 It's a great luxury and privilege to be able to take things like textiles for granted. But when we take them too much for granted, we tend to forget about the effort and knowledge that's embedded in them. The fabric of civilization, how textiles made the world, is a new book by former Reason Editor-in-Chief Virginia Postrell. It's an endlessly fascinating rich history of the remarkable luck, invention, and innovation that made possible the fabric-rich world we inhabit. The book aims to make the mundane nothing short of miraculous. Consider cotton. The fact that we have cotton at all, that it exists anywhere, is amazing. Most of the cotton we grow today is descended in part from a plant species that evolved in Africa and which somehow got over to what is now Peru, where it mixed with new-world strains, though nobody knows how. It happened long before there were human beings, but much more recently than when the continents were together. So we don't know. It could have gotten caught up in a hurricane. It could have floated on a piece of pumice. So it's this very unlikely happening that had tremendous world-changing consequences. The story of textiles is rife with attempts at protectionism and prohibition. In 17th and 18th century Europe, countries banned the importation of super soft, super colorful cotton prints from India, known as calicoes, because they threatened domestic producers of everything from lower quality cotton fabric to luxury silks. Everybody went crazy for them. Everybody from ladies and gentlemen to serving girls who maybe would have a kerchief. There was something at every price point, as we would say today. That was a huge threat to the existing textile industries, and there was a call for protectionism. Different countries adopted different policies. The most extreme example was in France. For 73 years, France treated calico the way the US treats cocaine. It wasn't just imported Indian prints. It was any prints, even if they were made in France, on French cloth, by French companies. Illegal. Calicoes also came in luxury versions, and people did wear them at court even when they were illegal. There was this huge amount of smuggling, and they were constantly ratcheting up the penalties. They got quite grotesque, at least for the major traffickers. Some of the earliest writings of classical liberalism are in this context. There are people saying, not only is this not working, but it is unjust to be sensing people to the galleys in order to protect silk makers' profits. And eventually, it was replaced with a giant tax on imports, but it was definitely better. But there was massive smuggling around the tax, too. Pastrel also documents how the Luddites, those 19th century English textile workers famous for smashing the power looms threatening to put them out of work, actually owed their jobs to an earlier technological breakthrough, spinning machines that emerged in the late 1700s. Before that period, weavers were sitting around twiddling their thumbs, because there wasn't enough supply for them to do their craft. Once you had the Industrial Revolution, suddenly you had lots of thread, and it was a golden heyday for weavers. They were well paid, and they had plenty of work, and then boom, their power looms. If you go back to that earlier period when spinning machines were introduced, the same thing happened. Lots of people depended on spinning for their livelihood, and they had their own period of rebelling against the new technologies and saying they're putting people out of work, families are going hungry. The book also upends some contemporary myths, such as the claim that commercial production of hemp for clothing was a casualty of the war on drugs. Hemp disappeared as a fabric long before marijuana prohibition. Hemp historically was a very coarse fabric for poor people who didn't have an alternative, and it was replaced by cotton for good reasons, because cotton was also affordable, but it was soft and washable and just a much better fabric. Pastryl says one thread that runs through her work from her 1998 book, The Future and its Enemies, is how complicated and over-determined the world is. There is no scratch. You don't start from scratch, and I think too many libertarians and radicals of all sorts want to make the world be like a clean sheet of paper so that they can start with their perfect system, where in fact human beings live in history and we inherit the legacies, positive and negative of that history.