F. Berdan, “Cotton in Aztec Mexico: Production, Distribution and Uses,” Mexican Studies 3 (1987): 241ff.; Joseph B. Mountjoy, “Prehispanic Cultural Development Along the Southern Coast of West Mexico,” in Shirley Goren-stein, ed., Greater Mesoamerica: The Archeology of West and Northwest Mexico (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000), 106; Donald D. Brandt, “The Primitive and Modern Economy of the Middle Rio Balsas, Guerrero and Michoacan,” Eighth American Scientific Congress, Section 8, History and Geography (Washington, DC, 1940), Abstract; for the weight of a bale of cotton in sixteenth-century Mexico see José Rodríguez Vallejo, Ixcatl, el algodón mexicano (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1976), 64.
2. K. D. Hake and T. A. Kerby, “Cotton and the Environment,” Cotton Production Manual (UCANR Publications, 1996), 324–27; Frederick Wilkinson, The Story of the Cotton Plant (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1899), 39.
3. There is some (slight) disagreement between Gavin Wright, The Political Economy of the Cotton South: Households, Markets, and Wealth in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Norton, 1978), 14–15, and Jason Clay, World Agriculture and the Environment: A Commodity-by-Commodity Guide to Impacts and Practices (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2004), 284–87.
4. Ralf Kittler, Manfred Kaysar, and Mark Stoneking, “Molecular Evolution of Pediculus humanus and the Origin of Clothing,” Current Biology 13 (August 19, 2003): 1414–15; for a much earlier dating of spinning and weaving see Eliso Kvabadze et al., “30,000 Year-Old Wild Flax Fibres,” Science 11 (September 2009): 1359.
5. Almut Bohnsack, Spinnen und Weben: Entwicklung von Technik und Arbeit im Textilgewerbe (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1981), 31–32; “Kleidung,” in Johannes Hoops, Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde, vol. 16 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 603–25; Mary Schoeser, World Textiles: A Concise History (New York: Thames & Hudson World of Art, 2003), 20; “Kleidung,” in Max Ebert, ed., Reallexikon der Vorgeschichte, vol. 6 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1926), 380–94; Harry Bates Brown, Cotton: History, Species, Varieties, Morphology, Breeding, Culture, Diseases, Marketing, and Uses (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1938), 1.
6. See for example T. W. Rhys Davids, trans., Vinaya Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), 168; Georg Buehler, trans., The Sacred Laws of the Âryas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1882), 165, 169, 170; Vijaya Ramaswamy, Textiles and Weavers in South India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1, 57; Doran Ross, ed., Wrapped in Pride: Ghanaian Kente and African American Identity (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1998), 77; Frank Goldtooth, as recorded by Stanley A. Fishler, In the Beginning: A Navajo Creation Myth (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1953), 16; Aileen O’Bryan, The Dîné: Origin Myths of the Navajo Indians, Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 163 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1956), 38; Francesca Bray, “Textile Production and Gender Roles in China, 1000–1700,” Chinese Science 12 (1995): 116; Anthony Winterbourne, When the Norns Have Spoken: Fate in Germanic Paganism (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004), 96.
. C. L. Brubaker et al., “The Origin and Domestication of Cotton,” in C. Wayne Smith and J. Tom Cothren, eds., Cotton: Origin, History, Technology, and Production (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1999), 4, 5–6, 12, 17, 22; Wafaa M. Amer and Osama A. Momtaz, “Historic Background of Egyptian Cotton (2600 BC–AD 1910),” Archives of Natural History 26 (1999): 219.
8. Thomas Robson Hay and Hal R. Taylor, “Cotton,” in William Darrach Halsey and Emanuel Friedman, eds., Collier’s Encyclopedia, with Bibliography and Index (New York: Macmillan Educational Co., 1981), 387; A. Lucas, Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries, 4th ed., revised by J. R. Harris (London: Edward Arnold, 1962), 147; Richard H. Meadow, “The Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Northwestern South Asia,” in David R. Harris, ed., The Origins and Spread of Agriculture and Pastoralism in Eurasia (London: UCL Press, 1996), 396; for a traditional Indian account of these classics, see S. V. Puntambekar and N. S. Varadachari, Hand-Spinning and Hand-Weaving: An Essay (Ahmedabad: All India Spinners’ Association, 1926), 1–9; James Mann, The Cotton Trade of Great Britain (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1860), 1, 2–3; Brown, Cotton, 2; see Herodotus, The Histories, ed. A. R. Burn, trans. Aubrey de Sélincourt, rev. ed., Penguin Classics (Harmonds worth, UK: Penguin, 1972), 245; Arno S. Pearse, The Cotton Industry of India, Being the Report of the Journey to India (Manchester: Taylor, Garnett, Evans, 1930), 15; J. Forbes Royle, On the Culture and Commerce of Cotton in India and Elsewhere: With an Account of the Experiments Made by the Hon. East India Company up to the Present Time (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1851), 116ff.
