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

xiv, 398 pp. A history of cotton's impact on the world describes how the fiber has been at the center of conflict and controversy, rendering nations into industrial powers, in a chronicle that documents cotton's domestication some 5,500 years ago, its key role in the colonization of the New World, and its post-Industrial Revolution part in transforming communities, prompting innovations, and promoting slavery.