mhalachai:elodieunderglass:madgastronomer:ardatli:air139:systlin:brunhiddensmusings:bemusedlybespect

mhalachai:elodieunderglass:madgastronomer:ardatli:air139:systlin:brunhiddensmusings:bemusedlybespectacled:ardatli:hearthburn:ardatli:I can’t. Every single sentence in this could not be more wrong if the author deliberately set out to be the wrongest person in wrongville. I just. I don’t care what else might be useful in this book, if your introduction is as fundamentally incorrect as this, the reliability of everything else you’ve ever said and that your editor has ever touched is immediately thrown into question. Monochromatic MY ASS. I… that is… such bullshit. Wool and silk are arguably the easiest fibers to dye. Cotton’s a stone bitch to color. (Let’s not even get into ‘change clothes irregularly’, that’s bullshit too.)I know, right?? Protein fibres suck up dye like no-one’s business; it’s cellulose that hates it. And as for the others… linen bedsheets, bitch. And linen and silk woven so finely as to be practically transparent. And I’d like to take my records of inventories with 100+ linen shifts for one person, because of multiple-changes-per-day, and shove them up his grant. It’s like he assumes that without cotton we also wouldn’t have, like, modern inventions and techniques? “Wool is hard to clean” I mean yeah you have to use Woolite on the gentle cycle and air dry but that’s not that much harder than using normal detergentwool being excellent to dye is its other great selling poin besides warmth- which is why ‘black sheep’ became a derogatory term, as black wool could not be dyed and thus was worth less as it would only ever be dark greyhistorical perspective on the fabric alternate reality he proposes- linen was durable but not easy to dye, but you largely didnt care as it was undergarments or bedsheets where you wont be publicly showing off the linens- who other then nobility cares if their bedsheets are vibrantly colored? the reason you wore linen undergarments is that they breathe and protect you from any itchyness (wool that had been properly treated by a fuller {one of the worst jobs in history} would not have been very itchy either) of thick wool clothings and to keep you from getting sweaty or stinky, not to show off your bright red skivvies. linen is still freaking awesome, its comfortable, durable, breathes. i wish i had linen undies instead of cotton ones that get stretched out and threadbare after a few months. i wish i had linen and wool shirt options instead of only paper thin cotton shirts the statement that sheep would require all the land ever- the deal with livestock through human history is that not all land is created equal, and livestock is how you used the areas that were sub-par. the fertile land you farmed crops, but there is far far more land thats unsuited for vegetables but grows grass just fine, as we cant eat the grass we set out animals like cows and sheep that CAN eat the grass and let them go wild chewin their cud and poopin on the ground while the humans are busy ploughing and harvesting on the more valuable land; allowing the ungulates to convert that grass into usable products like wool, cheese, meat, leather. there’s reasons some areas are covered with sheep and cows EVEN TODAY- either its not usable as croplands or the population nearby is so low that you couldn’t effectively organize labor to exploit farming. new zealand and australia have absurd numbers of sheep for this reason- the land is either too sparse, hilly, or remote, but wool can be exported for profit just fine. however areas like iowa and california have very few sheep as the land is better suited for grain and seasonal vegetables and using it for grazing would be less effectivefurther the statement that wool and linen are more labor intensive then cotton- theres a reason the cotton industry historically relied on slavery when wool and linen were historically a cottage industry people did in their spare time while being a full time farmer. you let a sheep out on the lawn to do its own thing, it grows the wool, once a year you shave it and spin it into thread- it produces more sheep and tasty mutton as well. linnen is made from flax plants, which are harvested with a sickle and then left in some water to rot for a week, split open, and the fibers inside spun into thread- teams up well with beekeeping as flax produces huge fields of beautiful flowers. in both the hard work is done by animals and a pond, not human hands. cotton however required you to not only plant it but spend time to pick individual bolls off of the flowering buds after it went to seed in the summer sun one at a time instead of mowing with a scythe like flax in an afternoon, which then had to have someone pick all the seeds out of each boll individually before spinning, theres no side