Book Review: The Fabric of Civilization

The Fabric of Civilization: How textiles made the world, by Virginia Postrel. 4.5 out of 5 stars; I was a bit disappointed by the chapter on dyes, because I know most of it already and in greater detail. Then I started counting up how many books I’d read specifically on dyes, and it’s more than a dozen, so.

One of the interesting aspects of this book is that instead of covering everything in historical order, the author broke the book into categories – fiber, cloth, thread, dyes, etc. – and went through the history of each. This allows for a greater focus on the social and technological developments that go along with each aspect of making fabric. For example, one of the things I did not know in the chapter on dyes was how incredibly awful fabrics dyed with murex-derived purple stink. A smell recreated by archaeologist Deborah Ruscillo in the summer of 2001 trying to figure out just how many snails the process required. She found that 1) a large wool cloak would require thousands of snails, 2) the flies, the flies, it’s awful, and 3) the stink of murex-dyed cloth lingers even two decades and many, many washes in Tide later.

(me: Wow, no wonder ancient Rome was addicted to incense.)

A few points of specific interest. First, there’s a lot on how incremental improvements and accumulated small changes in practices and technology add up to big effects over the centuries, and even over shorter timescales. Silk production, for example, picked up by (among other things) figuring out how to chill eggs to spread out harvests over the year, grafting two different types of mulberry to get maximum leaf production, inventing portable stoves to warm up silkworm rooms, and salting cocoons to give workers an extra week to reel them; all things that let the same number of people produce more silk per harvest. And one of the very cool bits near the end of the dyes chapter was about a company that can dye a pound of fabric using 3 gallons of water – when traditional dying often uses over 75 gallons. As in, if you really want to be environmentally friendly, stop throwing out modern technology.

Second, the author gets across that for most of history – as in up to just two centuries ago – thread was time-consuming to produce and always in short supply. There’s a very sobering chart of how many workdays it’d take to handspin the yarn for various items; thirteen days for enough cotton to weave a pair of jeans, 385 days for the wool for a Viking sail. Which doesn’t count another 600 estimated days to pluck the sheep and prep the wool to be spun.

Third – espionage, espionage and sabotage everywhere. If there’s a fiber, a technique, or a dye anywhere in the world, someone’s tried to walk off with it without permission. And Jacquard of the punch-card loom fame had to flee Lyon several times in his life due to threats and attacks from those who feared his machines would take jobs away from the more labor-intensive drawlooms.

Fourth, and this was very interesting to dig into in the wake of our modern social breakdown… the book covers how textiles led to “social technologies” such as agreements, records, laws, and other customs to allow trust and reduce risks between strangers in long-distance transactions. Because fabric gets traded everywhere. A sobering note in the book was the observation that because you can’t easily see, touch, or put a money value on these technologies, they’re often dismissed as not important, or even actively evil. I think we can agree that continues to be a Problem.

Overall, very interesting for anyone who wants to dig into the history of civilization or add depth to a fictional world. I’d heard about ancient China using bolts of silk as currency, for example, but that Iceland had wadmal, a woolen twill used as legal money, was new. And it’s fascinating to poke through Fibonacci introducing the modern number system in 1202, bills of exchange in 13th century Italy, and the realization that in 1730 Paris you could be arrested for wearing calico fabric. The hardback is a bit pricey, you might prefer the Kindle version; but there are some charts you’ll want a larger screen to read in that case.

All in all, a well-woven work!