White Gold: The International Empire of Cotton

Jessica Lucas

White Gold:  The International Empire of Cotton

Cotton has been around for thousands of years but it wasn’t until a device was developed to separate the seeds from the cotton that it became a really big business.  The type of cotton that was grown in the southern states of America have sticky seeds inside the cotton that is really time consuming and difficult to remove.  This is something that made cotton difficult to cultivate and not as profitable to harvest.  Many different people attempted to develop a device that would remove the seeds from the fiber but it took a long time to find an invention that actually worked.  When Eli Whitney developed a machine that did so and it was very simple but it did what it needed to do.  This cotton gin worked to run through the fibers with wire teeth that rotated and pulled the cotton out without seeds (p. 444).  This invention made it very easy for those farmers to harvest much larger quantizes of cotton.  With this invention production increased substantially but now the farmers needed cheap labor in order to keep up with demand.  This led to slavery being a huge product of the southern states that relied on the cotton as it became one of their larger crops. 

This led to a major reliance on the south for the cotton.  Other areas of the country looked to the south for their cotton and this was a way that things like food and other merchandise made it into the south.  This invention also led to an increase in Europe’s reliance on cotton.  The southern cotton went all over the country in the United States and was also sold to places as far as England and France.  The numerous quantities of cotton that made it overseas drastically changed the way that they did business and increased the demand on higher production.  This completely changed the textiles industry from a private family based type into a much large scale with huge companies manufacturing these things.  Cotton became very big for England and the reliance on it was huge.  Once slavery was gone cotton was still a very large enterprise in the south.  The south seemed to own the market for years because of cotton exportation and development.  Large development and industrialization would simply not have occurred without the development of the cotton gin.  It was an extremely important invention that allowed countries to expand and develop.  It also made cotton very much more available and not just for the rich. 

1        

      1. Would  industrialized development of America and Europe have occurred without the invention of the cotton gin?

2.. What were the good things that occurred from the reliance that the South had on cotton?  What were some of the bad things that occurred based on the reliance that the South had on cotton?