In the tradition of Mark Kurlansky's Cod and Salt , this endlessly revealing book reminds us that the fiber we think of as ordinary is the world's most powerful cash crop, and that it has shaped the destiny of nations. Ranging from its domestication 5,500 years ago to its influence in creating Calvin Klein's empire and the Gap, Stephen Yafa's Cotton gives us an intimate look at the plant that fooled Columbus into thinking he'd reached India, that helped start the Industrial Revolution as well as the American Civil War, and that made at least one bug—the boll weevil—world famous. A sweeping chronicle of ingenuity, greed,  conflict, and opportunism, Cotton offers "a barrage of fascinating information" ( Los Angeles Times ). "I have to hand it to Mr. Yafa. Cotton rules." — The Wall Street Journal "With wit and intelligence, Yafa demonstrates how a good deal of history can be learned by following a single thread." — The Washington Post "A comprehensive and often surprising history [of a crop that changed the world]."  — USA Today Stephen Yafa, a novelist, playwright, and award-winning screenwriter, has written for Playboy , Details , Rolling Stone , and the San Francisco Chronicle . For a scrawny, gangling plant that produces hairs about as insubstantial as milkweed, cotton has exerted a mighty hold over human events since it was first domesticated about 5,500 years ago in Asia, Africa, and South America. Cotton rode on the back of Alexander the Great all the way from India to Europe, robed ancient Egyptian priests, generated the conflicts that led to the American Civil War, inspired Marx’s and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, fooled Columbus into thinking he had reached Asia, and made at least one bug, the boll weevil, world famous. It also created the Industrial Revolution in England and in the United States, motivated single American women to leave home for the first time in history, and played a pivotal role in Mahatma Gandhi’s fight for India’s independence from British colonial rule. In these pages I trace the empires cotton built and destroyed, the fortunes it created, and the revolutions it stirred up along the way as it journeyed west from India to continental Europe, then to Great Britain, and from there to the United States. While I focus on cotton in America, it truly belongs to the world. Forty billion pounds a year grow on about seventy-seven million acres in more than eighty countries. In Ghana, on the West African coast, mourners wrap themselves in vibrant red kobene cotton cloth to express their close bonds to the deceased. In Ahmadabad, India, where Gandhi held his first fast in 1918 in support of textile workers, exquisitely subtle silk-screened cotton saris hang to dry high aboveground from hundreds of bamboo racks arranged like scaffolding; in Guatamala, women gather each morning and socialize in village circles as they weave and embroider magnificently ornate blouses called huipiles using cuyuscate, naturally colored cotton that grows in soft greens, browns, yellows, and chalk grays. An entire industry in Peru is devoted to the organic cultivation of coffee-latte-hued cotton. Just about everyone on the planet wears at least one article of clothing made from cotton at some point during the day; inevitably, by-products of the plant show up as well in something that person is doing, whether eating ice cream, changing diapers, filtering coffee, chewing gum, handling paper money, polishing fingernails, or reading a book. The source of cotton’s power is its nearly terrifying versatility and the durable creature comforts it provides. Cotton is family. We sweat in cotton. It breathes with us. We wrap our newborns in it. In fact, we pay cotton the highest compliment of all: we don’t go out of our way to be nice to it. Look in your closet. The rumpled things on the floor are most probably cotton—soiled shirts and khakis, dirty housework clothes and muddied socks that rise up in dank mounds ready to be baptized with detergent and reborn in the washer, fresh and clean as new snow. Linen, silk, wool—uptown fabrics to be sure, on display in the magnificent Bayeux Tapestry woven shortly after the Norman Conquest or in priceless Aubusson rugs, but not happy to be scrubbed with sudsy hot water and churned like butter in a dryer. Those fibrous divas demand attentive coddling while cotton, the sword carrier, needs only three squares a day and a pair of shoulders to drape itself over. Cotton is the fabric wool would be if it were light enough for summer and didn’t shrink to toddler-size in the dryer; it’s what silk would be if it gracefully absorbed sweat, and what linen might aspire to if it didn’t wrinkle on sight. Contemporary man-made technical polyesters, all created from petroleum by-products, have come along in their second or third generation to trump cotton as the preferred fabric for strenuous outdoor activity and gym wear. Not a problem. Cotton manufacturers responded by wedding one of the