Weaving Identity: Textiles, Global Modernization and Harris Tweed

By Susan M. Walcott

Creating an identity is crucial for survival, whether of individuals, countries or commercial products. Carefully selected elements combine positive pieces from the past to project a desired image into the present. Weaving Identity illustrates the process of transition through the tale of a special textile, as cloth manufactur

• Language: English
• Publisher: IngramSpark
• Release date: Mar 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9780578474199

Susan M. Walcott

Susan Walcott is Professor Emerita at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Degrees from Swarthmore, Rutgers and Indiana University were in history and geography, specializing in China and East Asian modernization.

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WEAVING IDENTITY

Susan M. Walcott

Professor Emerita, Geography

University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Gluasad Press, Oregon

[e-mail]

© 2019 by Susan M. Walcott

All rights reserved. Published 2019.

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-0-578-47418-2 (paperback)

e-book ISBN 978-0-578-47419-9

DEDICATION

To Donald Morrison Loch Street, weaver and piper

St. Kilda Waulking Song

I would make the fair cloth for thee,

Thread as the thatch-rope stout . . .

From Carmina Gadelica, Ortha non Gaidheal

(1900), in Sinclair, 1996, Hebridean Odyssey

A. Hattersley single-wide

B. Bonas Griffith double wide

C. Cloth inspector

D. Cloth mender

CONTENTS

Figures and Tables

Timeline

Prologue Setting the Scene

Chapter 1Spinning the Tale

Weaver women

Historical setting

Matheson’s Lewis and Harris Tweed

Global capitalism’s bedfellows

To be continued

Chapter 2China, Matheson and Opium War

Roots of war

Biography of a global capitalist

Opium War aftermath: Taipan and Taiping

Chapter 3Material and Modernization:

Traditional to 20th Century

Steps in the process

From cottage to mill manufacturing

Modernization and textile transition: Pendleton USA

Tough times and textiles: Early 20th century China

Chapter 4Asian Textile Transitions

Colonial influences

Japan’s journey: tradition and textiles

The Meiji Revolution: Opening to the West

Thailand: Jim Thompson Silk

Bhutan: Royal intervention

Chapter 5Crossing Paths: Scottish Crofters, Chinese Revolutions

China reborn

Lewis emerges from the wars

An industry on life support

Moving forward

Chapter 6The Dragon Leaps Overseas

Launching Chinese Outward Foreign Direct Investment

Investing in the UK

Shandong Ruyi Science and Technology Group

Chapter 7Tides in Global Trade

Spring 2009 – 2016

Clouds part and reappear

Straws in the wind:

Stornoway reconfigures

Carloway seeks survival

Shawbost shows a way

Weavers

Retail outlets

Chapter 8Future Patterns: A New Textile Trail?

Summarizing Development

Colorful past, global future

Acknowledgements

Bibliography

Index

FIGURES

TABLES

Table 6.1 Global Business Survey of Most Attractive Region to Establish Operations

Table 6.2 UK Earning from Foreign Direct Investment in Textiles and Wool, 2011-14

Table 6.3 Top European Countries for Chinese Outward Foreign Direct Investment (US$ billion)

TIMELINE

PROLOGUE

Setting the Scene

. . . you cannot separate Scotland from Harris Tweed or Harris Tweed from Scotland. Bahman Mostaghimi, Managing Director of Shandong Ruyi UK

Throughout history, cloth has furthered the organization of social and political life . . . and the transformations of meaning over time. Weiner and Schneider, 1989, Cloth and Human Experience

Our personal place of origin story is both real and imaginary. The location of our birth, and that of our parents who played a role in shaping us, has latitude and longitude. Where we live, by both choice and happenstance, contains experiences and our memories about them. Tales inhabiting these places are spun through time, containing strands of enduring themes and knots where time focuses on particular events portrayed as significant. The colors of these woven strands shift depending on the light later weavers of impressions choose to put on them, reframing the context and highlighting various aspects to suit contemporary fashion or the eyes of particular beholders. Are we part of a group identity, or a singular triumphant individual? Are we happier with our roots, or wings, retaining or ascending from them? Like the Russian matryoshka dolls that contain different sizes and faces of themselves, identity moves through stages of time and scales of place creating allegiances and our own self-image. Stories also have physical manifestations, some of which we choose to surround ourselves with in what we wear and inhabit. The story of textiles, in particular Scotland’s iconic tweed and China’s representative silk, displays an intriguingly intertwined development of national identity and global power that crosses several times over the last two centuries.

