Cotton Kingdom Web Series,
Ancient inventions.
The skilled craftsmen were in the Ottoman city of Tuqat. There were cotton workshops in Baghdad, Mosul and Basra. Muslin was made in Mosul. There were 600 weavers in Bamako, the current capital of Mali. Clothes made in Kano were worn in the Sahara. Timbuktu had 26 workshops in 1590 with 50 or more workers. Thirty to forty thousand people were involved in this profession in Osaka at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
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The idea of a professional jolahy came after the arrival of the workshop. Someone who made clothes for sale. But most of the production was in the villages.
And from here another profession became famous in India which was moneylender. Capital was needed to make the clothes. The rural weaver, for example, had to buy yarn and, until the cloth was ready, needed to make ends meet. The moneylenders used to give these loans. And money was returned on the sale of clothes. The need for capital from the cotton grower to the professional artisan has brought the capitalist and the producer in India into a deep bond.
Artisans in India had more control over their labor than in other parts of the world, as the moneylender was only interested in returning money. Not from a manufactured product.
In the Ottoman Empire, merchants used to give these loans and according to their needs and orders, farmers from yarn to craftsmen all used to make products for the merchants with a small profit. Merchants in China had this control even stronger.
As the cloth was being woven, so was the web of economic and political empire that surrounded it.
Production was low, labor was high. Major technological advances came in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But even before that, various inventions were made. Their center was Asia. A roller gin, a cotton cleaning , a bow, a chirkhas, and a variety of pots were invented in Asia. The chirkhas was a very important invention, especially in the eleventh century.
The greatest inventions were the innovations in the cotton plant. The cotton that was harvested in the 19th century was very different from what it was 2,000 years ago. Artificial selection has enabled cotton to be grown in a variety of environments. In China, Japan, South Asia, North and South America, West Africa and Anatolia, cotton seeds were imported from other regions and began to be harvested. Over the centuries, the characteristics of the cotton plant have changed. Plants with long, shiny fibers that are easy to separate from their shell.
New technologies in irrigation and agriculture also made it possible for the plant to travel to new worlds. Due to seed selection and better technology, the cotton plant reached more dry and cold areas.
Iran completed major irrigation projects in the ninth century, which led to the production of the cotton crop. But despite all this, these changes were much smaller than those of the eighteenth and nineteenth century industrial revolutions. Earlier, cotton production was increasing only because more people were working in it. The Industrial Revolution made it possible to produce more with fewer people.
The world was growing slowly before 1780. In particular, the limited means of transport meant that there were many obstacles to its spread. The domestic industry was at the heart of the cotton empire. The old social structures did not change because of this. It was a time when innovations in an unexpected place changed all that.
(to be continued)
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