"The story of humanity is the story of textiles--as old as civilization itself. Textiles created empires and powered invention. They established trade routes and drew nations' borders. Since the first thread was spun, fabric has driven technology, business, politics, and culture. In The Fabric of Civilization, Virginia Postrel traces this surprising history, exposing the hidden ways textiles have made our world. The origins of chemistry lie in the...

"The epic story of the rise and fall of the empire of cotton, its centrality in the world economy, and its making and remaking of global capitalism. Sven Beckert's rich, fascinating book tells the story of how, in a remarkably brief period, European entrepreneurs and powerful statesmen recast the world's most significant manufacturing industry combining imperial expansion and slave labor with new machines and wage workers to change the world. Here...

On June 23, 1911 -- a summer day so magnificent it seems as if God himself has smiled on the town -- Fall River, Massachusetts is reveling in its success. The Cotton Centennial is in full swing as Joseph Bartlett takes his place among the local elite in the parade grandstand. The meticulously planned carnival has brought the thriving textile town to an unprecedented halt; rich and poor alike crowd the streets, welcoming President Taft to America's...

The killer bargain referred to by this hard-hitting documentary's title is the availability of cheap consumer goods, imported by Western companies, whose prices don't reflect the actual human and environmental costs associated with their production in the developing world. Consumers remain largely unaware of the conditions under which the goods they buy are produced; this film makes those connections shockingly clear. While some retailers and manufacturers...

Weaving the Future is a video portrait of a unique indigenous community living in the Andean highlands of northern Ecuador. The story of the Otavalo Indians is not a stereotypical tale of "isolated people struggling to survive."

"Today's world textile and garment trade is valued at a staggering $425 billion. We are told that under the pressure of increasing globalisation, it is India and China that are the new world manufacturing powerhouses. However, this is not a new phenomenon: until the industrial revolution, Asia manufactured great quantities of colourful printed cottons that were sold to places as far afield as Japan, West Africa and Europe. Cotton explores this earlier...

"This is a book about waste transformed, and reuse, repurposing, and recycling -- and how we consume the products of our industry. Through the story of shoddy, Hanna Rose Shell takes up these provocative topics and offers a new way for us to think critically about them. Shoddy is a global potpourri of textile waste manufactured into a saleable commodity: for example, wool that has been sorted, scoured, stuffed into rag-grinding machines, and remade...

The uprising of '34 is a startling documentary which tells the story of the General Strike of 1934, a massive but little-known strike by hundreds of thousands of Southern cotton mill workers during the Great Depression. The mill workers' defiant stance, and the remarkable grassroots organizing that led up to it, challenged a system of mill owner control that had shaped life in cotton mill communities for decades. Sixty years after the government brutally...