9. Brown, Cotton, 5; Edward Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (London: H. Fisher, R. Fisher, and P. Jackson, 1835), 65–70; Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Cotton Textiles in the Indian Subcontinent, 1200–1800,” in Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi, eds., The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 23–25.
10. H. Wescher, “Die Baumwolle im Altertum,” in Ciba-Rundschau 45 (June 1940): 1635; Alwin Oppel, Die Baumwolle (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1902), 206–7; Clinton G. Gilroy, The History of Silk, Cotton, Linen, Wool, and Other Fibrous Substances (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1845), 334; Marco Polo, Travels of Marco Polo (Westminster, MD: Modern Library, 2001), 174; Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture, 56, 58.
11. A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), 48; M. D. C. Crawford, The Heritage of Cotton: The Fibre of Two Worlds and Many Ages (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924), 46; Amer and Momtaz, “Historic Background,” 212; Oppel, Die Baumwolle, 209; William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Peru (Westminster, MD: Modern Library, 2000), 51, 108, 300.
12. Gilroy, History of Silk, 331–32; Smith and Hirth, “Development of Prehispanic Cotton-Spinning,” 353; Barbara L. Stark, Lynette Heller, and Michael A. Ohnersorgen, “People with Cloth: Mesoamerican Economic Change from the Perspective of Cotton in South-Central Veracruz,” Latin American Antiquity 9 (March 1978): 9, 25, 27; Crawford, Heritage, 32, 35; Smith and Hirth, “Development of Prehispanic Cotton-Spinning,” 355; Barbara Ann Hall, “Spindle Whorls and Cotton Production at Middle Classic Matacapan and in the Gulf Lowlands,” in Barbara L. Stark and Philip J. Arnold III, eds., Olmec to Aztec: Settlement Patterns in the Ancient Gulf Lowlands (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997), 117, 133, 134.
13. Juan de Villagutierre Soto-Mayor, History of the Conquest of the Province of the Itza, 1st English edition, translated from the 2nd Spanish edition by Robert D. Wood (Culver City, CA: Labyrinthos, 1983), 197; Berdan, “Cotton in Aztec Mexico,” 235–38, 239; Smith and Hirth, “Development of Prehispanic Cotton-Spinning,” 356; R. B. Handy, “History and General Statistics of Cotton,” in The Cotton Plant: Its History, Botany, Chemistry, Culture, Enemies, and Uses, prepared under the supervision of A. C. True, United States Department of Agriculture, Office of Experiment Stations, Bulletin 33 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1896), 63; United States, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1975), Series K-550–563, “Hay, Cotton, Cottonseed, Shorn Wool, and Tobacco—Acreage, Production, and Price: 1790 to 1970,” 518; Hall, “Spindle Whorls,” 118; Stark, Heller, and Ohnersorgen, “People with Cloth,” 14, 29.
14. Brown, Cotton, 14; Kate Peck Kent, Prehistoric Textiles of the Southwest (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1983), 9, 27, 28, 29; the quote about blankets is from Ward Alan Minge, “Effectos del Pais: A History of Weaving Along the Rio Grande,” in Nora Fisher, ed., Rio Grande Textiles (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1994), 6; Kate Peck Kent, Pueblo Indian Textiles: A Living Tradition (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1983), 26; Crawford, Heritage, 37; David Watts, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change Since 1492 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 65, 89, 174; Mann, Cotton Trade, 4; Christopher Columbus, The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to America: 1492–1493, abstracted by Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, transcribed and translated into English, with notes and a concordance of the Spanish, by Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley Jr. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989), 131–35; see entries of October 16, November 3, and November 5, 1492, 85–91, 131, 135.
