British Imperialism and its Legacies: Cotton (Gossypium sp.)
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Glasgow Museums has a collection of plants collected from many places across the globe. Cotton, a shrubby member of the mallow family, is notable for the copious fibrous threads that cover the seeds in the capsules (bolls) of the fruiting plant. The fibres can be separated and spun to make long threads that are used to produce textiles and related materials. Wild cotton species, of which there are many, grow in widespread tropical and sub-tropical areas including the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australia. However, only a few species and hybrids are used for commercial cultivation, which today is worth about £10 billion to the global economy. Modern hybrids and plant varieties selected though selective breeding would be scarcely recognisable to the early indigenous users of the plants.
The dried cotton fruits in the collection were collected from El Centro in California and came to Glasgow Museums via the University of Strathclyde’s collection. The dried herbarium specimen is from a collection of plants donated to Glasgow Museums in 1882 by the Philosophical Society of Glasgow. It was grown in Moradabad (northern India) in 1843, likely at one of the experimental gardens that the East India Company established as part of the colonial expansion of agricultural products.
Humans’ exploitation of cotton plant fibres is thought to date back 7,000 years, in southern Asia and the Americas, but it is only in the last 200 years that, with increased mechanization, cotton has become an important commercial crop. (Indeed, it is argued that cotton was the driving force behind the Industrial Revolution.) However, this development has had a serious and harmful impact on peoples across the globe, ranging from the indigenous people of northern India to enslaved Africans transported to the Caribbean and southern states of the USA. It is ironic that a plant and its textile products, long utilised by many peoples across the globe, was virtually unknown to Europeans at the start of the 1700s, but became such a driving force behind the economic development and global domination of western nations.
Today, with increasing mechanization, people picking and processing cotton are fewer in number but cultivated farmland is much more extensive across the globe. However, even today it is not without controversy, ranging from trade wars due to unfair subsidies, to the exploitation of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang (western China), and increasing realisation of the crop’s impact on the environment. Cultivation requires the heavy use of fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides. Cotton is a thirsty crop, demanding high levels of irrigation in the semi-arid lands where it is often grown, resulting in over-exploitation of the water supply and increasing salination (salt deposits) of the groundwater.
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