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Loading... Fabric of Civilization (edition 2021)by Virginia Postrel (Author)
Work InformationThe Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World by Virginia Postrel
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. 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 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. 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 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. Recm'd by a former supervisor (SM). Fascinating account of the role of yarn and fabric making in the development of civilization. A great take away line from the introduction was an explicit inversion of the hoardy Arthur C Clarke quote: "any sufficiently familiar technology is indistinguishable from nature." Well worth the read. (2022 Book 2) no reviews | add a review
"The story of humanity is the story of textiles--as old as civilization itself. Textiles created empires and powered invention. They established trade routes and drew nations' borders. Since the first thread was spun, fabric has driven technology, business, politics, and culture. In The Fabric of Civilization, Virginia Postrel traces this surprising history, exposing the hidden ways textiles have made our world. The origins of chemistry lie in the coloring and finishing of cloth. The beginning of binary code--and perhaps all of mathematics--is found in weaving. Selective breeding to produce fibers heralded the birth of agriculture. The belt drive came from silk production. So did microbiology. The textile business funded the Italian Renaissance and the Mughal Empire; it left us double-entry bookkeeping and letters of credit, the David and the Taj Mahal. From the Minoans who exported woolen cloth colored with precious purple dye to Egypt, to the Romans who wore wildly expensive Chinese silk, the trade and production of textiles paved the economic and cultural crossroads of the ancient world. As much as spices or gold, the quest for fabrics and dyes drew sailors across strange seas, creating an ever-more connected global economy. Synthesizing groundbreaking research from economics, archaeology, and anthropology, Postrel weaves a rich tapestry of human cultural development"-- No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)338.4Social sciences Economics Production Secondary industries and servicesLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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I’ve played with the basics of spinning, weaving, and dyeing various fibers for years, and learned more about the impacts of these 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. ( )