The History of Silk, Cotton, Linen, Wool, and Other Fibrous Substances
The History of Silk, Cotton, Linen, Wool, and Other Fibrous Substances
Note: This summary is written through a specific lens — what an operator building a sustainable fashion brand can extract from this 1845 book. For a general summary, see Claude’s Take for what the book is about on its own terms.
TLDR for a sustainable fashion brand
An 1845 New York scrapbook of everything a self-taught Victorian could find on where cloth came from before the factory. Three things in it are worth an operator’s time: heritage-fiber origin stories that still do brand work today (Justinian’s smuggler-monks, Egyptian flax painted on a 1500-BC tomb wall, Spanish Merino protected as a state monopoly), a full section on obscure “other fibrous substances” that reads like a 2026 sustainable-fiber startup deck (pineapple, sea silk from Pinna shells, mallow, broom, nettle, paper mulberry, camel-hair felt), and — most useful of all — a cotton chapter that is a masterclass in how to narrate a supply chain while carefully not looking at the parts that are uncomfortable to look at. Not a modern production manual. Not a dye manual. Not a book to trust anywhere near slavery, race, or labor. But a goldmine for copy.
Fibers worth building a story around
Silk
The smuggler-monks. In 530 AD, two monks arrive at Justinian’s court in Byzantium and say they know how raw silk is actually made. Justinian, sick of buying from the Persians, sends them back. They return with silkworm eggs hidden in the hollow stem of a plant — Procopius says a bamboo walking staff — and hand them over. The entire silk economy of the Mediterranean starts right there. Ready-made origin copy for a heritage silk brand willing to admit that the whole industry began with a 1500-year-old act of industrial espionage.
The silkworm as its own funeral shroud. Gilroy patiently describes what a silkworm actually is. A caterpillar the size of a little finger, eats only mulberry leaves, sheds its skin four times in a month, and in one burst extrudes a single thread about a kilometer long from two holes under its jaw and wraps itself in it. Steamed alive, the pupa dies and the cocoon unspools. A modest silk robe takes about three thousand of these. Bombyx mori cannot fly, cannot feed itself, and has been selected so hard for silk yield that it exists as a tool for making silk. This is the fact most silk brand copy politely declines to mention, and which the kind of customer you actually want will respect you for saying out loud.
The Chinese plantation detail. Gilroy notes that silkworm houses were placed in the middle of mulberry plantations because “a sudden shout, or the bark of a dog, is destructive of the young worms,” and that the worms themselves are so passive “their own spontaneous will seldom leads them to travel over a greater space than three feet” in their entire life. The weird, specific details that differentiate brand story from Wikipedia.
Background fact for pricing copy: in the third century, raw silk was priced literally at its weight in gold. When the nuptial robes of Maria, wife of the Emperor Honorius, were exhumed in 1544 and burned, the silk alone yielded 36 pounds of pure gold thread.
Linen
Egyptian flax, pulled by the roots. A wall painting in the Grotto of El Kab, dated to roughly 1500 BC, shows five people pulling flax up by the roots (cutting wastes the long stem fibers) and combing out the seed capsules with a four-toothed wooden ripple. The woman in the painting is wearing a transparent linen shift that reaches to her ankles. The method is identical to the method used in Europe until industrialization. A 3,500-year-old illustrated spec sheet for the same process.
Plutarch on why wool was disgusting. The Egyptian priesthood wore linen exclusively and regarded wool as “the excretion of a sluggish body, taken from sheep.” Flax was what clean felt like. One theory Plutarch passes along is that the color of the flax blossom resembles “the etherial blue which surrounds the world.” That last line is an unexpectedly good brand quote for a modern linen line.
The mummy cloth debate. From roughly 1750 to 1834, European scholars argued whether Egyptian mummies were wrapped in linen or cotton. Rouelle said cotton. Blumenbach in 1811 tried to settle it by consulting “ladies, dealers in cotton and linen cloth, weavers and the like,” all of whom said cotton because it felt soft. James Thomson, a British cotton manufacturer, finally resolved it in 1834 by examining about 400 specimens under a microscope. Flax fibers are jointed tubes like canes; cotton fibers are flattened, twisted ribbons. Every mummy specimen was linen. Gilroy cites one traveler, Caillaud, who washed a mummy napkin eight times and then started using it as a handkerchief. “With a sort of veneration, I unfolded every day this venerable linen, which had been woven more than 1700 years.” Excellent durability copy.
The mummy-paper pipeline. Abdollatiph, an Arab physician who visited Egypt around 1200 AD, reports that Bedouin grave-robbers were unwrapping mummies in the catacombs and selling the linen wrappings to scribes for paper. The bandages were recycled into Europe’s first linen rag-paper. Gilroy’s Appendix B makes the case carefully and the broad claim turns out to be supportable. Unhinged, apparently true, and available for linen-plus-paper brand crossovers.
