Cotton
History
Terminology

Cash crop
Commodity
Cottonopolis
Cotton Belt
Cotton diplomacy
King Cotton

Types

Gossypium hirsutum
Gossypium barbadense
Gossypium arboreum
Gossypium herbaceum

Production

Cotton-spinning machinery
Cotton gin
Cotton mill
Cotton picker
Mercerised cotton
Spinning jenny
Spinning mule
Spinning wheel
Water frame

Fabric

Cambric
Chino
Corduroy
Denim
Seersucker
Terrycloth
vt

Cotton is a soft, fluffy staple fiber that grows in a boll, or protective case, around the seeds of the cotton plants of the genus Gossypium in the mallow family Malvaceae. The fiber is almost pure cellulose. Under natural conditions, the cotton bolls will increase the dispersal of the seeds.
The plant is a shrub native to tropical and subtropical regions around the world, including the Americas, Africa, Egypt and India. The greatest diversity of wild cotton species is found in Mexico, followed by Australia and Africa.[1] Cotton was independently domesticated in the Old and New Worlds.
The fiber is most often spun into yarn or thread and used to make a soft, breathable textile. The use of cotton for fabric is known to date to prehistoric times; fragments of cotton fabric  dated to the fifth millennium BC have been found in the Indus Valley Civilization.
Although cultivated since antiquity, it was the invention of the cotton gin that lowered the cost of production that led to its widespread use, and it is the most widely used natural fiber cloth in clothing today.
Current estimates for world production are about 25 million tonnes or 110 million bales annually, accounting for 2.5% of the world's arable land. China is the world's largest producer of cotton, but most of this is used domestically. The United States has been the largest exporter for many years.[2] In the United States, cotton is usually measured in bales, which measure approximately 0.48 cubic meters (17 cubic feet) and weigh 226.8 kilograms (500 pounds).[3]
Types
There are four commercially grown species of cotton, all domesticated in antiquity:
Gossypium hirsutum– upland cotton, native to Central America, Mexico, the Caribbean and southern Florida (90% of world production)
Gossypium barbadense– known as extra-long staple cotton, native to tropical South America (8% of world production)
Gossypium arboreum– tree cotton, native to India and Pakistan (less than 2%)
Gossypium herbaceum– Levant cotton, native to southern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula (less than 2%)
The two New World cotton species account for the vast majority of modern cotton production, but the two Old World species were widely used before the 1900s. While cotton fibers occur naturally in colors of white, brown, pink and green, fears of contaminating the genetics of white cotton have led many cotton-growing locations to ban the growing of colored cotton varieties.
History

Early history
Indian subcontinent

The earliest evidence of cotton use in the Indian subcontinent has been found at the site of Mehrgarh and Rakhigarhi where cotton threads have been found preserved in copper beads; these finds have been dated to the Neolithic (5th millennium BC).[4][5] Cotton cultivation in the region is dated to the Indus Valley Civilization, which covered parts of modern eastern Pakistan and northwestern India between 3300 and 1300 BC.[6] The Indus cotton industry was well-developed and some methods used in cotton spinning and fabrication continued to be used until the industrialization of India.[7] Between 2000 and 1000 BC cotton became widespread across much of India.[8] For example, it has been found at the site of Hallus in Karnataka dating from around 1000 BC.[9]
Americas
Cotton bolls discovered in a cave near Tehuacán, Mexico, have been
dated to as early as 5500 BC, but this date has been challenged.[10] More securely dated is the domestication of Gossypium hirsutum in Mexico between around 3400 and 2300 BC.[11]
In Peru, cultivation of the indigenous cotton species Gossypium barbadense has been dated, from a find in Ancon, to c. 4200 BC,[12] and was the backbone of the development of coastal cultures such as the Norte Chico, Moche, and Nazca. Cotton was grown upriver, made into nets, and traded with fishing villages along the coast for large supplies of fish. The Spanish who came to Mexico and Peru in the early 16th century found the people growing cotton and wearing clothing made of it.
Arabia
The Greeks and the Arabs were not familiar with cotton until the Wars of Alexander the Great, as his contemporary Megasthenes told Seleucus I Nicator of "there being trees on which wool grows" in "Indica". This may be a reference to "tree cotton", Gossypium arboreum, which is a native of the Indian subcontinent.
According to the Columbia Encyclopedia:[9]
Cotton has been spun, woven, and dyed since prehistoric times. It clothed the people of ancient India, Egypt, and China. Hundreds of years before the Christian era, cotton textiles were woven in India with matchless skill, and their use spread to the Mediterranean countries.

Iran
In Iran (Persia), the history of cotton dates back to the Achaemenid era (5th century BC); however, there are few sources about the planting of cotton in pre-Islamic Iran. The planting of cotton was common in Merv, Ray and Pars of Iran. In Persian poets' poems, especially Ferdowsi's Shahname, there are references to cotton ("panbe" in Persian). Marco Polo (13th century) refers to the major products of Persia, including cotton. John Chardin, a French traveler of the 17th century who visited Safavid Persia, spoke approvingly of the vast cotton farms of Persia.[13]
China
During the Han dynasty (207 BC - 220 AD), cotton was grown by Chinese peoples in the southern Chinese province of Yunnan.[14]
Middle Ages
Eastern world
Egyptians grew and spun cotton in the first seven centuries of the Christian era.[15]
Handheld roller cotton gins had been used in India since the 6th century, and was then introduced to other countries from there.[16] Between the 12th and 14th centuries, dual-roller gins appeared in India and China. The Indian version of the dual-roller gin was prevalent throughout the Mediterranean cotton trade by the 16th century. This mechanical device was, in some areas, driven by water power.[17]
The spinning wheel was invented in India, between 500 and 1000 AD.[18] The earliest clear illustrations of the spinning wheel come from the Islamic world in the eleventh century.[19]
Europe

During the late medieval period, cotton became known as an imported fiber in northern Europe, without any knowledge of how it was derived, other than that it was a plant. Because Herodotus had written in his Histories, Book III, 106, that in India trees grew in the wild producing wool, it was assumed that the plant was a tree, rather than a shrub. This aspect is retained in the name for cotton in several Germanic languages, such as German Baumwolle, which translates as "tree wool" (Baum means "tree"; Wolle means "wool"). Noting its similarities to wool, people in the region could only imagine that cotton must be produced by plant-borne sheep. John Mandeville, writing in 1350, stated as fact that "There grew there [India] a wonderful tree which bore tiny lambs on the endes of its branches. These branches were so pliable that they bent down to allow the lambs to feed when they are hungry." (See Vegetable Lamb of Tartary.)
Cotton manufacture was introduced to Europe during the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula and Sicily. The knowledge of cotton weaving was spread to northern Italy in the 12th century, when Sicily was conquered by the Normans, and consequently to the rest of Europe. The spinning wheel, introduced to Europe circa 1350, improved the speed of cotton spinning.[20] By the 15th century, Venice, Antwerp, and Haarlem were important ports for cotton trade, and the sale and transportation of cotton fabrics had become very profitable.[21]
Early modern period
Mughal India

Under the Mughal Empire, which ruled in the Indian subcontinent from the early 16th century to the early 18th century, Indian cotton production increased, in terms of both raw cotton and cotton textiles. The Mughals introduced agrarian reforms such as a new revenue system that was biased in favour of higher value cash crops such as cotton and indigo, providing state incentives to grow cash crops, in addition to rising market demand.[22]
The largest manufacturing industry in the Mughal Empire was cotton textile manufacturing, which included the production of piece goods, calicos, and muslins, available unbleached and in a variety of colours. The cotton textile industry was responsible for a large part of the empire's international trade.[23] India had a 25% share of the global textile trade in the early 18th century.[24] Indian cotton textiles were the most important manufactured goods in world trade in the 18th century, consumed across the world from the Americas to Japan.[25] The most important center of cotton production was the Bengal Subah province, particularly around its capital city of Dhaka.[26]
The worm gear roller cotton gin, which was invented in India during the early Delhi Sultanate era of the 13th–14th centuries, came into use in the Mughal Empire some time around the 16th century,[27] and is still used in India through to the present day.[16] Another innovation, the incorporation of the crank handle in the cotton gin, first appeared in India some time during the late Delhi Sultanate or the early Mughal Empire.[28] The production of cotton, which may have largely been spun in the villages and then taken to towns in the form of yarn to be woven into cloth textiles, was advanced by the diffusion of the spinning wheel across India shortly before the Mughal era, lowering the costs of yarn and helping to increase demand for cotton. The diffusion of the spinning wheel, and the incorporation of the worm gear and crank handle into the roller cotton gin, led to greatly expanded Indian cotton textile production during the Mughal era.[29]
It was reported that, with an Indian cotton gin, which is half machine and half tool, one man and one woman could clean 28 pounds of cotton per day. With a modified Forbes version, one man and a boy could produce 250 pounds per day. If oxen were used to power 16 of these machines, and a few people's labour was used to feed them, they could produce as much work as 750 people did formerly.[30]
Egypt

In the early 19th century, a Frenchman named M. Jumel proposed to the great ruler of Egypt, Mohamed Ali Pasha, that he could earn a substantial income by growing an extra-long staple Maho (Gossypium barbadense) cotton, in Lower Egypt, for the French market. Mohamed Ali Pasha accepted the proposition and granted himself the monopoly on the sale and export of cotton in Egypt; and later dictated cotton should be grown in preference to other crops.
Egypt under Muhammad Ali in the early 19th century had the fifth most productive cotton industry in the world, in terms of the number of spindles per capita.[31] The industry was initially driven by machinery that relied on traditional energy sources, such as animal power, water wheels, and windmills, which were also the principal energy sources in Western Europe up until around 1870.[32] It was under Muhammad Ali in the early 19th century that steam engines were introduced to the Egyptian cotton industry.[32]
By the time of the American Civil war annual exports had reached $16 million (120,000 bales), which rose to $56 million by 1864, primarily due to the loss of the Confederate supply on the world market. Exports continued to grow even after the reintroduction of US cotton, produced now by a paid workforce, and Egyptian exports reached 1.2 million bales a year by 1903.
Britain
East India Company

