The author encapsulates seven hundred years of natural fiber textiles' history within these slender pages. The theme revolves around those producers, who may be termed “market makers,” who set the standards that an intensively competitive market must meet and by the same logic dictated their “pricing” terms to “market takers” who were largely reactive to competitive forces. The region chosen is the Apennines comprising Umbria and the Marche.

The history of woolen textiles as well as hempen and flaxen cloth goes back to the Roman times if not earlier. The target was essentially auto-consumption and their use was both secular and ritual.

The potential of the production and trade in natural fibers became a notable feature of the medieval Apennine economy, a trend that was carried into the renaissance period of Europe until around the sixteenth century. The availability of abundant water led to a major technological innovation in the eleventh century—the shift from foot treadles to fulling machines. As city councils and merchant guilds became involved in controlling textile production and trade, the textile industries (especially wool) moved from the supervision of monasteries and feudal lords (such as the Ottoni family) into the control of the city fathers, in the course of the twelfth–thirteenth centuries.

In the period that followed, the growth of new urban industries was the most striking development in central Apennine textiles. A major reason was the failure of north-western European producers such as Belgium and northern France to export middling and low cost woolens in a competitive manner. Europe in the fourteenth century was war-torn, and local wool producers who lacked overhead costs (such as transportation) in regions such as the Apennines benefited vastly. Some prominent textile towns in the central Apennines were Ancona, Gubbio, Matelica, and San Severomp Marche. A noticeable effect was specialization in production processes such as wool and flax cleaning, combing, or carding; spinning; the various processes associated with weaving itself such as stretching, sizing, and weaving; and finishing processes involving washing, dyeing, and so on.

A major outcome of these changes was a change in organizational structure. The once-local textile crafts had become sufficiently market oriented to need guild regulations on aspects such as quality control and pricing. In textiles towns such as Matelica, the lana guild exercised full control over weavers, warpers, cleaners, and stretchers. An interesting aspect of Robert DuPlessis's book is his effort to recover the labor history of women in the regions. Most of the spinners were women, who usually worked from home. They were also a major part of the labor force employed in sectors such as cleaning and warping in the work houses because of the lower pieces rates that they were willing to accept. Despite their numerical strength in the textile industry, the author points out, “Women are not known to have belonged to guilds in the central Apennine region and their participation in corporate life was very rare throughout Europe” (p. 21).

Economic historians would do well to take note of DuPlessis's contribution to the current debates on “Proto-Industrialization,” a term that came into theoretical focus in the 1980s with the writings of Franklin Mendels and which has regained momentum through some recent publications on this theme. DuPlessis has argued that the natural fiber textiles production of the Apennine, with its features of an integrated rural-urban, nonfactory, market-oriented industrial system, provided a convincing example of proto-industrialization. This monograph then needs to be seen in conjunction with the work of M. R. Palairet on the woolen textiles of the Balkans. (The paper is part of the book edited by Peter Kriedte et al. as Industrialization before Industrialization, Cambridge University Press, 1981, Tr. from German by Beate Schempp.)

The period between the late sixteenth and eighteenth centuries has been described by the author as one of persistent crisis. The Apennine natural fiber industries went through the same slump that confronted a large part of western Europe in the seventeenth century. The city councils adopted a multipronged strategy to check the rapid collapse of the woolen industry. In the sixteenth century this decline was noticeably the result of the growing competition from English wool. The strategy was one based on growing subsidies to weavers on the one hand and stringent embargoes on imported textiles into the region on the other. The strength of the Apennine region lay in its low labor costs, principally female labor, but its greatest weakness was its failure to innovate in terms of technological advances. Innovation was limited to improved raw materials and experimentation in new products, neither of which could change the domestic producers into “market-makers” instead of “market-takers.”

The changing political scenario of the region foregrounds the author's study. The woes of “crisis” were followed by the turbulent years preceding Italian unification. The papacy had played an important part in the revival of Apennine textiles. Pope Pius VI abolished a number of tolls, taxes, and duties on silkworm cocoons greatly facilitating the production and sale of silk. In 1782 Bishop Minnucci founded a silk processing and weaving conservatory where poor girls could earn their dowry through fabric making. Physiocratic reforms did away partially with the stranglehold regulations of the guilds. However, whereas the Apennine region gained in terms of its export of raw material, especially silk, it bought back the same as finished goods, losing eventually on the roundabout.

The latter chapters take up the story from the postunification period when the protections, privileges, and subsidies offered by the papal states had become a thing of the past, to the world war period when, for a brief while, the silk industry of the region flourished. This was evident in the opening up of new mills and innovations such as modern steam-heated basins replacing the traditional basins fuelled by wood fires. This “Indian Summer” (sic p. 105) collapsed with the competition of textiles from regions such as India in cottons and Japan in silks. Rayon displaced silk in the twentieth century to the loss of the Apennine silk producers, although Italy took very quickly to rayon production, ranking second only to the United States.

As “tenacious survivors” the natural fiber textiles of the Apennine region have lasted unto the present day despite tough competition from China and India, which could hire labor at an even cheaper rate. With innovative techniques and the constant nurturing of the relationship between town and country, the Apennine producers could still become “market-makers.”

This fascinating saga of a region and its principal industry,—natural fiber textiles—is a must read for economic historians in general and textile historians in particular.