Three of my favorite history books

You might be surprised how much you don't know

Chris Lawton via Unsplash

You know a book is good when you keep thinking about it for years after you read it. The three books in this post fall into that category: not only did I enjoy them at the time I read them, but I still enjoy thinking about them long after I have finished reading. Usually this is because I learned something completely new that shifted my perspective in some way. For example, I almost didn’t pick up The Fabric of Civilization, by Virginia Postrel, because I wasn’t really interested in the history of fabrics. Or so I thought! But one chapter in and I realized my lack of interest was simply due to my lack of attention and knowledge—not because there’s anything boring about the history of fabric. It’s mind-blowing when you realize that something so commonplace and so taken for granted is so monumentally important in the history of humankind. (More on that below.)

These are the types of books I love discovering, and I also love sharing them here with you. Of course, “discovery” is in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps you have already discovered some of these titles and they are no longer new to you. However, I hope everyone will find at least something of interest, maybe even a book that will change how you think about history. So climb aboard and let’s set sail for new lands—the world of the past beckons.

The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found (Violet Moller)

It might sound strange to say that a history of ideas is a page turner, but it is! Extremely well-written and well-documented, The Map of Knowledge will take you on a tour of the intellectual hubs of the past (Alexandria, Baghdad, Cordoba, and Venice, among others) as a few intrepid scholars tried to preserve the scientific learning of the classical world. Stretching from 500 to 1500, the book examines the precarious journey of ancient learning through political turmoil and cultural destruction—a few bright fires burning through the mists of the “Dark Ages.” As Moller notes:

Captured on the page, scientific ideas travelled around the Mediterranean world, lighting up different places at different times in history. Looking back from our twenty-first-century vantage point, we can see the ebb and flow of this knowledge, the periods of acceleration, and those of stagnation, the ideas that were rejected and lost, only to be rediscovered and revived centuries later. It has not been a straight road, but one that has twisted and turned, run in circles and disappeared down dead ends, before returning once again and moving on. (p. 266-267)

This twisting road made things difficult for the development of science, but it makes for a great story. If you have any interest at all in the history of ideas, or the history of the Mediterranean, or the history of Europe during this time period, you will find much appreciate here. Especially recommended if you plan to travel to any of these cities over the summer—or if you just fancy a bit of armchair travel!

Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Lorraine Daston)

I wrote a whole article about this one last year, so feel free to take a look if you’d like a more detailed analysis of this book. But in brief I can say that this was an eye-opening and extremely helpful new way of thinking about the history of ethics. Plus, it’s just really interesting history! Everyone is familiar with rules, and rules (both spoken and unspoken) have guided human societies for millennia. But what are they, and what are they not? Does ethical action always revolve around rules, or can rules be immoral or amoral? And do we really need rules at all? Daston does a wonderful job of prompting and answering questions you never knew you needed to know. Not for the faint of heart, but if you are interested in intellectual history and ethics, this book is incredible.

The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World (Virginia Postrel)

If you’re like me, you might think cloth and fabric are pretty boring—or even that the topic is frivolous and unworthy of serious consideration. Unfortunately, many historians have felt the same way, which has led to serious neglect of the important place of textiles of human history. But look closely and you’ll discover that fabrics are intimately intertwined with human history:

Any sufficiently familiar technology is indistinguishable from nature. It seems intuitive, obvious—so woven into the fabric of our lives that we take it for granted. We no more imagine a world without cloth than one without sunlight or rain… Surrounded by textiles, we’re largely oblivious to their existence and to the knowledge and efforts embodied in every scrap of fabric. Yet the story of textiles is the story of human ingenuity. (p. 3)

Author Virginia Postrel notes that the quest for more and better textiles drove forward agriculture, technological innovation, chemistry (for dyes), industrialization, as well as global trade and all the advances associated with it (travel, banking, record-keeping, etc.). For much of human history the creation of fabric was a hugely laborious process, falling most heavily on women, who were forced to constantly work spinning wheels and silk reels. Only after the Industrial Revolution (which occurred, of course, primarily in pursuit of textiles) did fabric become the cheap and barely noticeable commodity we take it for today.

