The cotton industry is one of the most ancient. One or more of
the many species of the cotton plant is indigenous to four
continents, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and the manufacture
of the fiber into yarn and cloth seems to have developed
independently in each of them. We find mention of cotton in India
fifteen hundred years before Christ. The East Indians, with only
the crudest machinery, spun yarn and wove cloth as diaphanous as
the best appliances of the present day have been able to produce.

Alexander the Great introduced the "vegetable wool" into Europe.
The fable of the "vegetable lamb of Tartary" persisted almost
down to modern times. The Moors cultivated cotton in Spain on an
extensive scale, but after their expulsion the industry
languished. The East India Company imported cotton fabrics into
England early in the seventeenth century, and these fabrics made
their way in spite of the bitter opposition of the woolen
interests, which were at times strong enough to have the use of
cotton cloth prohibited by law. But when the Manchester spinners
took up the manufacture of cotton, the fight was won. The
Manchester spinners, however, used linen for their warp threads,
for without machinery they could not spin threads sufficiently
strong from the short-fibered Indian cotton.

In the New World the Spanish explorers found cotton and cotton
fabrics in use everywhere. Columbus, Cortes, Pizarro, Magellan,
and others speak of the various uses to which the fiber was put,
and admired the striped awnings and the colored mantles made by
the natives. It seems probable that cotton was in use in the New
World quite as early as in India.