Plant

Cotton

Gossypium (genus)

Also known as: Gossypium, Gossypium hirsutum

A genus of shrubs and small trees in the mallow family, independently domesticated four separate times — twice in the Old World (Africa/Arabia, India) and twice in the New World (Mesoamerica, coastal Peru). The fiber-bearing seed-floss of cotton is the most important non-food agricultural crop in the world; the modern industrial textile economy was built on this plant. The mechanization of cotton processing (gin, spinning jenny, power loom) is a substantial part of what we call the Industrial Revolution.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons — see source for license.

Scientific

Four cotton species were independently domesticated:

Gossypium hirsutum — upland cotton, Mesoamerica; now ~90% of world cotton
Gossypium barbadense — Egyptian / Pima / Sea Island cotton, coastal South America; long, fine staple
Gossypium arboreum — tree cotton, India / Pakistan
Gossypium herbaceum — African / Arabian cotton

The fiber is technically a seed hair — single-celled extensions of the seed coat. Each cotton boll contains 30+ seeds, each surrounded by thousands of these fiber cells.

Historical

Cotton was woven into cloth in the Indus Valley civilization (Mohenjo-daro, ~5,000 BCE) and along the coast of Peru at similar antiquity. The plant’s independent domestication on multiple continents reflects how broadly useful the fiber was.

The 18th–19th century industrial cotton economy is one of the most ecologically and morally consequential agricultural transformations in human history. The British textile industry’s demand for raw cotton drove the expansion of slave-worked cotton plantations across the American South; the 1793 cotton gin (Eli Whitney) was a force multiplier for that system. The Atlantic slave trade in its final and most intense decades was largely a cotton-supply system.

Modern production

Top producers: China, India, USA, Brazil, Pakistan. Cotton is among the most pesticide-intensive crops in [[industrial-agriculture|conventional agriculture]] — accounting for ~16% of global insecticide use on ~2.5% of arable land. Organic cotton, Better Cotton Initiative cotton, and Fair Trade cotton certifications exist to address the labor and environmental externalities.

Sources

FAO Crop Statistics
Wikipedia — Cotton

A plant entry in the 0mn1.one [[directory]].

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Cultural

shares approach with

Durian auto-linked from body mention
Kola nut auto-linked from body mention
Peanut American Southern crop-rotation kin — George Washington Carver's foundational research at Tuskegee promoted peanut as a cotton-rotation crop to restore soil nitrogen depleted by cotton monoculture.
Sugarcane Atlantic slave-economy kin — sugarcane and cotton were the two principal plantation crops driving the 17th–19th century Atlantic slave trade; both shaped the demographic, economic, and racial structure of the Americas.

General