Hidden stories #9

A peek into our library collection

What is the connection between books about sheep, fossil fuels and the emergence of capitalism? And what is the connection with the theme of History Month: Natural? Library curator Jantiene van Elk discusses five books on these topics and leaves it at that.

Photo by Patty van den Elshout i.o.v. TextielMuseum

Sally Coulthard. A short history of the world according to sheep. Londen: Head of Zeus, 2020

This 'brief history of the world according to sheep' is an enjoyable non-fiction book by Sally Coulthard. She shows how incredibly connected sheep are to humans. Sheep play a major role in trade and craftsmanship.

In the library, I am often asked about original local textiles. Many people are searching for a past in which there was a connection between the environment in which we live and the products we consume. The chapter on the fisherman's sweater from Guernsey and the Aran Islands shows that this desire for a local identity also existed in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, the fisherman's sweater is an invented tradition that does not date back to centuries-old customs. A similar invented tradition arose around the Icelandic sweater and Dutch fisherman's sweaters. These stories show people's need for a connection between people and landscape, a longing for identity.

 

Hanne Eide (red.) Formafantasma Oltre Terra. Oslo: The National Museum of Art, Architexture and Design, 2023

Formafantasma is the design agency of Italians Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin. Research is an important part of their work. Commissioned by the National Museum of Norway in Oslo, they investigated the relationship between sheep and humans. The name of the exhibition, Oltre terra, comes from the word transhumance, formed by combining the Latin words trans (across, 'oltre' in Italian) and humus (soil, 'terra'). Transhumance is the annual migration of shepherds and their sheep in tune with the seasons in search of the most nutritious grass. From the mountains in summer to the valleys in winter, from the colder regions of northern Spain in summer to the warm south of Spain.

The exhibition was also on display at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, supplemented with objects about/made of wool from the Netherlands. For example, there were two sample books from the TextielMuseum!

Wool is not just a material. The project that led to this book is about ecology, about the relationship between sheep, people and nature. The beautifully designed book shows all kinds of aspects of those relationships. You can also find a lot of information on the Formafantasma website.

 

Fossil capital: the rise of steam power and the roots of global warming / Andreas Malm - Londen: Verso, 2016.

How did we end up in the current climate crisis? Global warming began during the industrial revolution in the early nineteenth century. Graphs clearly show this. But why did textile companies start using steam engines? Was this an inevitable response to the demand for more energy, as is often thought?

Andreas Malm debunks this idea of inevitable technological progress. The directors of textile factories in nineteenth-century England chose coal over hydropower as an energy source because it gave them greater control over their workers. They could build factories wherever they wanted and produce whenever they wanted. Before that, factories were dependent on hydropower, which was only available along rivers.

Malm shows how manufacturers glorified the advantages of the coal-fired steam engine in newspapers and magazines. The manufacturers also wrote about their difficult workers. By the mid-nineteenth century, workers were already resisting the steam engine, the inhuman work pace imposed on them, and the polluting smoke. You can read about this, for example, in this poem about the steam engine that appeared in the Northern Star on 26 June 1847:

The very sun shines pale on a dark earth,

Where quivering engines groan their horrid mirth,

And black smoke-offering, crime and curses, swell,

From furnace-altars of incarnate hell.

For me, it is encouraging that the choice for fossil fuels was not inevitable, but rather the outcome of a social development in which a small group of people with a lot of capital determined the course of history. As a society, we can make different choices if we can counteract the power of a small group.

 

Discarded: how technofossils will be our ultimate legacy / Sarah Gabbott and Jan Zalasiewicz. - Oxford: university Press, 2025

In his book Fossil Capital, Andreas Malm strongly criticises the concept of 'the Anthropocene'. This is the term, proposed by some, for the era in which the Earth's climate and atmosphere are experiencing the consequences of human activity. Malm says that the concept of the Anthropocene gives the impression that all people on Earth are jointly responsible for the current global warming and pollution caused by microplastics. That is not the case. A small group of wealthy people has set this development in motion. The consequences are enormous and affect all people and the entire planet.

The book Discarded examines what our archaeological archive will look like in the future. What remains will the Anthropocene leave behind? When archaeologists start digging in the future, what will they find? Concrete, plastic, toxic substances, but also textiles. Textiles from the twentieth century are hardly to be found in the archaeological archive in the soil, because they were made from natural materials such as wool, cotton and linen. Due to the invention of synthetic fibres, our archaeological archive will look very different in the future. Synthetic materials hardly decay in nature.

 

Karl Polanyi. The great transformation: the political and economic origings of our time. United Kingdom: Penguin, 2024.

The Great Transformation is a classic book from 1944. The author, Karl Polanyi, criticised the market economy long before the neoliberal era. He demonstrates that the market economy is not 'natural', as was long claimed. Many people saw the development of the Western world as a succession of new and increasingly better ways of organising society. In 1944, Polanyi showed that the market economy, without regulation, is the cause of poorer relationships between people and a poor relationship with the living planet. Before the industrial revolution, land and labour, nature and people were not separated. The market system caused this separation. Polanyi puts it this way: man under the name of labor, nature under the name of land, were made available for sale.