The Origin of Silk Production.pdf

2020

2020

At a time when the social and cultural importance of silk in the pre-modern global world is increasingly evident, this volume returns to the issue of technology and queries the ways in which actors determined the nature of silk by deploying, selecting, or pursuing certain set of technics, practices, or ideals (while dismissing or ignoring others). Drawing on the growing research on silk’s cultural, social, economic, and intellectual implications, these chapters provide a fresh look at how technical processes have been historically shaped to define the identity of silk. Calling the technical system that has generated ideas about silk a form of textile seri-technics, this volume presents historical case studies that, sampled from diverse cultural regions, exemplify major technological processes and practices of silk textile production. The contributions tackle five technical attributes and principles of action that have come to make- up historical seri-technics

China Review International, 1996

When was silk first brought across the steppe from far China towards the European world? There is silk from the Middle Bronze Age of Uzbekistan, in Scythian burials of Siberia and among the Hallstatt grave-goods of western Europe. Teasing out the story of silk depends on identifying the textile, and distinguishing its several varieties apart.

There are only a limited number of readers that master the Danish language, and since I wanted to make this essay available to all the other people potentially interested in it, I have decided to translate it. I shall point out, however, that a couple of cognitions (some of which appear to be essential to the core statement of the essay’s conclusion) have become obsolete over the years. Thus, consider this text as a document of its time.

2020

Silk cultivation by means of domesticating the Bombyx Mori began in China around 4000 BCE, or even earlier. 1 Its migration out of China proper started a few centuries before the Common Era. The technology first headed eastward, towards Korea and Japan, much later it moved westward. This essay deals with the westward expansion of sericulture. Sericulture here is defined as including the operations of raising mulberry trees, harvesting mulberry leaves (the only suitable food for Bombyx Mori silkworms), silkworm rearing, harvesting their cocoons and reeling from them the silk filaments commonly known as "raw silk." 2 This chapter does not deal with "wild" silkworms as they have played an insignificant role in most Western silk cultivating countries outside China, apart from some regions in India. 3 The mulberry trees referred to are usually Morus Alba, although other kinds of Morus such as M. Nigra or M. Rubra, have been used to feed silkworms in the past. In this essay I argue that the time required to raise mulberry trees to maturity, and problems in ensuring a regular supply of silkworm eggs to rejuvenate silkworm stocks, contributed to the very slow pace of westward expansion of sericulture outside China proper. Moving westwards, similarities in processes are much more striking than actual differences. We can see how beliefs were part of the transmission of knowhow, as well as the gendering of sericultural tasks. Significant technical changes only happened when necessity arose in a specific economic and social en vironment. One example is Northern Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where special silk throwing machines to twist the silk thread, and modified silk reeling machinery, were developed to produce a much more perfect silk thread as required by the market.

Fibres and Textiles in Eastern Europe

The article presents the history of the development of sericulture in the world, including Poland. The advantages of natural silk which cause interest in its production and processing in many countries of the world are indicated. A brief description of mulberry silkworm breeding and the technology of silk processing into textile products are presented. The article provides information on the production of natural silk in several countries in 2015-2019. The share of silk in the world global production of fibres is about 0.2%. Over the last few years, the largest amounts of natural silk have been produced by the following countries: China, India and Uzbekistan – the total share of these countries in the world silk production is about 98%.

The Research Journal of the Costume Culture, 2013

This paper is concerned with the development of the silk trade and in particular with silk-ikat production. Early origins are explained and issues relating to the development of long-distance trade are discussed. The principal trading participants are identified and the focus is turned to silk-ikat production in Central Asia. It is recognised that the vast bulk of trade, along what became known as the 'Silk Route' (or 'Silk Road'), did not involve straight-forward or direct exchange between powers to the far east of the route and powers to the far west, but rather was done in stages between adjacent or not too distant locations. Diffusion of ideas was not therefore immediate and operational at one eastern or western extreme of a trading network but, rather, was a gradual process influencing adjacent participants, at stages between the geographic extremes over a long period of time.