15. Pliny the Elder, The Natural History of Pliny, vol. 4, trans. John Bostock and H. T. Riley (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1856), 134–35; Mann, Cotton Trade, 3; Christopher Ehret, The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002), 67–68; Ross, Wrapped in Pride, 75; Lars Sundström, The Trade of Guinea (Lund: Hakan Ohlssons Boktryckeri, 1965), 148; F. L. Griffith and G. M. Crowfoot, “On the Early Use of Cotton in the Nile Valley,” Journal of Egyptian Archeology 20 (1934): 7; Amer and Momtaz, “Historic Background,” 212, 214, 215, 217.
16. M. Kouame Aka, “Production et circulation des cotonnades en Afrique de l’Ouest du XIème siècle a la fin de la conquette coloniale (1921)” (PhD dissertation, Université de Cocody-Abidjan, 2013), 18, 41; Marion Johnson, “Technology, Competition, and African Crafts,” in Clive Dewey and A. G. Hopkins, eds., The Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of Africa and India (London: Athlone Press, 1978), 176, 195, 201; Venice Lamb and Judy Holmes, Nigerian Weaving (Roxford: H. A. & V. M. Lamb, 1980), 15, 16; Marion Johnson, “Cloth Strips and History,” West African Journal of Archaeology 7 (1977): 169; Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 48; Marion Johnson, “Cloth as Money: The Cloth Strip Currencies of Africa,” in Dale Idiens and K. G. Pointing, Textiles of Africa (Bath: Pasold Research Fund, 1980), 201. Patricia Davison and Patrick Harries, “Cotton Weaving in South-east Africa: Its History and Technology,” in Idiens and Pointing, Textiles of Africa, 177, 179, 180; Marie Philiponeau, Le coton et l’Islam: Fil d’une histoire africaine (Algiers: Casbah Editions, 2009), 15, 17; Ross, Wrapped in Pride, 75; Rita Bolland, Tellem Textiles: Archaeological Finds from Burial Caves in Mali’s Bandiagara Cliff (Leiden: Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, 1991); Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa and of the Notable Things Therein Contained, Done in the English in the Year 1600 by John Pory, vol. 3 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1896), 823, 824.
17. For the notion of the multiple origins of cotton and its domestication see Meadow, “Origins,” 397.
18. Brown, Cotton, 8; Maureen Fennell Mazzaoui, The Italian Cotton Industry in the Later Middle Ages, 1100–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 11, 15, 17–18; Lucas, Ancient Egyptian Materials, 148; Hartmut Schmoekel, Ur, Assur und Babylon: Drei Jahrtausende im Zweistromland (Stuttgart: Gustav Klipper Verlag, 1958), 131; Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture, 27; Richard W. Bulliet, Cotton, Climate, and Camels in Early Islamic Iran: A Moment in World History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 1, 8, 46; Marco Polo, Travels, 22, 26, 36, 54, 58, 59, 60, 174, 247, 253, 255.
19. Chao Kuo-Chun, Agrarian Policy of the Chinese Communist Party, 1921–1959 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), 5, 8ff.
20. Craig Dietrich, “Cotton Culture and Manufacture in Early Ch’ing China,” in W. E. Willmott, ed., Economic Organization in Chinese Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972), 111ff.; Mi Chü Wiens, “Cotton Textile Production and Rural Social Transformation in Early Modern China,” Journal of the Institute of Chinese Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong 7 (December 1974): 516–19; Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett, eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 7, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, part 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 256, 507; Kenneth Pomeranz, “Beyond the East-West Binary: Resituating Development Paths in the Eighteenth-Century World,” Journal of Asian Studies 61 (May 2002): 569; United States, Historical Statistics, 518.
21. Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680, vol. 1, The Lands Below the Winds (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 90; Crawford, Heritage, 7; William B. Hauser, Economic Institutional Change in Tokugawa Japan: Osaka and the Kinai Cotton Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 117–20; Mikio Sumiya and Koji Taira, eds., An Outline of Japanese Economic History, 1603–1940: Major Works and Research Findings (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1979), 99–100.
22. Stark, Heller, and Ohnersorgen, “People with Cloth,” 10, 29; Howard F. Cline, “The Spirit of Enterprise in Yucatan,” in Lewis Hanke, ed., History of Latin American Civilization, vol. 2 (London: Methuen, 1969), 137; Johnson, “Technology,” 259; Thomas J. Bassett, The Peasant Cotton Revolution in West Africa: Côte d’Ivoire, 1880–1995 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 33; James Forbes, Oriental Memoirs: A Narrative of Seventeen Years Residence in India, vol. 2 (London: Richard Bentley, 1834), 34; Moritz Schanz, “Die Baumwolle in Russisch-Asien,” Beihefte zum Tropenpflanzer 15 (1914): 2; on Korea see Tozaburo Tsukida, Kankoku ni okeru mensaku chosa (Tokyo: No-shomu sho noji shikenjyo, 1905), 1–3, 76–83.
