The European Linen Industry in Historical Perspective (review)

This volume edited by Brenda Collins and Philip Ollerenshaw comprises a selection of papers presented at a 1998 conference in Lisburn, Ireland, and organized by the Pasold Research Fund and the Linen Centre and Lisburn Museum. By reconsidering the development of a sector of the Continental textile industry that scholars have mostly neglected and by drawing attention to the manufacture of linen from the Middle Ages on, The European Linen Industry in Historical Perspective offers an important contribution to European economic history.

Cultivation of flax (the plant from which linen is made) in Europe dates from around 7000 BCE, and there are sources that testify to trading in the fiber in England by the ninth century. After that, flax and linen spread to most of northern Europe. The eighteenth century was probably the period of maximum expansion, because of growing demand in the colonies: manufacturers in Flanders, Scotland, Ireland, Silesia, Saxony, and even Russia became suppliers of cheap linen cloth for the territories across the ocean. Although the case studies presented in this book cover different areas and periods, they are closely linked by a common historiographic framework and a common focus on three central issues: the uses of linen in European material culture, the manufacture of linen in the process of industrialization, and the economic policies of the linen industries. The two editors present an introductory essay that covers both the research embodied in the essays that follow and the most recent historiography relative to the manufacture of linen, in addition to considering the role played by textiles in the process of European industrialization.

While it is impossible to analyze the twelve essays in detail here, one can identify three themes that provide the underlying structure of the volume. The essays by Elizabeth Wincott Heckett, David Mitchell, Robert Du Plessis, and Beverly Lemire discuss the role of linen cloth in European and colonial consumer culture from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and illustrate the notable variety of manufactures—from luxurious damask linen to the everyday cloth intended for export across the ocean—as well as the numerous adaptations introduced to satisfy consumers' tastes. During the eighteenth century, for example, British producers of linen cloth were able to imitate Indian cottons well enough to compete with the calicoes and chintz imported from the Orient. Heckett and the others also demonstrate how symbiotic forms of interaction were created between the manufacturing of linen and that of cotton.

The essays by Brian Mackey, Adrienne Hood, Jane Gray, and Inger Jonsson concern the transition from a proto-industry in areas where linen was manufactured on the basis of the putting-out system. These scholars compare demographic dynamics, organizational and worker productivity, and technological change and the question of gender in households involved in the working of linen fiber in Ireland, Scotland, Flanders, Sweden, and Pennsylvania. By contributing to the debate on proto-industrialization, their essays transcend the subject of linen manufacture itself.

Finally, the essays by Alastair Durie, Peter Solar, Karl Ditt, and Philip Ollerenshaw focus on the evolution of the linen industry in Belgium, Germany, and the United Kingdom (in particular Scotland and Ireland) during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By considering the role played by business firms and the impact of the industrial policies adopted in different countries, they analyze the recent decline in the sector through competition from cotton and chemical-based fibers.

Enriched by an ample bibliography, this significant volume may be considered a point of reference for anyone who wishes to undertake research on the European linen industry between the Middle Ages and the twentieth century.