Mann notes that the wool-wearing European explorers quickly swapped their itchy garb for local cotton -- a fashion that quickly caught on back in the old countries. He says in a footnote:
"When cotton became readily available there in the eighteenth century, it grabbed so much of the textile market that French woolmakers persuaded the government to ban the fabric. The law failed to stem the cotton tide. As the historian Fernand Braudel noted, some woolmakers then thought outside the box: they proposed sending prostitutes in cotton clothing to wander Paris streets, where police would publicly strip them naked. In theory, bourgeois women would then avoid cotton for fear of being mistaken for prostitutes and forcibly disrobed. This novel form of protectionism was never put into place."