The English East India Company introduced the Britain to cheap calico and chintz cloth on the restoration of the monarchy in the 1660s. Initially imported as a novelty side line, from its spice trading posts in Asia, the cheap colourful cloth proved popular and overtook the EIC's spice trade by value in the late 17th century. The EIC embraced the demand, particularly for calico, by expanding its factories in Asia and producing and importing cloth in bulk, creating competition for domestic woollen and linen textile producers. The impacted weavers, spinners, dyers, shepherds and farmers objected and the calico question became one of the major issues of National politics between the 1680s and the 1730s. Parliament began to see a decline in domestic textile sales, and an increase in imported textiles from places like China and India. Seeing the East India Company and their textile importation as a threat to domestic textile businesses, Parliament passed the 1700 Calico Act, blocking the importation of cotton cloth. As there was no punishment for continuing to sell cotton cloth, smuggling of the popular material became commonplace. In 1721, dissatisfied with the results of the first act, Parliament passed a stricter addition, this time prohibiting the sale of most cottons, imported and domestic (exempting only thread Fustian and raw cotton). The exemption of raw cotton from the prohibition initially saw 2 thousand bales of cotton imported annually, to become the basis of a new indigenous industry, initially producing Fustian for the domestic market, though more importantly triggering the development of a series of mechanised spinning and weaving technologies, to process the material. This mechanised production was concentrated in new cotton mills, which slowly expanded till by the beginning of the 1770s seven thousand bales of cotton were imported annually, and pressure was put on Parliament, by the new mill owners, to remove the prohibition on the production and sale of pure cotton cloth, as they could easily compete with anything the EIC could import.
The acts were repealed in 1774, triggering a wave of investment in mill based cotton spinning and production, doubling the demand for raw cotton within a couple of years, and doubling it again every decade, into the 1840s[33]
Indian cotton textiles, particularly those from Bengal, continued to maintain a competitive advantage up until the 19th century. In order to compete with India, Britain invested in labour-saving technical progress, while implementing protectionist policies such as bans and tariffs to restrict Indian imports.[34] At the same time, the East India Company's rule in India contributed to its deindustrialization, opening up a new market for British goods,[34] while the capital amassed from Bengal after its 1757 conquest was used to invest in British industries such as textile manufacturing and greatly increase British wealth.[35][36] British colonization also forced open the large Indian market to British goods, which could be sold in India without tariffs or duties, compared to local Indian producers who were heavily taxed, while raw cotton was imported from India without tariffs to British factories which manufactured textiles from Indian cotton, giving Britain a monopoly over India's large market and cotton resources.[37][34][38] India served as both a significant supplier of raw goods to British manufacturers and a large captive market for British manufactured goods.[39] Britain eventually surpassed India as the world's leading cotton textile manufacturer in the 19th century.[34]
India's cotton-processing sector changed during EIC expansion in India in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. From focusing on supplying the British market to supplying East Asia with raw cotton. As the Artisan produced textiles were no longer competitive with those produced Industrially, and Europe preferring the cheaper slave produced, long staple American, and Egyptian cottons, for its own materials.
Industrial Revolution

The advent of the Industrial Revolution in Britain provided a great boost to cotton manufacture, as textiles emerged as Britain's leading export. In 1738, Lewis Paul and John Wyatt, of Birmingham, England, patented the roller spinning machine, as well as the flyer-and-bobbin system for drawing cotton to a more even thickness using two sets of rollers that traveled at different speeds. Later, the invention of the James Hargreaves' spinning jenny in 1764, Richard Arkwright's spinning frame in 1769 and Samuel Crompton's spinning mule in 1775 enabled British spinners to produce cotton yarn at much higher rates. From the late 18th century on, the British city of Manchester acquired the nickname "Cottonopolis" due to the cotton industry's omnipresence within the city, and Manchester's role as the heart of the global cotton trade.
Production capacity in Britain and the United States was improved by the invention of the modern cotton gin by the American Eli Whitney in 1793. Before the development of cotton gins, the cotton fibers had to be pulled from the seeds tediously by hand. By the late 1700s, a number of crude ginning machines had been developed. However, to produce a bale of cotton required over 600 hours of human labor,[40] making large-scale production uneconomical in the United States, even with the use of humans as slave labor. The gin that Whitney manufactured (the Holmes design) reduced the hours down to just a dozen or so per bale. Although Whitney patented his own design for a cotton gin, he manufactured a prior design from Henry Odgen Holmes, for which Holmes filed a patent in 1796.[40] Improving technology and increasing control of world markets allowed British traders to develop a commercial chain in which raw cotton fibers were (at first) purchased from colonial plantations, processed into cotton cloth in the mills of Lancashire, and then exported on British ships to captive colonial markets in West Africa, India, and China (via Shanghai and Hong Kong).
By the 1840s, India was no longer capable of supplying the vast quantities of cotton fibers needed by mechanized British factories, while shipping bulky, low-price cotton from India to Britain was time-consuming and expensive. This, coupled with the emergence of American cotton as a superior type (due to the longer, stronger fibers of the two domesticated Native American species, Gossypium hirsutum and Gossypium barbadense), encouraged British traders to purchase cotton from plantations in the United States and plantations in the Caribbean. By the mid-19th century, "King Cotton" had become the backbone of the southern American economy. In the United States, cultivating and harvesting cotton became the leading occupation of slaves.
During the American Civil War, American cotton exports slumped due to a Union blockade on Southern ports, and also because of a strategic decision by the Confederate government to cut exports, hoping to force Britain to recognize the Confederacy or enter the war. This prompted the main purchasers of cotton, Britain and France, to turn to Egyptian cotton. British and French traders invested heavily in cotton plantations. The Egyptian government of Viceroy Isma'il took out substantial loans from European bankers and stock exchanges. After the American Civil War ended in 1865, British and French traders abandoned Egyptian cotton and returned to cheap American exports, sending Egypt into a deficit spiral that led to the country declaring bankruptcy in 1876, a key factor behind Egypt's occupation by the British Empire in 1882.
During this time, cotton cultivation in the British Empire, especially Australia and India, greatly increased to replace the lost production of the American South. Through tariffs and other restrictions, the British government discouraged the production of cotton cloth in India; rather, the raw fiber was sent to England for processing. The Indian Mahatma Gandhi described the process:
English people buy Indian cotton in the field, picked by Indian labor at seven cents a day, through an optional monopoly.
This cotton is shipped on British ships, a three-week journey across the Indian Ocean, down the Red Sea, across the Mediterranean, through Gibraltar, across the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic Ocean to London. One hundred per cent profit on this freight is regarded as small.
The cotton is turned into cloth in Lancashire. You pay shilling wages instead of Indian pennies to your workers. The English worker not only has the advantage of better wages, but the steel companies of England get the profit of building the factories and machines. Wages; profits; all these are spent in England.
The finished product is sent back to India at European shipping rates, once again on British ships. The captains, officers, sailors of these ships, whose wages must be paid, are English. The only Indians who profit are a few lascars who do the dirty work on the boats for a few cents a day.
The cloth is finally sold back to the kings and landlords of India who got the money to buy this expensive cloth out of the poor peasants of India who worked at seven cents a day.[41]
United States

In the United States, Southern cotton provided capital for the continuing development of the North. The cotton was largely produced through the labor of enslaved African Americans. It enriched both the Southern landowners and the Northern merchants. Much of the Southern cotton was trans-shipped through northern ports. In this era the slogan "Cotton is king" characterized the attitude of the South toward this monocrop.
Cotton remained a key crop in the Southern economy after emancipation and the end of the Civil War in 1865. Across the South, sharecropping evolved, in which landless black and white farmers worked land owned by others in return for a share of the profits. Some farmers rented the land and bore the production costs themselves. Until mechanical cotton pickers were developed, cotton farmers needed additional labor to hand-pick cotton. Picking cotton was a source of income for families across the South. Rural and small town school systems had split vacations so children could work in the fields during "cotton-picking."
It was not until the 1950s that reliable harvesting machinery was introduced (prior to this, cotton-harvesting machinery had been too clumsy to pick cotton without shredding the fibers).  During the first half of the 20th century, employment in the cotton industry fell, as machines began to replace laborers and the South's rural labor force dwindled during the World Wars.
Cotton remains a major export of the southern United States, and a majority of the world's annual cotton crop is of the long-staple American variety.[42]
The Moon
China's Chang'e 4 brought cotton seed sprouts to the Moon's far side.  On January 15, China announced a cotton seed sprouted, the first "truly otherworldly plant in history."  Inside the Von Kármán Crater,  the capsule and seeds sit inside the Chang'e 4 lander.[43]
Cultivation

Successful cultivation of cotton requires a long frost-free period, plenty of sunshine, and a moderate rainfall, usually from 60 to 120cm (24 to 47in). Soils usually need to be fairly heavy, although the level of nutrients does not need to be exceptional. In general, these conditions are met within the seasonally dry tropics and subtropics in the Northern and Southern hemispheres, but a large proportion of the cotton grown today is cultivated in areas with less rainfall that obtain the water from irrigation. Production of the crop for a given year usually starts soon after harvesting the preceding autumn. Cotton is naturally a perennial but is grown as an annual to help control pests.[44] Planting time in spring in the Northern hemisphere varies from the beginning of February to the beginning of June. The area of the United States known as the South Plains is the largest contiguous cotton-growing region in the world. While dryland (non-irrigated) cotton is successfully grown in this region, consistent yields are only produced with heavy reliance on irrigation water drawn from the Ogallala Aquifer.
Since cotton is somewhat salt and drought tolerant, this makes it an attractive crop for arid and semiarid regions. As water resources get tighter around the world, economies that rely on it face difficulties and conflict, as well as potential environmental problems.[45][46][47][48][49] For example, improper cropping and irrigation practices have led to desertification in areas of Uzbekistan, where cotton is a major export. In the days of the Soviet Union, the Aral Sea was tapped for agricultural irrigation, largely of cotton, and now salination is widespread.[48][49]
Cotton can also be cultivated to have colors other than the yellowish off-white typical of modern commercial cotton fibers. Naturally colored cotton can come in red, green, and several shades of brown.[50]
Genetic modification

