A cotton and alpaca wool cloth from Peru, about 200 AD (in the Brooklyn Museum) First place where people grew cotton South America was the first place in the world where people grew [...]
India cotton bolls hanging from the plants India cotton farming About 2500 BC, a thousand years after people started to grow cotton in Peru, the Harappan people in India also [...]
Sharecroppers and cotton: Cotton pickers in the 1800s AD Slavery and the cotton gin The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 AD made it possible for enslaved people to [...]
Slavery and the Cotton Gin: A cotton baby dress from about 1796 AD (Wisconsin Historical Society) Cotton in the Caribbean When European explorers came to the West Indies in 1492 [...]
Ancient China trade: Rice paddy with a Chinese man planting rice Farming in Ancient China In China, as in West Asia, India, or Africa, most people have spent most of [...]
Qing Dynasty fisherman In the Qing Dynasty, most people kept on dressing the way they had before: both men and women wore mostly loose blue or black cotton shirts over [...]
Kyrgyz women spinning Around 1000 AD, the Mongols were still wearing mostly hemp clothing like the earlier Scythians. But in addition to their tunics, the Mongols sewed the hemp into [...]
Uzbek ruler in his yurt (1509, probably at Samarkand, in Uzbekistan) The Uzbek empire After the collapse of the Mongol Timur's empire in the 1400s AD, many smaller states replaced the [...]
Important to Uighur history: Yakub Beg Uighurs become independent After the collapse of the Mongol Empire about 1600 AD, the Uighurs regained their independence. Earlier Uighurs Who were the Mongols? [...]
Grasslands of Central Asia - the steppe In 1500 AD, most of Central Asia was grassland. Nomads rode horses and tended big herds of cattle there. Only in the western part of [...]