Starting in deep prehistory, The Fabric of Civilization shows us how humans have shaped the world in search of fabric: prehistoric humans bred cotton for its long fibers, silk worms for their long threads, and sheep for their long wool—a process that took about 2,000 generations, or 5,000 years. Even “the microbiology that revolutionized human understanding of infectious disease, saving the lives of millions, began with a quest to rescue silk production” (p. 30). That is, Giovanni Bassi, a provincial lawyer in early 19th century Italy, while seeking the remedy to a disease that killed silkworms, discovered “the microbial origin of disease in animal life” (p. 32)—setting the stage for Louis Pasteur’s breakthroughs in immunology and vaccines.

Open this book at random and you will find any number of passages to make you reframe your understanding of history:

To weave is to devise, to invent—to contrive function and beauty from the simplest of elements. In The Odyssey, when Athena and Odysseus scheme, they “weave a plan.” Fabric and fabricate share a common Latin root, fabrica: “something skillfully produced.” Text and textile are similarly related, from the verb texere, “to weave,” which in turn derives—as does techne—from the Indo-European word teks, meaning “to weave.” (p. 5)

What we usually call the Stone Age could just as easily be called the String Age. The two prehistoric technologies were literally intertwined. Early humans used string to attach stone blades to handles, creating axes and spears. The blades survived the millennia, waiting to be excavated by archaeologists. The cords rotted away, their vestiges invisible to the naked eye. Scholars named prehistoric ages after the layers of increasingly sophisticated stone tools they found: Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic. Lithic means “of or pertaining to stone.” Nobody thought about the missing threads. But we get a false picture of prehistoric life and of the earliest products of human ingenuity when we imagine only the hard tools that easily endure the passage of time. (p. 8)

At only four years old, an Aztec girl was introduced to spinning tools. By age six, she was making her first yarn. If she slacked off or spun poorly, her mother punished her by pricking her wrists with thorns, beating her with a stick, or forcing her to inhale chili smoke. The severity of the punishments reflected the importance of mastering the craft. (p. 47)

A Viking Age sail 100 meters square took 154 kilometers (60 miles) of yarn. Working eight hours a day with a heavy spindle whorl to produce relatively coarse yarn, a spinner would toil 385 days to make enough for the sail. Plucking the sheep and preparing the wool for spinning required another 600 days. From start to finish, Viking sails took longer to make than the ships they powered. (p. 51)

I could go on and on, but I will stop there. The point is, there is a 100% chance you will learn something new and astonishing from The Fabric of Civilization. If you’re anything like me, throughout the book you will consistently be amazed at the resourcefulness and intelligence that allowed people to grow, twist, and weave fibers into a wearable technology. But really, why should we be surprised? We tend to think that those of us alive today, with all our advanced machinery and AI, are smarter than anyone else who has ever lived. But this is obviously untrue—we have the same mental, physical, and social capabilities as generations of humans going back at least 50,000 years (and probably much further). There were geniuses of the Stone Age, too, and plenty of time to try out new things. And much like today, once a new development made life easier and better, and it caught on and spread quickly (ok, maybe not as quickly as today).

Postrel makes a convincing case that historians (and all of us) have ignored the history of textiles at our peril. When we misunderstand—or simply don’t think about—aspects of the past, we lose a crucial piece of our own culture. We also fail to relate properly to what came before us. For example, we may romanticize the pre-industrial past as a time of pastoral abundance and simple living, but do we take into account the difficulties, the constant shortage of food and fiber, the fact that people routinely starved or went without proper clothing? Or alternatively, we may criticize things we don’t understand:

We blasé moderns may denigrate portraits of women holding distaffs or working spinning wheels as mere symbols of domesticity and subordination. For our ancestors, however, they reflected a fundamental fact of life: without this constant labor, there could be no cloth. (p. 51)

The Fabric of Civilization reminds us that the past is more complicated, and more interesting, than we usually suspect. It’s sheer hubris to take our current achievements for granted, feeling smugly superior to those who came before. Everything we have now is built on the hard work and ingenuity of previous generations. As Postrel concludes,

This heritage does not belong to a single nation, race, or culture, or to a single time or place. The story of textiles is not a male story or a female story, not a European, African, Asian, or American story. It is all of these, cumulative and shared—a human story, a tapestry woven from countless brilliant threads. (p. 246)

I would recommend this book to absolutely anyone. You will be amazed, both by how much you didn’t know about textiles, and by how much there is to know. And like any good book, it will make you think about the world in an entirely new way.

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