Genetically modified (GM) cotton was developed to reduce the heavy reliance on pesticides. The bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) naturally produces a chemical harmful only to a small fraction of insects, most notably the larvae of moths and butterflies, beetles, and flies, and harmless to other forms of life.[51][52][53] The gene coding for Bt toxin has been inserted into cotton, causing cotton, called Bt cotton, to produce this natural insecticide in its tissues. In many regions, the main pests in commercial cotton are lepidopteran larvae, which are killed by the Bt protein in the transgenic cotton they eat. This eliminates the need to use large amounts of broad-spectrum insecticides to kill lepidopteran pests (some of which have developed pyrethroid resistance). This spares natural insect predators in the farm ecology and further contributes to noninsecticide pest management.
But Bt cotton is ineffective against many cotton pests, however, such as plant bugs, stink bugs, and aphids; depending on circumstances it may still be desirable to use insecticides against these. A 2006 study done by Cornell researchers, the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy and the Chinese Academy of Science on Bt cotton farming in China found that after seven years these secondary pests that were normally controlled by pesticide had increased, necessitating the use of pesticides at similar levels to non-Bt cotton and causing less profit for farmers because of the extra expense of GM seeds.[54] However, a 2009 study by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Stanford University and Rutgers University refuted this.[55] They concluded that the GM cotton effectively controlled bollworm. The secondary pests were mostly miridae (plant bugs) whose increase was related to local temperature and rainfall and only continued to increase in half the villages studied. Moreover, the increase in insecticide use for the control of these secondary insects was far smaller than the reduction in total insecticide use due to Bt cotton adoption. A 2012 Chinese study concluded that Bt cotton halved the use of pesticides and doubled the level of ladybirds, lacewings and spiders.[56][57] The International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA) said that, worldwide, GM cotton was planted on an area of 25 million hectares in 2011.[58] This was 69% of the worldwide total area planted in cotton.
GM cotton acreage in India grew at a rapid rate, increasing from 50,000 hectares in 2002 to 10.6 million hectares in 2011. The total cotton area in India was 12.1 million hectares in 2011, so GM cotton was grown on 88% of the cotton area. This made India the country with the largest area of GM cotton in the world.[58] A long-term study on the economic impacts of Bt cotton in India, published in the Journal PNAS in 2012, showed that Bt cotton has increased yields, profits, and living standards of smallholder farmers.[59] The U.S. GM cotton crop was 4.0 million hectares in 2011 the second largest area in the world, the Chinese GM cotton crop was third largest by area with 3.9 million hectares and Pakistan had the fourth largest GM cotton crop area of 2.6 million hectares in 2011.[58] The initial introduction of GM cotton proved to be a success in Australia– the yields were equivalent to the non-transgenic varieties and the crop used much less pesticide to produce (85% reduction).[60] The subsequent introduction of a second variety of GM cotton led to increases in GM cotton production until 95% of the Australian cotton crop was GM in 2009[61] making Australia the country with the fifth largest GM cotton crop in the world.[58] Other GM cotton growing countries in 2011 were Argentina, Myanmar, Burkina Faso, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, South Africa and Costa Rica.[58]
Cotton has been genetically modified for resistance to glyphosate a broad-spectrum herbicide discovered by Monsanto which also sells some of the Bt cotton seeds to farmers. There are also a number of other cotton seed companies selling GM cotton around the world. About 62% of the GM cotton grown from 1996 to 2011 was insect resistant, 24% stacked product and 14% herbicide resistant.[58]
Cotton has gossypol, a toxin that makes it inedible. However, scientists have silenced the gene that produces the toxin, making it a potential food crop.[62] On October 17, 2018, the USDA deregulated GE low-gossypol cotton.[63][64]
Organic production
Organic cotton is generally understood as cotton from plants not genetically modified and that is certified to be grown without the use of any synthetic agricultural chemicals, such as fertilizers or pesticides.[65] Its production also promotes and enhances biodiversity and biological cycles.[66] In the United States, organic cotton plantations are required to enforce the National Organic Program (NOP). This institution determines the allowed practices for pest control, growing, fertilizing, and handling of organic crops.[67] As of 2007, 265,517 bales of organic cotton were produced in 24 countries, and worldwide production was growing at a rate of more than 50% per year.[68]
Pests and weeds

The cotton industry relies heavily on chemicals, such as herbicides, fertilizers and insecticides, although a very small number of farmers are moving toward an organic model of production, and organic cotton products are now available for purchase at limited locations. These are popular for baby clothes and diapers. Under most definitions, organic products do not use genetic engineering. All natural cotton products are known to be both sustainable and hypoallergenic.
Historically, in North America, one of the most economically destructive pests in cotton production has been the boll weevil. Due to the US Department of Agriculture's highly successful Boll Weevil Eradication Program (BWEP), this pest has been eliminated from cotton in most of the United States. This program, along with the introduction of genetically engineered Bt cotton (which contains a bacterial gene that codes for a plant-produced protein that is toxic to a number of pests such as cotton bollworm and pink bollworm), has allowed a reduction in the use of synthetic insecticides.
Other significant global pests of cotton include the pink bollworm, Pectinophora gossypiella; the chili thrips, Scirtothrips dorsalis; the cotton seed bug, Oxycarenus hyalinipennis; the tarnish plant bug, Lygus lineolaris; and the fall armyworm, Spodoptera frugiperda, Xanthomonas citri subsp. malvacearum.
Harvesting

Most cotton in the United States, Europe and Australia is harvested mechanically, either by a cotton picker, a machine that removes the cotton from the boll without damaging the cotton plant, or by a cotton stripper, which strips the entire boll off the plant. Cotton strippers are used in regions where it is too windy to grow picker varieties of cotton, and usually after application of a chemical defoliant or the natural defoliation that occurs after a freeze. Cotton is a perennial crop in the tropics, and without defoliation or freezing, the plant will continue to grow.
Cotton continues to be picked by hand in developing countries.[69]
Competition from synthetic fibers
The era of manufactured fibers began with the development of rayon in France in the 1890s. Rayon is derived from a natural cellulose and cannot be considered synthetic, but requires extensive processing in a manufacturing process, and led the less expensive replacement of more naturally derived materials. A succession of new synthetic fibers were introduced by the chemicals industry in the following decades. Acetate in fiber form was developed in 1924. Nylon, the first fiber synthesized entirely from petrochemicals, was introduced as a sewing thread by DuPont in 1936, followed by DuPont's acrylic in 1944. Some garments were created from fabrics based on these fibers, such as women's hosiery from nylon, but it was not until the introduction of polyester into the fiber marketplace in the early 1950s that the market for cotton came under threat.[70] The rapid uptake of polyester garments in the 1960s caused economic hardship in cotton-exporting economies, especially in Central American countries, such as Nicaragua, where cotton production had boomed tenfold between 1950 and 1965 with the advent of cheap chemical pesticides. Cotton production recovered in the 1970s, but crashed to pre-1960 levels in the early 1990s.[71]
Uses

Cotton is used to make a number of textile products. These include terrycloth for highly absorbent bath towels and robes; denim for blue jeans; cambric, popularly used in the manufacture of blue work shirts (from which we get the term "blue-collar"); and corduroy, seersucker, and cotton twill. Socks, underwear, and most T-shirts are made from cotton. Bed sheets often are made from cotton. Cotton also is used to make yarn used in crochet and knitting. Fabric also can be made from recycled or recovered cotton that otherwise would be thrown away during the spinning, weaving, or cutting process. While many fabrics are made completely of cotton, some materials blend cotton with other fibers, including rayon and synthetic fibers such as polyester. It can either be used in knitted or woven fabrics, as it can be blended with elastine to make a stretchier thread for knitted fabrics, and apparel such as stretch jeans. Cotton can be blended also with linen as Linen-cotton blends which give benefit of both plant materials which wrinkle resistant, lightweight,  breathable and can keep heat more effectively than only linen. These blends are thinner and lighter, but stronger than only cotton.[72]
In addition to the textile industry, cotton is used in fishing nets, coffee filters, tents, explosives manufacture (see nitrocellulose), cotton paper, and in bookbinding. The first Chinese paper was made of cotton fiber. Fire hoses were once made of cotton.
The cottonseed which remains after the cotton is ginned is used to produce cottonseed oil, which, after refining, can be consumed by humans like any other vegetable oil. The cottonseed meal that is left generally is fed to ruminant livestock; the gossypol remaining in the meal is toxic to monogastric animals. Cottonseed hulls can be added to dairy cattle rations for roughage. During the American slavery period, cotton root bark was used in folk remedies as an abortifacient, that is, to induce a miscarriage. Gossypol was one of the many substances found in all parts of the cotton plant and it was described by the scientists as 'poisonous pigment'. It also appears to inhibit the development of sperm or even restrict the mobility of the sperm. Also, it is thought to interfere with the menstrual cycle by restricting the release of certain hormones.[73]
Cotton linters are fine, silky fibers which adhere to the seeds of the cotton plant after ginning. These curly fibers typically are less than 1⁄8 inch (3.2mm) long. The term also may apply to the longer textile fiber staple lint as well as the shorter fuzzy fibers from some upland species. Linters are traditionally used in the manufacture of paper and as a raw material in the manufacture of cellulose. In the UK, linters are referred to as "cotton wool". This can also be a refined product (absorbent cotton in U.S. usage) which has medical, cosmetic and many other practical uses. The first medical use of cotton wool was by Sampson Gamgee at the Queen's Hospital (later the General Hospital) in Birmingham, England.
Shiny cotton is a processed version of the fiber that can be made into cloth resembling satin for shirts and suits.[74] However, it is hydrophobic (does not absorb water easily), which makes it unfit for use in bath and dish towels (although examples of these made from shiny cotton are seen).
Long staple (LS cotton) is cotton of a longer fibre length and therefore of higher quality, while Extra-long staple cotton (ELS cotton) has longer fibre length still and of even higher quality. The name "Egyptian cotton" is broadly associated high quality cottons and is often an LS or (less often) an ELS cotton.[75] The American cotton variety Pima cotton is often compared to Egyptian cotton, as both are used in high quality bed sheets and other cotton products. While Pima cotton is often grown in the American southwest,[76] the Pima name is now used by cotton-producing nations such as Peru, Australia and Israel.[77] Not all products bearing the Pima name are made with the finest cotton: American-grown ELS Pima cotton is trademarked as Supima® cotton.[78]

Cotton lisle is a finely-spun, tightly twisted type of cotton that is noted for being strong and durable. Lisle is composed of two strands that have each been twisted an extra twist per inch than ordinary yarns and combined to create a single thread. The yarn is spun so that it is compact and solid. This cotton is used mainly for underwear, stockings, and gloves. Colors applied to this yarn are noted for being more brilliant than colors applied to softer yarn. This type of thread was first made in the city of Lisle, France (now Lille), hence its name.[79][80][81]
International trade

