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Sep 12, 2016tirjan rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
A compelling read. Cotton, that is so commonplace today, was known to be useful to those societies where the crop grew in nature - India, Mexico, Peru, elsewhere in South Asia and other places. But NOT in Europe. Yet beginning in the 18th century and throughout the 19th cotton became the basis for the success of the economies of Britain, France, Germany Russia, China and later Japan and the US. But the United States initially had a hand in the success of British cotton manufacture because the American south became the preferred producer of raw cotton that the mills of Manchester relied upon. The Industrial Revolution in Britain was based on cotton and the US grew economically largely because of its slavery based cotton plantations in the south. But with emancipation of the slaves, the whole dynamic changed. The so-called Cotton Famine in the late 1860s was the beginning of the fall of British dominance in the world cotton trade and by 1960 it represented less than 1% of the world cotton manufacture.