Cotton and civilization

In an unexpected and quirky way, cotton was a keystone resource in the development of "civilization" as we know it.

In the medieval and early-Renaissance period, a book cost about the equivalent of one day's un-skilled labor  per-page. Since hand-written script was much less compact than the mechanical typeset pages we are used to today, a five-hundred page book (like Fifty Shades of Grey) might be 1500 pages of vellum. And, if the vellum was particularly fine, it was almost transparent and was only marked on one side. So the 1500 page book was printed on 1500 separate sheets of vellum and would cost the equivalent of three year's wages for the average Joe. I suspect Fifty Shades would not have sold as many copies, had it cost that much today.

Even into the middle of the Renaissance, paper was made from beaten linen rags. Linen is not very productive and the paper-makers were competing with other trades like candle-wick makers and the like. Also, because fabric was so precious, clothing was worn to mere tatters and there wasn't that much substance when they were sold to the rag-pickers. Despite all of that, a "University" textbook on cheaper paper might sell for the equivalent of $200 or $300 and a third of that was the cost of the paper it was printed on. It was a bargain compared to the meticulously tanned and scraped hides that became vellum and parchment.

But something incredible happened between 1500 and 1800 AD. Cotton started being grown in the American deep-South and India became a major exporter of cotton. The price of paper dropped from the equivalent of $0.30 a page to the equivalent of $2.50 for a ream of 500 sheets. That is 1/60th the price. The daily wage of an unskilled laborer in 1800 was about $0.70, enough to purchase 140 sheets of paper. That was a huge leap from the single page in a book that a day's labor could purchase in the late-Medieval times**.

Paper was cheap enough to publish newspapers which were passed from one person to the next and were then recycled. That was absolutely unheard of when a single sheet of material to write upon was a working man's daily pay*. Broad-sheets could be printed and tacked to trees and fence-posts. Political tracts that expressed radical, political ideas were written, published and tacked up on trees, fence posts and the sides of buildings (and to church doors). Hymns were written. Plays were captured for eternity. Laws were codified and became accessible to a broad swath of humanity.

Key to that was the nature of cotton. Linen fibers are trapped in the stem and bundles of stems must be submerged in water for the stems to partially decay. Then the stems are beaten to dislodge the semi-rotten flesh and leave the fibers, which are then combed, dried, bleached in the sun. The yield of usable fiber per acre of ground is not very impressive. 

Bundles of flax in a "retting" pond.

That limits linen production to places like Holland and Belgium and certain areas in France and Britain, places where many shallow ponds dot the landscape where bundles of flax can be submerged.

In modern times, an acre of flax yields about 400 pounds of processed linen. Before fertilizer, insecticides and improved varieties were developed, one third of that was probably an outstanding yield.

Cotton, on the other hand, yields about 800 pounds per acre. 

Cotton which is not trapped in stems and the lack of shallow ponds and autumn springs are not a limiting factor in the production of cotton. Even the "waste", the dust from the outsides of the seed (the linters) can be used for paper.

The explosive embrace in the growing cotton resulted in a quantum leap in the affordability of "paper", which in turn resulted in a quantum leap in the quality and amount of thinking and the ability to share ideas and to integrate other people's insights into one's own thinking.

I appreciate African-American's visceral reaction to "cotton" and the plantation system. But that cultural empathy should not totally obscure the fact that if cotton did not exist, it is likely that we would still be living in a pre-scientific world...say, the equivalent of 1550 AD technology.

*Comparing the cost of an object to the price of a day's labor from an unskilled worker is misleading. The nature of the economy was such that a day's pay was only sufficient to keep the worker and his family alive for one-more-day. In fact, it was less than that because his wife and kids were out there hustling for calories and barterable goods. An unskilled worker NEVER had excess money to pay for anything beyond the barest of necessities.

The only point of referring to an unskilled person's daily wage is that it is one of the few commodities that seems ageless. The point is that if a wealthy person wanted to buy a book then he had to be willing to forego the kilometer of irrigation ditch he could have paid to have dug with the same amount of money

** I am guilty of conflating blank pages of paper with pages in books covered with hand-written script. So sue me.

---A huge note of thanks to Alma Boykin and Lucas Machias, both of whom cheerfully sent me reference materials. All errors are mine.---