The largest producers of cotton, currently (2009), are China and India, with annual production of about 34 million bales and 33.4 million bales, respectively; most of this production is consumed by their respective textile industries. The largest exporters of raw cotton are the United States, with sales of $4.9 billion, and Africa, with sales of $2.1 billion. The total international trade is estimated to be $12 billion. Africa's share of the cotton trade has doubled since 1980. Neither area has a significant domestic textile industry, textile manufacturing having moved to developing nations in Eastern and South Asia such as India and China. In Africa, cotton is grown by numerous small holders. Dunavant Enterprises, based in Memphis, Tennessee, is the leading cotton broker in Africa, with hundreds of purchasing agents. It operates cotton gins in Uganda, Mozambique, and Zambia. In Zambia, it often offers loans for seed and expenses to the 180,000 small farmers who grow cotton for it, as well as advice on farming methods. Cargill also purchases cotton in Africa for export.
The 25,000 cotton growers in the United States are heavily subsidized at the rate of $2 billion per year although China now provides the highest overall level of cotton sector support.[82] The future of these subsidies is uncertain and has led to anticipatory expansion of cotton brokers' operations in Africa. Dunavant expanded in Africa by buying out local operations. This is only possible in former British colonies and Mozambique; former French colonies continue to maintain tight monopolies, inherited from their former colonialist masters, on cotton purchases at low fixed prices.[83]
Leading producer countries

The five leading exporters of cotton in 2011 are (1) the United States, (2) India, (3) Brazil, (4) Australia, and (5) Uzbekistan. The largest nonproducing importers are Korea, Taiwan, Russia, and Japan.[85]
In India, the states of Maharashtra (26.63%), Gujarat (17.96%) and Andhra Pradesh (13.75%) and also Madhya Pradesh are the leading cotton producing states,[86] these states have a predominantly tropical wet and dry climate.
In the United States, the state of Texas led in total production as of 2004,[87] while the state of California had the highest yield per acre.[88]
Fair trade
Cotton is an enormously important commodity throughout the world. However, many farmers in developing countries receive a low price for their produce, or find it difficult to compete with developed countries.
This has led to an international dispute (see United States – Brazil cotton dispute):
On 27 September 2002, Brazil requested consultations with the US regarding prohibited and actionable subsidies provided to US producers, users and/or exporters of upland cotton, as well as legislation, regulations, statutory instruments and amendments thereto providing such subsidies (including export credits), grants, and any other assistance to the US producers, users and exporters of upland cotton.[89]
On 8 September 2004, the Panel Report recommended that the United States "withdraw" export credit guarantees and payments to domestic users and exporters, and "take appropriate steps to remove the adverse effects or withdraw" the mandatory price-contingent subsidy measures.[90]

While Brazil was fighting the US through the WTO's Dispute Settlement Mechanism against a heavily subsidized cotton industry, a group of four least-developed African countries– Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Mali– also known as "Cotton-4" have been the leading protagonist for the reduction of US cotton subsidies through negotiations. The four introduced a "Sectoral Initiative in Favour of Cotton", presented by Burkina Faso's President Blaise Compaoré during the Trade Negotiations Committee on 10 June 2003.[91]
In addition to concerns over subsidies, the cotton industries of some countries are criticized for employing child labor and damaging workers' health by exposure to pesticides used in production. The Environmental Justice Foundation has campaigned against the prevalent use of forced child and adult labor in cotton production in Uzbekistan, the world's third largest cotton exporter.[92] The international production and trade situation has led to "fair trade" cotton clothing and footwear, joining a rapidly growing market for organic clothing, fair fashion or "ethical fashion". The fair trade system was initiated in 2005 with producers from Cameroon, Mali and Senegal.[93]
Trade

Cotton is bought and sold by investors and price speculators as a tradable commodity on 2 different commodity exchanges in the United States of America.
Cotton No. 2 futures contracts are traded on the New York Board of Trade (NYBOT) under the ticker symbol CT. They are delivered every year in March, May, July, October, and December.[94]
Cotton futures contracts are traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) under the ticker symbol TT. They are delivered every year in March, May, July, October, and December.[95]
Critical temperatures
Favorable travel temperature range: below 25°C (77°F)
Optimum travel temperature: 21°C (70°F)
Glow temperature: 205°C (401°F)
Fire point: 210°C (410°F)
Autoignition temperature: 360°C (680°F) - 425°C (797°F)[96]
Autoignition temperature (for oily cotton): 120°C (248°F)
A temperature range of 25 to 35°C (77 to 95°F) is the optimal range for mold development. At temperatures below 0°C (32°F), rotting of wet cotton stops. Damaged cotton is sometimes stored at these temperatures to prevent further deterioration.[97]
Egypt has a unique climatic temperature that the soil and the temperature provide an exceptional environment for cotton to grow rapidly.
British standard yarn measures
1 thread = 55in or 140cm
1 skein or rap = 80 threads (120yd or 110m)
1 hank = 7 skeins (840yd or 770m)
1 spindle = 18 hanks (15,120yd or 13.83km)
Fiber properties

The chemical composition of cotton is as follows:
cellulose 91.00%
water 7.85%
protoplasm, pectins 0.55%
waxes, fatty substances 0.40%
mineral salts 0.20%
Genome

There is a public effort to sequence the genome of cotton. It was started in 2007 by a consortium of public researchers.[98]  Their aim is to sequence the genome of cultivated, tetraploid cotton. "Tetraploid" means that its nucleus has two separate genomes, called A and D. The consortium agreed to first sequence the D-genome wild relative of cultivated cotton (G. raimondii, a Central American species) because it is small and has few repetitive elements. It has nearly one-third of the bases of tetraploid cotton, and each chromosome occurs only once. Then, the A genome of G. arboreum would be sequenced. Its genome is roughly twice that of G. raimondii. Part of the difference in size is due the amplification of retrotransposons (GORGE). After both diploid genomes are assembled, they would be used as models for sequencing the genomes of tetraploid cultivated species. Without knowing the diploid genomes, the euchromatic DNA sequences of AD genomes would co-assemble, and their repetitive elements would assemble independently into A and D sequences respectively. There would be no way to untangle the mess of AD sequences without comparing them to their diploid counterparts.
The public sector effort continues with the goal to create a high-quality, draft genome sequence from reads generated by all sources. The effort has generated Sanger reads of BACs, fosmids, and plasmids, as well as 454 reads. These later types of reads will be instrumental in assembling an initial draft of the D genome. In 2010, the companies Monsanto and Illumina completed enough Illumina sequencing to cover the D genome of G. raimondii about 50x.[99] They announced that they would donate their raw reads to the public. This public relations effort gave them some recognition for sequencing the cotton genome. Once the D genome is assembled from all of this raw material, it will undoubtedly assist in the assembly of the AD genomes of cultivated varieties of cotton, but much work remains.
See also

Cotton gin
Cotton mill
Cotton recycling
Diplomacy of the American Civil War#Cotton and the British economy
International Cotton Advisory Committee
Java cotton (kapok)
King Cotton
Madapolam
Mercerized cotton
Sea Island Cotton
The Cotton Museum

Further reading
Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Knopf, 2014.
Brown, D. Clayton. King Cotton: A Cultural, Political, and Economic History since 1945 (University Press of Mississippi, 2011) 440 pp. ISBN978-1-60473-798-1
Ensminger, Audrey H. and Konlande, James E. Foods and Nutrition Encyclopedia, (2nd ed. CRC Press, 1993). ISBN0-8493-8980-1

Moseley, W.G. and L.C. Gray (eds). Hanging by a Thread: Cotton, Globalization and Poverty in Africa (Ohio University Press and Nordic Africa Press, 2008). ISBN978-0-89680-260-5
Riello, Giorgio. Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (2013)
Smith, C. Wayne and Joe Tom Cothren. Cotton: origin, history, technology, and production (1999) 850 pages
True, Alfred Charles. The cotton plant: its history, botany, chemistry, culture, enemies, and uses (U.S. Office of Experiment Stations, 1896)
Yafa, Stephen H. Big Cotton: How A Humble Fiber Created Fortunes, Wrecked Civilizations, and Put America on the Map (2004) ; also published as Cotton: The Biography of a Revolutionary Fiber. New York: Penguin USA, 2006.

Which country is the highest producer of cotton?


The Bactrian camel (Camelus bactrianus) is a large, even-toed ungulate native to the steppes of Central Asia. The Bactrian camel has two humps on its back, in contrast to the single-humped dromedary camel.[2] Its population of two million exists mainly in the domesticated form.[3] Their name comes from the ancient historical region of Bactria.[4]
Domesticated Bactrian camels have served as pack animals in inner Asia since ancient times. With its tolerance for cold, drought, and high altitudes, it enabled the travel of caravans on the Silk Road.[5] A small number of feral Bactrian camels still roam the Mangystau Province of southwest Kazakhstan and the Nubra Valley in India.[6] Bactrian camels, whether domesticated or feral, are a separate species from the wild Bactrian camel which is the only truly wild (as opposed to feral) species of camel in the world.
Taxonomy

Lamini

Alpaca

Vicuña

Llama
GuanacoCamelini

Dromedary

Wild Bactrian camel
Bactrian camelPhylogenetic relationships of the dromedary from combined analysis of all molecular data.[7]
The Bactrian camel shares the genus Camelus with the dromedary (C. dromedarius) and the wild Bactrian camel (C. ferus). The Bactrian camel belongs to the family Camelidae.[1][8] The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle was the first to describe the species of Camelus: in his 4th-century-BC History of Animals he identified the one-humped Arabian camel and the two-humped Bactrian camel.[9][10] The Bactrian camel was given its current binomial name Camelus bactrianus by Swedish zoologist Carl Linnaeus in his 1758 publication Systema Naturae.[11]
In 2007, Peng Cui (of the Chinese Academy of Sciences) and colleagues carried out a phylogenetic study of the evolutionary relationships between the two tribes of Camelidae: Camelini — consisting of the three Camelus species (the study considered the wild Bactrian camel as a subspecies of the Bactrian camel) — and Lamini — consisting of the alpaca (Vicugna pacos), the guanaco (Lama guanicoe), the llama (L. glama) and the vicuña (V. vicugna). The study revealed that the two tribes had diverged 25 million years ago (early Miocene), notably earlier than what had been previously estimated from North American fossils. Speciation began first in Lamini as the alpaca came into existence 10 million years ago (late Pleistocene). Nearly two million years later, the Bactrian camel and the dromedary emerged as two independent species.[7]
The Bactrian camel and the dromedary often interbreed to produce fertile offspring. Where the ranges of the two species overlap, such as in northern Punjab, Iran and Afghanistan, the phenotypic differences between them tend to decrease as a result of extensive crossbreeding between them. The fertility of their hybrid has given rise to speculation that the Bactrian camel and the dromedary should be merged into a single species with two varieties.[12] However, a 1994 analysis of the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene revealed that the species display 10.3% divergence in their sequences.[13]
Differences from wild Bactrian camels
The wild Bactrian camel (Camelus ferus) was first described by Nikolay Przhevalsky in the late 19th century and has now been established as a distinct species from the Bactrian camel (Camelus bactrianus).[14][15]
Zoological opinion nowadays tends to favour the idea that C. bactrianus and C. dromedarius are descendants of two different subspecies of C. ferus (Peters and von den Driesch 1997: 652) and there is no evidence to suggest that the original range of C. ferus included those parts of Central Asia and Iran where some of the earliest Bactrian remains have been found.[16] In particular, a population of wild Bactrian camel has been discovered to live within a part of the Gashun Gobi region of the Gobi Desert. This population is distinct from domesticated herds both in genetic makeup[17] and in behavior.
As many as three regions in the genetic makeup are distinctly different from Bactrian camels, with up to a 3% difference in the base genetic code. However, with so few wild camels, what the natural genetic diversity within a population would have been is not clear.
Another difference is the ability of these wild camels to drink saltwater slush, although whether the camel can extract useful water from it is not yet certain. Domesticated camels are unable to drink such salty water.[18]
Description

