The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World

Where do I even start with this book.

It is brilliant on so many levels. The overlooked history of women in the making of the modern world, you could start here I guess becuase that is really where it all starts.

She mentions how many paintings and illustrations from the past show women spinning or making thread like this was some menial task that women did, except it was not menial, everything was built upon fabrics which could only be made with the thread all those women spun.

In the Viking world it took longer to spin the thread to make the sails than it took to build the boat itself. So when someone wanted a new longship the first thing to be organised was to breed the sheep for the wool to make the sails. Roman togas could have a 2 show more year waiting list.

Then various spinning revolutions came along that mechanised and speeded up the process and that =eventually kick started the entire Inductrial Revolution.

I'm cherry picking and skipping here because this book really deserves a read, it is social, cultural, political and global history all in the one cover. show less

This was a very interesting account of the ways in which textiles have played a role in the development of civilization. Virginia Postrel looks at all stages of textiles from fiber to thread to cloth and dye, as well as the roles of traders and consumers, from ancient times to the present day. She concludes with innovators who are driving today’s textile industry forward in ways their forebears could never have imagined.

In every chapter of this book I found “aha moments,” and things that sent me off to the internet to learn more. I had never thought about the parallels between weaving and computer programming, but that explains a lot about why I find weaving patterns so interesting. Postrel unpacks a lot of scientific concepts in show more ways that make them easier for the layperson to understand. Although I admit some of these interested me more than others (I may have skimmed at times), I found this book fascinating on so many levels. show less

I will never look at textiles the same way again. The author sets the stage with a Preface, then has a chapter for each aspect of fabric production and use: Fiber, Thread, Cloth, Dye, Traders, Consumers, and Innovators. She concludes with a brief “Afterward: Why Textiles.” Each chapter starts with the earliest, most basic information then builds on that with the technology used to deal with it. The very end of the book has a glossary, from abacist to woad. This is followed by a 30-page section of end notes detailing whence her information comes, if one wishes to dig deeper. It concludes with an index.

I’ve played with the basics of spinning, weaving, and dyeing various fibers for years, and learned more about the impacts of these show more on civilization itself, as well as on fabrics, in the later chapters. It is a very readable account, though dense with information. The place of woven cloth, as a commodity, on the foundation of international banking, for instance, was eye-opening. This is not a “how to” book, but rather one that explores the basic technology for each aspect, chronicles its history and the impacts on the world at that time and now. It is also very current – published in 2021.

I recommend this book whole-heartedly to everyone interested in how fabric shaped the world we live in, with a sense of how that technology is shaping the future. Fascinating!

The author is, or at least has been, local. She mentions some places in Los Angeles in the last and the Southern California Handweavers Guild. I apparently bought this paperback at last year’s handweavers convention in Torrance, because my copy is signed by the author, dated last May. I’m so glad I bought it. show less

Virginia Postrel writes here a sweeping overview of all aspects of textile production, something I understand normal people seldom think about.

It's a unique book in that Postrel barely inserts herself into the story at all - no "My Year of Trying to Learn Spinning, Weaving, and Other Fabricky Things" this. She might begin a chapter or section describing her attendance at some textile-related class, or getting food poisoning in India while researching some dye method, but then poof - it is quickly no longer about her at all. Refreshing!

Not that I wouldn't want to hear about Postrel. Long ago I enjoyed a book of hers called THE FUTURE & ITS ENEMIES, and I used to read REASON magazine when she was editor. I listened to an interview with show more her promoting this book a short time ago. She learned to weave & spin, too, as part of her research. She was fun to listen to.

But the book jumps all over. The chapters are: Fiber, Thread, Cloth, Dye, Traders, & Consumers; and within the chapters themselves she also does a lot of jumping. I would have preferred more depth and more narrative arc, somehow.

My favorite chapter was "Dye." I love this observation: "'Any weed can be a dye,' fifteenth-century Florentine dyers used to say. But that's only if you want yellows, browns, or grays..." Ha! That's always my complaint about natural dyeing with things you can find in Vermont: all I ever got was yellow.

And her dye class in India: "Rinse and dump, rinse and dump - tub after tub of water gets hurled into the yard. To my drought-trained Angeleno eyes, it seems like a disturbingly thirsty process." I've often thought how different my hobbies might be if I lived out west - the washing and the dyeing of fiber uses tubs full of water. Happily, I live in a place that dumps snow during the winter in ample amounts that I feel perfectly happy pulling all the water I like out of our well all summer long.

It also seemed to me that the book was a bit Eurocentric. I wished there had been an exploration of how they made calico in India - instead, all that's discussed is how it changed fashions and spurred competing industries in Europe.

There are copious pictures and a beautiful cover. I would recommend jumping around as the interest takes you. show less

The book consists of seven chapters with a preface and afterward. Each chapter deals with a particular part of fabric production: Fiber, Thread, Cloth, Dye, Traders, Consumers, and Innovators. Each chapter starts in ancient times and ends in modern ones, showing how things have changed over time.

