Biography cotton fiber revolutionary

For a scrawny, gangling plant that produces hairs about as insubstantial as milkweed, cotton has exerted a mighty hold over human events since it was first domesticated about 5,500 years ago in Asia, Africa, and South America.

Cotton rode on the back of Alexander the Great all the way from India to Europe, robed ancient Egyptian priests, generated the conflicts that led to the American Civil War, inspired Marx’s and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, fooled Columbus into thinking he had reached Asia, and made at least one bug, the boll weevil, world famous.

It also created the Industrial Revolution in England and in the United States, motivated single American women to leave home for the first time in history, and played a pivotal role in Mahatma Gandhi’s fight for India’s independence from British colonial rule.

In these pages I trace the empires cotton built and destroyed, the fortunes it created, and the revolutions it stirred up along the way as it journeyed west from India to continen