Roberta Brockschmidt

Lolli Jacobsen

A good book in the tradition of Simon Garfield...a trip through the ages with cotton fiber as the focus. I would recommend for anyone who enjoys traveling through history one product at a time. The author takes you from the Middle Ages through the early millennium, ending with biotechnology and fair labor practices. Although I am familiar with the story, it was a good romp through history with interesting biographies of individuals to enhance the story. ( )

My wife, who usually doesn’t read non-fiction, read this book and enjoyed and recommended it. I wear cotton every day. Almost every piece of clothing I own is cotton, because cotton is comfortable. Learning the history of this versatile fiber was interesting. This book is primarily about the affects of cotton on society, from the industrial revolution to organic farming to the growth of Levi Strauss and Gap to the origin of the Blues. The book is well written, and while it never drags, it does seem to go on for a long time. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it as much as reading a novel, but it is enlightening and much more digestible than many of the non-fiction books I have read. I would recommend this to anyone that thinks it looks interesting, because if you have that bent toward learning about things, this will be a satisfying read. ( )

The first eight chapters are brilliant. The best integrated account I have read of cotton, weaving, technology and the essential contribution of slavery to the industrial revolution. The ninth chapter is an inspired digression on denim. But then the narrative gets lost in the social history of the blues. The whole book stops following the economic thread that is so well handled up until slavery ends in the USA and the boll weevil asserts its influence. The role of biotechnology both in defeating pests and changing the basis for global competition in cotton is well presented, but it stands alone. There is a need for a continuous series of graphs and statistics to understand the changes in global supply particularly after 1900. All we get are hints at odd dates. There are some paragraphs comparing cotton in China today with the US in the nineteenth century, but this is colour, not historical analysis.

Most surprising in this book – no mention at all of the sewing machine and the move to ready-made clothing. Surely this must have had some influence on the size and nature of demand for woven cloth and yarns? There is a significant emphasis on jeans, metal studs, work clothes and fashion, so the author cannot say that the factory production of clothing (after 1870 or so) is not part of his story.
The issue of subsidies for cotton farmers is described in all its irrationality, but only tantalizing hints are given on how this system came into existence and why it survives. (Government got involved over decades, assisting farmers to deal with cotton pests and the variability of output). Precision agriculture is described in intriguing detail.

This account was completed before the ending of the Multi Fibre Agreement in 2004.

This is a good book, worth reading particularly up to Chapter 9, but in no way is it comparable with Mark Kurlansky, the master of the genre.

I read “Cotton” on the Kindle for PC. It was not as well managed as the other two books I have read on this medium. A lot of the references are to websites but there are no hot-links and you cannot extract text. You have to write references down and then type them in. There are no indications in the text when endnotes are available. There is no hotlink from endnotes, back to the text. There is an index – but it gives no page numbers or locations and has no hot-links! All in all, a second-rate Kindle product – and more expensive than the first, absolutely brilliant Kindle product I purchased (Hazell, A. 2010. “The Last Slave Market”). ( )