The Transition From Field To Fashion Cotton Industry

Clothing, ice cream, salad dressing, margarine, refreshing beer, sausages... These fashionable daily necessities are directly related to cotton. At present, 1 out of every 23 people in the world are engaged in cotton Directly related industries.

Cotton is the raw material for spinning and weaving.

However, I am afraid you have not thought that lint has also entered hairdressing, shampoo, toothpaste, facial milk and other beauty salons, including ice cream, sausages and so on. The cottonseed with rich protein provides our dining table with edible oil only next to soybeans. About 1 billion liters of cottonseed oil are used every year to produce chips, butter and salad dressing.

Cotton is also the raw material for making soap, fertilizer, explosives, fungicides, insecticides and plastics and synthetic rubber. Even in the rocket propellant of heaven, cotton fibers are indispensable. Cotton, photographic paper, banknotes and candles are also used in medicine.

Moreover, the wings of the first aircraft made by the Wright brothers are cotton Made; the first light Edison lights up, the wick is carbonized cotton yarn...

At present, the world has grown 35 million hectares of cotton fields between 37 degrees north latitude and 32 degrees south latitude, covering more than 90 countries, and 300 million people are directly related to cotton industry.

Amazing discoveries of colonists

Mexico Aboriginal rewrites human cotton history

In 326 BC, Alessandra Te, an ancient Macedonian king, led the army across the India river. They saw that the clothes of local residents were more refined and lighter than other places. The soldiers searched and gathered cotton seeds everywhere. The soldiers returned to Greece and quickly planted their seeds in the fields. As a result, the cotton they hoped for did not grow.

The Arabs live closer to India. In first Century, they came from India. Imported Cotton cloth brings fine fine cotton cloth to Italy and Spain. Around ninth Century, moors spread cotton planting to Spain. Cotton was introduced into Britain in fifteenth Century.

In medieval Europe, people also misunderstood cotton for the first time. Previously, people there had been getting wool from sheep, so when they heard that cotton was grown, they thought cotton came from a special sheep, and the sheep came out of the tree. Therefore, the word "cotton" in German is literally translated into "tree wool".

In the age of geographical discovery, European countries competed to colonize. In 1519, Spanish Spaniard Cortes was appointed by the king of Spain and led the expedition to invade the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. To the delight of the colonists, the clothes of the local IYA and the Ateck people are extremely flexible. They even have cultivated colored cotton, and have colored cotton into cloth to make local clothes, even blankets are cotton.

This discovery will advance the history of human cotton application at least in 2000.

This discovery has also changed the pattern of World Trade: before that, cotton fabrics in India and China used to be very popular. The colonial American cotton is a fine cotton fabric with long fiber length and high quality. It is more suitable for weaving. As a result, Britain India cotton is no longer needed, but its domestic cotton products are shipped to India, which is cheaper than real estate, making it a dumping ground for British products. China is no exception. The import of cotton before and after the Opium War accounted for only second of opium, while cotton accounted for third.

Today, Mexico is known as "the home of cotton", and the upland cotton and cotton species that account for more than 90% of world cotton output are originally produced here. 9 of the 32 wild cotton species in the world originate in Mexico.

Cotton changes human life

In 5000 BC, Central America began to use cotton.

In 5000 BC, the India River Basin began to plant cotton.

In the first Century, Arabia merchants brought fine fine cotton cloth to Italy and Spain.

The cotton planting method was passed to Spain in ninth Century.

Cotton was introduced into Britain in fifteenth Century and then introduced into the colonies in North America.

Cotton textile industry spread to Britain in late sixteenth Century

In 1700, the British Parliament issued a decree to strictly prohibit the import of printed cloth from India, Persia and China.

Hargreaves invented the hand-held spinning machine in 1760s.

In 1793, the United States exported only 221.3 tons of cotton, accounting for less than 1% of the world's cotton production.

In 1860, the US cotton output reached 900 thousand tons, and more than 70% were exported overseas, mainly in Britain.

The transfer of cheap cotton clothes from family workshops to factories leads to industrial revolution.

At first, the cotton fabric worn by the British was printed from India.

By the middle of seventeenth Century, British talents had established their own in Manchester. cotton spinning Weaving industry. This enabled the poor to wear beautiful and attractive clothes for the first time in history. A new consumer class was born.

Edward Baynes, a historian in nineteenth Century, described the benefits of extremely beautiful cheap cotton fabrics to the masses. The poor class can also dress very neatly like the middle class in eighteenth Century, and even enjoy the pleasure of costumes.

