Pictures of Cotton in Eighteenth-Century China

Pictures of Cotton in Eighteenth-Century China narrates cotton’s journey from a little understand material to a cherished commodity ennobled by associations with the classical heritage of China. In the 12th century, cotton, an imported crop, was plucked from the fields and entered the margins of agricultural treatises. The material was eventually “acknowledged” as cotton, an object distinct from silk, worthy of representation. By the late 16th century, representations of the plant and of the lab