“We suffer textile amnesia because we enjoy textile abundance.“

“We suffer textile amnesia because we enjoy textile abundance. (…) Every scrap of cloth, I now realize, represents the solutions to innumerable difficult problems.

(…) How do you finance a crop of silkworms or cotton, a new spinning mill, or a long-distance caravan? How do you record weaving patterns so someone else can duplicate them? How do you pay for textile shipments without physically sending currency? What do you do when the law forbids the cloth you want to wear or use?“