A British cotton merchant, from his manager in London, got the message: "no matter how many plain cloth you can produce, we will have good times." "You must find ways to invent, and you have great potential in industry."

The earliest factory in the world is cotton mill. Cotton fabrics are generally welcomed by people from all walks of life in the UK, and the market demand is increasing. In order to increase productivity and meet the needs of the market, many people began to engage in technological innovation in the cotton textile industry, which opened the curtain on the British Industrial Revolution in eighteenth Century. There has been a boom in technological innovation in the field of cotton spinning.

At the same time, the protection and reward of intellectual property rights in Britain made almost all of them fall into a fanatical worship of new technologies and inventions. A British publication said, "the contribution of engineering technology is greater than that of wars and diplomacy; its contribution is greater than that of churches and universities; its contribution is greater than that of abstract philosophy and literature; in changing society, its contribution is greater than that of our laws."

In 1733, John Kay, a clocks and watches in England, invented the flying shuttle. The weavers weave cloth and throw the shuttle between the longitude and latitude lines. Now, the pedal pedal drives the shuttle to and fro to improve the efficiency. The use of flying shuttle results in imbalance between spinning and weaving. A weaver often needs 6-8 spinning workers to supply cotton yarn, causing severe "yarn shortage".

To this end, the Royal Society of arts offered a reward in 1761 to encourage people to invent new textile machines. The conditions for winning the prize are: the newly invented machine can "spin 6 wool, linen, linen or cotton thread at a time, and only need one person to open the machine or to see the machine".

In 1765, Weaver Hargreaves invented a new style. Do spinning The machine, named after his daughter's "Jeanne spinning machine", has changed the spinning wheel that can only drive one spindle into 16-18 spindles at the same time. This means that it can spin only one thread at a time and spin 16 to 18 lines at the same time, which greatly improves the efficiency. Although the Jeanne spinning machine is still using manpower, it has three parts: power, transmission and tools. It is already a machine. The appearance of "Jeanne spinning machine" opened the prelude to the industrial revolution and became the symbol of the beginning of the British Industrial Revolution.

Cotton planting, picking and weaving automatically formed the first globalization.

The British Industrial Revolution is only a small part of the globalization of cotton. In 1860, the United Kingdom consumed more than 1 billion pounds of cotton per year, which is more than the sum of world cotton output except the United States.

Eric Orsenna, a French writer, wrote in his "cotton country trip: the epitome of globalization": "for the first time in human history, globalization revolves around cotton planting, picking, spinning and weaving.

In the British American colony, cotton production has developed rapidly. Cotton is grown in all parts of the United States south of 37 degrees north latitude. To pick cotton, we need manpower. Thus, for the first time, globalization organized itself, and Africa joined the group dance unhappily. Industrialization and slavery kept pace with each other. At that time, Manchester and its surrounding areas were all over the textile mill, and for some time Liverpool became the center of selling black slaves.

In 1791, the share of world cotton production in the United States was virtually uncounted. The southern part of the United States produced only 2 million pounds of cotton in 1791, which is insignificant compared with other cotton producing areas. The output of Asian cotton production is close to 400 million pounds.

In the next 10 years, cotton production in the United States increased by 25 times. Before the outbreak of the civil war, the annual output of cotton was more than 1 billion pounds, about 2/3 of the world's total cotton output. Most of the cotton in the United States is used for export. From 1815 to 1860, cotton exports accounted for nearly half of the total exports of the United States, and more than 70% of the cotton produced in the United States exported to overseas countries, mainly to the United Kingdom.

One hundred years later, the United States gained independence, but did not stop supplying cotton to the European continent. Shortly afterwards, the federal government tried to clamp down on slavery in the southern states. But at the time, Hammond, governor of South Carolina, saw that the destruction of the slave cotton plantations was no doubt a disaster to the world. The industrial world would submit to cotton, so there was nothing to worry about in the southern US: No, you didn't dare to fight against cotton. No force in the world dare to fight cotton. Cotton dominates everything.

As we all know, a war followed. Who will feed the British textile industry? Britain has called on its two territories, Egypt and India. In the same era, the French textile department finally developed, and began to bring up a climax of cotton production in its African Empire.

Today, cotton is competing for higher research and quality. cotton The by-product has also developed to light industry, chemical industry, food, medicine and so on, and its products are more than 130.

As Eric Orsenna said, from the first globalization of cotton production to the globalization of many fields now, almost every globalization has brought about different degrees of growth in production and wealth. The globalization brought by industrial civilization will not stop, nor will it be plain sailing. It is impossible for the national economy to be unaffected by globalization.

