Rise and Fall of King Cotton - Book Review

This is a book about the history of Cotton plant. This is a very well written book. It is out of print now and can be either loaned from libraries or purchased from used book sellers. I loaned it from our library.

I grew up in a cotton town - Erode. My town was a big market for cotton clothes. I had many many friends from the weaving families and i had even visited their family handlooms and powerlooms. We had a spinning mill (natesar mill) in front of my house and everyday the mill workers came on bicycles with their lunch pails. When the siren went on, workers would enter and the earlier shift workers would leave. Occasionally there would be picket lines for the workers strike. Almost every month there would be union members standing outside and would shout slogans announcing their demands. I was naturally curious to know about Cotton. India was a major cotton producer in the ancient times. Indian cotton was the luxury fabric used for the Roman togas.

This book combines the history of technology of processing cotton with the social impact that the crop had on so many continents.

o Cotton was the crop that largely fueled the Slave trade and the Plantation system in American South.
o The Lancashire cotton mills employing poorly paid and treated workers and that produced cotton cloth were essentially funding the whole Slave operations!
o When American Civil War raged, it shut off the cotton from American South and thus pushing the British to go to India to source their Cotton. They had originally given up on growing cotton for their industries in India due to various reasons.
o Many of the Indian Railway projects that the British built were actually for transporting cotton! And many were funded after civil war, perhaps indirectly by the Cotton industry. The cotton crop was introduced in my home town Erode around 1819. I believe, the original railway lines (railroad) and railway station in my home town were originally built by the British. It is astonishing to know that it perhaps got built there only because of the American Civil war!

The book chronicles how many important inventions that made the cotton cloth production possible were invented by American and English inventors and how despite the patent laws, they were cheated out of their inventions by the ruthless capitalists of the early industrial age.

The book is a strong cautionary tale for the modern times. Technology, Trade, Consumption and Social changes all feed off of each other in powerful ways in both good and bad. There are plenty of examples that were contemporary to the cotton's development like: Automobiles. But there are also plenty of modern examples: internet, mobile phones, etc.