product and it depletes the soil like a sonovabitchpictured- super easy, giving a sheep a haircut would be so much worse right? im sure the man on a horse with a whip and gun is there to make sure everyone is having a good timeand finally the primary dumb part of the highlighted segment- the assumption that if cotton didnt exist you would sleep on a pile of straw. what? is this talking today or talking medieval times again? flipping NEOLITHIC folks were bright enough to lay a blanket on top of their straw pile before they took a nap on it.  even back when straw beds were common you didnt lay on the straw, the straw was a filling for a leather or canvas bag so that you didnt get poked, and even then chances are pretty good you stuffed your bed with feathers because if theres something an agrarian society has more then enough of its poultry. if you are talking today i challenge you to go to a matress store and find a cotton filled bed- theyre filled with springs or foam, and for all points and purposes the foam is just a high tech version of straw that doesn’t rot. that, and any modern mattress is synthetic fiber to combat body odor and sweat absorptionthis is not how beds work these pre-cotton folk seem to be pretty comfortable, even if they hadnt invented perspective yet. as there is no crown im pretty sure they werent importing their fabrics from india or egyptoh, look, pre-cotton comfortable underwear, soft sheets, and a bed that looks excessively comfortable with no straw or furs in sighta world without cotton isnt a world without soap either jackassI love everyone in this thread thank you. please someone shown me multi chromatic dies, are y'all insisting middle ages was a buncha tie died serfs?Given that tie-dye was one among many resist dye methods popular in India and Indonesia in the middle ages, yes. Not in Europe, necessarily, but boy did tie-dye ever exist pre-1600. As far as Europe is concerned, they hadn’t figured out how to dye cotton and get anything even remotely similar in quality to the hundreds of colour-fast styles they’d later run into in India. But they also knew how to weave brocades. And stripes. And repeat patterns. And a lot of them liked obnoxious colour combinations.(This one is a cheat b/c it’s a European image of a woman in Persian clothing, but I love her stripe combinations too much to leave her out.) And have some plaids, parti-colours, checks and stripes for good measure:Also, if we hadn’t had cotton, at least in the US, we’d have a ton of HEMP fabric. Which, if you use the right variants, is just as soft and more durable. A large chunk of the reason we don’t have much hemp fiber production in the US is that cotton growers had enough political clout to quash it.And yeah, who the fuck thinks COTTON is easier to dye than wool or silk?Apparently, Sven Beckert, Professor of History at Harvard and author of “Empire of Cotton: A Global History”, from which this appears to be an excerpt. The book won the Bancroft Prize and shortlisted for the Pulitzer. It looks like it’s one of those books that does “Guns Germs and Steel” through the lens of the authors’ favorite animal/substance/pop song - I.E, “society exists in its current form because of X” - with the idea being that cotton caused the Industrial Revolution and the structure of modern capitalism. Which could be fun, apart from the highlighted paragraph being rather misleading about, well, cotton.At first glance, it genuinely does appear a book on fibercraft made it all the way to the “prize-awarding” stage without the input of a single fibercrafter at any point in the process, which is quite astonishing, since fibercrafters are not exactly Quiet and Reserved. The immense amount of interconnected knowledge contained in a single woman knitting on the train is just boiling under the surface of her skin like a living thing, waiting to leap out and sink its teeth into someone’s throat. You don’t mess around with Fiber Fandom; the unexpectedly serious Discourse will cover everything from medieval economies to the proper husbandry of goats.  I’d be rather tempted to quietly ask the author about this, and just see if it’s something he propagates throughout the book, or if it’s just a passage he popped in for hyperbole and attempted humor to set up his argument (perhaps there’s a gotcha on the next page where he says “LOL JUST KIDDING, I WAS JUST TRYING TO SET A SCENE”) and it didn’t come off quite right. Like, deliberately attempting to mislead in order to set up a one-two punch. I really would be interested in hearing more about the book, OP! my judgement is reserved since this passage could potentially undermine an interesting work.after all the research i’ve done for my most recent story, I am here for this discourse. -- source link

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