Customer Reviews

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

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I spent my first 24 years working on the family cotton farm in apparent ignorance of cottons significant impact on this nation and the world. I only wish I had access to such a book while I was growing up so that I could better understand and appreciate the history, and future, of cotton. Now, at least, when I talk of my formative years on the farm, I can provide some relevant and interesting facts about the industry.

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.)

"Gunsligers, snake-eyed varmints, low-down horse rustlers, and lily-livered scumsuckers bit the dust when John Wayne pulled out his six-shooter and started fanning the trigger." (p. 213) Trigger???

That sentence should give you an idea of just how jarring, flip and accurate this author is.

Three crops are the foundation of modern Europe's (and America's) economic and imperial hedgemony over the rest of the world: spices, sugar and cotton. Cotton is, simply, the genesis of the industrial revolution and the resurrection of American slavery. As such, the subject is incredibly important. Mr. Yafa isn't up to the task.

Yes, he's trying to write a popular history rather than a scholarly treatise. But his focus is virtually completely on America. As such is scope is simply too limited.

He mentions aniline as the foundation for synthetic indigo dye in passing in a long, rambling aside about blue jeans. Aniline and the coal-tar it's derived from are the cornerstones of modern chemistry, the chemical industry and the modern (early 20th century) German economy. Eh. No biggie.

If the guy could write, I'd probably be more forgiving of the book's shortcomings. It is a big subject.

Despite the importance of cotton, there aren't very many books extant about its history. Yafa doesn't have the sweep the subject deserves, but you will learn a few things, at least some of the outline of the story.

Having farmed cotton for over 30 years, I am familiar with the subject of this book. The inaccuracies are numerous, an example being, the caption under the picture of a cottonpicker opposite page 239 stating " Mechanical harvesters span ten to twelve rows at a time." The largest picker today is only six rows wide. I found the same type of inability to get the facts correct and exaggeration throughout the book. There was also a feeling of a slant, as if, the author already had an opinion on the subject before he started his research on the book and made the research meet the opinion.
It seems the author should continue writing fiction and leave alone historical subjects where accuracy and objectivity are needed. I would skip this one.

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 is now forty billion pounds a year worldwide; and the subsidies for American cotton farmers which are disastrous for millions of poor farmers around the world (and may increase their poverty and acceptance of terrorism, Yafa argues). Yafa explains how a world that is sometimes resistant to genetic modification has embraced GM cotton mostly because you wear cotton and don't eat it. Such logic is false; you do eat cotton, in cottonseed oil, and in the short fibers go in cheap ice cream to thicken it. In fact, as Yafa shows, you and almost everyone else in the planet will be using cotton somehow today. It's a good reason to learn about the plant, and this brightly-written and detailed history does the job nicely.

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 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.

"Big Cotton" and US agricultural subsidies are big news in the world of trade. Yafa teases a promise to enlighten on this situation, but fails to deliver.

Yafa knows there is a big and tangled picture here to illustrate, but is unable to work out the world view and settles instead for a series of scenes in cotton's long history. The start of the industrial revolution in England, the rise of Lowell, MA, the beginning of Levi Straus & Co are written as grand chapters containing some amusing anecdotes, but sitting in isolation.

In the final chapters, pesticides and genetically-modified cotton appear, largely wrapped in a diatribe on the evils of both rather than any real analysis. Yafa has left out how the South changed from a resion of sharecroppers pre-WW II to industrial farming by the mid-50's.

Most disappointing are the final chapters on the current world trade. There is a complex story to be told here of US politics and farming as well as farming in Africa. Yafa misses most of this. The devil is in the details of most of this story. With few if any numbers and no detail of costs or pricing Yafa cannot capture this story. It does not lend itself to a journalistic approach, although Yafa's refernces to stories in the Wall Street Journal suggest that the WSJ writers may have written a better piece on the subject than "Big Cotton".

Meanwhile, Yafa purports to tell a tale worldwide in scope, yet his "Big Cotton" is really a US story. After 300 pages of almost exclusively US tales we are told that China is the biggest current producer. Where did the Chinese industry come from? Or Pakistan's or India's?

If you are looking for the story of cotton, keep looking - this is not the book.

