Nature's Evil

In the middle of the nineteenth century, an epidemic of the ‘pepper disease’ killed silkworms all over Europe and Central Asia; Louis Pasteur intervened, but science was powerless to help. Monoculture, a result of the breeders’ selection to create a homogeneous kind of silk moth, was one of the causes of the disease. But, in Japan, the breeders had crossed the local silk moth with the Chinese species, and these Japanese hybrids were not susceptible to the disease. On the eve of Japanese industrialisation, silk became the country’s main export commodity. During the Soviet era sericulture was successfully established in Uzbekistan and Crimea – silk was produced for military parachutes and for export. But the technology of sericulture had hardly changed since the Middle Ages. A woman who worked in Soviet sericulture in the 1960s describes the intricacies of the process which have eluded written history:

Whole plantations of mulberry were grown nearby. We cut great armfuls and brought them to feed the larvae. They munched the leaves so loudly that it sounded as if the place was full of horses, not insects. When the larvae became dormant we filled the whole room with thistles from the steppe – this plant is also called ‘tumbleweed’. After dormancy the caterpillars became a transparent yellow colour and transformed into pupae. They crawled onto the thistle stems and began to ‘cast their spell’, swaying as if they were dancing as they spun their cocoons. 5

Hemp and flax

Hemp and flax – the plant from which linen is produced – are unfussy plants and can grow anywhere except in deserts and the tropics. Their need for sun, water and soil is no more than any weed requires; hemp easily grows unattended. Linen and hemp do not absorb dyes, and their natural hues are yellowish or grey. Although more expensive, cotton and silk are much more attractive. But linen sailcloth is as durable as cotton cloth, and hemp fabric is much stronger, though coarser. There were tasks that only these tough fibres could perform.

It was simple to grow flax and hemp, but processing them needed more steps and skills than were involved in the processing of wool or cotton. Flax had to be plucked by hand so that the whole stem, right down to the roots, was taken; it was dried, cleaned, braked and scutched to separate the fibre from the woody stems, heckled with combs of different gauges, pounded, sorted, then steeped in water and dried again, and finally drawn out into threads and spun. The coarser hemp went through roughly the same cycle, repeated over long periods of time. The male and female hemp plants have different characteristics; the fibre from the male plants is finer, so the grading of plants needed special skills. While most of these operations were mechanical processes, retting (the practice of dissolving or decomposing extra cellulose from the fibres) was a chain of biochemical reactions that required very particular conditions. All in all, the processing of flax and hemp was a dirty and laborious task, which involved shifting huge masses of the raw crop from the field to the barn and then from the barn to the river and back. The sheaves of hemp needed constant attention but the work was not continuous; there were long breaks which might last weeks or months. While the fibre was drying or soaking, the peasant could get on with other tasks. As the processing involved chemical changes, it could not be hurried up or intensified. These slow, uneven cycles led not to the division of labour but, on the contrary, to multitasking – combining different occupations and shifting from one to another. For this reason the forced labour of slaves, which was suited to tobacco and cotton, was ineffective for hemp.

Although both plants grow on dry land, they were profoundly important for maritime civilisations. Sails were made from linen, and ropes, sacks and cables from hemp. The toughest of natural fibres, hemp is not affected by seawater. This is one of the numerous contingencies that underlie the raw materials economy. A plant which in nature never comes into contact with seawater turns out to be uniquely adapted to function in this hostile environment. All maritime empires, from the Roman to the British, needed vast quantities of hemp, and there was simply no substitute for it. But the Catholic empires – the Portuguese, the Spanish, the French – and Orthodox Russia managed hemp better than the Protestant and Puritan ones.