American cotton: a Yucatán domesticate that clothes the world, and the Spanish record of the fibre it left behind
The cotton grown almost everywhere today is Gossypium hirsutum, domesticated in the northern Yucatán some 5,500 years ago. Two Spanish witnesses show what the sixteenth century made of it: Oviedo reporting that Hispaniola's cotton went uncultivated because sugar and hides paid better, and Acosta counting 5,677 arrobas of cochineal against 64 arrobas of cotton in one fleet — the American fibre clothed America, not Europe, and did duty as money where coin was absent.
Why this wins its question: Cotton's global history is normally told from Manchester backwards, with the American contribution reduced to nineteenth-century plantation supply. The species question — that the cotton of nearly every field today was domesticated in the northern Yucatán about 5,500 years ago — is settled in the genomics literature but almost never joined to the colonial record, and the two disagreeing genomic readings are rarely reported together. This object does both, and adds what the sixteenth-century Spanish witnesses actually wrote: that Caribbean cotton went uncultivated because sugar and hides paid faster, that 64 arrobas of cotton crossed in the same fleet as 5,677 arrobas of cochineal, and that in some provinces woven cotton served as money. Achievement, motive and cost, each quoted from its page.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The cotton of the modern world is an American species. A 2026 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, resting on 392 sequenced samples — 158 newly collected in northern Yucatán, 141 from south-western coastal Florida, 51 previously sequenced wild Caribbean cottons, 30 domesticated accessions and 12 outgroups, yielding 21.6 million biallelic variants — concludes that "the Yucatán Peninsula (México) was the center of original domestication, from which later modern annualized cultivars were derived", and dates the parallel domestications of Gossypium hirsutum and G. barbadense from the archaeological record to "around 5,500 y ago in the northern Yucatán Peninsula". The paper calls cultivated cotton the leading fibre crop globally; it gives no percentage, and none is claimed here.
A single centre of origin is not the only reading on offer. A 2023 study of chloroplast genomes from 23 wild, landrace and breeding-line samples in Mexico concludes instead that "the evolutionary history of cotton in Mexico involves multiple events of introgression and genetic divergence", and estimates about 11,700 years BP between the wild Yucatán-Guatemala variety and the rest of its samples and about 3,600 years BP between the Banderas Bay wild population and the Oaxacan coyuchi landrace. The dissent is reported at lower confidence than the 2026 finding because 23 maternally inherited genomes are a much thinner sample than 392 nuclear-sequenced accessions.
Oviedo, writing as a resident of Hispaniola, states that the island's cotton was abundant and neglected: "En esta isla hay tanto algodon que la natura produçe, que si se diessen las gentes á lo curar y labrar, mas é mejor que en parte del mundo se haria." He measures the omission against the Aegean: on Chios, the principal island of the Genoese, cotton is one of their chief riches and industries, "y aqui no curan dello" — and here they take no care of it.
The same page says why, and does not flatter the reason. The island carried twenty powerful sugar ingenios besides horse-driven trapiches, ships going continually to Spain loaded with sugar at a ducat or a peso the arroba; and cattle in herds of eight, ten and twelve thousand head, of which three to five hundred at a time were killed for their hides while the meat was left to rot in the field, an arrelde of beef being worth two maravedís. Capital went where the return was quickest. Oviedo also names, in the same passage, who consumed the by-product: the molasses and leavings of the sugar "se pierden é se dan á los negros é trabajadores" — the enslaved workforce of the mills appears in the same sentence as the waste.
Acosta, in book IV chapter 23 of 1590, gives the fibre its place in the economy of the Indies without reference to Europe: cotton "es uno de los mayores beneficios que tienen las Indias, porque les sirue en lugar de lino y de lana para ropa". He locates it in the hot lands, the valleys and coast of Peru, in New Spain, in the Philippines and in China, and above all in Tucumán, Santa Cruz de la Sierra and Paraguay, where "en estas partes es el principal caudal", the principal capital of the country.
His own figures show which way the trade actually ran. Of the fleet he describes for 1587 he reports 5,677 arrobas of cochineal grana worth 283,750 pesos and about 25,263 arrobas of indigo from New Spain — against 64 arrobas of cotton brought from Santo Domingo to Spain in the same year. The dyes crossed the Atlantic; the fibre stayed. In the Indies, he writes, cotton "es la tela de que mas ordinariamente visten hombres y mugeres, y hazen ropa de mesa, y aun lonas, o velas de naos" — clothing, table linen and even the canvas of ships' sails.
He also records a finished craft rather than a raw material. There is a coarse and thick cotton cloth and another "delicado y subtil", and it is dyed in diverse colours so as to make "las diferencias, que en paños de Europa vemos en las lanas" — the range of grades and colours that European cloth achieved in wool. Elsewhere he notes that in the province of Santa Cruz de la Sierra woven cotton ran "por precio en lugar de dinero", in the same list as cacao in Mexico, coca in Peru and iron wedges in Paraguay, in markets he calls "grandísimos y frequentísimos" that needed neither coin nor middlemen because everyone was skilled at judging what was a fair exchange.
What neither Spanish writer could see is the depth of the achievement they were looking at. Oviedo takes the cotton of Hispaniola for something "la natura produçe", nature's own product awaiting European husbandry; the genomic evidence makes the plants of the Mesoamerican lowlands the outcome of some five millennia of selection by their cultivators, from which every modern annualised cultivar was later derived. The Spanish record is good evidence of the sixteenth-century economy of the fibre and poor evidence of its origins, and is used here only for the former.