Angela Lakwete explores the history of the cotton gin as an aspect of global history and an artefact of southern industrial development. She examines gin invention and innovation in Asia and Africa from the earliest evidence to the 17th century, when British colonizers introduced an Asian hand-cranked roller gin to the Americas. Lakwete shows how indentured British, and later enslaved Africans, built and used foot-powered models to process the cotton they grew for export. After Eli Whitney patented his wire-toothed gin, southern mechanics transformed it into the saw gin, offering stiff competition to northern manufacturers. Far from being a record of southern failure, Lakwete concludes, the cotton gin - correctly understood - supplies evidence that the slave labour-based antebellum South innovated, industrialized and modernized.