23. Oppel, Die Baumwolle, 201; Berdan, “Cotton in Aztec Mexico,” 241; Hall, “Spindle Whorls,” 120; Sundström, Trade of Guinea, 147; Curtin, Economic Change, 50, 212; Brown, Cotton, 8; Reid, Southeast Asia, 93; Gilroy, History of Silk, 339; Carla M. Sinopoli, The Political Economy of Craft Production: Crafting Empire in South India, c. 1350–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 185; A. Campbell, “Notes on the State of the Arts of Cotton Spinning, Weaving, Printing and Dyeing in Nepal,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (Calcutta) 5 (January to December 1836): 222.
24. Hall, “Spindle Whorls,” 115, 116, 120, 122, 124; Davison and Harries, “Cotton Weaving,” 182; Oppel, Die Baumwolle, 209; Prescott, Conquest of Peru, 51; Gilroy, History of Silk, 339, 343; Curtin, Economic Change, 213; Kent, Prehistoric Textiles, 35; Kent, Pueblo Indian, 28; Reid, Southeast Asia, 93; Sundström, Trade of Guinea, 148–49; Lamb and Holmes, Nigerian Weaving, 10–11; Johnson, “Technology,” 261.
25. Reid, Southeast Asia, 94.
26. Berdan, “Cotton in Aztec Mexico,” 242, 259; Mote and Twitchett, Ming Dynasty, 507, 690ff.; K. N. Chaudhuri, “The Organisation and Structure of Textile Production in India,” in Tirthankar Roy, ed., Cloth and Commerce: Textiles in Colonial India (Waltnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1996), 71; Wiens, “Cotton Textile,” 520; Sinopoli, Political Economy, 177.
27. Berdan, “Cotton in Aztec Mexico,” 242; Bray, “Textile Production,” 119; Sundström, Trade of Guinea, 162; Curtin, Economic Change, 212; Davison and Harries, “Cotton Weaving,” 187; Johnson, “Cloth as Money,” 193–202; Reid, Southeast Asia, 90; Sundström, Trade of Guinea, 164; Stark, Heller, and Ohnersorgen, “People with Cloth,” 9.
28. Smith and Hirth, “Development of Prehispanic Cotton-Spinning,” 356; Bulliet, Cotton, Climate, and Camels, 46, 59; Philiponeau, Coton et l’Islam, 25; Pedro Machado, “Awash in a Sea of Cloth: Gujarat, Africa and the Western Indian Ocean Trade, 1300–1800,” in Riello and Parthasarathi, eds., The Spinning World, 161–79; the importance of traders’ distance from the polities they originated from is also emphasized by Gil J. Stein, Rethinking World-Systems: Diasporas, Colonies, and Interaction in Uruk Mesopotamia (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), 173.
29. See Hall, “Spindle Whorls,” 115; Stark, Heller, and Ohnersorgen, “People with Cloth,” 9; Berdan, “Cotton in Aztec Mexico,” 247ff., 258; Kent, Prehistoric Textiles, 28; Volney H. Jones, “A Summary of Data on Aboriginal Cotton of the Southwest,” University of New Mexico Bulletin, Symposium on Prehistoric Agriculture, vol. 296 (October 15, 1936), 60; Reid, Southeast Asia, 91; Sundström, Trade of Guinea, 147; Bassett, Peasant Cotton, 34; Curtin, Economic Change, 212–13; Halil Inalcik, “The Ottoman State: Economy and Society, 1300–1600,” in Halil Inalcik and Donald Quataert, eds., An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 296; Hauser, Economic Institutional Change, 59.
