Big Cotton: How A Humble Fiber Created Fortunes, Wrecked Civilizations, and Put America on the Map

by Stephen Yafa

Book Overview

In the tradition of Mark Kurlansky's Cod and Salt, this endlessly revealing book reminds us that the fiber we think of as ordinary is the world's most powerful cash crop, and that it has shaped the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670033677
• Release Date: December 2004
• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.6" x 1.4" x 5.9"

Customer Reviews

Good Book-Cotton A Biography of a Revolutionary Fiber

This is a great book on what ordinarily would seem to be a boring subject.

Planted it - Picked it - Wore it - Now, I've read it !

This is dramatic history, hidden in the very creases of our jeans. As I kid on a farm, I picked cotton for my cousins and farmer families in the little known cotton kingdom of Florida; Santa Rosa County. The picking machines were just coming into play and school kids were being forced out of a labor niche to go save America from communism in Southeast Asia. We were further displaced to corporate America where few could relate to an ice cold jug of water at the end of a long row of cotton. The machines gained. The successful farmers became family corporate enterprises and bulked up with acreage and machinery. Between cotton and peanuts, the farming businessmen now make very good livings for themselves and many more whom they employ. This book helped me to spin the story of my own youth into the yarn of America and the world. It should be a movie .. or better yet, a 5 part Discovery Channel series. The history channel is so stuck on war features, it may miss the huge story of war in this book because of its unasuming title. This is a book that every person in the cotton business should read and one that every student of world history and American history should read. I hope to spread the word in my own blogs from me3tv.com.

Cotton's Compendium

This is the complete story of cotton's global, economic impact from the first recordings of reported history up to and including our current era.. Big Cotton is the most complete history of this cloth yet written. It is the an economic story highlighting how cotton cultivation and production have profoundly shaped the past 5,500 years of human history. From India to Europe to the United States, this plant has defined the economic and social institutions that endure today, from agricultural economies to the industrial revolution, from slavery and the Underground Railroad to wage slavery, from the American Civil War and the most marvelous technological accomplishments to environmental and social disasters of truly epic, global proportions. Driven by greed, fomenting social and economic misery while providing the cheapest and most durable of human clothing and fashion worldwide, Stephen Yafa's remarkably excellent story is the most well written book I have ever read.

A Nice Informal Study

This is an enjoyable look into the history and myriad uses of cotton, a material we use every day but rarely give much thought to. Stephen Yafa has a personal interest in the subject in that he is a native of Lowell, Massachusetts, the first American cotton mill town. I have a personal interest in cotton as well, being descended from generations of cotton planters and farmers in the southern US. I was always grateful that my parents were able to make the jump away from cotton so that I didn't have to depend on the stuff for my livelihood, but the pervasiveness of the plant in human history and its impact on so many different regions came as a surprise to me as I read Big Cotton. Yafa begins Big Cotton with a discussion of the early origins and spread of the cotton plant in ancient human history. The strongest sections of the book deal with the impact cotton had on the Industrial Revolution and the growth and development of the United States. The later chapters deal with more social and cultural history and provide some intriguing speculations on the role genetically modified cotton will play in the future. Yafa also gives some interesting information on the role of cotton in international affairs, as Chinese cotton production rises and as US cotton subsidies jeopardize the livelihoods of West African cotton farmers. Yafa writes in an informal, breezy style which is pleasant and often witty. (He apologizes in the introduction for the many unavoidable puns about the thread of the story and such, but these add to what is already a pleasureable reading experience.)

100% Cotton

Cotton is " a scrawny, gangling plant that produces hairs about as insubstantial as milkweed," writes Stephen Yafa, but the full title of his _Big Cotton: How a Humble Fiber Created Fortunes, Wrecked Civilizations, and Put America on the Map_ (Viking) makes clear how much the world prizes these insubstantialities. The humble fiber here has a grand history, from its first domestication over five thousand years ago to its current genetic modifications. Cotton may not actually be historically as all-powerful as Yafa makes it seem; like any book that casts an intense regard on a limited subject, _Big Cotton_ can make it seem as if cotton is really more important than, say, coal or sugar, which have in their turn inspired innovation and greed. Nonetheless, this is an excellent world-wide history, and by the end, Yafa has fully justified his subtitle. First domesticated independently on different continents around 5,500 years ago, the family _Gossypium malavaceae_ bears protective lint around its seeds, fibers that can be spun into fabrics. The original cotton introduced to Europe came from India in the seventeenth century. What made chintz an irresistible fad was that the Indians had found ways to die the cotton with brilliant colors that were slow to fade as the cloth was used or washed. Consumers so prized chintz that they ignored import bans, and eventually English inventors built factories to take production to an industrial scale. The resulting mill system was enormously lucrative, and also famously cruel, employing children as young as eight for thirteen hour days in hot, dangerous factories in which they constantly inhaled cotton fibers, producing what was eventually known as byssinosis, or brown lung disease. The American version, begun by Francis Cabot Lowell, who used his photographic memory to steal details of the British machines, was more paternalistic, but economics ensured that American mills, too, became hellish sweatshops. The aftereffects of the Civil War caused the large plantations to be divided into smaller units that were toiled upon by sharecroppers. It was a shameful system that impoverished white farmers and black; cotton production, however, did not flag until the boll weevil crossed the Rio Grande from Mexico in 1892 and proceeded inexorably to all the acreage that cotton had claimed. The weevil's entrance enables Yafa to embark on numerous branches of this story, from the use of pesticides to the influence of the weevil, and cotton farming in general, on the music of the blues. Cotton is a huge topic, and Yafa's often discursive style suits it well, as he discusses entertainingly the rise of denim and of blue jeans (blue because cotton has a particular molecular affinity for dye from the indigo plant); the rise of the current biggest cotton producer, China; Gandhi's use of cotton spinning as a tool against oppression; the modern use of pesticides on the crop (second in tonnage only to those used on corn), which