King Cotton

“Tree Cotton”

A few cotton fabrics discovered in a cave in south eastern, Mexico, have been dated to around 5800 BC, although it is difficult to know for sure that this date is correct due to fiber decay. Other sources have been discovered dating the domestication of cotton in Mexico to approximately 5000 to 3000 BC.

Cotton was first cultivated in parts of the Old World (Asia, Africa, and Europe) 7,000 years ago during the 5th millennium BC (4,000 BC – 5,000 BC), by the inhabitants of western Pakistan. Cotton cultivation became more widespread during the Indus Valley Civilization (3300 to 1300 BC), which covered a huge section of the northwestern part of South Asia, comprised of parts of today’s eastern Pakistan and northwestern India.

Between 2000 and 1000 BC cotton became widespread in east India; long before the era we moderns call “AD” or the “Common Era”, the use of cotton textiles had spread from India to Asia Minor (now modern Turkey) or western Asia and beyond, the Greeks and the Arabs were not familiar with cotton until after the Wars of Alexander the Great, which was a few years beyond 315 BC; in fact one Greek geographer and author of the era described cotton as a type of wool that grew on trees located within the Indus valley.

During the Han dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD), cotton was grown by non Chinese peoples in the Chinese province of Yunnan (side note: this region did not become a Chinese province until the Han dynasty began) located in south western China.

The good folks of northern Europe were for many years unfamiliar with even the way cotton was created, they only new for sure it was an imported product from India; John Mandeville (there is dispute as to his nationality, English or French), when writing in his very popular novel of the day (1350 AD,) stated what he apparently believed to be fact, this preposterous belief: “There grew there [in India] a wonderful tree which bore tiny lambs on the ends of its branches. These branches were so pliable (flexible) that they bent down to allow the lambs to feed when they are hungry.”

By the end of the 1500’s, cotton was cultivated throughout the warmer regions in Asia as well as the Americas and almost everyone knew by then that there was not a “Lamb Tree” responsible for the product.

So I guess when the Spanish arrived in Mexico and Peru in the early 16th century and found the native inhabitants growing cotton and wearing clothing made from it; it was probably not such a terrible surprise. In actual fact it has been determined that cotton has been home to South America since at least 2500 BC, and some historians say more than twice that long.

In large part as a result of the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, by the 1840s, India was unable to supply the vast quantities of cotton fibers needed by the mechanized British factories; shipping bulky, low-price cotton from India to Britain was time-consuming and expensive. Add to the equation the emergence of American cotton as a superior type due to the longer, stronger fibers of the two domesticated Native American species / types; the result of  combining these facts: British traders began to purchase cotton from plantations in the United States and the Caribbean. So, by the mid-19th century, “King Cotton” had become the backbone of the southern American economy.

Cotton remained a key crop in the Southern economy even after the Civil War’s end in 1865. All across the South, “sharecropping” became commonplace, in which free black farmers and landless white farmers worked on cotton plantations of the wealthy land owners in return for a share of the profits. Such cotton plantations required huge labor forces or  “pickers” to hand-pick cotton, and it was not until the 1950s (nearly 100 years later) that effective and reliable harvesting machinery was introduced to replace these cotton pickers; while this resulted in a tremendous increase in production capabilities, it more or less eliminated the role of the share cropper.

Here’s something I didn’t know, small quantities of cotton can and are cultivated to have colors other than the standard yellowish off-white that is typical of modern commercial cotton fibers. Naturally colored cotton can be grown in red, green, and several shades of brown.

In addition to the textile industry, cotton is or has been used in fishing nets, coffee filters, tents, cotton paper, and for bookbinding among other things. You may recall that the first Chinese paper was made of cotton fiber and it was once common for fire hoses to be made of cotton.

In addition to all this the lowly cotton seed that for hundreds of years hampered the use of cotton is now used to produce cottonseed oil, which, after refining, can be consumed by humans just like any other vegetable oil such as corn oil or olive oil. The cottonseed meal that is left generally is fed to livestock such as cattle.

The largest producers of cotton, as of 2009, were China and India; while the largest exporters of raw cotton as of the same time period was the United States, with sales of $4.9 billion, and Africa, with sales of $2.1 billion.

The three leading exporters of cotton in 2011 are (1) the United States, (2) India, (3) Brazil, however in 2011 China remains the worlds largest producer at 33 Million bales; India stays in the number two production with 27 Million bales and the United States is in the 3^rd place with a distant 18 Million bales.  Brazil has dropped from 3^rd to 5^th in this category with 9.3 million bales produced.

All this information about cotton and I’ll bet you are still wondering about the cotton tree described by John Mandeville back in 1350.  Well the fact is there is a cotton bulb producing shrub tree and in India no less; it grows to be 3 to 6 feet or so tall (1 or 2 meters tall); its scientific name is  Gossypium arboreum (a name I can’t pronounce), and is commonly called “tree cotton”. Yes it can be used to produce textiles or clothing and after a good deal of research, I have yet to find reference to a tree that produces anything even close to a lamb.

Sources …

http://tgsfree4allinfo.blogspot.com/2011/09/ancient-indus-script_22.html          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton                                      

http://ganyardhillfarm.com/barn_news/teaching-resources/cotton-facts/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gossypium_arboreum