Quotes About Cotton

It was on the back of cotton, and thus on the backs of slaves, that the U.S. economy ascended in the world (p.119).

our journey through the empire of cotton has shown that civilization and barbarity are linked at the hip

Europeans united the power of capital and the power of the state to forge, often violently, a global production complex, and then used the capital, skills, networks, and institutions of cotton to embark upon the upswing in technology and wealth that defines the modern world.

India and China, or, for that matter, the Aztec and Inca empires, had not even come close to such global dominance, and even less so to reinventing how people produced things in the far-flung corners of the globe. And yet starting in the sixteenth century, armed European capitalists and capital-rich European states reorganized the world's cotton industry.

Today cotton is so ubiquitous that it is hard to see it for what it is: one of mankind's great achievements.

by 1905, cotton experts estimated, a full 15 million people, or about 1 percent of the world's population, were engaged in the growing of cotton.

One reason it is hard to see cotton's importance is because it has often been overshadowed in our collective memory by images of coal mines, railroads, and giant steelworks--industrial capitalism's more tangible, more massive manifestations (p.xviii).

Such preponderance of women workers resulted all too often in the invisibility of the cotton industry, overshadowed by the male-dominated coal-mining, iron-making, and railroading industries.

By 1830, one in six workers in Britain labored in cottons.

In 2001, the U.S. government paid a record $4 billion in subsidies to cotton growers, a cost that exceeded the market value of the crop by 30 percent. To put it another way, these subsidies amounted to triple that year's USAID payments to all of Africa, a part of the world where production costs for cotton were only about a third of what they were in the United States. In

Cotton manufacturers understood that their prosperity was entirely dependent on the labor of slaves and they "dreaded the severity of the revulsion which must sooner, or later arrive.

The sweaty cotton gave off a sour but friendly smell.

Americans believe cotton is best, but we've invented new fabrics that will change your lifestyle.

When I first went to Kmart, I was so excited that I could bring my kind of taste to the masses. They didn't have 100 percent cotton sheets at mass market in 1987. We made those in yellow and pink and pale blue.

There's a catharsis in cutting down trees. But there's absolutely none of that in picking cotton. It's maddening! It's fiddly, and it pricks your fingers, and it's something that's a very hard skill if you have no alacrity for it.

Just as much as the United States mattered to cotton, cotton mattered to the United States. Cotton reinvigorated slavery, established the young nation's place in the global economy, and eventually helped create the political and economic conflicts that resulted in civil war.

From the beginning, the prospect of American settlements in Texas was entirely dependent on slavery. It was no secret. Everyone knew it. Austin would say it over and over and over: The only reason Americans would come to Texas was to farm cotton, and they would not do that without slaves. They really didn't know any other way.

Possibly you are not aware of the fact that the largest sum given by any contributor to the fund is but a trifle when compared with the losses suffered by nearly all the firms in the cotton trade during the disastrous years of the American war.

All of the world was crying out for cotton, and the new land of the County, unworn and fertile, produced it abundantly. Cotton was the heart beat of the section, the planting and the picking were the diastole and systole of the red earth.

with towels so plush and fine that when she at last emerged she felt like a princess using them, or at least like the daughter of a dictator who was willing to kill without mercy in order for his children to pamper themselves with cotton such as this

with towels so plush and fine that when she at last emerged she felt like a princess using them, or at least like the daughter of a dictator who was willing to kill without mercy in order for his children to pamper themselves with cotton such as this, to feel this exquisite sensation on their naked stomachs and thighs, towels that felt as if they had never been used before and might never be used again.

It was a little blue cotton-knit dress with tiny daisies all over it, and it was tighter than Gran liked and shorter than Jason deemed proper in his sister.

Another method of eating burning coals employs small balls of burned cotton in a dish of burning alcohol.

The late afternoon sun shone on women in cotton frocks and little sunburnt, barefoot children. It blazed on a silky yellow flower with coarse leaves which sprawled over a bank of rock. The air ruffling through the window smelled of the sea.