What were the advantages of cotton as a crop?

What were the advantages of cotton as a crop?

1. Cotton had many advantages as cash crop: inexpensive to market and easy to store and transport. 2. Cotton had major disadvantage—used up nutrients in soil—so farmers began crop rotation.

Why is cotton important?

Cotton is one of the most important fiber and cash crop of India and plays a dominant role in the industrial and agricultural economy of the country. It provides the basic raw material (cotton fibre) to cotton textile industry.

Why was cotton so popular?

Cotton fabric is popular because it’s easy to care for and comfortable year-round. In hot, humid weather, cotton “breathes.” As the body perspires, cotton fibers absorb the moisture and release it on the surface of the fabric, so it evaporates.

How did cotton start?

In the Indus River Valley in Pakistan, cotton was being grown, spun and woven into cloth 3,000 years BC. Arab merchants brought cotton cloth to Europe about 800 A.D. When Columbus discovered America in 1492, he found cotton growing in the Bahama Islands. By 1500, cotton was known generally throughout the world.

How did Northerners profit from cotton?

How did northerners profit from cotton? Northern textile industries take southern cotton and produce clothing, fabric, etc. Increased $300 slave pre-cotton gin; now becomes worth $2000 after cotton gin.

What kept the price of cotton high?

By 1820, the United States was more than growing 30 times as much cotton as it had when Whitney invented the gin, making it the world’s leading supplier. The mills’ insatiable hunger for cotton kept prices high, so that white southern farmers demanded ever more land, and ever more enslaved people, to grow it.

Who did the South sell cotton to?

As Union armies moved into cotton regions of the South in 1862, the U.S. acquired all the cotton available, and sent it to Northern textile mills or sold it to Europe. Meanwhile, cotton production increased in British India by 70% and also increased in Egypt.

Why was cotton so important in the industrial revolution?

Cotton was a main raw material of the industrial revolution. Its strong fibres were uniquely suited to the hard mechanical treatment in the spinning machinery. Cotton fabrics are used for garments as well as interior textiles. In the 19th Century cotton became fashionable among the Europeans.

Why was there an increased demand for cotton?

While it was true that the cotton gin reduced the labor of removing seeds, it did not reduce the need for slaves to grow and pick the cotton. In fact, the opposite occurred. Cotton growing became so profitable for the planters that it greatly increased their demand for both land and slave labor.

How did cotton cause the Civil War?

Suddenly cotton became a lucrative crop and a major export for the South. However, because of this increased demand, many more slaves were needed to grow cotton and harvest the fields. Slave ownership became a fiery national issue and eventually led to the Civil War.

How cotton changed the world?

Cotton was one of the world’s first luxury commodities, after sugar and tobacco, and was also the commodity whose production most dramatically turned millions of black human beings in the United States themselves into commodities. Cotton became the first mass consumer commodity.

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