Nature's Evil

Many technologies were common to all fibres. The plant or animal had to be nurtured and the fibre collected; all that was required for this was land, time and labour. The harvested fibre was cleaned – combed, pulled, washed, dried. Once the moisture had been removed from it, it was softened and straightened. This heavy, mostly manual work transformed a damp, dirty raw material into a tradable commodity – a dry material which would keep well and was light to transport. On arrival in the metropole, this material underwent secondary processing. Short filaments had to be twisted together to form one long thread, and the thread had to be wound into balls or hanks and then woven into cloth. It was then sent on to other craftsmen who cut the fabric and stitched it into garments, bedclothes, sails, cables or sacks. In the era of the Silk Road the cost of transporting the material made up almost all of the price of the finished goods. Sea transport lowered the trading outlay; but even during the period of the Industrial Revolution, cotton in Virginia cost 20 per cent less than in Manchester.

Fibre demonstrates the fortuitous link between human needs and nature’s variety. Living creatures are made up of cells; a minute number of these cells elongate into fibres. In order to make thread, these fibres have to be joined to one another – a process that doesn’t happen in nature. An individual cotton fibre is one long cell, which develops in the coating of the cotton seed. The cell twists itself into a microscopic tubule that is hollow inside, which explains why it holds heat so well. But there is more to it. The cell walls that allow it to roll itself into a hollow tube also allow it to curl together with another cell. Joined along their length, these micro-tubules make a flexible and robust thread in which the individual fibres are inseparable – their bonds are just as strong as the individual filaments. 2 These threads can be further rolled together or interwoven to produce cloth. The cloth can be dyed using a complex chemical process requiring different raw materials – natural dyes. The hollow tubules of cotton absorb these dyes better than any other fibre except for silk. But these dyes – violet purple, blue indigo, red cochineal – are also by-products of nature, which evolved them for quite other purposes. In nature, these organic substances would never be anywhere near the cells of silk or cotton.

Silk

In order to obtain 200 grams of silk thread for a shirt, producers had to rear a thousand silkworms and feed them 36 kilograms of mulberry leaves. Then they spent many long hours unravelling the silk cocoons of the larvae into long, unbroken filaments, washing and drying, scutching and combing them before twisting individual filaments into a thread, weaving the thread into cloth and finally sewing a shirt. At first people gathered cocoons from the forest. When the moths hatched, the chemical structure of the cocoon changed and the fibres shortened. It was crucial to unravel the cocoons before that, so people kept them close to the house. About 1600 bce the ancient Eurasians began to plant mulberry and cultivate silkworms in their gardens. This was how the symbiotic trinity of man, mulberry and moth started. The caterpillars eat the mulberry’s leaves but the adult moths pollinate its flowers; the fertilised flowers produce sweet fruits which are eaten by humans, who disperse the seeds; the mulberry grows and needs pollination by moths. Using the silk fibres, humans cocooned themselves from heat, moisture and insects. In due course, this material became an inexhaustible source of beauty, wealth and power. In exchange for these favours, silk required labour, warmth and loyalty and led to the development of settled life, private ownership and global trade.

The ability of the silk moth to overcome the chemical defence of the mulberry tree and the ability of man to clear land to grow this tree created a new ecological niche for all three of them – man, moth and mulberry. But the tree and the moth were more sensitive to climate than man. Outside particular areas in China, India, Japan, Central Asia, Persia and, by the early modern period, Southern Europe, silk proved very difficult to produce. Because of this, silk had always been a monopoly of remote, exotic places. Light to transport, easy to dye, not prone to rotting, silk came from a great distance, was therefore extremely expensive, and proved to be an ideal product for early European trade.