Aesop's wolf in sheep's clothing is a well-known fable of a wolf that having disguised herself in the fleece of one of her prey, ‘whole flocks destroys’. Aesop tells a story of deception and devastation that ultimately ends with the wolf being brought to justice. Aesop's tale had great resonance among early modern Europeans, for whom a sheep's fleece was more than a captivating prop for a moral fairy tale. The entire European woollen industry depended on the sheep's fleece, and an eighteenth-century British commentator observed that ‘every wilful attempt to supplant or debase it, is an act of treason against the State’. In this story the wolf – cotton – degraded the rules that dominated the moral economy of pre-industrial Europe, opening the doors for an unprecedented growth that extended way beyond the limits that fibres such as wool, flax, hemp and silk had long imposed on the industrial development of the West.

Yet there is one important difference between the story of cotton and that of the wolf. Unlike Aesop's wolf, the ascendancy of western cotton textiles was not halted. The industry displayed a vitality that no creature – however mythical – could possibly embody. Cotton, a fibre that in the mid eighteenth century accounted for a tiny percentage of Europe's textile production, by the early decades of the following century became the most important textile in the West, characterised by new mechanised and urbanised structures of production. Historically, no other area had ever so radically changed its manufacturing economy, transforming a previously minor sector into the largest of its industries. In Britain, where cotton had accounted for just 2.6 per cent of value added in industry in 1770, by 1831 it had reached 22.4 per cent. Over the seventy years classically defined as ‘the industrial revolution’ (1760–1830), cotton production had increased at rates at least double that of other sectors of the British economy, especially in the 1780s following the introduction of innovative machinery in spinning.