Big Cotton: How A Humble Fiber Created Fortunes, Wrecked Civilizations, and Put America on the Map
by Yafa, Stephen
- Used
- Fine
- Hardcover
- first
- Condition
- Fine/Fine
- ISBN 10
- 0670033677
- ISBN 13
- 9780670033676
- Seller
-
Santa Barbara, California, United States
Payment Methods Accepted
About This Item
New York: Viking; Penguin, 2004. pxiv, 398 pages, illustrations; 22 cm. Tight, clean copy. Dust jacket protected in a mylar cover. A fine copy of the first printing. "Cotton has touched off wars and revolutions, inspired astonishing inventions, laid waste to entire ecosystems, and enslaved untold millions of people. Alexander the Great carried cotton cloth on his back from India to Europe. Starting from the late eighteenth century, the fiber transformed creaky rural England into the greatest industrial power on earth. Today, cotton is, if anything, more preeminent than ever and at the center of raging global controversies. Now Stephen Yafa delves deep into the past to tell the amazing story of this humble, infinitely adaptable fiber that has--again and again--reinvented our world.Domesticated simultaneously in Peru and Pakistan some 5,500 years ago, later a prime motive for the colonization of the New World, as Yafa shows, cotton's most profound impact came after the Industrial Revolution. By the mid-nineteenth century, the vast plantations of the antebellum South, the grim mill towns of New England, and the soot-spewing factories of the English Midlands were knit together in a global system of exploitation and enslavement--all of it based on cotton. When Marx and Engels composed The Communist Manifesto, they chose cotton manufacturing as the prime symbol of capitalism run amok. Beautifully researched and written, Big Cottontraces the cultural, economic, and social history of the 'world's friendliest' fiber from the kingdoms of Mesopotamia to the Gap. / Stephen Yafa, a novelist, playwright, and award-winning screenwriter, has written for Playboy, Details, Rolling Stone, and the San Francisco Chronicle." - Publisher.. 1st. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. 8vo. Collectible.
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Details
- Bookseller
- LEFT COAST BOOKS (US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 108249
- Title
- Big Cotton: How A Humble Fiber Created Fortunes, Wrecked Civilizations, and Put America on the Map
- Author
- Yafa, Stephen
- Format/Binding
- Hardcover
- Book Condition
- Used - Fine
- Jacket Condition
- Fine
- Edition
- 1st
- ISBN 10
- 0670033677
- ISBN 13
- 9780670033676
- Publisher
- Viking; Penguin
- Place of Publication
- New York
- Date Published
- 2004
- Size
- 8vo
- Keywords
- COLLECTIBLE
- Bookseller catalogs
- Media / Fabrics & Textiles; XXX / COLLECTIBLES; Design / Fashion & Costume; American / 3. Neo-Classical & Romantic;
Terms of Sale
LEFT COAST BOOKS
30 day return guarantee, with full refund including original shipping costs for up to 30 days after delivery if an item arrives misdescribed or damaged.
About the Seller
LEFT COAST BOOKS
Biblio member since 2016
Santa Barbara, California
About LEFT COAST BOOKS
Established in Santa Barbara, California, in 2004, Left Coast Books specializes in ART BOOKS, offering thousands of titles on painting, sculpture, graphic arts, architecture, design, photography, film, video, and performance art. We also sell classics, literature, history, and a broad variety of useful academic books.
Glossary
Some terminology that may be used in this description includes:
- Fine
- A book in fine condition exhibits no flaws. A fine condition book closely approaches As New condition, but may lack the...
- Tight
- Used to mean that the binding of a book has not been overly loosened by frequent use.
- Cloth
- "Cloth-bound" generally refers to a hardcover book with cloth covering the outside of the book covers. The cloth is stretched...
- Jacket
- Sometimes used as another term for dust jacket, a protective and often decorative wrapper, usually made of paper which wraps...