For thousands of years, the growing of cotton was a very small scale affair, mostly involving Indian farmers. Technological change and the introduction of capitalism changed all of that. First there was “war capitalism,” driven by the forcible appropriation of land and slavery. Conditions for workers in the mills were horrific, too. Then you had “industrial capitalism,” in which state power was used in a variety of ways to nudge, and sometimes compel, farmers around the world to give up growing other crops and to raise cotton exclusively. The result was widespread misery and famine. The British and American mill workers, for their part, ultimately put themselves out of work by demanding decent working conditions. Today, most cotton and cloth production takes place in impoverished countries, and the march of creative destruction continues unabated.
It is a depressing story, to say the least. I do have to make the following points in defense of capitalism, however: the history of the production of cotton cloth is not typical of capitalism, which did not typically depend on coercion and slavery; and the vast and widespread benefits to consumers are not considered in the book. For the world in its entirety, cheap cotton cloth was a blessing, not a curse, the immense pain it inflicted on its producers notwithstanding.