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Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]
- Автор: Эткинд Александр Маркович
- Год: 2022
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wiley
- Переводчик: Sara Jolly
- Жанр: История
Электронная книга - «Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]». Краткое содержание книги:
In the middle of the nineteenth century, an epidemic of the ‘pepper disease’ killed silkworms all over Europe and Central Asia; Louis Pasteur intervened, but science was powerless to help. Monoculture, a result of the breeders’ selection to create a homogeneous kind of silk moth, was one of the causes of the disease. But, in Japan, the breeders had crossed the local silk moth with the Chinese species, and these Japanese hybrids were not susceptible to the disease. On the eve of Japanese industrialisation, silk became the country’s main export commodity. During the Soviet era sericulture was successfully established in Uzbekistan and Crimea – silk was produced for military parachutes and for export. But the technology of sericulture had hardly changed since the Middle Ages. A woman who worked in Soviet sericulture in the 1960s describes the intricacies of the process which have eluded written history:
Whole plantations of mulberry were grown nearby. We cut great armfuls and brought them to feed the larvae. They munched the leaves so loudly that it sounded as if the place was full of horses, not insects. When the larvae became dormant we filled the whole room with thistles from the steppe – this plant is also called ‘tumbleweed’. After dormancy the caterpillars became a transparent yellow colour and transformed into pupae. They crawled onto the thistle stems and began to ‘cast their spell’, swaying as if they were dancing as they spun their cocoons. 5
Hemp and flax
Hemp and flax – the plant from which linen is produced – are unfussy plants and can grow anywhere except in deserts and the tropics. Their need for sun, water and soil is no more than any weed requires; hemp easily grows unattended. Linen and hemp do not absorb dyes, and their natural hues are yellowish or grey. Although more expensive, cotton and silk are much more attractive. But linen sailcloth is as durable as cotton cloth, and hemp fabric is much stronger, though coarser. There were tasks that only these tough fibres could perform.
It was simple to grow flax and hemp, but processing them needed more steps and skills than were involved in the processing of wool or cotton. Flax had to be plucked by hand so that the whole stem, right down to the roots, was taken; it was dried, cleaned, braked and scutched to separate the fibre from the woody stems, heckled with combs of different gauges, pounded, sorted, then steeped in water and dried again, and finally drawn out into threads and spun. The coarser hemp went through roughly the same cycle, repeated over long periods of time. The male and female hemp plants have different characteristics; the fibre from the male plants is finer, so the grading of plants needed special skills. While most of these operations were mechanical processes, retting (the practice of dissolving or decomposing extra cellulose from the fibres) was a chain of biochemical reactions that required very particular conditions. All in all, the processing of flax and hemp was a dirty and laborious task, which involved shifting huge masses of the raw crop from the field to the barn and then from the barn to the river and back. The sheaves of hemp needed constant attention but the work was not continuous; there were long breaks which might last weeks or months. While the fibre was drying or soaking, the peasant could get on with other tasks. As the processing involved chemical changes, it could not be hurried up or intensified. These slow, uneven cycles led not to the division of labour but, on the contrary, to multitasking – combining different occupations and shifting from one to another. For this reason the forced labour of slaves, which was suited to tobacco and cotton, was ineffective for hemp.
Although both plants grow on dry land, they were profoundly important for maritime civilisations. Sails were made from linen, and ropes, sacks and cables from hemp. The toughest of natural fibres, hemp is not affected by seawater. This is one of the numerous contingencies that underlie the raw materials economy. A plant which in nature never comes into contact with seawater turns out to be uniquely adapted to function in this hostile environment. All maritime empires, from the Roman to the British, needed vast quantities of hemp, and there was simply no substitute for it. But the Catholic empires – the Portuguese, the Spanish, the French – and Orthodox Russia managed hemp better than the Protestant and Puritan ones.
In Venice there was a Hemp Guild which controlled both the quality of hemp produced and the middlemen who traded in it. Having founded the English Royal Navy, Henry VIII in 1533 laid every farmer under the obligation to set aside some land for hemp production. Elizabeth I raised this hemp tax and increased the punishment for non-payment. In 1611 London asked the colonists in Jamestown to sow hemp alongside their tobacco crop. The obedient deputies of the colonial assemblies in Virginia, then Maryland and Pennsylvania, copied these decisions. The British government offered a subsidy for every acre sown with hemp. Ten of the thirteen American colonies followed suit. In Virginia, if a household couldn’t manage the required consignment of hemp, it paid a fine of 1,000 lb of tobacco. Clearly, the farmers preferred growing wool and tobacco for the mass market to growing hemp for the government’s benefit. Then a myth arose that the English climate was unsuitable for hemp growing. In 1808 the government asked the East India Company to implement the production of hemp in India. The empire was permanently short of hemp and its by-products. The reasons had little to do with climate: hemp grew everywhere, and it grew in England. It was the processing that needed certain environmental conditions. There was no similar problem with any other raw material – with grain or wool or cotton; if there was a shortage of them, prices rose and then production increased, even though with delay. 6
Unable to impose hemp on their farmers, the British Empire and its American colonies depended on Russian hemp. The eminent historian Alfred Crosby wrote his first book about America’s resource dependence on imperial Russia. Hundreds of American ships plied back and forth across the Atlantic and the Great Lakes. Each vessel had sails, ropes and rigging lines, and nearly all of them were made out of North European, for the most part Russian, hemp and linen; a mere 2 per cent of the hemp which they used in ships’ rigging was home-grown in America. For example, the three-masted, 44-cannon frigate Constitution , which left the Boston shipyard in 1794 and is still afloat today, had about a hundred tons of rigging; every rope was made out of imported hemp. Such a frigate needed two sets of sails, each containing about an acre of linen canvas, and this too had been sourced from the ports of Northern Europe. Every few years the rigging and sails had to be replaced. ‘Russian hemp’ was considered the most robust and reliable. Linen from Silesian flax was finer than Russian, and this quality was prized for underwear and clothes. But Russian linen made the best sails and Russian hemp made the best ropes.
The unusual processing shaped the history of hemp: turning plants into a commodity needed competent, honest and prolonged labour. The long filaments of the hemp plant are joined together by a sticky tar which has to be removed before the splitting and cleaning process can begin. The Americans used natural ventilation to do this. After the harvest, the hemp stalks were left lying on the ground for about a month and occasionally turned over. This got rid of the unwanted tar but damaged the fibres, which became coarse and partly lost their ability to curl up. These fibres were suitable for making sacks but made poor-quality ropes; the American sailors refused to use them, even though they were cheap. The Russian method began by drying the stalks in sheaves, but then the stalks were strewn in water and pressed under wooden frames. The purer the water, preferably running water, the better the fibre produced. Depending on its intended use, the hemp was soaked for anything from two weeks to three years. In some cases the water was heated up. Then the fibre was dried, and only after this was it scutched and combed. As a result, commercial hemp, suitable for rigging, was only ready for sale two years after the crop had been cut in the fields. This method of retting never lent itself to mechanisation or to slave labour; the production process needed knowledge, experience and patience. Much of this work was done by women, and probably by children too.