Fabric is one of those things that is so ubiquitous and important for life, and yet is also so ordinary and cheap nowadays that we simply forget about it. The book emphasizes that for most of human history fabric was at the forefront of thought. The amount of time and effort that’s gone into clothing and cloth for other purposes (sails, table coverings, curtains, blankets, etc.) is astronomical.

The book begins with the idea that modern people show more look at ancient art dealing with women and see a spindle and think, ah, this is a domestic scene. But we forget that the spindle as a means of turning fibres into thread was the start of production, necessary for the home, yes, but also an important industry. Millions of women over the course of history have spun thread and made cloth, whether of flax, cotton, wool, or silk. It was constant work because cloth is always needed. The book also shows how spinning thread was undervalued, partly because it was women’s work, but also because the higher the cost of thread, the higher the cost of cloth. We do the same thing today, keeping the final cost of clothing low so the rich can buy a lot of it, even if that means exploiting the workers who sew the cloth into clothing.

My interests are in ancient and medieval history so I didn’t expect the modern sections to interest me, but they were also fascinating. Learning about how cotton plants were cross bread and a fluke mutation created the cotton plants bred today was neat.

This is an excellent book dealing with a topic that affects everyone, but to which we give entirely too little thought. show less

Lots of interesting things to talk about, but the "journalism" style and credulousness about innovations in textile tech were frustrating for me and would have made me drop the book many times, except the history bits were interesting.

What I mean by "journalism" style is the book reads like a series of magazine longreads. Introducing scientists by what they look like felt very off to me, like what is the point of the first thing about this researcher is that he's athletic or jovial?

And then, the vast marjority of references or quotes are just "a researcher says" or "according to an archaeologist", and you have to go to the endnotes to find out the name. It was honestly confusing when one section about dyes speaks of "an Aztec girl", show more where I wasn't sure until reading it twice if this was a specific person we know about from writings or a hypothetical example.

At least the book is pretty good about explaining sciencey concepts and mostly good at describing methods of spinning, weaving, or dyeing. (Quick searches for video or color pictures helped me a lot.) show less

Postrel’s book is an interesting look at the impact of textiles on human history and civilization. It focuses on woven textiles, with brief mentions of knitting and felting. Postrel's approach is journalistic, reviewing academic historical articles while emphasizing stories that illuminate key issues. She personalizes the story editorial comments, such as, “In short, it’s complicated. Textiles tend to be.”
She traces the evolution of textiles through the adaptation of natural fibers –flax, wool, silk, and cotton – over centuries. Human selection refined these materials until the emergence of synthetic and bioengineered fibers, which are now displacing natural ones. It’s interesting to note that the labor-intensive process show more of spinning fibers took weeks of labour to produce enough cloth for a pair of trousers, years of work to provide sails for a navy.
One notable historical development is the highly organized silk spinning in northern Italy, creating the first textile factories two centuries before the industrial revolution. Despite this early industrialization, silk remained a luxury product, although Postrel says it created a basis for later mass production.
Postrel suggests that the fundamentals of arithmetic in Euclid come out of the basic operations of weaving, a key activity in ancient Greek society. Weaving patterns, when expressed in written form, become the basis for transmitting industrial design and standardized notation. Surprisingly, the weaving of microscopic fibers in the 1960s laid the foundation for early computer storage, an unexpected intersection of ancient crafts with modern technology.
Knitting eventually surpassed weaving as the most common textile form, with 16th-century knitting machines evolving into computer-programmable devices capable of producing intricate patterns, including three-dimensional shapes like shoe forms. This shift reflects the adaptability and evolution of textile techniques throughout history.
Dyeing of fibers evolved from pre-modern forms of chemistry, using natural materials in intricate processes. Examples include obtaining indigo blue from plants, Tyrian purple from sea snails, and red from common plants or cochineal imported from Aztec plantations. The trade with India in the 1600s introduced lightweight cotton with colorful prints, showcasing the global exchange of textile traditions.
The development of chemistry as a science from the 1850s onwards led to the demand for synthetic textile dyes and the inception of the chemical industry. Synthetic dyes replaced traditional dyes from colonial sources within 50 years. This shift transformed the textile industry and also influenced the development of pharmaceuticals and other synthetic materials.
Postrel also develops the idea that textiles required “social technologies” such as literacy, records, agreements, laws, practices and standards. These social technologies formed the basis of economic and legal institutions in China, Iceland, West Africa and northern Italy. Textile traders' bills of exchange, says Postrel, formed the foundation of credit, banking and currency.
She emphasizes that consumers, rather than producers, determine the meaning and value of textiles. They continuously evolve in form and meaning, as seen in the adaptation of traditional African and Guatemalan weaving techniques to contemporary styles.
The book concludes with the 1930s development of synthetic fibers like nylon and polyester, marking a revolutionary moment comparable to the impact of ceramics and metallics. This development reflects the ongoing transformative power of textiles throughout history, connecting ancient craftsmanship with modern technological advancements.
Although a bit programmatic, I found this book an interesting survey of historical developments related to everyday products that we use without thinking of how they came to us and how they affected contemporary society. show less