The Bactrian camel is the largest mammal in its native range and is the largest living camel. Shoulder height is from 180 to 230cm (5.9 to 7.5ft), head-and-body length is 225–350cm (7.38–11.48ft), and the tail length is 35–55cm (14–22in). At the top of the humps, the average height is 213cm (6.99ft). Body mass can range from 300 to 1,000kg (660 to 2,200lb), with males often being much larger and heavier than females.[3][19] Its long, wooly coat varies in colour from dark brown to sandy beige. A mane and beard of long hair occurs on the neck and throat, with hairs measuring up to 25cm (9.8in) long. The shaggy winter coat is shed extremely rapidly, with huge sections peeling off at once, appearing as if sloppily shorn. The two humps on the back are composed of fat (not water as is sometimes thought). The face is typical of a camelid, being long and somewhat triangular, with a split upper lip. The long eyelashes, along with the sealable nostrils, help to keep out dust in the frequent sandstorms which occur in their natural range. The two broad toes on each foot have undivided soles and are able to spread widely as an adaptation to walking on sand. The feet are very tough, as befits an animal of extreme environments.
Natural habitat
These camels are migratory, and their habitat ranges from rocky mountain massifs to flat arid desert, stony plains, and sand dunes. Conditions are extremely harsh – vegetation is sparse, water sources are limited and temperatures are extreme, ranging from as low as −40°C in winter to 40°C in summer. The camels’ distribution is linked to the availability of water, with large groups congregating near rivers after rain or at the foot of the mountains, where water can be obtained from springs in the summer months, and in the form of snow during the winter.
Life history
Bactrian camels are exceptionally adept at withstanding wide variations in temperature, ranging from freezing cold to blistering heat. They have a remarkable ability to go without water for months at a time, but when water is available they may drink up to 57 liters at once. When well fed, the humps are plump and erect, but as resources decline, the humps shrink and lean to the side. When moving faster than a walking speed, they pace, by stepping forwards with both legs on the same side (as opposed to trotting, using alternate diagonals as done by most other quadrupeds). Speeds of up to 65 kilometres per hour (40mph) have been recorded, but they rarely move this fast.  Bactrian camels are also said to be good swimmers. The sense of sight is well developed and the sense of smell is extremely good. The lifespan of Bactrian camels is estimated at up to 50 years, often 20 to 40 in captivity.
Diet
Bactrian camels are diurnal, sleeping in the open at night and foraging for food during the day. They are primarily herbivorous. With tough mouths that can withstand sharp objects such as thorns, they are able to eat plants that are dry, prickly, salty or bitter, and can ingest virtually any kind of vegetation. When other nutrient sources are not available, these camels may feed on carcasses, gnawing on bones, skin, or various different kinds of flesh. In more extreme conditions, they may eat any material they find, which has included rope, sandals, and even tents. Their ability to feed on a wide range of foods allows them to live in areas with sparse vegetation. The first time food is swallowed, it is not fully chewed. The partly masticated food (called cud) goes into the stomach and later is brought back up for further chewing.
Bactrian camels belong to a fairly small group of animals that regularly eat snow to provide their water needs. Any animals living above the snowline are obliged to do this, as snow and ice are the only forms of water during winter, and by doing so, their range is greatly enlarged. The latent heat of snow and ice is enormous compared with the heat capacity of water, demanding a large sacrifice in heat energy and forcing animals to eat only small amounts at a time.[20]
Reproduction
Bactrian camels are induced ovulators— they ovulate after insemination (insertion of semen into the vagina); the seminal plasma, not the spermatozoa, induces ovulation. Ovulation occurs in 87% of females after insemination: 66% ovulate within 36 h and the rest by 48 h (the same as natural mating). The least amount of semen required to elicit ovulation is about 1.0 ml.[21]
Males during mating time are often quite violent and may bite, spit, or attempt to sit on other male camels. The age of sexual maturity varies, but is usually reached at 3 to 5 years. Gestation lasts around 13 months. One or occasionally two calves are produced, and the female can give birth to a new calf every other year. Young Bactrian camels are precocial, being able to stand and run shortly after birth, and are fairly large at an average birth weight of 36kg (79lb). They are nursed for about 1.5 years. The young calf stays with its mother for three to five years, until it reaches sexual maturity, and often serves to help raise subsequent generations for those years. Wild camels sometimes breed with domesticated or feral camels.
Relationship to humans

The Bactrian camel is thought to have been domesticated (independent of the dromedary) sometime before 2500 BC in Northeast Afghanistan[22] or southwestern Turkestan.[23] The dromedary camel is believed to have been domesticated between 4000 BC and 2000 BC in Arabia. As pack animals, these ungulates are virtually unsurpassed, able to carry 170–250kg (370–550lb) at a rate of 47km (30 miles) per day, or 4km/h (2mph) over a period of four days. Furthermore, Bactrian camels are frequently ridden, especially in desertified areas. In ancient Sindh, for example, Bactrian camels of two humps were initially used by the rich for riding. The camel was later brought to other areas such as Balochistan and Iran for the same purpose.[24]
Bactrian camels have been the focus of artwork throughout history. For example, western foreigners from the Tarim Basin and elsewhere were depicted in  of the Chinese Tang dynasty (618–907).
United States imports
Bactrian camels were imported to the US several times in the mid- to late 1800s, both by the US military and by merchants and miners, looking for pack animals sturdier and hardier than horses and mules. Although the camels met these needs, the United States Camel Corps was never considered much of a success. Having brought two shipments of fewer than 100 camels to the US, plans were made to import another 1,000, but the US Civil War interrupted this. Most surviving camels of these endeavors, both military and private, were merely turned loose to survive in the wild. As a result, small feral herds of Bactrian camels existed during the late 19th century in the southwest deserts of the United States.[25]
Documentaries
The Story of the Weeping Camel is a 2003 Mongolian documentary/story about a family of nomadic shepherds trying to get a white calf accepted by his mother, which rejected him after a difficult birth.
Population

Gallery

Riding a Bactrian camel in Nubra Valley, India
Bactrian camels in Mongolia
Bactrian camels in the Chuya Steppe, Altai Mountains, Russia
Bactrian Camels in the Kyzyl Kum Desert

See also

Bactria
Camel

, University of Michigan Animal Diversity project

 by Aaron Sneddon
; discovery of camels in the Gashun Gobi region


The 2019 World Series of Poker is the 50th annual tournament, and will take place from May 28-July 16 at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the WSOP there will be a $50,000 No Limit Hold'em event as well as the Big 50, a $500 buy-in No Limit Hold'em event with a guaranteed $5 million prize pool and $1 million for the winner. There will also be a short deck tournament held for the first time. All No Limit Hold'em events will employ the Big Blind Ante format.
The $10,000 No Limit Hold'em Main Event will begin on July 3. The structure of the Main Event has been changed, with players now receiving 60,000 chips at the start of the tournament, up from 50,000 in 2018.[1]
The full schedule of events is expected to be released in early 2019.[2]

How long does the World Series of Poker last?


The Cyrillic script /sɪˈrɪlɪk/ is a writing system used for various alphabets across Eurasia, particularly in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and North Asia. It is based on the Early Cyrillic alphabet developed during the 9th century AD at the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire.[4][5][6] It is the basis of alphabets used in various languages, especially those of Orthodox Slavic origin, and non-Slavic languages influenced by Russian. As of 2011, around 250 million people in Eurasia use it as the official alphabet for their national languages, with Russia accounting for about half of them.[7] With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the third official script of the European Union, following Latin and Greek.[8]
Cyrillic is derived from the Greek uncial script, augmented by letters from the older Glagolitic alphabet, including some ligatures. These additional letters were used for Old Church Slavonic sounds not found in Greek. The script is named in honor of the two Byzantine  brothers,[9] Saints Cyril and Methodius, who created the Glagolitic alphabet earlier on. Modern scholars believe that Cyrillic was developed and formalized by early disciples of Cyril and Methodius.
In the early 18th century, the Cyrillic script used in Russia was heavily reformed by Peter the Great, who had recently returned from his Grand Embassy in western Europe. The new letterforms became closer to those of the Latin alphabet; several archaic letters were removed and several letters were personally designed by Peter the Great (such as Я, which was inspired by the Latin R). West European typography culture was also adopted.[10]
Letters
Cyrillic script spread throughout the East Slavic and some South Slavic territories, being adopted for writing local languages, such as Old East Slavic. Its adaptation to local languages produced a number of Cyrillic alphabets, discussed hereafter.

The early Cyrillic alphabet[11][12]АБВГДЕЖЅ[13]ꙀИІКЛМНОПРСТОУ[14]ФХѠЦЧШЩЪЪІ[15]ЬѢꙖѤЮѪѬѦѨѮѰѲѴҀ[16]
Capital and lowercase letters were not distinguished in old manuscripts.

Yeri (Ы) was originally a ligature of Yer and I (Ъ + І = Ы). Iotation was indicated by ligatures formed with the letter І: Ꙗ (not an ancestor of modern Ya, Я, which is derived from Ѧ), Ѥ, Ю (ligature of І and ОУ), Ѩ, Ѭ. Sometimes different letters were used interchangeably, for example И = І = Ї, as were typographical variants like О = Ѻ.  There were also commonly used ligatures like ѠТ = Ѿ.
The letters also had numeric values, based not on Cyrillic alphabetical order, but inherited from the letters' Greek ancestors.

