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Originally Posted by celle
In Australia and New Zealand, bed linen (and general household materials, such as towels) is called manchester. Stores have a department that is called manchester, where you buy such things.
Apparently, this originates from the time when all household wares had to be imported. The best linen at that time was made in Manchester (UK) and so people would ask for "Manchester linen". This gradually became shortened, so we now call it "manchester".
Now that this sort of thing is now made of "best Egyptian cotton", I wonder if we'll start to call it "Egyptian"?
Egyptian cotton, though late entrant, does make fine fabric. I don't think it's very good for making towels, or other stuff made if terry cloth. In Bombay, what we know as simply towel, was called turkish towel. If you asked for towel in the local market, you were either asked if you wanted turkish towel, or were given a piece of cotton cloth with knobby feel.
Manchester being the centre of cotton textile industry is an accident of historical events.
I remember reading in history that Megasthenes, Selucus Nikator's ambassador to an Indian king wrote that wool grew on plants in India. In the middle ages, Europeans imagined cotton to come plants that bore lambs.
What I don;t understand is what took Egyptians and Greeks so long to learn about cotton when Egyptian cotton is the best. Egyptians made fabrics using fibres from many plants.