The rise and fall of Egypt's Cotton Empire

March 15, 2020 1:59 PM

In the relatively more recent history of cotton (Wikipedia), Egyptian cotton went from the international standard for excellence (thanks in part to the U.S. Civil War [Smithsonian Magazine], when the blockade of Southern ports lead to Industrial Britain losing 80% of its cotton imports), to a diluted (Applied DNA Sciences, 2016) or mislabeled product (Target press release, 2016). That's the quick synopsis of The End of Egyptian Cotton, a longer article from the New Yorker, looking at the long, international history of what was, for a period, a "white gold."
posted by filthy light thief (7 comments total)

If you'd like to hear more, here's an hour and a half talk by Sven Beckert (C-SPAN Book TV), speaking on his book, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Amazon; Goodreads), about the origins of the global cotton trade and its impact on the international economy. You can read an excerpt on The Atlantic, which focuses on the U.S. slavery-based cotton industry, and how the Civil War changed cotton production globally.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:06 PM on March 15, 2020

I'd always assumed that it was Milo Minderbinder who crashed Egyptian cotton in the '40s.
posted by Strange Interlude at 2:46 PM on March 15, 2020 [12 favorites]

Ventile used to be very long-staple Egyptian cotton, tightly woven so it would become waterproof when damp. Now it's just regular cotton treated with PFCs or paraffin wax.
posted by scruss at 4:23 PM on March 15, 2020 [5 favorites]

Egyptian cotten was preferred for yacht sails until the invention of Nylon, and shortly after that, Dacron.
posted by SemiSalt at 5:14 PM on March 15, 2020 [2 favorites]

White gold. Cairo tea.
posted by neon909 at 6:17 PM on March 15, 2020 [5 favorites]

I had just started the Empire Of Cotton book referenced above when I got distracted by the new Hilary Mantel novel. It (the cotton book) was pretty compelling in the first few chapters.
posted by janell at 9:00 PM on March 15, 2020

I have an old economic botany textbook kicking around here somewhere (quite honestly I'll probably never see it again) which claims that Egyptian Cotton does not have the longest staple of the traditional varieties. That distinction apparently belongs to Sea Island Cotton.

Which makes sense in a way, because if the habitat of a cotton plant is a sea island, the seeds are very likely to be blown out to sea, and to have any chance of germinating, such seeds would have to remain airborne all the way to another island, and that would be more likely with longer staples.
posted by jamjam at 9:32 PM on March 15, 2020 [5 favorites]