Silk is the smoothest and most lustrous of the natural fabrics. Desire for these wonderful textiles, originating in China, wove webs of diplomacy and trade radiating through the ancient world, from Korea and Japan to India, Persia, the Mediterranean and beyond. As a global economy took shape in the early modern world, silk and the desires it stirred played a newly significant role. Like silver and spices, cotton, porcelain or tea, silk contributed to the emergence of new extractive and manufacturing systems that reconfigured consumption practices and shaped the rise of industrial capitalism.
It is the trajectory of silk's rival yarn, cotton, its rise as plantation crop and principal raw material for the industrial manufacture of textiles, that has defined the terms and expectations for our familiar history of the Industrial Revolution, its machine orientation and its colonial divisions of labour. However, as the editors of this valuable and fascinating volume note, the material specificities of silk and sericulture sent its production and manufacture as well as material design and aesthetic appreciation along very different paths. Compared to narratives organised around the rise of cotton as the world's primary textile, the different linkages and trajectories suggested by a silk-centred history challenge many cherished assumptions about periodisation and chronology, directions of influence, centres and peripheries, scale, innovation, the power of states and the roles of taste and fashion as catalysts of innovation and promoters at once of consumption and control.
Silk seduces intellectually as well as materially: today's field of silk studies engages a multitude of scholars and scientists from many disciplines. As the editors of Threads of Desire acknowledge, the thirteen cases which they have selected, spanning the early modern world from China, Japan and Vietnam, through Bengal, Iran and the Ottoman Empire, to Italy and England, New England and New Spain, constitute an invitation to further analysis rather than drawing definitive conclusions. The contributions are all excellent, enthralling individually and collectively. Together they map fascinating, multi-directional sequences or dynamics of geographical, technical and social diffusion, channelled through complex linkages and loop-backs of tastes, ideas, skills and institutions. Organised in three sections, Asian Origins, European Developments and Global Exchange, the volume mobilises its richly detailed and carefully sequenced case-studies to illuminate longue durée trends of global evolution, while undermining an over-simplified linear chronology or geography.
In a short review I can only hint at the rewards these fascinating studies offer. Let me describe how the first few chapters flow, to give a hint of how the volume works as a whole. Section 1, Asian Origins, begins with a discussion by Schäfer of the regional structures of Ming China's state silk manufacture, a case which she uses to probe the historiographical question of how analysis of economic and technological change is affected by the politics of history and periodisation. In the following chapter Sheng investigates the velvets manufactured in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the port of Zhangzhou in Fujian, to explain how the resources to produce a sophisticated luxury came to be available in a city hitherto of marginal importance, outside the protected sphere of state industries. Although their name suggests an ancient origin in China, in fact these fabrics were probably inspired by contemporary Italian velvets. On world markets the Zhangzhou velvets were identified as a Japanese speciality, although Japan imported them. If these Chinese luxury goods were identified as Japanese, it is because the Japanese port of Tsushima was the main far-eastern base for Europe's East India Companies. Matthee's chapter uses the circulation of raw silk to analyse how a novel early-modern European institution, the East India Company, cemented new networks and unexpected directions of commodity exchange not only between Europe and Asia but also within Asia, “from Iran to Bengal via China and Vietnam”.
In the final chapter of Asian Origins, Phillips charts the rise of a new east-west node of silk manufacture, the Ottoman empire, stretching from Istanbul and Bursa to Damascus, Chios and the gates of Vienna. Phillips documents the rise and fall of luxury silk production within Ottoman territories. She emphasises how the empire's legal apparatus interacted with textile types and markets, affecting both internal consumption and exports. Carrying the theme of luxury, control and technical innovation through into Section 2, European Developments, Faroqhi shifts our attention away from the familiar Mediterranean or trans-Asian circuits to look at both internal markets for Ottoman silks and its exports to eastern and central European neighbours. Phillips and Faroqui both show the technical ingenuity with which manufacturers responded to new tastes, or to obstacles like the Islamic prohibition on luxury, or the slender purses of would-be purchasers. A weave with an outer face of silk and an inner face of cotton, for instance, was both more affordable and less ostentatious than textiles of pure silk.
The theme of the popularisation of silk consumption is, as one expects of good global history, prominent in this collection. In England and New England, for instance, the mass production of ribbons and other trimmings allowed ordinary folk to partake of the luxury and the symbolic and aesthetic pleasures of silk (see the chapters by Mitchell and Marsh). To control rising popular demand in Tokugawa Japan the state, as Fujita notes, promoted the expansion of sericulture to reduce imports of yarn from China. Although the modern history of silk in Japan is not treated here, we might note that it was silk, rather than cotton, that featured most prominently in Japan's industrialisation, reversing earlier flows by exporting huge quantities of silk yarn to China in the 1920s and 1930s.
As a historian of technology, I particularly appreciated the volume's emphasis on the materialities of silk production: the tastes of silkworms as well as those of sultans determined where sericulture could be practised; the technicalities of reeling, weaves and decoration put silk and cotton into subtly contrasting aesthetic worlds. In the final chapter Riello contrasts the “textile spheres” of the major world fibres, silk, cotton, wool and “linen” (bast fibre might have been a better term here), and shows how specific technical differences shaped the corresponding regimes of production and consumption. As a colonial commodity cotton was grown at plantation scale in “undeveloped” peripheries, and exported for processing to the industrial metropolis. This geographical division of labour and capital is considered basic to the extraction regimes that built Western industrial capitalism. As Riello explains, the material characteristics of sericulture resisted similar scaling and division. In the silk sphere small-scale, household-based production and primary processing of raw materials fed more locally into larger-scale, urban and mechanically complex cloth-making. Silk history supports recent Japanese and European arguments for an “industrious revolution” and its important yet under-estimated role in shaping the contours of the modern global economy. With silk as an irresistible lure, this fascinating volume will entice a new and broader readership to engage with this significant historical critique.
