Peacocks and Penguins: The Political Economy of European Cloth and Colors
Author(s): Jane Schneider
Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 5, No. 3, Political Economy (Aug., 1978), pp. 413-447
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/643750
So, I finished reading this article yesterday (if you want a copy, let me know – I will e-mail it to those without JSTOR access) and found it pretty interesting. I am not well versed enough on the specifics of the wool or dye trades to really verify its contents, but they made for interesting food for thought.
The article summary:
“This paper relates color symbolism in European dress to the historical geography of textile manufacturing and dyeing, dating back to the Middle Ages. Its central concern is the widespread use of black, not only as a color of mourning, but also as a mode for communicating religious and political goals. Black clothing, it is argued, constituted both a practical and a symbolic means of resisting the luxury, polychrome fabrics that older and more developed civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean ex-ported. Although beautiful and tempting, these textiles were instruments of hegemony, for they were produced under monopoly conditions furthered by the highly uneven world distribution of dyestuffs. In Europe they commanded basic resources-slaves and bullion-in exchange and thus created an unequal balance of trade. Black cloth, which contributed in many different ways first to arrest and then to reverse this imbalance, was a totally indigenous product that native craftsmen manufactured and brought to perfection using native raw materials. As such, it had something in common with contemporary symbols of national liberation, perhaps even when it called attention to death.”
The paper traces and interesting path from the Medieval through Modern (18th/19th C) Eras. It discusses the imbalance of trade between Eastern empires and Europe, followed by the internal textile trade imbalance within Europe itself, the reaction of nascent nation-states to the loss of their capital to other countries (i.e. sumptuary law), the change of national trade balance and the counter-trade reaction created by the introduction of later period materials inventions. Overall the theme of the paper (the use of black cloth by European states as a trade and political tool) seems to be fairly well supported by the evidence given.
Makes me want to make a pitch-black, velvet on satin Spanish ensemble with silver trim and a big-old black ruff set. *evil grin*
Interesting quotes:
"By examining manifestations of black dress over time, we discover that, more than a funerary color, it resembled key symbols of national liberation with which we are familiar today. Like these symbols it bore a complex relationship to social class. Such symbols tap egalitarian sentiments when "national" leaders speak through them to expel compradors and imperialist agents from the higher strata of the body politic; but they often become routinized, ceremonialized, and elitist when the body politic is on its own. The process of routinization in turn calls forth "reformations," in which groups disadvantaged by the new alignment of forces strip the original symbols of their encrusted accumulations of pomp and splendor so as to use them, in purified form, to announce a renewed revolution. In the resulting conflict, class and regional enemies speak to each other in different dialects of the same language: embroidered black and plain black coexist in struggle."
“Italian hegemony, and demand for bullion, was not spread evenly, however; it advanced, as Braudel has suggested, "along narrow channels running northwards with the great trade routes" (Braudel 1972, Vol.1:223). The main cluster of these routes transversed a corridor or "isthmus" that lay between eastern France on one side, Hungary and Poland on the other, and stretched as far north as England and Scandinavia. To the west of this corridor, in France and Spain, centralizing monarchies had successfully warded off excessive Italianization and diverted the oppressive fiscal demands of the papacy onto "less united and stable countries like Germany" (Dickens 1966:35). As a result, the bulk of the Mediterranean trade went over the alpine passes and up the Rhine. Everywhere it penetrated, it stimulated a local economy to new levels of production and exchange, and to increased outflows of bullion. "Geographers talk of a catchment area of a river; here there was a catchment of many trades by the quick flowing rivers of money to the profit of financiers in Genoa and Florence" (Braudel 1972, Vol.1:386,393). That the balance of trade was un-favorable to the north was "wholly to be expected"; in spite of it, northern merchants and artisans were "as if under apprenticeship, looking for guidance to the towns of the South" (Braudel 1972, Vol. 1:215). In England this situation led to a series of anti-Italian riots in the fifteenth century (Myers 1963:73,159-162; also see Holmes 1960 on Florentine merchants in London).”
“South German and alpine politics of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries similarly fused moral and economic concerns. Angry at merchants who sent "great sums of good money to Italy," reformers declared that "cloth made in foreign lands shall not be sold in our markets," and they advocated clothes of solid colors, a different color each for men and women (Braudel 1972, Vol. 1:215; Shapiro 1909:16). Both moral and economic criticisms of ostentation were reflected in municipal sumptuary laws that, although not new, multiplied rapidly in much of Europe after 1400. These laws had as a central purpose the limitation of purchases to which social pressure and rivalry for status drove citizens, even against their will, threatening them with financial ruin.”
"
“Counter-Reformation violence in south Germany and the Low Countries turned many thousands of Protestants into refugees. A large number of these refugees were skilled workmen, the most highly skilled being dyers (Burn 1846: Kisch 1964; see also Kamen 1971:89-99; Trevor-Roper 1967). It was incumbent upon states like England and Holland, where the new draperies were not yet well-established, to offer protection and exemptions to Protestant migrants. Flemish, German,”
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