COTTON
Cotton factory in Vietnam in 1987 Cotton is arguably the world's most important nonfood crop. It supplies about 80 percent of the world's natural fibers and continues to be primary material in half the world's textiles despite competition from synthetic fibers. Cotton is ideal fore making cloth because its fibers bond and interlock when spun into long strands that can be is easily dyed. [Source: Jon Thompson, National Geographic, June 1994**]
Cotton accounts for 40 percent of the fiber used today. About 20 million farmers in 80 countries produce 44 million metric tons of cotton a year.
Cotton was once called white gold. Developing the machinery to quickly make it into cloth was a driving force behind the Industrial Revolution. Providing labor to produce it for these machine was behind the slave economy in the southern United States and in turn and indirect cause of the American Civil War. Making money from it kept the colonial economies going in places like India and Egypt.
Cotton is used to make clothes, towels, sheets, rugs, draperies, cloth, batting, cellulose products, cordage, and sewing threads. It can also be ground into currency, crushed into vegetable oil, and woven into coffee filters, bookbindings, tents, diapers and fishnet. Fire men like cotton firehouses over polyester ones because they soak up enough water to keep them from melting. Environmentalists like it mops up oil spills better than almost any other material. And doctors like for bandages and sutures because of its durability under a lot of different conditions. **
Websites and Resources: Cotton Incorporated cottoninc.com ; National Cotton Council of America cotton.org ; Wikipedia article on Cotton wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton ; Story of Cotton cottonsjourney.com ; Cotton Outlook cotlook.com ; Cotton Council International, Cotton USA cottonusa.org ; UNCTAD www.unctad.org/infocomm/anglais/cotton ; Plant Cultures plantcultures.org/plants/cotton ;
World’s Top Cotton Producing Countries
Seed Cotton refers to cotton harvested from the field prior to ginning. It is comprised of raw cotton and seeds. During ginning, cotton fiber is separated from the seed. The resulting raw cotton is called lint. Lint is made up of long fibers suitable for producing yarn. After the ginning process some small fibers are still attached to the seed. These are called linters.
Cotton is grown in more than 80 countries. In 1992 they produced a total of 83 million bales, or almost 40 billion pounds. The United States, China, India and the former Soviet Union have traditionally been the world’s largest producers. To achieve the status as the world's forth largest cotton producer the Soviet Union Russia drained water for irrigation from the rivers leading into the Aral Sea, causing the one-time sixth largest lake in the world to shrink to number four. In the early 2000s, China consumed 37 percent of the world’s cotton.
World’s Top Producers of Seed Cotton (2020): 1) China: 29500000 tonnes; 2) India: 17731050 tonnes; 3) United States: 9737277 tonnes; 4) Brazil: 7070136 tonnes; 5) Pakistan: 3454334 tonnes; 6) Uzbekistan: 3063998 tonnes; 7) Turkey: 1773646 tonnes; 8) Argentina: 1046043 tonnes; 9) Burkina Faso: 782925 tonnes; 10) Benin: 728000 tonnes; 11) Mexico: 674706 tonnes; 12) Turkmenistan: 636360 tonnes; 13) Cote d’Ivoire: 490442 tonnes; 14) Cameroon: 445808 tonnes; 15) Tajikistan: 401366 tonnes; 16) Australia: 372872 tonnes; 17) Azerbaijan: 336792 tonnes; 18) Kazakhstan: 326582 tonnes; 19) Sudan: 320553 tonnes; 20) Myanmar: 308953 tonnes [Source: FAOSTAT, Food and Agriculture Organization (U.N.), fao.org. A tonne (or metric ton) is a metric unit of mass equivalent to 1,000 kilograms (kgs) or 2,204.6 pounds (lbs). A ton is an imperial unit of mass equivalent to 1,016.047 kg or 2,240 lbs.]
cotton sofa cover World’s Top Producers (in terms of value) of Seed Cotton (2019): 1) China: Int.$21175158,000 ; 2) India: Int.$16711604,000 ; 3) United States: Int.$11671878,000 ; 4) Brazil: Int.$6210176,000 ; 5) Pakistan: Int.$4049204,000 ; 6) Uzbekistan: Int.$2427379,000 ; 7) Turkey: Int.$1981969,000 ; 8) Australia: Int.$1465812,000 ; 9) Mexico: Int.$826106,000 ; 10) Argentina: Int.$786230,000 ; 11) Benin: Int.$713386,000 ; 12) Burkina Faso: Int.$652457,000 ; 13) Mali: Int.$640294,000 ; 14) Turkmenistan: Int.$524321,000 ; 15) Tajikistan: Int.$363068,000 ; 16) Cote d’Ivoire: Int.$320710,000 ; 17) Kazakhstan: Int.$310236,000 ; 18) Chad: Int.$292791,000 ; 19) Cameroon: Int.$290506,000 ; 20) Egypt: Int.$274773,000 ; [An international dollar (Int.$) buys a comparable amount of goods in the cited country that a U.S. dollar would buy in the United States.]
