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Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective capsule, around the seeds of cotton plants of the genus Gossypium. The plant is a shrub native to tropical and subtropical regions around the world, including the Americas, Africa, India, and Pakistan. The fiber most often is spun into yarn or thread and used to make a soft, breathable textile, which is the most widely used natural-fiber cloth in clothing today. The English name derives from the Arabic which began to be used circa 1400.The botanical purpose of cotton fiber is to aid in seed dispersal.
HISTORY OF COTTON
According to the Foods and Nutrition Encyclopedia, the earliest cultivation of cotton discovered thus far in the Americas occurred in Mexico, some 8,000 years ago. The indigenous species was, which is today the most widely planted species of cotton in the world, constituting about 89.9% of all production worldwide. The greatest diversity of wild cotton species is found in Mexico, followed by Australia and Africa.
Cotton was first cultivated in the Old World 7,000 years ago (5th millennium BC4th millennium BC, by the inhabitants of the Indus Valley Civilization, which covered a huge swath of the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent, comprising today parts of eastern Pakistan and northwestern India. The Indus cotton industry was well developed and some methods used in cotton spinning and fabrication continued to be used until the modern industrialization of India. Well before the Common Era, the use of cotton textiles had spread from India to the Mediterranean and beyond.
Greeks and the Arabs were apparently ignorant about cotton until the Wars of Alexander the Great, as his contemporary Megasthenes told Seleucus I Nicator of "there being trees on which wool grows" in "Indica".
According to The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition:
"Cotton has been spun, woven, and dyed since prehistoric times. It clothed the people of ancient India, Egypt, and China. Hundreds of years before the Christian era, cotton textiles were woven in India with matchless skill, and their use spread to the Mediterranean countries. In the first century, Arab traders brought fine muslin and calico to Italy and Spain. The Moors introduced the cultivation of cotton into Spain in the 9th century. Fustians and dimities were woven there and in the 14th century in Venice and Milan, at first with a linen warp. Little cotton cloth was imported to England before the 15th century, although small amounts were obtained chiefly for candlewicks. By the 17th century, the East India Company was bringing rare fabrics from India. Native Americans skillfully spun and wove cotton into fine garments and dyed tapestries. Cotton fabrics found in Peruvian tombs are said to belong to a pre-Inca culture."
In Iran, the history of cotton dates back to the Achaemenid era (5th century B.C.); however, there are few sources about the planting of cotton in pre-Islamic Iran. The planting of cotton was common in Merv, Ray and Pars of Iran. In the poems of Persian poets, especially Ferdowsi's Shahname, there are many references to cotton ("panbe" in Persian). Marco Polo (13th century) refers to the major products of Persia, including cotton. John Chardin, a famous French traveler of 17th century, who had visited the Safavid Persia, has approved the vast cotton farms of Persia.
In Peru, cultivation of the indigenous cotton species Gossypium barbadense was the backbone of the development of coastal cultures, such as the Norte Chico, Moche and Nazca. Cotton was grown upriver, made into nets and traded with fishing villages along the coast for large supplies of fish. The Spanish who came to Mexico in the early 16th century found the people growing cotton and wearing clothing made of it.
During the late medieval period, cotton became known as an imported fiber in northern Europe, without any knowledge of how it was derived, other than that it was a plant; noting its similarities to wool, people in the region could only imagine that cotton must be produced by plant-borne sheep. John Mandeville, writing in 1350, stated as fact the now-preposterous belief: "There grew there [India] a wonderful tree which bore tiny lambs on the endes of its branches. These branches were so pliable that they bent down to allow the lambs to feed when they are hungrie ." This aspect is retained in the name for cotton in many European languages, such as German Baumwolle, which translates as "tree wool" By the end of the 16th century, cotton was cultivated throughout the warmer regions in Asia and the Americas.
