The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global

Economy; Book Summary

A Summary of Chapters 2-15 of the Second Edition Book by
Pietra Rivoli
The history of cotton production in the U.S. began with the entrepreneurial developments in the
production of cotton cloth and yarns in England. When the first cotton textile factories started
producing clothes that the poor could afford, the price of cotton lowered dramatically. The lower
prices created more demand for textile mills, which in turn caused England to need more cotton.
At first the Americas didn't seem like a promising source of cotton, but by the 1830's the
American South became the world leader in cotton production. Most of their cotton was sent to
England, less than 30 percent stayed in America. The production of cotton in America was aided
by slavery, which had been abolished in India by 1843. However, slavery in America was
abolished in 1863, so it had another 20 years of cheap labor over its main competitor.
When the plantations started spreading west across America there was a problem with growing
the cotton. Only Upland cotton would grow further west, but that kind of cotton was much harder
to remove from its seed then the preferred, Sea Island cotton, which would only grow along the
coast. As plantation owners tried working with the Upland cotton they realized that unless
something was invented that could remove the cotton from the seed than England's demand for
cotton couldn't be supplied. In the fall of 1792 a man named Eli Whitney, a Yale graduate and a
very innovative man, was staying for a few days on a plantation during his trip from New York
to Savannah, Georgia. When he heard about how cotton growers needed something to remove
the cotton from the sticky Upland cotton seed he thought that he had the solution. When his
invention worked the cotton boom quickly progressed.
Even after slavery was abolished in America, they still had a way of continuing to produce large
quantities of cotton. It was called "sharecropping". Sharecropping is essentially loaning your
land to another man, who had to use it to grow cotton. The landowner would give the man food,
a home, and even the right to hunt and fish. In return, the man who grew the cotton would pay
for the things that were provided to him, and the land rent, with the money he got from selling
his crop. A lot of the time the man would barely break even, or he wouldn't be able to pay off his
loan, so the next year he would start out in debt. Sharecropping was legal, but it still provided a
way for Americans to have cheap labor for growing cotton.
When Americans started going farther west, into Texas and Oklahoma, the farms grew larger,
and the profits got bigger. People owned large quantities of land; some had many hundreds of
thousands of acres. When farms were that big the owners didn't like to take risks on whether or
not they would have a big enough labor force. So instead of building their farms where the
people were, they built the people were the farms were. On the ranch, the owners would create a
small town for their workers to live in year-round. When the land needed to be planted, the farm
needed to be weeded, or the cotton needed to be picked, the land owner would have workers at
his disposal.