World’s Top Producers of Cotton Lint (2019): 1) India: 6033470 tonnes; 2) China: 4891915 tonnes; 3) United States: 4335440 tonnes; 4) Brazil: 2688403 tonnes; 5) Pakistan: 1556052 tonnes; 6) Turkey: 814000 tonnes; 7) Uzbekistan: 769224 tonnes; 8) Australia: 414336 tonnes; 9) Mexico: 368000 tonnes; 10) Argentina: 307912 tonnes; 11) Benin: 300000 tonnes; 12) Mali: 295163 tonnes; 13) Burkina Faso: 247420 tonnes; 14) Côte d'Ivoire: 211500 tonnes; 15) Tanzania: 183796 tonnes; 16) Turkmenistan: 158296 tonnes; 17) Sudan: 149940 tonnes; 18) Cameroon: 140000 tonnes; 19) Tajikistan: 114897 tonnes; 20) Kazakhstan: 114000 tonnes
Top Cotton-Producing Countries in 2008: (Production, $1000, Production, metric tons, FAO): 1) China, 11133600 , 7500000; 2) India, 5621725 , 3787000; 3) United States of America, 4141996 , 2790200; 4) Pakistan, 2983804 , 2010000; 5) Brazil, 1953551 , 1315984; 6) Uzbekistan, 1820269 , 1226200; 7) Turkey, 999055 , 673000; 8) Greece, 430499 , 290000; 9) Turkmenistan, 415654 , 280000; 10) Syrian Arab Republic, 362213 , 244000; 11) Burkina Faso, 335492 , 226000; 12) Nigeria, 247908 , 167000; 13) Egypt, 237516 , 160000; 14) Argentina, 201889 , 136000; 15) Australia, 197138 , 132800; 16) Benin, 186005 , 125300; 17) Mexico, 185560 , 125000; 18) Tajikistan, 172941 , 116500; 19) Mozambique, 166606 , 112232; 20) Kazakhstan, 155870 , 105000;
Weaving and Cloth
weaving in Sumatra Weaving is the interlocking at right angles of two sets of fibers to make cloth or a similar material. Spinning is the process by which fibers are drawn and twisted into string, yarn or thread. These tasks have traditionally been done at home by women with looms and spinning devices. The advantage with working at home is that women could work and care for their children at the same time and do weaving and spinning when they are not doing other chores.
To make yarn the old-fashion way: 1) fibers are cleaned and straightened by carding with a toothed card (a sort of brush with stiff bristles). 2) The fibers are then rolled between two cards to produce a thin fiber-like piece called a sliver. 3) The sliver is placed on a spike called a distaff. 4) A strand of wool is then pulled off and a weight known as whorl is attached to it. 5) The strand is twisted into a thread by spinning it with the thumb and forefinger. Since each thread is made this way, you can how time consuming it must have been to make a piece of cloth before machinery was widely used.
To make cloth the old-fashion way: 1) Threads are placed on a warp-weighted loom. Warps are the downward hanging threads on a loom, and they are set up so that every other thread faces forward and the others are in the back. 2) A weft (horizontal thread) is then taken in between the forward and backward row of warps. 3) Before the weft is threaded through in the other direction, the position of the warps is changed with something called a heddle rod. This simple tool reverses the warps so that the row in the front is now in the rear, and visa versa. In this way the threads are woven in a cross stitch manner that holds them together and creates cloth. The cloth in turn is all kinds of things. Cloth is often sold to clothing manufacturers in rolls. One roll of cloth is about 11 meters in length.
Sometimes natural dies are used. Red is made with madder or kermes (an insect found in kermes oak); yellow with wild chamomile, saffron, vine leaves and the rinds of pomegranates; black from acorns; and blue from plants with indigo. Natural dyes produce richer and more natural colors. The depth of color can be controlled by the type of water — rain, river or spring — used. Plant dyes though are notoriously unpredictable. They are affected by weather conditions, soil and when they are harvested. They have mostly been replaced by chemical dyes.
Early History of Cotton
Jewish cotton seller
in Jerusalem in 1880 Cotton has been used as a fibre at least since 3000 B.C. in India and the Americas. Fragments of 4000-year-old cotton cloth have been found in Indus valley in Pakistan and in the coastal valleys of Peru. In ancient Peru mummies were wrapped in cotton while those from ancient Egypt were wrapped in linen. Even so samples of cotton have from ancient Egypt have also been found. Some scientists say that cotton has been cultivated for more than 7,000 years.
