A caution to authors: no matter how well you know your subject, no matter how deeply you’ve researched it, also research your tangential comments. Getting a detail wrong can torpedo your credibility.

A case in point: I’ve just taken The Empire of Cotton out of the library. Been waiting for it for a while & was eager to start listening. Within the first ten minutes – literally – the author made six blanket statements about pre-industrial textiles in Europe that I know are flat out wrong.

The biggest clunker is:

“[your clothes] are largely monochromatic since, unlike cottons, wool and other natural fibres do not take colours very well”

• really? Had the author done ANY research on pre-industrial dyes? Any at all? Or even looked at paintings of the period? While linen takes colour indifferently, wool accepts dyes just fine, and silk dyes magnificently!

Other dubious “facts”:

“you wake up in the morning in a bed covered in fur or straw”

• while fur is nice & warm, and straw certainly was used – even in the 20^th century, I had occasion to sleep on a paillasse – your pre-industrial bedding might include, among other things, wool, feathers, down, linen, hemp, and, if you’re super-rich, possibly even silk. Not just fur&straw 

“it is hard to wash your clothes”

• linens, and some wools, are easy to wash

“you change [your clothes] irregularly”

• most people in Europe wore linen next to the skin and changed these body linens routinely, even daily if they could afford it.

“[your clothes] smell”

• while standards were less exacting than today’s, stinky clothes were not the norm. Cleanliness was important – one of the functions of body linens was to protect the outer clothes.

“…and scratch”

• not all wools scratch, most linens don’t scratch, and I’ve never met a scratchy silk

He did get one thing right:

“[your clothes] are expensive or, if you make your own, labour intensive”. Actually, if someone makes them for you, they’re still labour intensive.

The author appears to have been trying to set up his book’s background with a quick gallop through the conditions preceding his main subject. Which is fine; he wasn’t writing about the pre-industrial rag trade. But making pronouncements based on assumptions that seem to come from a combination of “everybody knows” & entertainment industry interpretations, was a mistake.

Now that I know he didn’t know what he was talking about in an area I know well, I wonder what else he got wrong. I’m going to return the book without finishing it. He may be 100% accurate about everything else, but how would I know?