The industrial production of cotton. For millennia, humans around the world have cultivated cotton and produced cloth. Invariably, cotton did not travel far to get to the loom. This all began changing in the eighteenth century and especially in the 1800s. Female laborers are ubiquitous in this illustration, along with the barefoot child carrying raw cotton. Steam engines equipped with industrial belts made the revolution in manufacturing possible, and sustained slavery and unfree labor from the USA to Egypt.