"Cotton has exerted a mighty hold over human events since it was first domesticated about 5,500 years ago in Asia, Africa, and South America. Cotton rode on the back of Alexander the Great all the way from India to Europe, robed ancient Egyptian priests, generated the conflicts that led to the American Civil War, inspired Marx's and Engels' Communist Manifesto, fooled Columbus into thinking he had reached Asia, and made at least one bug, the boll weevil, world famous. It also created the Industrial Revolution in England and in the United States, motivated single American women to leave home for the first time in history, and played a pivotal role in Mahatma Gandhi's fight for India's independence from British colonial rule... ​

It truly belongs to the world. Forty billion pounds a year grow on about seventy-seven million acres in eighty countries according to the International Cotton Advisory Committee...​

Just about everyone on the planet wears at least one article of clothing made from cotton at some point in the day; inevitably, by-products of the plant show up as well in something that person is doing, whether eating ice cream, changing diapers, filtering coffee, chewing gum, handling paper money, polishing fingernails, or reading a book. The source of cotton's power is its nearly terrifying versatility and the durable creature comforts it provides... ​

Cotton is family....​

Whether you find the story of cotton to be a tribute to man's remarkable ability to achieve or a cautionary tale, you'll likely come away as I did with a profound respect for the power of the plant. 'You dare not make war upon cotton!' South Carolina senator James H. Hammond thundered on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1858. 'No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king!' I discovered the truth to be a little more insidious. Kings are mere mortals; they die and the world keeps turning. This plant, by contrast, has eternally rewarded and punished with the haughty abandon of a capricious god. It has also stirred up more mischief than any penny-ante royal no matter how venal, and yet it remains so casually seductive in its look and feel that we are willing to forgive its sins even as we continue to pay for them. Some of us have a lot to learn from cotton" (Yafa, 2005, pp. 1-3). 

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Yafa, S. (2005). Cotton: The Biography of a Revolutionary Giber. New York, NY: Penguin.