The spread and cultivation of cotton in China
In ancient and modern China and abroad, there are generally four varieties of domesticated cotton: Asian tree cotton, African grass cotton, Central American land cotton and South American sea island cotton. According to historical records, it was Asian cotton that was cultivated earlier and spread outward. In 1929, archaeologists found three fragments of cotton fabrics from 3250 BC to 2750 BC in the Mohenzo Daro region of present-day Pakistan, which is the earliest cotton textile found in archaeology. In the 6th century BC, Indian cotton textiles were sold to ports along the Red Sea and Persian Gulf coasts, and Greek merchants trafficked these cotton textiles from Egypt and Persia to Europe, and Roman merchants later participated in them, making cotton textiles a coveted item for the upper echelons of society.
The introduction of Asian cotton to China is a major event in the history of cotton's global spread. Based on the literature and newly unearthed data, the history of the introduction of woody perennial Asian cotton to China can be roughly determined. In the 2nd century BC or earlier, cotton and cotton fabrics began to be introduced to China. In the 3rd century BC "Shangshu Yugong" in the "Yangzhou" paragraph, it is written that "Island Yi Huifu, 厥篚织贝", "Huifu" and "Weaving Shell" are likely to be cotton textiles. "Jibei", "Gubei", "Robbery" and so on are mostly the names of cotton in ancient books on the mainland, and to this day some rural areas in the south still call cotton "Jibei". According to the Later Han Dynasty Book of southern Manchu Southwest Yi Biography, "Emperor Wu's late Zhuya (present-day Hainan Island) taishouhui (太守会) sun xing, adjusted a wide range of offerings. Other historical sources also show that during the Western Han Dynasty, the residents of Hainan Island had begun to grow cotton weaving. Regarding the spread route of cotton, some scholars have deduced that Asian cotton was first introduced to southwest China by land from India. However, cotton was not widely popularized after it was introduced to China, and it was only cultivated in the southwest frontier and southeast coastal provinces.
At the end of the Song Dynasty and the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty, the Songjiang people Huang Daobo learned textile technology from the Li people. The teaching of technology and the innovation of tools made the cotton cultivation in the Yuan Dynasty rapidly spread in the Jiangnan region. During the Yuan Dynasty, the country was unprecedentedly unified, the territory was vast, the government attached importance to nongsang, and cotton planting also completed the spatial distribution from the Pearl River Basin to the Yangtze River Basin to the Yellow River Basin. It is worth noting that the Yuan Dynasty government set up a wooden cotton lifting department to collect cotton and cotton cloth as a summer tax. This was the first time that the central government had set up a special agency to manage cotton, and it was the beginning of the first large-scale collection of cotton on the mainland. According to the "Yuan Shi Shi Shi Ben Ji", by the 26th year of the Yuan Dynasty (1289), the rulers of the Yuan Dynasty "placed the Eastern Zhejiang, Jiangdong, Jiangxi, Huguang, and Fujian Mumian Lifting Divisions, and responsible the people for losing 100,000 Wooden Cotton Horses, in short" in general", indicating that by the time of the Yuan Dynasty, the cotton industry had covered the Yangtze River Basin and a vast area of Southern China. It should be noted here that the word "cotton" first appeared in the books of the Southern Song Dynasty, which means wooden cotton. By the Yuan and Ming dynasties, "cotton" and "cotton" were mostly common. By the Qing Dynasty, cotton or cotton eventually became idiomatic terms. Regarding the planting of cotton, many agricultural history documents since the Yuan Dynasty, such as the "Nongsang Jijiao", "Wang Zhennong Book", "The Complete Book of Agricultural Politics", etc. have been recorded in detail, and the Ming Dynasty Song Yingxing's "Tiangong Kaiwu" records that cotton planting "has every inch of soil".
In the late Qing Dynasty, especially after the 20th century, Asian tree cotton and African grass cotton (introduced from India along the overland Silk Road in the 2nd century AD, to Xinjiang, Shaanxi and Gansu regions, and spread only in the northwest region) were gradually eliminated by the market due to the short length of the velvet, and the American upland cotton and the South American sea island cotton were replaced by the high quality of the velvet. Since its introduction to the mainland in 1865, American upland cotton has been improved several times and has become the most important cotton species on the continent. Among them, Xinjiang Cotton Region is not only the most important cotton-producing area in the mainland, but also the world's top high-quality cotton-producing area. Xinjiang cotton, which is highly mechanized, intelligent, large-scale, industrialized and environmentally friendly, is of great significance to the stability and development of the world's cotton industry chain. China, together with India and the United States, is known as the world's three largest cotton producers, and China is also the world's largest consumer of cotton.
