Crops
Cotton
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The world's leading natural fiber crop, domesticated independently at least four times, in the Indus Valley, Africa, Mesoamerica and the Andes. Cotton clothed the ancient world, drove the industrial revolution's mills, and, with the cotton gin, entrenched plantation slavery in the American South.
Facts
Scientific NameGossypium hirsutum (upland cotton, the dominant commercial species) 1 Domestication RegionDomesticated independently in the Old and New Worlds (Indus Valley, Africa, Mesoamerica, coastal Peru) 1 Domesticated When (Circa)by circa 5000 BC in both hemispheres 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Cash Crop, Concepts Cotton was among the defining cash crops of the colonial and antebellum plantation economy.
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