Retting, defined for the operator. Linen is not cut from flax. Stems are immersed in water (or dew-retted on the ground) for days or weeks until the pectin holding the fibers to the woody core ferments and breaks down; the long fibers are then separated by beating. This is retting. It is slow, it stinks, and the wastewater is toxic to fish. Gilroy takes it for granted his readers know this. A modern brand should not.
Wool
Most of Gilroy’s wool chapters are dated pastoral padding. Three useful things.
Spain invented luxury wool and treated it as a state secret. Spanish Merino was the most prized fine wool in Europe into the 19th century, and Spain protected it the same way China protected silk. Strabo says breeding rams sold for a talent each — roughly £200 sterling, the price of a farmhouse. Estremadura’s twice-yearly transhumance was governed by the Mesta code. For several centuries exporting live Spanish sheep was a capital offense; the Bourbon crown broke the monopoly only in the late 18th century by sending flocks as diplomatic gifts to France, Saxony, and Britain.
Undyed is a feature, not a compromise. The sheep of Bætica (the Guadalquivir valley in Andalusia) produced wool in natural drab, gray, brown, and what Martial called “metallic golden” shades, and the wool was made into clothing without dyeing. Martial’s line is brand copy ready for a naturally-pigmented wool brand: “My wool disdains a lye, or caldron hue. / Poor Tyre may take it: me my sheep imbue.”
Sheep were kept for the fleece, not the meat. Varro, Columella, and Pliny all treat sheep as primarily a clothing animal. They produce milk and cheese, and are eaten only at festivals. Martial scolded a man who ate a ram: “Hast pierc’d the neck of the Phryxean lord, / Who oft had shelter’d thine?” Two thousand years of Roman agricultural writing backing the “wool is renewable, meat is incidental” argument.
Cotton, and the 1845 silence
This section gets its own heading because it is by far the book’s most useful lesson for a modern sustainable-fashion operator, and none of it is the lesson Gilroy thought he was teaching.
The ancient cotton history is charming: Herodotus on Indian “fleeces from trees”; Romans figuring out that the “wool-bearing tree” and the “wool-bearing herb” were two species of Gossypium; cotton awnings first used in 63 BC to shade the Apollinarian games. The Indian section is better. At Dacca, jamdani muslins — named Abrowan (running water) and Siebnem (evening dew) — were spun at dawn while dew was still on the ground because the thread was too fine to handle after sunrise. A single retti of cotton (about 120 milligrams) was spun into 80 cubits of thread. The Raffugars, the darners, could pull a thread out of a woven muslin and replace it with a finer one. The Dacca industry was so good that in 1678 the English woollen lobby successfully got Parliament to prohibit Indian imports to save the domestic trade.
Then Gilroy reaches 1845 India, and the tone is the most interesting thing in the book. Citing Dr. Francis Hamilton, he reports with audible indignation that Indian journeyman weavers near the Ganges earned “from 1 shilling to 1 shilling and fourpence per week” and that the East India Company had reduced them to “a state of dependence almost amounting to servitude.” He quotes a petition from 117 Bengali manufacturers to the Privy Council in 1831 noting that British fabrics entered Bengal duty-free while Bengali fabrics paid 10% in Britain, and makes it very clear he thinks this is disgraceful. He can see British extraction in India perfectly, in detail, in 1845.
Then he turns to American cotton, and the register changes. Eli Whitney gets a worshipful footnote — “one of the most ingenious and extraordinary men that ever lived,” a national hero who “virtuously” died in debt. The entire treatment of American cotton is this sentence:
“While the invention of the cotton gin has been the chief source of the prosperity of the Southern planter, the Northern manufacturer comes in for a large share of the benefits derived from this most important offspring of American ingenuity.”
And this one, rhetorically:
“Who is there that, like him, has given his country and the world a machine — the product of his own skill — which has furnished a large part of its population, from childhood to age, with a lucrative employment; by which their debts have been paid off; their capitals increased; their lands trebled in value?”
Sixteen years before Fort Sumter. New York. Dedicated to “THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES.” The American cotton industry is “lucrative employment from childhood to age.” The word slave appears in the book only in reference to Roman spinning women and the felt cap given to freed Romans. The people picking cotton in Alabama and Mississippi in 1845 are not mentioned. Not denied. Not hinted at. They do not exist on the page.
What makes this the most useful thing in the book is that Gilroy is not especially a racist or a propagandist. He is a moderately liberal Northern author who can see British extraction in India with total clarity and who, when he turns to the American supply chain, simply looks somewhere else. He writes about the gin, the Northern mills, and Whitney’s tomb. The enslaved labor at the other end of the rope is structurally outside his frame.