Cyrillic numerals123456789АВГДЄЅЗИѲ102030405060708090ІКЛМНѮѺПЧ (Ҁ)100200300400500600700800900РСТѴФХѰѾЦ
The early Cyrillic alphabet is difficult to represent on computers. Many of the letterforms differed from those of modern Cyrillic, varied a great deal in manuscripts, and changed over time. Few fonts include glyphs sufficient to reproduce the alphabet. In accordance with Unicode policy, the standard does not include letterform variations or ligatures found in manuscript sources unless they can be shown to conform to the Unicode definition of a character.
The Unicode 5.1 standard, released on 4 April 2008, greatly improves computer support for the early Cyrillic and the modern Church Slavonic language. In Microsoft Windows, the Segoe UI user interface font is notable for having complete support for the archaic Cyrillic letters since Windows 8.

Letters of the Cyrillic alphabet (see also Cyrillic digraphs)А
AБ
BeВ
VeГ
GeҐ
Ghe upturnД
DeЂ
DjeЃ
GjeЕ
YeЁ
YoЄ
Ukrainian YeЖ
ZheЗ
ZeЗ́
ZjeЅ
DzeИ
IІ
Dotted IЇ
YiЙ
Short IЈ
JeК
KaЛ
ElЉ
LjeМ
EmН
EnЊ
NjeО
OП
PeР
ErС
EsС́
SjeТ
TeЋ
TsheЌ
KjeУ
UЎ
Short UФ
EfХ
KhaЦ
TseЧ
CheЏ
DzheШ
ShaЩ
ShchaЪ
Hardsign (Yer)Ы
YeryЬ
Softsign (Yeri)Э
EЮ
YuЯ
YaImportant Cyrillic non-Slavic lettersӀ
PalochkaӘ
Cyrillic SchwaҒ
AynҘ
Bashkir DheҪ
Bashkir TheҠ
Bashkir QaҖ
ZhjeҚ
Ka with
descenderҢ
NgҤ
En-gheӨ
Barred OҮ
Straight UҰ
Straight U
with strokeҺ
Shha (He)Ҳ
Kha with
descenderӐ
A with
breveCyrillic letters used in the pastꙖ
AiotifiedѤ
EiotifiedѦ
YussmallѪ
YusbigѨ
Yussmall iotifiedѬ
Yusbig iotifiedѮ
KsiѰ
PsiꙞ
YnѲ
FitaѴ
IzhitsaѶ
Izhitsa okovyҀ
KoppaОУ
UkѠ
OmegaѾ
OtѢ
Yat
Letterforms and typography
The development of Cyrillic typography passed directly from the medieval stage to the late Baroque, without a Renaissance phase as in Western Europe. Late Medieval Cyrillic letters (still found on many icon inscriptions today) show a marked tendency to be very tall and narrow, with strokes often shared between adjacent letters.
Peter the Great, Czar of Russia, mandated the use of westernized letter forms in the early 18th century. Over time, these were largely adopted in the other languages that use the script. Thus, unlike the majority of modern Greek fonts that retained their own set of design principles for lower-case letters (such as the placement of serifs, the shapes of stroke ends, and stroke-thickness rules, although Greek capital letters do use Latin design principles), modern Cyrillic fonts are much the same as modern Latin fonts of the same font family. The development of some Cyrillic computer typefaces from Latin ones has also contributed to the visual Latinization of Cyrillic type.

Cyrillic uppercase and lowercase letter forms are not as differentiated as in Latin typography. Upright Cyrillic lowercase letters are essentially small capitals (with exceptions: Cyrillic ⟨а⟩, ⟨е⟩, ⟨і⟩, ⟨ј⟩, ⟨р⟩, and ⟨у⟩ adopted Western lowercase shapes, lowercase ⟨ф⟩ is typically designed under the influence of Latin ⟨p⟩, lowercase ⟨б⟩, ⟨ђ⟩ and ⟨ћ⟩ are traditional handwritten forms), although a good-quality Cyrillic typeface will still include separate small-caps glyphs.[17]
Cyrillic fonts, as well as Latin ones, have roman and italic types (practically all popular modern fonts include parallel sets of Latin and Cyrillic letters, where many glyphs, uppercase as well as lowercase, are simply shared by both). However, the native font terminology in most Slavic languages (for example, in Russian) does not use the words "roman" and "italic" in this sense.[18] Instead, the nomenclature follows German naming patterns:

Roman type is called pryamoy shrift ("upright type")—compare with Normalschrift ("regular type") in German
Italic type is called kursiv ("cursive") or kursivniy shrift ("cursive type")—from the German word Kursive, meaning italic typefaces and not cursive writing
Cursive handwriting is rukopisniy shrift ("handwritten type") in Russian—in German: Kurrentschrift or Laufschrift, both meaning literally 'running type'
As in Latin typography, a sans-serif face may have a mechanically sloped oblique type (naklonniy shrift—"sloped", or "slanted type") instead of italic.
Similarly to Latin fonts, italic and cursive types of many Cyrillic letters (typically lowercase; uppercase only for handwritten or stylish types) are very different from their upright roman types. In certain cases, the correspondence between uppercase and lowercase glyphs does not coincide in Latin and Cyrillic fonts: for example, italic Cyrillic ⟨т⟩ is the lowercase counterpart of ⟨Т⟩ not of ⟨М⟩.
A boldfaced type is called poluzhirniy shrift ("semi-bold type"), because there existed fully boldfaced shapes that have been out of use since the beginning of the 20th century. A bold italic combination (bold slanted) does not exist for all font families.
In Standard Serbian, as well as in Macedonian,[19] some italic and cursive letters are allowed to be different to resemble more to the handwritten letters. The regular (upright) shapes are generally standardized among languages and there are no officially recognized variations.[20]
The following table shows the differences between the upright and italic Cyrillic letters of the Russian alphabet. Italic forms significantly different from their upright analogues, or especially confusing to users of a Latin alphabet, are highlighted.

Also available as a .абвгдеёжзийклмнопрстуфхцчшщъыьэюяабвгдеёжзийклмнопрстуфхцчшщъыьэюя
Note: in some fonts or styles, lowercase italic Cyrillic ⟨д⟩ (⟨д⟩) may look like Latin ⟨g⟩ and lowercase italic Cyrillic ⟨т⟩ (⟨т⟩) may look exactly like a capital italic ⟨T⟩ (⟨T⟩), only smaller.

Cyrillic alphabets

Among others, Cyrillic is the standard script for writing the following languages:
Slavic languages: Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, Rusyn, Serbo-Croatian (for Standard Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin), Ukrainian
Non-Slavic languages: Abkhaz, Aleut (now mostly in church texts), Bashkir, Chuvash, Erzya, Kazakh (to be replaced by Latin script by 2025[1]), Kildin Sami, Komi, Kyrgyz, Dungan, Mari, Moksha, Mongolian, Ossetic, Romani (some dialects), Sakha/Yakut, Tajik, Tatar, Tlingit (now only in church texts), Tuvan, Udmurt, Yuit (Siberian Yupik), and Yupik (in Alaska).
The Cyrillic script has also been used for languages of Alaska,[21] Slavic Europe (except for Western Slavic and some Southern Slavic), the Caucasus, Siberia, and the Russian Far East.
The first alphabet derived from Cyrillic was Abur, used for the Komi language. Other Cyrillic alphabets include the Molodtsov alphabet for the Komi language and various alphabets for Caucasian languages.
Name
Since the script was conceived and popularised by the followers of Cyril and Methodius, rather than by Cyril and Methodius themselves, its name denotes homage rather than authorship. The name "Cyrillic" often confuses people who are not familiar with the script's history, because it does not identify a country of origin (in contrast to the "Greek alphabet"). Among the general public, it is often called "the Russian alphabet," because Russian is the most popular and influential alphabet based on the script. Some Bulgarian intellectuals, notably Stefan Tsanev, have expressed concern over this, and have suggested that the Cyrillic script be called the "Bulgarian alphabet" instead, for the sake of historical accuracy.[22]
In Bulgarian, Macedonian, Russian, and Serbian, the Cyrillic alphabet is also known as azbuka, derived from the old names of the first two letters of most Cyrillic alphabets (just as the term alphabet came from the first two Greek letters alpha and beta).
History

