Gossypium hirsutum

Gossypium hirsutum is a cotton species native to Central America and Mexico. Also called upland cotton, it supplies most of the world’s cultivated cotton fiber.

Gossypium: A genus of flowering plants that includes the cotton species cultivated for textile fiber. Gossypium hirsutum is one of the genus’s four principal domesticated cotton species.
Domestication of cotton: The process by which people selected and cultivated cotton plants for useful fiber and seed. Human selection transformed wild G. hirsutum ancestors into a crop with abundant, usable fiber.
Cotton gin: A machine that separates cotton fibers from seeds and other plant material. Mechanical ginning made large-scale processing of this species’ seed-laden fiber practical.
Industrial Revolution: A period of major economic and technological change beginning in Britain in the late eighteenth century. Mechanized spinning and weaving drove sharply rising demand for cotton fiber.
Cotton fiber: A soft natural textile fiber formed from elongated seed-hair cells of cotton plants. The seed hairs of this species provide most commercially harvested cotton fiber.
Mesoamerica: A historical cultural region extending across central and southern Mexico and parts of Central America. The species’ origin and early cultivation are rooted in this region.
Cotton textile production: The chain of processes that turns harvested cotton fiber into yarn, fabric, and finished goods. Most cotton textile production begins with fiber harvested from G. hirsutum.
Atlantic slave trade: The forced transportation of millions of Africans across the Atlantic for enslavement in the Americas. The expansion of cotton cultivation in the Americas was entangled with enslaved labor and this trade.
Cotton boll: The dry fruit of a cotton plant, which splits open to expose seeds and attached fibers. Its opening signals that G. hirsutum’s fiber crop is ready for harvest.
Tehuacán Valley: A valley in central Mexico with archaeological evidence of early agriculture and plant use. Cotton remains from this region document early use of American cotton.

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