30. Sundström, Trade of Guinea, 156, 157; Ramaswamy, Textiles, 25, 70–72; Chaudhuri, “Organisation,” 55; Inalcik, “Ottoman State,” 352; Mann, Cotton Trade, 2–3, 23; Smith and Cothren, Cotton, 68–69; Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture, 24, 76; Wescher, “Die Baumwolle,” 1639; Gilroy, History of Silk, 321; John Peter Wild and Felicity Wild, “Rome and India: Early Indian Cotton Textiles from Berenike, Red Sea Coast of Egypt,” in Ruth Barnes, ed., Textiles in Indian Ocean Societies (New York: Routledge, 2005), 11–16; Surendra Gopal, Commerce and Crafts in Gujarat, 16th and 17th Centuries: A Study in the Impact of European Expansion on Precapitalist Economy (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1975), 3; the quote on the Indo-Levant trade is in Inalcik, “Ottoman State,” 355, see also 350, 354, 355; Eliyahu Ashtor, “The Venetian Cotton Trade in Syria in the Later Middle Ages,” Studi Medievali, ser. 3, vol. 17 (1976): 690; Suraiya Faroqhi, “Crisis and Change, 1590–1699,” in Inalcik and Quataert, eds., An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 524; Eugen Wirt, “Aleppo im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Hans Geord Majer, ed., Osmanische Studien zur Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1986), 186–205; Sinopoli, Political Economy, 179.
31. Crawford, Heritage, 6, 69; Reid, Southeast Asia, 90, 95; in Sinnappah Arasaratnam and Aniruddha Ray, Masulipatnam and Cambay: A History of Two Port-Towns, 1500–1800 (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1994), 121; for some informative maps on Gujarat’s overseas trade as well as its domestic trade during this period, see Gopal, Commerce and Crafts, 16, 80, 160; Mazzaoui, Italian Cotton, 9–11; Beverly Lemire, “Revising the Historical Narrative: India, Europe, and the Cotton Trade, c. 1300–1800,” in Riello and Parthasarathi, eds., The Spinning World, 226.
32. B. C. Allen, Eastern Bengal District Gazetteers: Dacca (Allahabad: Pioneer Press, 1912), 106; Sinopoli, Political Economy, 186; Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture, 75; Ramaswamy, Textiles, 44, 53, 55; Wiens, “Cotton Textile,” 522, 528; Yueksel Duman, “Notables, Textiles and Copper in Ottoman Tokat, 1750–1840” (PhD dissertation, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1998); Mazzaoui, Italian Cotton, 22; Max Freiherr von Oppenheim, Der Tell Halaf: Eine neue Kultur im ältesten Mesopotamien (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1931), 70; Sundström, Trade of Guinea, 147; Lamb and Holmes, Nigerian Weaving, 10; Curtin, Economic Change, 48; Aka, Production, 69; Youssoupha Mbargane Guissé, “Ecrire l’histoire économique des artisans et createurs de l’Afrique de l’Ouest” (presentation, Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar, Senegal, December 2011); Hauser, Economic Institutional Change, 20–30.
33. Chaudhuri, “Organisation,” 49, 51, 53; Hameeda Hossain, “The Alienation of Weavers: Impact of the Conflict Between the Revenue and Commercial Interests of the East India Company, 1750–1800,” in Roy, ed., Cloth and Commerce, 117; Suraiya Faroqhi, “Notes on the Production of Cotton and Cotton Cloth in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Anatolia,” in Huri Islamoglu-Inan, ed., The Ottoman Empire and the World-Economy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 267, 268; Inalcik, “Ottoman State”; Huri Islamoglu-Inan, State and Peasant in the Ottoman Empire: Agrarian Power Relations and Regional Economic Development in Ottoman Anatolia During the Sixteenth Century (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994), 223, 235; Socrates D. Petmezas, “Patterns of Protoindustrialization in the Ottoman Empire: The Case of Eastern Thessaly, ca. 1750–1860,” Journal of European Economic History (1991): 589; Prasannan Parthasarathi, “Merchants and the Rise of Colonialism,” in Burton Stein and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 96, 98; S. Arasaratnam, “Weavers, Merchants and Company: The Handloom Industry in Southeastern India, 1750–90,” in Roy, ed., Cloth and Commerce, 87; Bray, “Textile Production,” 127.
34. Smith and Hirth, “Development of Prehispanic Cotton-Spinning,” 349; Angela Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005), 11–12; Mazzaoui, Italian Cotton, 74–82, 89; Smith and Hirth, “Development of Prehispanic Cotton-Spinning,” 354–55; John H. A. Munro, Textiles, Towns and Trade: Essays in the Economic History of Late-Medieval England and the Low Countries (Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1994), 8, 15; Maureen Fennell Mazzaoui, “The Cotton Industry of Northern Italy in the Late Middle Ages, 1150–1450,” Journal of Economic History 32 (1972): 274.
35. Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, Creating Abundance: Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 108–9; John Hebron Moore, “Cotton Breeding in the Old South,” Agricultural History 30, no. 3 (July 1956): 95–104; John Hebron Moore, Agriculture in Ante-Bellum Mississippi (New York: Bookman Associates, 1958), 13–36, 97; Lewis Cecil Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1933), 689–90; James Lawrence Watkins, King Cotton: A Historical and Statistical Review, 1790 to 1908 (New York: J. L. Watkins, 1908), 13; Bassett, Peasant Cotton, 33; Mazzaoui, Italian Cotton, 20–21; Bulliet, Cotton, Climate, and Camels, 40; Chaudhuri, “Organisation,” 75.
36. Mahatma Gandhi, The Indian Cotton Textile Industry: Its Past, Present and Future (Calcutta: G. N. Mitra, 1930), 6.
37. As quoted in Henry Lee, The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary: A Curious Fable of the Cotton Plant (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle, & Rivington, 1887), 5.
38. Mann, Cotton Trade, 5; Oppel, Die Baumwolle, 39; see also exhibits at Museu Tèxtil i d’Indumentària, Barcelona, Spain.
39. That the Crusades were crucial to the introduction of the cotton textile industry into Europe is confirmed by “Baumwolle,” entry in Lexikon des Mittelalters, vol. 1 (Munich: Artemis Verlag, 1980), 1670.
40. Alfred P. Wadsworth and Julia De Lacy Mann, The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, 1600–1780 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1931), 15; Mazzaoui, “Cotton Industry,” 263; Ashtor, “Venetian Cotton,” 677.
41. During the twelfth century, cotton manufacturing arose in places such as southern France, Catalonia, and, most significantly, northern Italy. See Mazzaoui, “Cotton Industry,” 268; Wescher, “Die Baumwolle,” 1643, 1644; Mazzaoui, Italian Cotton, 114.
42. Mazzaoui, Italian Cotton, 64, 66, 69; Mazzaoui, “Cotton Industry,” 271, 273, 276; Wescher, “Die Baumwolle,” 1643.
43. Mazzaoui, Italian Cotton, 7, 29, 63; Mazzaoui, “Cotton Industry,” 265.
44. Mazzaoui, Italian Cotton, 53; Ashtor, “Venetian Cotton,” 675, 676, 697; Mazzaoui, Italian Cotton, 35.
45. Mazzaoui, Italian Cotton, 65–66, 74–82, 89; Lakwete, Inventing the Cotton Gin, 11–12; Mazzaoui, “Cotton Industry,” 274, 275; Bohnsack, Spinnen und Weben, 65–66, 37, 63, 67, 114, 115; Karl-Heinz Ludwig, “Spinnen im Mittelalter unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Arbeiten‚ cum rota,” Technikgeschichte 57 (1990): 78; Eric Broudy, The Book of Looms: A History of the Handloom from Ancient Times to the Present (Hanover, NH: Brown University Press, 1979), 102; Munro, Textiles, 8, 15.
46. Mazzaoui, Italian Cotton, xi, 29.
47. Mazzaoui, Italian Cotton, 139, 144, 150, 152; Mazzaoui, “Cotton Industry,” 282, 284; Wolfgang von Stromer, Die Gründung der Baumwollindustrie in Mitteleuropa (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1978), 84–86; Eugen Nübling, Ulms Baumwollweberei im Mittelalter (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1890), 146.
48. Von Stromer, Die Gründung, 32; Götz Freiherr von Poelnitz, Die Fugger (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1981); Richard Ehrenberg, Capital and Finance in the Age of the Renaissance: A Study of the Fuggers and Their Connections, trans. H. M. Lucas (New York: Harcourt, 1928).
49. Von Stromer, Die Gründung, 1, 2, 8, 21, 128, 139, 148; Nübling, Ulms Baumwollweberei, 141; Bohnsack, Spinnen und Weben, 152.
50. Mazzaoui, Italian Cotton, 141; Von Stromer, Die Gründung, 88.
51. Mazzaoui, Italian Cotton, 55, 54, 154; Wadsworth and Mann, Cotton Trade, 23; Inalcik, “Ottoman State,” 365; Daniel Goffman, “Izmir: From Village to Colonial Port City,” in Edhem Eldem, Daniel Goffman, and Bruce Masters, eds., The Ottoman City Between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 79–134.
52. Nübling, Ulms Baumwollweberei, 166.
Written by SvenBeckert in "Empire of Cotton, A Global History", Borzoi Books/Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2014, excerpts chapter one. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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