History of the alphabet
Egyptian hieroglyphs 32 c. BCE
Hieratic 32 c. BCE
Demotic 7 c. BCE
Meroitic 3 c. BCE
Proto-Sinaitic 19 c. BCE
Ugaritic 15 c. BCE
Epigraphic South Arabian 9 c. BCE
Ge’ez 5–6 c. BCE
Canaanite-Phoenician alphabet 12 c. BCE
Paleo-Hebrew 10 c. BCE
Samaritan 6 c. BCE
Libyco-Berber 3 c. BCE
Tifinagh
Paleohispanic (semi-syllabic) 7 c. BCE
Aramaic 8 c. BCE
Kharoṣṭhī 4 c. BCE
Brāhmī 4 c. BCE
Brahmic family (see) E.g.
Tibetan 7 c. CE
ʼPhags-pa script 13 c. CE
Devanagari 10 c. CE
Canadian syllabics 1840 CE
Hebrew 3 c. BCE
Pahlavi 3 c. BCE
Avestan 4 c. CE
Palmyrene 2 c. BCE
Syriac 2 c. BCE
Nabataean 2 c. BCE
Arabic 4 c. CE
N'Ko 1949 CE
Sogdian 2 c. BCE
Orkhon (old Turkic) 6 c. CE
Old Hungarian c. 650 CE
Old Uyghur
Mongolian 1204 CE
Mandaic 2 c. CE
Greek 8 c. BCE
Etruscan 8 c. BCE
Latin 7 c. BCE
Cherokee (syllabary; letter forms only) c. 1820 CE
Runic 2 c. CE
Ogham (origin uncertain) 4 c. CE
Coptic 3 c. CE
Gothic 3 c. CE
Armenian 405 CE
Georgian (origin uncertain) c. 430 CE
Glagolitic 862 CE
Cyrillic c. 940 CE
Old Permic 1372 CE
Mesopotamian cuneiform 32 c. BCE
Ugaritic (shape influenced) 15 c. BCE
Old Persian cuneiform (apparently inspired) 525 BCE
Indus script 26 c. BCE
Cretan hieroglyphs (possible ancestor of Linear A) 21 c. BCE
Linear A 18 c. BCE
Linear B 15 c. BCE
Cypro-Minoan syllabary 16 c. BCE
Cypriot syllabary 11 c. BCE
Chinese Characters 13 c. BCE
Chinese family (see) E.g.
Kana 800 CE
Chữ Nôm 13 c. CE
Zhuyin 1913 CE
Mesoamerican family (see) E.g.
Maya script 3 c. BCE
Ogham (origin uncertain) 4 c. CE
Dongba symbols 10 c. CE
Hangul 1443 CE
Yi script 15 c. CE (syllabic version established in 1974)
Thaana 18 c. CE (derived from Brahmi numerals)
Osmanya alphabet 1920s CE
Santali alphabet (or Ol Chiki script) 1925 CE
Borama alphabet 1933 CE
Kaddare script (resembling Osmanya script and Brahmi script.) 1952 CEvt
The Cyrillic script was created in the First Bulgarian Empire.[23] Its first variant, the Early Cyrillic alphabet, was created at the Preslav Literary School. It is derived from the Greek uncial script letters, augmented by ligatures and consonants from the older Glagolitic alphabet for sounds not found in Greek. Tradition holds that Cyrillic and Glagolitic were formalized either by Saints Cyril and Methodius who brought Christianity to the southern Slavs, or by their disciples.[24][25][26][27] Paul Cubberley posits that although Cyril may have codified and expanded Glagolitic, it was his students in the First Bulgarian Empire under Tsar Simeon the Great that developed Cyrillic from the Greek letters in the 890s as a more suitable script for church books.[23] Later Cyrillic spread among other Slavic peoples, as well as among non-Slavic Vlachs.
Cyrillic and Glagolitic were used for the Church Slavonic language, especially the Old Church Slavonic variant. Hence expressions such as "И is the tenth Cyrillic letter" typically refer to the order of the Church Slavonic alphabet; not every Cyrillic alphabet uses every letter available in the script.
The Cyrillic script came to dominate Glagolitic in the 12th century. The literature produced in the Old Bulgarian language soon spread north and became the lingua franca of the Balkans and Eastern Europe, where it came to also be known as Old Church Slavonic.[28][29][30][31][32] The alphabet used for the modern Church Slavonic language in Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic rites still resembles early Cyrillic. However, over the course of the following millennium, Cyrillic adapted to changes in spoken language, developed regional variations to suit the features of national languages, and was subjected to academic reform and political decrees. A notable example of such linguistic reform can be attributed to Vuk Stefanović Karadžić who updated the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet by removing certain graphemes no longer represented in the vernacular, and introducing graphemes specific to Serbian (i.e. Љ Њ Ђ Ћ Џ Ј), distancing it from Church Slavonic alphabet in use prior to the reform. Today, many languages in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and northern Eurasia are written in Cyrillic alphabets.
Relationship to other writing systems
Latin script

A number of languages written in a Cyrillic alphabet have also been written in a Latin alphabet, such as Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Serbian and Romanian (in the Republic of Moldova until 1989, in Romania throughout the 19th century). After the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, some of the former republics officially shifted from Cyrillic to Latin. The transition is complete in most of Moldova (except the breakaway region of Transnistria, where Moldovan Cyrillic is official), Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan. Uzbekistan still uses both systems, and Kazakhstan has officially begun a transition from Cyrillic to Latin (scheduled to be complete by 2025). The Russian government has mandated that Cyrillic must be used for all public communications in all federal subjects of Russia, to promote closer ties across the federation. This act was controversial for speakers of many Slavic languages; for others, such as Chechen and Ingush speakers, the law had political ramifications. For example, the separatist Chechen government mandated a Latin script which is still used by many Chechens. Those in the diaspora especially refuse to use the Chechen Cyrillic alphabet, which they associate with Russian imperialism.

Standard Serbian uses both the Cyrillic and Latin scripts. Cyrillic is nominally the official script of Serbia's administration according to the Serbian constitution;[33] however, the law does not regulate scripts in standard language, or standard language itself by any means. In practice the scripts are equal, with Latin being used more often in a less official capacity.[34]
The Zhuang alphabet, used between the 1950s and 1980s in portions of the People's Republic of China, used a mixture of Latin, phonetic, numeral-based, and Cyrillic letters. The non-Latin letters, including Cyrillic, were removed from the alphabet in 1982 and replaced with Latin letters that closely resembled the letters they replaced.
Romanization

There are various systems for Romanization of Cyrillic text, including transliteration to convey Cyrillic spelling in Latin letters, and transcription to convey pronunciation.
Standard Cyrillic-to-Latin transliteration systems include:
Scientific transliteration, used in linguistics, is based on the Bosnian and Croatian Latin alphabet.
The Working Group on Romanization Systems[35] of the United Nations recommends different systems for specific languages. These are the most commonly used around the world.
ISO 9:1995, from the International Organization for Standardization.
American Library Association and Library of Congress Romanization tables for Slavic alphabets (ALA-LC Romanization), used in North American libraries.
BGN/PCGN Romanization (1947), United States Board on Geographic Names & Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use).
GOST 16876, a now defunct Soviet transliteration standard. Replaced by GOST 7.79, which is ISO 9 equivalent.
Various informal romanizations of Cyrillic, which adapt the Cyrillic script to Latin and sometimes Greek glyphs for compatibility with small character sets.
See also Romanization of Belarusian, Bulgarian, Kyrgyz, Russian, Macedonian and Ukrainian.
Cyrillization
Representing other writing systems with Cyrillic letters is called Cyrillization.
Computer encoding
Unicode

As of Unicode version 11.0, Cyrillic letters, including national and historical alphabets, are encoded across several blocks:
Cyrillic:
Cyrillic Supplement:
Cyrillic Extended-A:
Cyrillic Extended-B:
Cyrillic Extended-C:
Phonetic Extensions:
Combining Half Marks:
The characters in the range U+0400 to U+045F are basically the characters from ISO 8859-5 moved upward by 864 positions. The characters in the range U+0460 to U+0489 are historic letters, not used now. The characters in the range U+048A to U+052F are additional letters for various languages that are written with Cyrillic script.
Unicode as a general rule does not include accented Cyrillic letters. A few exceptions include:
combinations that are considered as separate letters of respective alphabets, like Й, Ў, Ё, Ї, Ѓ, Ќ (as well as many letters of non-Slavic alphabets);
two most frequent combinations orthographically required to distinguish homonyms in Bulgarian and Macedonian: Ѐ, Ѝ;
a few Old and New Church Slavonic combinations: Ѷ, Ѿ, Ѽ.
To indicate stressed or long vowels, combining diacritical marks can be used after the respective letter (for example, U+0301◌́COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT: ы́ э́ ю́ я́ etc.).
Some languages, including Church Slavonic, are still not fully supported.
Unicode 5.1, released on 4 April 2008, introduces major changes to the Cyrillic blocks. Revisions to the existing Cyrillic blocks, and the addition of Cyrillic Extended A (2DE0 ... 2DFF) and Cyrillic Extended B (A640 ... A69F), significantly improve support for the early Cyrillic alphabet, Abkhaz, Aleut, Chuvash, Kurdish, and Moksha.[36]
Other
Punctuation for Cyrillic text is similar to that used in European Latin-alphabet languages.
Other character encoding systems for Cyrillic:
CP866 – 8-bit Cyrillic character encoding established by Microsoft for use in MS-DOS also known as GOST-alternative. Cyrillic characters go in their native order, with a "window" for pseudographic characters.
ISO/IEC 8859-5 – 8-bit Cyrillic character encoding established by International Organization for Standardization
KOI8-R – 8-bit native Russian character encoding. Invented in the USSR for use on Soviet clones of American IBM and DEC computers. The Cyrillic characters go in the order of their Latin counterparts, which allowed the text to remain readable after transmission via a 7-bit line that removed the most significant bit from each byte—the result became a very rough, but readable, Latin transliteration of Cyrillic. Standard encoding of early 1990s for Unix systems and the first Russian Internet encoding.
KOI8-U – KOI8-R with addition of Ukrainian letters.
MIK – 8-bit native Bulgarian character encoding for use in Microsoft DOS.
Windows-1251 – 8-bit Cyrillic character encoding established by Microsoft for use in Microsoft Windows. The simplest 8-bit Cyrillic encoding—32 capital chars in native order at 0xc0–0xdf, 32 usual chars at 0xe0–0xff, with rarely used "YO" characters somewhere else. No pseudographics. Former standard encoding in some GNU/Linux distributions for Belarusian and Bulgarian, but currently displaced by UTF-8.
GOST-main.
GB 2312 – Principally simplified Chinese encodings, but there are also the basic 33 Russian Cyrillic letters (in upper- and lower-case).
JIS and Shift JIS – Principally Japanese encodings, but there are also the basic 33 Russian Cyrillic letters (in upper- and lower-case).
Keyboard layouts

Each language has its own standard keyboard layout, adopted from typewriters. With the flexibility of computer input methods, there are also transliterating or phonetic/homophonic keyboard layouts made for typists who are more familiar with other layouts, like the common English QWERTY keyboard. When practical Cyrillic keyboard layouts or fonts are unavailable, computer users sometimes use transliteration or look-alike "volapuk" encoding to type in languages that are normally written with the Cyrillic alphabet.
See also

Cyrillic (Unicode block)
Cyrillic Alphabet Day
Cyrillic digraphs
Faux Cyrillic, real or fake Cyrillic letters used to give Latin-alphabet text a Soviet or Russian feel
Languages using Cyrillic
List of Cyrillic digraphs
List of Cyrillic letters
Russian cursive
Russian manual alphabet
Yugoslav manual alphabet
Russian Braille
Yugoslav Braille
Vladislav the Grammarian
Internet top-level domains in Cyrillic: gTLDs, .мон, .бг, .қаз, .рф, .срб, .укр
Notes

Ivan G. Iliev. Short History of the Cyrillic Alphabet. Plovdiv. 2012.
Bringhurst, Robert (2002). The Elements of Typographic Style (version 2.5), pp.262–264. Vancouver, Hartley & Marks. ISBN0-88179-133-4.
Nezirović, M. (1992). Jevrejsko-španjolska književnost. Sarajevo: Svjetlost. [cited in Šmid, 2002]
Šmid, Katja (2002). "(603 KiB)", in Verba Hispanica, vol X. Liubliana: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Liubliana. ISSN.
'The Lives of St. Tsurho and St. Strahota', Bohemia, 1495, Vatican Library
Philipp Ammon:  in: Sjani (Thoughts) Georgian Scientific Journal of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, N 17, 2016, pp.248–256

 overview and history of Cyrillic charsets.
, a collection of writing systems and transliteration tables

 review of Cyrillic charsets in Slavic Languages.

, article about the Cyrillic script

What is the most popular language using Cyrillic script?


