Early Modern Era
Today’s world textile and garment trade is valued at a staggering $425 billion. We are told that under the pressure of increasing globalization, it is India and China that are the new world manufacturing powerhouses. However, this is not a new phenomenon: until the industrial revolution, Asia manufactured great quantities of colorful printed cottons that were sold to places as far afield as Japan, West Africa and Europe. Cotton explores this earlier globalized economy and its transformation after 1750 as cotton led the way in the industrialization of Europe. By the early nineteenth century, India, China and the Ottoman Empire switched from world producers to buyers of European cotton textiles, a position that they retained for over two hundred years. This is a fascinating and insightful story which ranges from Asian and European technologies and African slavery to cotton plantations in the Americas and consumer desires across the globe. (Cambridge)
Modern Era
Conventionally grown cotton uses a larger amount of insecticides than any other single crop grown. Nearly $2.6 billion worth of pesticides are applied in the cotton fields yearly. In the U.S. and around the world, pesticides used on cotton — even when used according to label instructions — harm people, wildlife and the environment. Many of the most hazardous pesticides on the market, including broad-spectrum organophosphates and carbonated pesticides, are sprayed on cotton fields.
In a 2002 study of pesticide illnesses in California cotton was categorized third amongst the crops that total for worker illnesses causes by pesticides.
Also in 1996 an incident in which estimated 250 farmworkers were sprayed with a mixture of highly toxic pesticides. The mixture was applied to a cotton field by a plane and dozens of workers in an adjacent field harvesting grapes experience symptoms of acute pesticide poisoning. (Panna)
-Ginette Mea
Cotton 