Book quotes.

Some are really long I just thought it would be better to have whole sections and pick and choose rather than accidently missing something useful.  Let me know if you want me to research more into certain sections I just went through the first few chapters of Bertha S. Dodge's Cotton: The Plant That Would Be King so there's more if we need it.

"Would any sane nation make war on cotton?" Senator Hammond demanded of his colleagues, then answered the rhetorical question himself. "Without firing a gun, without drawing a sword, should they make war on us, we could bring the whole world to our feet. The South is perfectly competent to go on one, two, or three years without planting a seed of cotton...What would happen if no cotton were furnished for three years?...this is certain: England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilised world with her, save the South.  No, you dare not make war on cotton, No power on earth dares make war on cotton. Cotton is King." (2)

"At the time of Senator Hammond's speech, nothing else seemed to matter. For most of his colleagues there was to come a time of reckoning, but, as it was to turn out, the senator would not be alive to draw lesson from it.  That lesson could be summed up in a few sentences - the plants that, for various reasons, people let themselves become dependent upon come to exercise a tyranny out of all proportion to their own intrinsic worth." (3)

"Spinning has always had a hold on the imagination of people who find a special fascination in the spinner's power to transform fine fibres into long, strong threads that may further be spun into ropes or set on looms to be woven into fabrics of infinite variety and design." (4)

"On many a frieze carved in ancient Greece or Rome sit those three sisters Fates in whose hands rests human destiny; Clotho, the youngest, wielding a distaff from which she spins the thread of life; Lachesis, the middle one, measuring off that thread for the inexorable Atropos to sever.  In later times, when the pagan legends of ancient Greece and Rome had become outmoded, the magic motif survived.  Many children of our own times have been entertained by centuries-old folk-tales in which some much abused maiden, being set the task of spinning a roomful of flax into gold, succeeds with the help of some superhuman being, to end in the arms of a Prince Charming whose throne she will eventually share."(4)

"To today's beholder, this conversion of a handful of fluff into usable threads still smacks of magic, even where the device used to achieve this feat is no more sophisticated than half a gourd shell, in which is twirled a foot-long slender stick bearing a sticky ball of clay about four inches from one point." (5)

"Cotton is a multinational plant, and one or another of its many varieties is native to most of the warmer regions of this earth.  Long used by human beings, it was, nevertheless, slow to acquire snob value. No yearning for fine cottons sent sixteenth-century galleons roaming distant seas. No greed for controlling lands where cotton grew native set nations of the seventeentth century at odds. In fact, though older than recorded history and native to romantically distant lands, cotton was to make no great stir with Europeans until after the nineteenth century had dawned and the age of machines was ushered in. No one could then have been persuaded that this shrub...was destined to play a large and dramatic role in the affairs of nations." (10)

"Fifteen centuries were to pass before Europeans began to take an active interest in the plant itself and then only as one among many botanical curiosities featured in the newly popular herbals of the day." (11)

On cotton garments being sent from employees of the English East India Company to their families in England "their delight was so potent, with the new fabric becoming so fashionable, that imported cottons were soon being seen as a menace to the place long occupied by traditional English woolens." (14)

"By 1700, thoroughly alarmed and undoubtedly under pressures from their constituents, members of Parliament had decided to put a stop to it all by passing a law limiting the importation of cotton fabrics.  It did not seem necessary to include raw cotton fiber in the interdiction - a loophole on which cotton fanciers soon zeroed in.  Presently, the manufacture of cotton piecegoods was to be almost entirely transferred from India to Britain." (15)

Eighteenth century, looms become faster "The single-thread spinners had already been having a hard enough time meeting the demands of the old-style cottage looms.  Multiplying the speed of looms meant, of course, multiplying the demands, which required either a tremendously increased number of spinners or a greatly increased number of threads that each spinner could produce.  The time for spinning machines had come." (24)

"John Wyatt of Birmingham, who devised in 1738 a machine for "spinning by rollers". For a long time, John Wyatt received little credit for his part in this important invention since, because of personal money problems, he did not try to patent it in his own name but used the name of a more solvent associate.  Furthermore, Wyatt's invention was presently superseded, if not actually copied, by the man now usually creditted as the inventor of the spinning jenny, one Richard Arkwright" (24)

Hargreaves facts "Descirbed as "illiterate and a stout, broad-set man about five feet ten inches high" (30)

"Mobs formed and headed for Hargreaves' home, gutting it and destroying both his hated machine and his loom.  They could not, however, destroy his idea or his skills, which moved with him to another town where he formed a partnership with a man who would build a small cotton mill using the new spinning jenny. This gave the inventor enough cash to pay for a patent - dated July 12, 1770.  As inevitably as spinning machines were to become an accepted part of the burgeoning cotton industry, there would arise claims that Hargreaves has appropriated the inventions of others.  The actual fact, however, was that others were infringing upon Hargreaves' rights, making him an entirely legitimate member of the company of inventors. (31)