Now in paperback, this is a history of the cotton industry, and the overwhelming role played by cotton in dictating the shape of our world. It won the Bancroft Prize and the Philip Taft Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
For about 900 years, from 1000 to 1900, cotton was the world's most important manufacturing industry. It remains a vast business - if all the cotton bales produced in 2013 had been stacked on top of each other they would have made a somewhat unstable tower 40,000 miles high.