The seven islands of the Outer Hebrides form Scotland’s last inhabited outpost facing the North Atlantic, floating thirty miles northwest of the Scottish mainland. A mix of steely gray blue and aquamarine water in The Minch strait signals the chilly, often turbulent approach to the Isle of Lewis, the main island. The name Hebrides itself signifies remoteness. Sparse low-storied settlements scatter along the island’s edges. Undulating marshy moors and steep rugged hills with the oldest rocks in Britain stretch across the interior, separating the southern Harris section from the main body of Lewis. Small shieling huts used as summer dwellings in the past by shepherds grazing their flocks stand slowly crumbling. Furrows of lazy bed potatoes push across fields, and brown peat blocks excavated for fuel from family moorland plots dry in carefully stacked piles. An occasional tall white energy-generating windmill punctures the skyline in a modern contrast. Ironically this bit of modernity links back to preserve a piece of the past in at least one township that uses part of their electricity profits to provide Harris Tweed looms for beginning weavers.

The key to a society’s successful transition from traditional to modern lies with building on a distinguishing cultural element embodying an identity that aids integration into new circumstances. For the humble Hebrideans salvation came from this notable cloth, dyed in the colors of their landscape: blues of skies and lakes, grays of stones, browns and greens of moor and moss, reds and yellow from local flowers and lichen. Coloring the wool before mixing it with other threads according to a distinctive recipe gave rise to the expression dyed in the wool, meaning set from the beginning. Harris Tweed’s enduring image conjures up an aristocratic bespoke British hunting jacket, resonant of imperial dominance. That its major markets today come from China and Japan indicates the successful appeal of this fabled fabric, a model of globe-spanning survival that still literally hangs by a thread.

The earliest remaining written record of human settlement here comes from Pliny the Elder, a Greek historian who wrote in 55 BCE of Hyperborea (Far to the North). A first century Roman described Haemodae as inhabited by Picts, barbarians with painted tattoos. The Roman historian Pliny referred to the Gallic provinces as pervaded by the magical art … [of a] tribe of wizards and physicians. Indeed, natives used the wool spun from their sheep to create a fabric capable of surviving onslaughts by Romans, Vikings, confiscatory landlords, British business barons, and the gyrations of a global economy. Arabs, carriers of the seeds of Renaissance in many areas, brought cotton cloth and silk production to Europe in the 10th century. Wool production centered in Flemish (now Belgian) and English towns as early as the 14th century, forming a major export basis for further industrialization. The 15th century witnessed the spread of both textiles from the Italian city-states to manufacturing centers in the rest of Western Europe. Industrial innovations begun in Britain in the mid-1600s subsequently travelled abroad carried by emigrants and imperialists transferring production equipment and methods to new lands under their control. This industrial modernization raised concerns for cultural preservation in traditional societies in places as large as China and as small as the islands off Scotland’s Atlantic coast that were threatened by global economic and political movements.

Textiles are an important bellwether of change, commonly the first industry to trigger a society’s transition to industrialization. Traditional household-based economies needed to be self-sufficient, with a certain amount of activity involving community-level cooperation to share skills and limited resources. More isolated areas retain this self-contained model the longest. The typical cottage industry division of labor started with rural women workers creating and weaving the woolen yarn into cloth. Urban factory workers then finished the process by dyeing, shrinking, packaging and sending the material to merchants for sale. The greatest flood of workers moving from rural farms to urban factories, from a commodity to a cash economy, first encountered the ordered demands of mechanized life in a textile factory.

Societies manage the crucial transition from traditional to modern by drawing on a widening geographic sphere for labor, production knowledge and market targets. Conflicts come from the introduction of new forces: military conquest, innovations and information challenging customary practices and ultimately an individual’s sense of self-worth and identity. Achieving a sustainable balance adjusting these demands is a global challenge accompanying the movement of people into a mechanized modern world. The tale of Harris Tweed, a woven wool material produced only on a remote cluster of islands off the west coast of Scotland, serves as a microcosm of turbulent times. Accommodations reached over three centuries reshaped the world since the 1700s. Symbols surrounding Harris Tweed – the orb, St. George ‘s cross, and ancient name for Scotland - carry the past into present in Figure P.3. Modernization’s mix of sustaining ingredients includes selected traditional processes preserving cultural aspects of identity with the efficient methods of industrial mass production. A successful segue from old ways to a new world needs both. The name Harris Tweed proclaims the importance of its place of production, but the tale of its creation and survival is as twisted and complex as the fabric’s patterns and multi-hued threads.

For two centuries, the colorful contributions of several remarkable individuals critically shaped Harris Tweed’s global endurance. Their dynamic stories range from the entrepreneurial Lady Dunmore and merchant-war profiteer Lord Matheson in the mid-19th century to contemporary politicians, oil barons, and models turned tweed promoters who all struggled to promote this singular cloth and its homeland’s way of life. The true survivors are the solitary home weavers working in sheds close to their homes, creating a cloth protected by the first trademark granted in Britain. The orb and cross, recently recognized as its own coat of arms, draws on the family crest of Harris’s Lady Dunmore who first realized its market potential, popularizing and promoting the tweed woven on her Harris estate’s section of southern Lewis in 1846.

The move to standardize and preserve the cloth woven by beleaguered crofters occurred following the potato famine and the infamous Clearances, when landlords substituted sheep for human occupants of their small crofts. Many desperate inhabitants were driven