Main Page
I Am Setsuna[lower-alpha 1] is a Japanese role-playing video game developed by Tokyo RPG Factory and published by Square Enix. It was released for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita in Japan in February 2016, and worldwide for PlayStation 4 and Microsoft Windows in July 2016. It was released for Nintendo Switch as a launch title worldwide on March 3, 2017.[6]
The story, set in a land gripped by perpetual winter, follows a mercenary and his charge, a maiden named Setsuna who must offer herself as a sacrifice at a sacred shrine to appease hostile demons. The story's central theme is sadness. The gameplay, which is deliberately designed to evoke role-playing games of the 1990s, uses an Active Time Battle system based on those used in early Final Fantasy games and Chrono Trigger.
The game was moderately well-received critically and commercially, and a spiritual successor, Lost Sphear, was released across 2017 and 2018 in different regions.
Gameplay

I Am Setsuna is a role-playing video game in which players take control of a party of characters, navigating environments from an angled top-down perspective. Locations such as towns and dungeons are reached by navigating the game's overworld. In towns, the party can talk with villagers to reveal plot elements, and find treasure chests containing useful items. Various items such as healing potions or "Fogstone" items for escaping from battle are sold in shops in towns and across the world.[7]
Enemies are represented by icons: contact with the icons initiates a battle. Battles take place in the environments where the enemy is encountered rather than shifting to a specific battle arena. Characters' health and magic meter are respectively represented by HP and MP. Characters fight using a version of the Active Time Battle System featured in games such as entries in the Final Fantasy series: after each action is taken by a character in battle, an ATB gauge must fill again before another action is taken. Available actions include attacking with weapons; using special combat abilities or magic, which are lumped together as "Techs"; or using an item. If more than one character's ATB gauges are full, they will perform actions in the order in which instructions are issued to them.[7][8]
Each character may equip "Spritnite" crystals on their gear. These crystals grant both passive bonuses and the abilities on the "Techs" menu.  Some of these Techs can synergize together into a new attack; for instance, the spinning "Cyclone" and rushing "Charge" techs can become "X-Strike," a two-person attack directed at one enemy.  If one of these "Double Techs" are available, the "Techs" menu will change to "Combo".[8]
Each time an action is taken, or a character's ATB gauge is allowed to remain full, a separate "Setsuna" gauge begins to fill.  When full, it grants a "Momentum" charge which may be expended at the player's discretion to grant power boosts to the character's actions. These boosts can include dealing multiple versions of the attack, recovering health, or dealing critical damage to an enemy.[8]
Story
The game begins on a snow-bound island, which is regularly beset by angry demons. According to an ancient custom, a maiden is sacrificed to appease the demons. The demons grow restless once again, and the girl Setsuna is chosen as the sacrifice. The story begins with Endir accepting a mission to assassinate Setsuna, when he finds her, she convinces him to accompany her in her pilgrimage alongside Aeterna. While on their journey, they meet Nidr, the previous sacrifice guard and Setsuna's real father, who after regaining his confidence, is convinced to help Setsuna on her journey. Then, they meet Kir, a rare blood whose village is under attack by monsters. The party defeats the monsters and Kir joins them. On their way to the Last Lands they are attacked by the Reaper several times. Later on they come across Julienne, a female knight who wishes to see her kingdom restored. She travels with them, and when they finally arrive to the Last Lands, they find it unreachable due to a Vanished Land. Aeterna disappears, and Julienne leaves the party.
When all of them reunite again, Julienne opens a path to ruins belonging to her kingdom to attain an airship; they use it to travel to the Last Lands, where they find the Time Judge, creator of Aeterna, she explains to them that the Sacrifices pass their magical energy to her so that she can rewind time and keep the Dark Samsara, a mass of evil magical energy, from destroying the world. However, she believes that Setsuna and her guards might be able to destroy him completely because she did not foretell Endir's coming. The Time Judge resurrects the Reaper, now called Fides, and send him with the party to destroy the Dark Samsara.
When they arrive to his realm, Setsuna and the others defeat him. It is revealed that The Dark Samsara is an innocent youth who possessed an immense amount of magical energy who meant to help with the experiments to preserve magical energy in the world. As a result, the youth was destroyed, and he became a mass of ever growing energy known as The Dark Samsara. The newly created monster destroyed the royal kingdom and was sealed away by the Time Judge before he could commit further destruction to the world. His consciousness flees to the past in an attempt to change it by killing the Sacrifice. When all hope is lost, Endir and Setsuna are revealed to have the ability to travel to the past as well. They go after the Dark Samsara in the same place Endir and Setsuna first met. There, they fight the Youth, and Setsuna fuses him with herself, showing her kind, selfless nature, and asks Endir to destroy her body.
The player is presented with two choices, to kill or spare Setsuna. However, both led to the same outcome, Endir killing Setsuna. The ending shows Aeterna vanishing after accomplishing her mission of seeing the sacrifice pilgrimage through. Nidr goes to see Setsuna's adoptive father. Kir returns to his village, Julienne reunites with her subordinates, Fides sets on a journey with an airship builder who helped the party in several occasions, and Endir roams the snowy land with Setsuna's spirit watching over him.[8][9]
Development
I Am Setsuna was developed by Tokyo RPG Factory, a studio created by Square Enix and staffed by external staff to produce role-playing video games (RPGs).[9][10][11] The concept for I Am Setsuna was written in September 2014, with development beginning the following month. The alpha build was completed by August 2015.[12] The concept originated from plans to re-create a game similar to classic RPGs from the genre's golden age. The staff was made up of developers who agreed with this vision. In keeping with this, the battle system was adopted from role-playing games like early Final Fantasy titles and other games like Chrono Trigger. The game's playtime was designed to be similar to SNES games of the 90s, going against the prevalent trend of added content with the scale and power of gaming technology. One of the difficult elements was balancing the game's difficulty so it could be enjoyed by both casual and hardcore gamers.[9] The battle system was specifically based on the Active Time Battle system used in Chrono Trigger.[8][13] According to Hashimoto, Chrono Trigger was used as inspiration due to its popularity, it being a favorite of the assembled development team, and the fact that there were few spiritual successors to it on the market.[13] I Am Setsuna was developed using the Unity game engine.[3]
A key theme running through the game is "sadness". The story's setting, in a land covered by snow, and its general tone carried this theme, alongside evoking the emotional stories of classic role-playing games. The theme also extends to its title, which stems from the word "setsunasa": while it holds a variety of meanings in Japanese, the meaning used by the production team was sadness or sorrow. "Setsuna" also translated as "a moment in time", which tied into the game's SP battle mechanic.[9][11][12] Much of the effort in writing went into the game's language, with the team obsessing over how players would respond to different words. For this reason, they used katakana as little as possible, instead using native kanji expressions for terms like "monster". Despite lacking katakana, the setting used writing schemes akin to those from European literature, giving the world a unique feel.[1] The game's central themes, which focused on life and death as represented by Setsuna's sacrifice, was included as part of the callback to earlier role-playing games. One of the main features of the hero's design was his mask, which made it harder for players to fully empathize with him.[9] The character designs were done by toi8; he was brought in at an early stage, and his designs were likewise meant to reinforce the atmosphere.[1] The game's music was composed by Tomoki Miyoshi, a young composer whose first notable score was for Soul Calibur V. Almost all tracks were performed on solo piano played by Randy Kerber, who had worked on major films including Forrest Gump and Titanic. The music incorporated the game's themes.[12][2]
The game was first announced at the 2015 Electronic Entertainment Expo as a game for the PlayStation 4 under the title Project Setsuna.[14] The game was designed as a new IP, with its future developments to be decided after Square Enix reviews its post-launch reception and success.[11] Its next showing was at that year's Tokyo Game Show, where its official Japanese title was revealed, alongside its release on the PlayStation Vita.[15] There are no differences in content between the two versions of the game, with the only exception being that the PlayStation 4 version looks better on a large screen due to resolution issues. They also wanted to enable players to have a portable version, accommodating different playstyles.[9] At the event, it was described by Square Enix as a "pure fantasy, true role-playing video game".[16] As of September 2015, development was reported as 60% complete.[17] In November of the same year, the game's Japanese release date was revealed to be February 18, 2016.[4] In March 2016, Square Enix announced details regarding the game's English release, including its English title, I Am Setsuna, and the fact that it would only be released on the PS4 and Microsoft Windows platforms, not on the Vita.[18] According to Hashimoto, this was due to a trend in Western gaming for full immersion in a gaming world. Another factor was the smaller Vita market in the West when compared to home consoles and PC gaming.[13] Despite this decision, he said that there was still a chance for a Western Vita release if there was enough demand.[19] I Am Setsuna was released internationally on July 19, 2016.[5] The game was later announced as a launch title for the Nintendo Switch worldwide on March 3, 2017.[6] It was available at retail in Japan, whilst being a Nintendo eShop exclusive in other regions.
Reception
Reception
Japanese gaming magazine Famitsu gave both versions a score of 32 out of 40.[24] Positive comments were made on the overall atmosphere, its old-school design, "tasteful" graphics, somber story, and the piano score. Points that were criticized were the lack of novelty in its design, and frequent loading times when navigating town environments.[33] Dengeki PlayStation found the game worth its low cost, and commented positively on its serious story, character customization options, and the balance of "quality and quantity". The reviewers were less positive about other aspects, such as difficult-to-handle battle system, repetitive combat, and difficulties with buying and selling equipment.[32] GameSpot praised the "delicate" writing, "Beautifully tragic" story, combat system, tech combos, and boss battles, but criticized "promising story beats" for feeling rushed, "too easy" common enemies, and "Random elements" disrupting combat balance.[27] IGN said it "has some combat balance issues, but that doesn't keep it from delivering a highly emotional tale."[29]
According to Media Create, the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita versions of I Am Setsuna debuted at #6 and #7 respectively. The PlayStation 4 version sold 33,629, while the PlayStation Vita version sold 27,994, bringing total sales to roughly 66,000 units.[34] By the following week, the Vita version had dropped out of the top 20, while the PlayStation 4 version had sold a further 6,619 units.[35] The Nintendo Switch version debuted at #22 on the Media Create chart, selling roughly 4625 copies.[36]
Sequel

I Am Setsuna was enough of a success for Square Enix to greenlight a second game from Tokyo RPG Factory.[37] A spiritual successor,  Lost Sphear, was announced in May 2017 for the Switch, PS4, and Microsoft Windows platforms. It was released in October 2017 in Japan and January 2018 in the West.[38]

Notes

 on IMDb