Extended reading

There is no "cotton" in Shuo Wen Jie Zi.

Sleiman, a businessman from Arabia who came to China in the Tang Dynasty, wrote "journey to the east of Sleiman" in the ninth Century A.D., in which he described the cotton seen in the Beijing area in India.

Yes, cotton is not a native Chinese species.

In the Eastern Han Dynasty, Xu Shen's "Shuo Wen Jie Zi" did not contain cotton characters, but only the word "mian" or "Jiao". The word "mian" or "Jiao" refers to silk floss produced by silkworms, not the cotton produced today. This is because the earliest Chinese clothing materials are mainly silk and hemp, silk fabric is called silk, and the fabric of hemp is called cloth. The Royal aristocrats are mostly dressed in silk, and civilians wear cloth.

Historical documents and unearthed cultural relics prove that the people of all nationalities in the border areas of China are far more cultivated and used than cotton in the Central Plains until the Han Dynasty. During the Tang and Song Dynasties, cotton began to transplant to the Central Plains. In the Southern Song Dynasty, Yuan Wenzhuan's "Wun Yi leisure commentary" (AD 1190) has a record: "now the word book has another cotton, for the wood Mian also." It indicates that the word "cotton" is a new word at that time.

3 ways of cotton introduction into China

There are about 3 ways to import cotton into China. According to the analysis of flora and historical data, cotton is generally thought to be transmitted from two directions to the Central Plains. South Road was the first Asian cotton in India. It was transported to Hainan Island and Guangdong and Guangxi through Southeast Asia. According to historical records, at least in the Qin and Han Dynasties, it was introduced to Fujian, Guangdong and Sichuan. The second way was introduced from India to Yunnan by Burma, about the time of Qin and Han Dynasties. The third way is the introduction of Africa's cotton and West Asia into Xinjiang and Hexi corridor. The time is about the northern and Southern Dynasties. The north road is the "western region" of the ancient books. During the song and Yuan Dynasties, the cotton spread to the vast area of the Yangtze River and the the Yellow River basin. By thirteenth Century, the cotton of the North Road had been spread to the Wei River Basin of Shaanxi.

That is to say, cotton cloth has gradually replaced silk since this period, and has become the main clothing material of our people. After the yuan, the rulers tried to collect cotton and cotton cloth, published books on cotton planting technology, and advised people to plant cotton. Ming Hongwu first ordered the promotion of cotton cultivation, where min Tian 5 mu to 10 acres, mulberry, hemp, kapok (namely cotton and cotton) half a mu. Double over 10 acres. And stipulates that cotton is the object of agricultural tax collection. Therefore, during the Hongwu and Yongle years, cotton has been everywhere in the world, and its profit is 100 times greater than that of silk and hemp (i.e. hemp). Since then, the world has seen fewer and fewer silkworms. (Qianlong Huzhou Fu Zhi).

Global search

Peru produces multicolored cotton

Peru breeds 5 colored cotton varieties of beige, brown, brown, reddish brown and purplish red, and can be directly woven into colored cotton and cotton fabrics with this kind of cotton.

Peru is located on the west coast of South America. It has a long history of cotton planting. Because of the hot climate, abundant rainfall, moist air and fertile soil, it is very suitable for cotton planting. As early as 2500, colored cotton textiles appeared in MOCA area in northern Peru. After years of war, natural disasters and man-made disasters, agricultural production was sluggish and colored cotton was lost. It is reported that the colored cotton seeds in Peru were found in the funeral products of an ancient MOCA's tomb in 1988. After germination tests, these colored cotton seeds have not yet lost vitality, miraculously sprouting and growing into plants. The color of fiber has three kinds: grey, red, yellow and brown. These ancient colored cotton seeds have become the original basic materials for the study of colored cotton in Peru.

American women have 8 pairs of jeans per person.

The US cotton lifestyle shows that women have an average of 8 items. Jeans 。 Even with such a high rate of ownership, three of four people answered that they would like to buy new jeans in the near future. Jeans born in the nineteenth Century were formerly the working clothes of pioneers in the western United States. In the 50s of the last century, the popularity of cowboy movies in the West made jeans gradually break away from the concept of overalls, and all classes began to wear this relaxed and casual dress.

Jeans have a long life and the older jeans are actually worth more money. The more you wash, the more beautiful it is, the older and the more delicious it is. The quality of a pair of jeans depends largely on the fabric quality. The real jeans are made of 100% cotton cloth, and even their sutures are cotton.