1 Introduction : Global Cotton Andglobal History

This book is a history of cotton textiles, but also a story narrated through cotton textiles. It is a story of how the world we live in has changed over the last thousand years. Cotton today is a very large industry, the most common material for our clothing and furnishings, a widely traded commodity, as well as the source of the means of living for millions of cultivators, workers and large and small traders. Cotton has also a cultural value: cotton textiles are consumed across the entire world and the cotton fibre has acquired specific social and cultural meanings. We think of it as a fabric softer and more casual than wool or silk, and more ‘organic’ than synthetics; we like our blue jeans, our T-shirts and cotton underwear. One strand of this book is a narrative of how cotton came to be such a ubiquitous commodity, material and product. A thousand years ago the presence of cotton was limited. Raw cotton was cultivated and manufactured only in specific parts of the world. Slowly it entered into the consuming habits of millions of people, especially in the Indian subcontinent.1 This book narrates the success of cotton in becoming global. But what does ‘global’ mean? Cotton came to be part of the production, exchange and consumption of many societies around the world. By 1300 India had developed a sophisticated series of regional industries specialised in the production of different types of cotton textiles that were traded across the Indian Ocean.2 Cotton textile production was a flourishing industry also in China and had made inroads into Southeast Asia and in parts of Africa. Cotton and cotton textiles became ‘global’ not just by virtue of being contemporaneously present in different places, but also by their capacity to connect different corners of the world. Cotton textiles were probably the most traded commodity in the medieval and early modern world. However the ‘globalisation’ that cotton brought about was a tenuous linking of different places across Asia, some parts of Africa and Europe, rather than a thick web of connections.3 A world that produces and exchanges more over time is a world that becomes richer: people are busy at the loom or at cultivating raw cotton; others might