European society's cognition and introduction of cotton
While cotton and cotton fabrics were widely cultivated and spread in South Asia and the Arab world, the understanding of cotton in European societies was still in the imaginary stage. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus of the 5th century BC said that there was a strange tree in India that could grow wool. In the Roman world, cotton seemed to be a bizarre material, not only because it was naturally soft and light, but also because the trees that grew cotton were rather strange. Even in Europe, some people imagine cotton as somewhere in the world, there is a sheep that can grow wool without eating grass, and some people call this "plant sheep" "vegetable sheep", "vegetable sheep" is a mixture of plants and animals.
Cotton was first introduced to Europe as a result of the expansion of Islam in the Iberian Peninsula. By 950 AD, some Islamic-influenced cities such as Seville, Cordoba, Granada, Barcelona, etc. had cotton textiles. The Crusades, which lasted for more than 200 years in the 11th and 13th centuries, allowed Europeans to penetrate deep into the cotton growth belt of the Arab world. The earliest non-Islamic cotton industry centers in Europe appeared in northern Italian cities such as Milan, Bologna, Venice, etc., of which Venice was the first cotton distribution center in Europe and has long dominated the cotton trade in the Mediterranean world. During this period, the Italian cotton industry not only had easy access to high-quality raw cotton from India and the Arab world, but also had access to Asia's superb textile skills and advanced textile tools.
The Great Discovery of Geography opened up the global exchange of different species. Terrestrial cotton (plateau cotton) from the southern highlands of Mexico began a process of spread from the New World to the Old World due to the arrival of European colonists. Native Americans not only contributed important food crops such as potatoes, corn, and sweet potatoes to the world, but also contributed comfortable and warm cotton fabrics to mankind. Columbus recorded in his voyageary that when they arrived at a place in the Bahamas, the locals wore cotton fabrics, dyed cotton threads of various colors and were woven with beautiful patterns and patterns, and they "gave us cotton thread balls as gifts." This is the earliest clear record of American cotton by Europeans. In the centuries following the Age of Discovery, American upland cotton was rapidly cultivated and cultivated around the world for its velvet length advantage.
The opening of new shipping routes and the prosperity of the Maritime Silk Road have provided convenient conditions for the further external spread of Asian cotton. Eurasian trade became an important trade route second only to the Atlantic trade route, and exotic Asian products such as spices, coffee, Indian cotton, Chinese silk, tea and porcelain were continuously exported to Europe, and were loved by all classes of European society. At the end of the 17th century, The cotton cloth exported by India to Europe triggered the "cotton cloth fever" in European society. Throughout the 18th century, in the Arab world and In Europe, India was a major supplier of cotton textiles.
In the 1760s, the Industrial Revolution arose in Britain, and the technology of cotton textile industry underwent significant changes, and capitalist industrial cotton began to replace handmade cotton in the agricultural era. As the American scholar Sven Beckett points out in The Empire of Cotton, the capitalization of cotton completely changed the fate of cotton, telling a "story of the rise and fall of the cotton empire dominated by Europe." Cotton and cotton fabrics were incorporated into the European-dominated capitalist world system, which closely linked the different civilizational regions of the world into a global economic network "about land, labor, transportation, production and marketing". Italian scholar Giorgio Lleho's "Global History of Cotton" shows the transformation of the "old cotton textile system" under the "centrifugal" system in the pre-industrial era to the "new cotton textile system" under the "centripetal" system in the industrial period, that is, the transformation of the first cotton textile revolution led by India in the pre-industrial era to the second cotton textile revolution led by britain in the industrial era, which means that there is a new diversion of world wealth in different regions.
White and flawless, light and breathable cotton provides people with comfortable and soft cotton woven clothes, which meets people's basic survival needs and diversified consumption choices for cold and warmth. Since the Age of Discovery, cotton and cotton fabrics have spread around the world, which has had a profound impact on the economic and social development of different civilizations in the old and new continents. French writer Eric Ossener concludes: "The first globalization in human history was automatically formed around the cultivation, picking, spinning, and weaving of cotton... To understand the cosmopolitanization, to understand the cosmopolitanization of the past and the cosmopolitanization of today, it is better to study a piece of cloth. "It can be said that the global spread of cotton and cotton fabrics has written a history of material and cultural exchanges in which cotton interacts with human beings and exchanges and learns from different civilizations