Basing a book on a commodity is not a unique plan, but in this instance it is a fruitful way of looking at social, political, and economic history. My review necessarily simplifies some of the issues presented. My interest in the subject is caused in part by having visited Lowell and having become astonished at the vast size of the National Park Service installation there. In reading the book I learned that Paul Tsongas, a boyhood friend of the author, was instrumental in having the National Park Service turn Lowell into a living museum. (The author grew up in Lowell, a city famous for Jack Kerouac, its mills, and the Lowell system of employer-employee relations.)

Cotton has versatility. Down sides to the cotton story abound. Child laborers were used in Manchester, England. Cotton crops and irrigation resulted in the diversion of the waters of the Aral Sea. India traded cotton cloth with China and Indonesia at the time of Alexander the Great. In the seventeenth century cotton replaced wool in England and silk in France. The governments attempted bans.

In the eighteenth century Richard Arkwright created the factory system. English people desired the fabrics called chintz and calico. Cotton manufacturing provided a source of immense wealth. Arkwright spun his cotton thread establishing an industrial dynasty near the Derwent River. Afterwards Watts's steam engine and Cartwright's power loom resulted in cotton manufacturing in Manchester. In America Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin. Slater, a former employee of Arkwright, built a cotton yarn factory in Rhode Island. By 1809 there were eighty-seven operations in New England and New York. Slater limited himself to cotton yarn. Francis Cabot Lowell used his photographic memory to become a sort of industrial spy in Manchester, England. The mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, automated using the Jacquard system.

Lowell introduced corporate paternalism since farmers could not spare their sons but sent daughters to work at the mill. Anthony Trollope believed that Lowell was a commercial utopia. The harmonious view of the enterprise lasted about twenty years. Later the inevitable friction between workers and management took place. At any rate, Lowell never was the ideal community observers believed it was. The good press was a product of a publication, THE LOWELL OFFERING, written by the female workers. The Lowell mill was less life-draining, less polluted than comparable English factories.

Another concern of conscience was that cotton and slavery were connected strongly. The owners, the Boston Associates, were dubbed the Lords of the Loom. Mill towns included Saco, Lynn, Chicopee, Taunton, Dover, Fall River. Daniel Webster, taking a moderate stance and defending monied interests, was shunned by his good friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Greenleaf Whittier. Irish immigrants, more malleable than the daughters of the farmers, formed a great portion of the workforce of the mills by 1860. Northern mill owners and English textile lords misjudged the length of the war. After the war and the immense losses of the South, the price of cotton fell. The share-cropping era commenced.

The development of ring spinning and the bobbin changer reduced the need for skilled operators. This enabled owners to build mills closer to the raw materials, a case of disruptive technology. Factory villages emerged in North and South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. Most complexes were financed by Northern investors. The author contends that cotton democratized greed. In childhood Andrew Carnegie was a bobbin boy.

The Cone brothers of Baltimore convinced the Southern mills to upgrade the quality of their product. In the West Levi Strauss sold blue jeans, denim. Adding rivets strengthened the work garments. Levi's became a brand pioneer. Sanford Cluett developed a process to preshrink cotton fabrics in 1933. In 1970 denim resurrected the American cotton apparel industry. The Gap and Banana Republic raised the public appeal of cotton pants, blue jeans and khakis.

Research has produced transgenic cotton seed. We are all in the dark about the future of biotechnology. In America two hundred thousand textile workers have lost their jobs since 1997. Cotton, subsidized in the U.S., has been used by both liberal and conservative journals to illustrate the cruel arrogance of power. The National Park Service facility at Lowell is described in this splendid book's Afterward. A glossary, notes, bibliography, and index follow.

This book is an adequate introduction to the long and convoluted history of cotton, but not, I hope, the finest piece of scholarship on the subject.

Big Cotton provides fascinating tidbits about the cotton plant and the fabric made from it. Although Yafa's "cotton-centric" approach to history is sometimes simplistic, it still makes for interesting reading. However, the writing tends to be clumsy and confusing, and the textile puns are overused. Also, for my tastes, Yafa's political and regional biases intrude into his subject far too often.

Altough Yafa does include a few useful tidbits of information, his malice for and bias against the cotton industry ultimately precludes this book as a good source for useful information. Yafa's bias renders his judgement suspect, and what could have been a fascinating tale becomes yet another piece of propaganda.