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The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles…
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The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World (edição: 2020)

de Virginia Postrel (Autor)

MembrosResenhasPopularidadeAvaliação médiaMenções
3561471,855 (4.21)15
"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"--… (mais)
Membro:waltergrinder
Título:The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World
Autores:Virginia Postrel (Autor)
Informação:Basic Books (2020), 320 pages
Coleções:Sua biblioteca
Avaliação:****1/2
Etiquetas:Nenhum(a)

Informações da Obra

The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World de Virginia Postrel

  1. 00
    A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire de Amy Butler Greenfield (alco261)
    alco261: A Perfect Red provides additional details for the section of the Postrel's book on dye and conversely.
  2. 00
    5,000 Years of Textiles de Jennifer Harris (MarthaJeanne)
    MarthaJeanne: Very different takes on textile history.
  3. 00
    The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger de Marc Levinson (szarka)
    szarka: Although about very different industries, The Box and The Fabric of Civilization both mine the fascinating intersection of history, economics, technology, and business.
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Mostrando 1-5 de 13 (seguinte | mostrar todas)
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. ( )
  Strider66 | Jul 19, 2022 |
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. ( )
  lauralkeet | Jul 16, 2022 |
Quines són les necessitats bàsiques per l’ésser humà?, alimentar-se, l’aixopluc i vestir-se. D’aquestes tres, la demanda de dues, alimentar-se i vestir-se, són infinites, es renoven constantment. D’aquestes dues, la que proporciona un major valor afegit és la necessitat de vestir-se, car que els tèxtils proporcionen unes oportunitats de diferenciació social, estatus, valor estètic i negoci uns quants ordres de magnitud per sobre de l’aliment, per molt vital que sigui aquest últim. Si féssim un salt enrere de 500 anys en una màquina del temps, i volguéssim utilitzar coneixements moderns per a fomentar una indústria per crear riquesa per la nostra ciutat o país, aquesta indústria seria la tèxtil. Recordem que la revolució industrial a occident es va construir sobre els telers de les fàbriques.

“El tejido de la civilización” és el títol de l’últim llibre que he llegit. Recorre des de tots els angles possibles la manera en què el teixit, la seva confecció, ha estimulat el coneixement, la tecnologia, el comerç. El teixit ha sigut una força impulsora de la civilització, està darrere dels orígens de l’agricultura, un dels beneficis de la qual podria ser la producció de fibres naturals. Està darrere dels orígens de la química moderna, que buscava la creació de nous i millors tints. Està darrere de la comptabilitat per partida doble i la invenció de les lletres de canvi per part dels comerciants tèxtils italians. Els primers codis binaris (1,0,1,0,1,0,1,0) podrien tindre un origen probable en patrons per la trama d’un telar, i d’aquí podríem saltar als Elements d’Euclides, l’aritmètica dels quals tenen molt sentit prenent-los com un conjunt d’exercicis orientats a calcular els fils de la trama i l’ordit necessaris per a crear elements decoratius geomètrics a la tela.

Tot el que el llibre explica és fascinant i l'autora, Virginia Postrel, s'ha hagut de documentar d'allò més en una gran quantitat de matèries diferents. Jo l'únic punt feble que li he trobat és que degut a la complexitat d'algunes explicacions tècniques sobre la confecció, i el funcionament d'alguns telers, falten imatges que ajudin a comprendre l'explicació, que inevitablement és feixuga. ( )
  raulmagdalena | Mar 13, 2022 |
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) ( )
  bohannon | Feb 12, 2022 |
Perspective worldwide on fabric for Susan and her quilting activities... ( )
  Brightman | Dec 16, 2021 |
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Accustomed to the brilliant tones of synthetic dye, we tend to imagine ancient purple as a bright color. But the Tyrian purple worth its weight in silver wasn’t the Technicolor hue bedecking Rex Harrison as Julius Caesar in 1963’s Cleopatra. Pliny described it as “the color of coagulated blood: dark when observed from the front, with bright reflections when seen from an angle.” In later Latin it was called blatta, from the word for “clot.” The most valuable of ancient dyes was not, by today’s standards, an especially attractive color.
It also stank – and not just during the dyeing process. Pliny’s younger contemporary, the satirical poet Martial, listed “a fleece twice drenched in Tyrian dye” in a litany of terrible smells and joked that a rich woman dressed in purple because of its odor, hinting that it masked her own. “What is the cause of the prices paid for purple-shells,” clucked a disapproving Pliny, “which have an unhealthy odor when used for dye and a gloomy tinge in their radiance resembling an angry sea?” For buyers, the answer was social status. Few could afford Tyrian purple, so it marked its owner as special….Even the purple’s notorious stench conveyed prestige, because it proved the shade was the real thing, not some imitation fashioned from cheaper plant dyes.
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"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"--

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