Textiles reflect both intimate expressions of local culture and distant connections among global producers and traders. They thus integrate intangible notions of identities and beliefs with very concrete patterns of exchange driven by changing tastes, relative prices, and technical know-how. The Spinning World teases the reader with its interplay of soft and hard history, an approach few specialists will find satisfying.

The editors of The Spinning World aim to weave a global, cultural history of cotton textiles with a revision of the sector's role in the economic divergence of Western Europe and Asia. The volume consists of twenty chapters arranged into sections on textile manufacturing, trade and consumption, and lastly economic impacts in “Europe” and “Asia.” The framework is inclusive and ambitious, suggesting that the qualitative specificities of an individual sector bear directly on the aggregate course of nations.

The volume succeeds best as an overview of seven centuries of textile consumption and manufacturing across nine major regions of the world, from Imperial China to Spanish America. The editors are to be congratulated for organizing such a distinguished array of cultural, economic, and social historians, each having deep expertise in textiles. Robert S. DuPlessis’ and Marta V. Vicente's essays illustrate how cotton textiles signify changing class and social status in the Americas. Olivier Raveux's essay shows the uneven adaptation of technical knowledge in the face of political opposition in seventeenth-century Marseille. By contrast, Masayuki Tanimoto observes continuity and integration in the industry's development from peasant to mechanized production in Tokugawa Japan. The dense descriptions illuminate the great breadth and variety of the cotton textile industry in the early modern period.

In this regard, The Spinning World joins other recently edited volumes integrating international scholarship on cotton textiles, notably Tirthanker Roy and Giorgio Riello's How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textile, 1500–1850 (Brill, 2008) and Douglas A. Farnie and David J. Jeremy's The Fibre That Changed The World: The Cotton Industry in International Perspective, 1600–1990s (Oxford, 2004). Like the Roy and Riello volume, The Spinning World arose from the Global Economic History Network associated with the London School of Economics and the Leverhulme Trust from 2003 to 2007. Indeed, the volumes overlap significantly in terms of themes, the actual contributors, and editorial direction. The Spinning World is not simply more of the same however.

The Spinning World differentiates itself effectively by its wider geographic and temporal coverage. The diverse social and political meanings attached to cotton consumption are emphasized when the sector is not seen through an Indo-centric lens. Riello's chapter on globalization of cotton textiles, for example, makes explicit that the success of cotton textiles depended in the first instance on the ability to compete, be it through direct substitution or expansion of consumption patterns, against locally established fabrics including linen, silk, or wool.

The Spinning World distinguishes itself unsuccessfully by tethering interpretations of the cotton textile sector to the so-called Great Divergence debate. The effort feels forced as it fails to consolidate and integrate the rich narratives accumulated in the first two sections of the volume. The introductory essay aspires for but fails to deliver a corrective to the Eurocentrism the authors bemoan. Expanding the temporal and geographic frames of references is an essential first step that underscores that the basic point that the economic “initial conditions” between Europe and Asia were often overstated. Yet by itself, the effort is wholly insufficient for dislodging the narrative of nineteenth-century European textile dominance based on technical superiority, higher labor productivity, and a culture of inventiveness.

One would have hoped for deeper theorizing: on the barriers of semi-agricultural societies toward technical innovation, on the social obstacles facing entrepreneurial manufacturers and merchants, on the causes of low labor productivity, and on the uneven impacts of state policies. At the very least, the economically literate reader needs to bridge the dense descriptions of specific markets with the big story of macro-economic divergence. Instead, The Spinning World truncates the global discussion into the well-worn story of cotton textiles between India and Britain. How does the volume explain the decline of India's cotton manufacturing? The final essay by Parthasarathi and Ian Wendt sadly provides no new insight, just a respinning of an old nationalist thread. Overall, The Spinning World extends our knowledge on an important sector without offering a coherent integration of the global experience.