This is the exact failure mode that every modern sustainable brand is at risk of. It isn’t usually lying. It’s looking at the specific part of the chain that photographs well and leaving the rest unwritten. Cotton in 1845 is cotton in 2026 in every structurally important way: global commodity, multi-continent chain, labor conditions that range from bad to coercive, careful copy about the parts that look good. Gilroy’s chapter is what that looks like with 180 years of hindsight. The exercise for any brand-building operator: write a paragraph about where your cotton comes from, then read Gilroy’s Whitney footnote, then read your paragraph again.
Other fibers you’ve never heard of (and should)
This is the most immediately actionable section of the book. Almost every plant Gilroy covers here is either back or coming back.
Pinna nobilis (sea silk). A Mediterranean bivalve up to two feet long that anchors itself to the seabed with a tuft of golden silky fibers called a byssus. Divers at Tarentum (Taranto) harvested them by hand, washed them in tepid water, combed them with iron scarde, spun them on a distaff, and knit them into stockings and gloves. Tertullian, second century: “Nor was it enough to comb and to sow the materials for a tunic. It was necessary also to fish for one’s dress. For fleeces are obtained from the sea, where shells of extraordinary size are furnished with tufts of mossy hair.” St. Basil called it “the golden fleece of the Pinna, which no artificial dye could imitate.” Procopius reports that the Byzantine satraps of Armenia wore Pinna-silk chlamys cloaks as imperial insignia. Italians called it Lana Penna — fish wool. The craft was almost extinct in Gilroy’s day and survives today in essentially one person: Chiara Vigo on Sant’Antioco in Sardinia, who publicly refuses to sell the material and only gives it away. The single most unhinged, romantic, unscalable fiber in the book — literally a fleece from a mollusk — and catnip for any luxury brand willing to borrow the story without trying to manufacture it.
Pineapple leaf (piña). Gilroy covers this as a then-novelty. Frederick Burt Zincke patented a process in England in 1836: crush the leaves with a tilt hammer, rinse in soft water, dry in the shade. Fibers 1/5000th of an inch in diameter, “glossy, even, and smooth,” and — the key property — “readily receive the most delicate dyes,” which flax famously does not. The plant “thrives upon a barren rock, where no other plant would live,” needs almost no care, is unpalatable to livestock because of oxalic acid content, and reproduces from offsets. Zincke’s list of applications: “shawls, drills, damask-linens, plushes, carpets, rugs, lace, bonnets, paper.” Piña is now a legitimate fiber again in the Philippines, marketed both as traditional handwoven piña and as Piñatex, the pineapple-based vegan leather. Everything Gilroy says about dye affinity and minimal land/water footprint still holds.
Mallows (Malva silvestris, Hibiscus cannabinus). The forgotten bast fiber. Gilroy devotes a chapter to it because the Greek word molochina appears in Aristophanes, Plautus, Isidore of Seville, and a Charlemagne-era poem: “Wrapt in a mallow shawl the lady shines.” Aristophanes’s Lysistrata jokes about mallow shifts so transparent the women might as well be naked. The Hibiscus species that produce it in India (kenaf, sunn hemp) are back as sustainable fiber crops now — they produce usable bast fiber in three months and grow on marginal land.
Spartum / esparto / Spanish broom. Pliny says whole mountains in Spain were covered with it, and natives made mattresses, shoes, coarse garments, and torches from it. In Bas-Languedoc, peasants who could not grow flax soaked broom twigs in water, beat them like flax, and wove the fiber into “sheets, napkins, and shirts. The peasants in this district use no other kind of linen.” Esparto is still grown for paper in North Africa and is one of the most efficient dryland fiber crops in existence.
Nettle. Stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) gives up a fine, strong bast fiber similar to linen when retted. Gilroy mentions it alongside broom in the Pope Benedict XIV / Albanian colony story. Used in Europe as a linen substitute through WWI, when the Germans, blockaded from cotton, made soldier uniforms from it. Coming back now as a low-input cellulosic.
Paper mulberry bark (Broussonetia papyrifera). Gilroy quotes M. de la Rouverie, who took bark in sap, beat it with mallets, steeped it in water, and produced “a cloth the texture of which appeared as if formed of silk.” This is tapa cloth — still the most important textile tradition of Polynesia, Tonga, Samoa, and Hawaii.
Camel hair. Prosper Alpinus reports the ancient Egyptians made camel-hair cloth fine enough to be worn by Venetian senators. Moorcroft documents cloth from the wild camels of Khotan. Tartar women in the Crimea made narrow light camel cloth for daily wear.
Cashmere via the Angora goat. Gilroy covers the French experiments of M. Polonceau, who crossed French goats with Cashmere goats and by the 1820s was producing down “more valuable than that of the East,” yielding 12–30 ounces per animal per season versus 2–4 ounces for uncrossed Cashmere. The Society for the Encouragement of Agriculture gave him their gold medal in 1826. Under-used story for any European cashmere brand pushing back on Mongolia-only sourcing.
