Introduction
Cotton, a fiber used in clothing and textiles, is and has been the most popular fiber in the world. In fact, most people do not realize the various fabrics made from cotton, such as velvet, denim, and flannel.
Cotton has had a long, tumultuous history in regards to U.S. history, as a material used by homo sapiens. For instance, cotton has been found to be used as fabric in the prehistoric times, with fragments of cotton also found to date back to the fifth millennium BC in the Indus Valley civilization. All throughout the world, be it with the Han Dynasty in China to the Aztecs in Mexico, or the Achaemenids in modern day Iran, cotton has been a material central to the human experience.
Cotton is typically measured by bale, a set weight and dimension. A bale of cotton equals 480 pounds; however, cotton may also be weighed in the tons (one ton is 2,000 pounds).
Cotton is part of the Gossypium genus and is an insoluble cellulose that comes from the cotton plant. It is mainly grown in tropical and subtropical climates. After it is grown, picked cotton must go through processing—where it is cleaned, fluffed, and compressed—before it can be used for fabrics.
Learn for yourself about cotton production by country in the map and charts.
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