I just finished a wonderfully fascinating, insightful book by Stephen Yafa who writes for Details and Rolling Stone, "Big Cotton" 2005. Yafa pulls off the seemingly impossible: he makes a fiber exciting.
Yafa pulls the thread of cotton's history from time immemorial to present day. However, Yafa's, who was born in the textile mill town of Lowell, MA, main focus is the impact of cotton on the U.S./U.K. After a background on the flexibility of this wonder crop, Yafa relates the dramatic impact cotton had on the American War for Indpendence and the Civil War and the culture of the South (Eli Whitney's struggles in patent law were incredibly insightful).
Southern culture was locked into cotton thus explaining why many not in the slavocracy supported the CSA (at least at first), for self-interest and to preserve their culture. "No, you dare not make war on cotton. Now power on earth dare make war on cotton. Cotton is King." Senator James Hammond, South Carolina. As well, Yafa shows how Northern mill owners tolerated slavery (or turned a blind eye) until pushed into abolition by their own workers and the UK.
The subtitle is "how a humble fiber created fortunes, wrecked civilizations, and put America on the map" and Yafa demonstrates how cotton did all these things. Interesting side hikes include, the plight of the boll weevil and the struggle to control it. How some in the South escaped the cycle of cotton and became wealthy, for example farmers in Enterprise, Alabama, wiped out because of the boll weevil, became peanut farmers and did quite well. So much so that they built a tribute to the boll weevil in the town square (the book includes a photograph so doubting Thomases can be shown). Also the beginnings of one young B.B. King in Mississippi's cotton fields.
Yafa ends his book with the impact of cotton on the new South (the pollution, the subsidies) and the world (the emergence of China and Western Africa). With the exception of a year in D.C. I have always lived a Yankee and had very little awareness of how cotton shaped a region of our nation and how cotton is still of upmost importance in global trade.
This book is highly recommended. I could not put it down.
