Textiles

Textiles were among the first articles of human manufacture and trade primarily because of the wide availability of raw materials and the many uses of fabric—utilitarian, symbolic, aesthetic. Lengths of cloth can be used as clothing or for ornamentation, but typically fabrics undergo further transformation before consumers buy them. Creating textiles involves a sequence of processes from preparing raw materials through fabricating and finishing the resulting cloth. Yet over five millennia, textiles have experienced repeated changes in virtually every respect—primary materials, production methods, manufacturing centers, and regulations.

The long history of making, trading, and using cloth reveals the ways in which new and hybrid products and styles are created in numerous locations by all kinds of groups and individuals for a dizzying array of purposes. Textile products and practices have consistently traversed borders of all kinds: the process now termed “globalization” has occurred repeatedly in the past. Historical analysis of textiles likewise emphasizes how regulation—formal and informal, state-imposed and market-based, secular and religious—has shaped consumption and how fashion, expressed first and most durably in clothing, became central to the understanding of, and a dominant motive for, consumption in the modern period. Studying textile consumption underlines the fact that production and consumption, far from being separate spheres of activity, form a broad network of constant interaction and mutual modification.

Until recently, most textiles were destined for those who made them. Yet often the same individuals who made simple fabrics from local raw materials for their own use also purchased fancy textiles, made from non-local materials, in the market. As a result, the textile trade has been one of the largest sectors of commerce since early antiquity and remains so today, encompassing not only finished fabrics but fibers, styles, techniques, tools, and even workers. The diffusion of textile knowledge has therefore occurred for as long as the circulation of the goods made with that knowledge.

For many centuries, textiles were woven, knitted, knotted, crocheted, felted, or otherwise fabricated by hand, usually employing inherited techniques and tools. Traditional technologies were not changeless, however; many innovations from horizontal looms to spinning wheels were introduced to improve productivity, quality, or uniformity. But because most machines depended on human muscle, textile production was carried out either in the home or in small workshops. The development of machines powered by wind or water, and later by steam and electricity, changed all that. As early as the Middle Ages, some finishing processes moved into buildings with central power sources, followed in eighteenth-century Britain on a much larger scale by spinning and weaving, setting off the momentous and eventually global transformation known as the Industrial Revolution. Textiles remain central to development policies today, due to the historical mobility of textile skills and knowledge, the relatively low capital requirements of most textile production, and the ongoing strong [Page 1444]demand for cloth throughout the world. Even though most nations engage in some textile manufacture (whether handicraft or industrial) within their own borders, cloth and products made from it remain vital to international trade.

Natural fibers—chiefly cotton, flax, hemp, silk, and wools—have dominated textile production throughout the world. Sometimes this supremacy reflects the fact that similar plants are found in disparate regions of the globe: cotton, for instance, was indigenous to both Asia and the Americas. But plants and animals have also been widely diffused, a process that began in remotest antiquity and continues today. The cultivation of cotton was introduced into West Africa between the tenth and thirteenth centuries CE; sheep were brought to Western Europe in remote antiquity and into Australia at the end of the eighteenth century; alpacas, native to Andean regions in South America, are now being raised in Europe and North America.

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