Natural dyes and pre-industrial techniques
Gilroy’s dyeing material is the weakest part of the book relative to what a modern operator wants. What’s here:
Tyrian purple. Two species of murex snail — buccinum and purpura — each yield a single drop of dye from a sac in the throat. Pliny’s recipe as Gilroy transcribes it: collect the juice, heat with sea salt, let ripen three days, dilute with five times its bulk of water, keep warm six days more, skim off the membranes, prepare the wool with lime-water or fucus lichen (mordant step), dip once in purpura juice and then once in buccinum juice. Fifty drachms of wool required 100 drachms of the first liquor and 200 of the second. A pre-dye with kermes (scarlet scale insect) intensified the shade. Roughly 10,000 snails per gram of dye. Plutarch says the Persian royal treasury at Susa held purple cloth that still retained its color after 190 years. The durability claim is real. The labor and ecological claims are the reality check on anyone saying “natural dyes = low impact.”
Indigo. Gilroy only mentions it in passing, quoting Hasselquist in the 1750s: “the common people in Egypt are clothed in linen only, dyed blue with indigo.” He does not describe the process. Fill this gap from other sources.
Madder, woad, cochineal. Alluded to, not chaptered. If you want recipes, mordants, and lightfastness, not your book.
The undyed-natural case. Where Gilroy is genuinely useful on dyeing: the Spanish Bætic wool was celebrated across Roman literature precisely for not being dyed. The whole “undyed is a feature” argument in 2000-year-old form.
Felting (Appendix C — the book’s best technical chapter). Fiber matting through moisture, heat, and mechanical agitation, without spinning or weaving. Older than weaving. Scythian nomads lived under felt tents. Herodotus describes Argippaei tribes covering their trees in winter with thick undyed felt. Phrygian postillions wore cloaks of white camel-hair felt “half an inch thick” that stood upright on the ground like armor. The Greek pileus and Roman felt skull-cap were the mark of the freed slave: a manumitted Roman had his head shaved and received a cap of undyed felt, which thereafter meant liberty. Felting had to be actively reinvented at Leeds in the early 19th century after falling out of Western use. For any modern brand working with no-spin, no-weave fiber (and there are a growing number), this is the deepest technique in the book.
Pre-industrial production rates. Gilroy is mostly not numerate, but one useful number: Dacca’s finest cotton was spun at roughly 1/3000th of a gram per meter of thread, and only while the dew was on the ground. A full Dacca muslin took months to a year. Any modern brand using “slow fashion” as copy should remember the historical baseline for truly fine handwoven muslin was something on the order of a centimeter of finished cloth per person-hour.
What this book will not help you with
It will not tell you how to dye anything in a modern workshop. No lightfastness data, no mordant ratios, no reliable fiber properties. Its classical philology is outdated, its religious framing is airless Victorian Protestantism, its science is pre-Pasteur. It is wrong about several specific points (the Pinna’s “cancer friend,” various of Ctesias’s claims it passes along, the old belief that mummies were wrapped in cotton). Its treatment of labor is dishonest by omission where American cotton is concerned and moralistic where it suits the author. Do not use this book as a production manual, a chemistry reference, or a model for thinking about supply-chain ethics. Use it as a source of stories.
Claude’s Take
Worth roughly three hours to a sustainable-fashion operator. Thirty minutes in the silk chapter for the bamboo-cane story and the silkworm description. One hour in the “Other Fibrous Substances” chapters for alternative-fiber origin stories you will not find assembled in one book anywhere else. Thirty minutes in the linen chapter for the mummies and the Plutarch-on-wool quote. Thirty minutes in the Whitney footnote and the Indian weaver passage, read back-to-back. Thirty minutes in the felt appendix. Skip the pastoral poetry, skip the classical philology arguments about byssus, skip the wool taxonomy, skip Gilroy’s thoughts on divine providence.
The single most important takeaway is the cotton lesson. Not the technical history — the failure mode. A 1845 Northern author can see British exploitation of Indian weavers with perfect clarity and simultaneously write a hagiography of Eli Whitney without once mentioning the enslaved people at the other end of the gin. He isn’t hiding anything. He is looking at the parts of the chain that are easy to look at and not mentioning the parts that aren’t. Any brand that tells a story about where its materials come from is one edit away from doing exactly what he did. The useful exercise is not to feel superior to him but to read the Whitney footnote, read your own About page, and see whether the structure is the same.
What to do next: pick two alternative fibers from the “Other Fibrous Substances” chapters — Pinna, piña, mallow, spartum, nettle, paper mulberry — that could plausibly sit behind an actual product, and spend a day finding the modern producers. They exist. Most are small, most are in Southeast Asia or the Mediterranean, and most would benefit materially from a brand willing to tell their story without making up anything that isn’t already in Gilroy and Pliny.