No one is quite sure where the cotton we use today originated from. Plants of different species similar to modern cotton plants were domesticated in India and Central and South America thousands of years ago.
Unlike silk which for centuries was produced only in Asia, cotton was produced all over the world. Soldiers in the army of Alexander the Great used it to pad their saddles. The Chinese developed cotton in ancient times but didn’t use it widely until the 13th century. When the Spanish arrived n the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries they found that the Aztecs and Incas were skilled at spinning, weaving and dying cotton.
Cotton was not widely used in the making of cloth in Europe until the A.D. 15th century and even then weavers mostly combined it linen.. Raw cotton appeared in Italy in the 12th century. It was introduced from India by Arabs via Spain and Sicily and was called muslin after the cotton manufacturing town of Mosul in present-day Iraq. Clothing had traditionally been made most from wool and flax (linen), with silk being beyond the means of all but the rich.
Cotton from the Americas was superior to strains brought to Europe from the Middle East and India because its long strands (three inches in some case) were ideal for ideal for making smooth comfortable cloth. This cotton most likely was first cultivated in what is now Tabasco and Veracruz states in Mexico.
Cotton and the Industrial Revolution
Cotton mill in Tashkent in 1905 The Industrial Revolution came about as an effort to devise faster ways to make cotton cloth and print it. One of the most important technological advances of that period was the water-powered spinning machine, which efficiently produced cotton thread for the first time. It was invented by Sir Richard Arkwright, a former barber who used fashion wigs from the hair he clipped from his clients, in the Derbyshire village of Cromford in 1771 and immediately put to work in a factory opened by Arkwright..
During the 18th century English women had taken a fancy to comfortable garments made from cloth woven in India. Arkwright and others realized that large profits could be made by growing cotton in the America and spinning it into thread and cloth in England. What is now the southern United States as selected because they were closer to Britain than India and had ideal climate for growing the crop.
In 1793 the cotton industry was given another boost when Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, a hand cranked devise with a roller with teeth that tore the cotton into bits and removed the fluffy fibers (or lint) from seeds. By the mid 1800's America was exporting nearly two billion pounds of cotton a year. Most of it was being shipped into Liverpool and then transported by river and canal to Manchester for manufacturing. India did not become a major producer of cotton again until after the American Civil War stopped the supply of cotton to Britain from the United States. Egypt also later became a large supplier. **
Cotton, Colonialism and India
The classic example of imperialism (the acquisition of territory of one state by another to exploit their resources) involved cotton, India and Britain. Cotton grown in India was shipped to Manchester, England where it was made into finished goods which were sold back to India for a tidy profit. Gandhi began his home spinning movement and making of clothes to foil this trade. The British exploited Egypt in a similar way.
Cotton starting flowing out of India after the supply from the United States was cut off by the American Civil War. Cotton originated from South Asia. Cotton undergarments made in India in the 16th century were said be so delicate and beautifully embroidered they only lasted for a couple of hours. It was no surprise that Gandhi's first fast in 1918 was conducted to support textile workers in Ahmedabad striking for higher wages.
The factory in Ahmedabad where the men worked is still running today. "To drive the looms," wrote Jon Thompson in National Geographic,"huge wheels clattered and clanked, now run by electricity but powered by steam engines in the 19th century. Cotton dust had accumulated on the windows and on every pipe and loom and wire...Overhead pipes sprayed mist into the air to moisten the cotton fiber. The workers...wore only loin clothes...because of the unbearable heat and humidity...Although some of the workers were speaking , no sound came from their mouths. They were lip reading — some of them permanently deaf by the unrelenting noise." [Jon Thompson, National Geographic, June 1994]
Cotton Plant
Cotton comes from the puffy, cotton fluff of seed pods that grow on plants that are a members of the mallow family. Cotton is ideal fore making thread and cloth because the flattened, twisted fibers that come from the seed pods interlock and bond when spun into string threads.
About two months after planting, when the plant is about a foot high, flowers develop from buds called “squares.” The flowers starts out white and then turn red on the second day after they appear. On the third day the petals fall off leaving behind undeveloped, flattened green pods called boll. .
The boll takes about 45 to 60 days to mature into an egg-shaped pod about an inch in diameters and an inch and a half long. Inside of each mature pod are three to five cotton-filled compartments call "locks." Each locks contains seven to ten seeds to which thousands of fluffy white cotton fibers are attached.
Cotton plants are weak. They are usually planted close together as a means of support. Only when they reach a height of six centimeters are growers confident that the plant won’t fail. After the plants are stronger and reach a height of ten centimeters they "chopped" to clear away weeds and excess plants. Some field have to "chopped" seven or times before the harvest.
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons
Text Sources: Mostly National Geographic articles. Also Time, Newsweek, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wikipedia, The Independent, Times of London, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, Compton?s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.
Last updated April 2022