Textile Important Quotes

Many questions come to mind. How influenced by contemporary religions were many of the scholars who wrote the texts available today? How many scholars have simply assumed that males have always played the dominant role in leadership and creative invention and projected this assumption into their analysis of ancient cultures? Why do so many people educated in this century think of classical Greece as the first major culture when written language was in use and great cities built at least twenty-five centuries before that time? And perhaps most important, why is it continually inferred that the age of the "pagan" religions, the time of the worship of female deities (if mentioned at all), was dark and chaotic, mysterious and evil, without the light of order and reason that supposedly accompanied the later male religions, when it has been archaeologically confirmed that the earliest law, government, medicine, agriculture, architecture, metallurgy, wheeled vehicles, ceramics, textiles and written language were initially developed in societies that worshiped the Goddess? We may find ourselves wondering about the reasons for the lack of easily available information on societies who, for thousands of years, worshiped the ancient Creatress of the Universe.

Britain also banned exports from its colonies that competed with its own products, home and abroad. It banned cotton textile imports from India ('calicoes'), which were then superior to the British ones. In 1699 it banned the export of woolen cloth from its colonies to other countries (the Wool Act), destroying the Irish woolen industry and stifling the emergence of woollen manufacture in America.

The cultural Left has contributed to the formation of this politically useless unconscious not only by adopting “power” as the name of an invisible, ubiquitous, and malevolent presence, but by adopting ideals which nobody is yet able to imagine being actualized. Among these ideals are participatory democracy and the end of capitalism. Power will pass to the people, the Sixties Left believed only when decisions are made by all those who may be affected by the results. This means, for example, that economic decisions will be made by stakeholders rather than by shareholders, and that entrepreneurship and markets will cease to play their present role. When they do, capitalism as we know it will have ended, and something new will have taken its place. […] Sixties leftists skipped lightly over all the questions which had been raised by the experience of non market economies in the so-called socialist countries. They seemed to be suggesting that once we were rid of both bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, “the people” would know how to handle competition from steel mills or textile factories in the developing world, price hikes on imported oil, and so on. But they never told us how “the people” would learn how to do this. The cultural Left still skips over such questions. Doing so is a consequence of its preference for talking about “the system” rather than about specific social practices and specific changes in those practices. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic. Its insouciant use of terms like “late capitalism” suggests that we can just wait for capitalism to collapse, rather than figuring out what, in the absence of markets, will set prices and regulate distribution. The voting public, the public which must be won over if the Left is to emerge from the academy into the public square, sensibly wants to be told the details. It wants to know how things are going to work after markets are put behind us. It wants to know how participatory democracy is supposed to function. The cultural Left offers no answers to such demands for further information, but until it confronts them it will not be able to be a political Left. The public, sensibly, has no interest in getting rid of capitalism until it is offered details about the alternatives. Nor should it be interested in participatory democracy –– the liberation of the people from the power of technocrats –– until it is told how deliberative assemblies will acquire the same know-how which only the technocrats presently possess. […] The cultural Left has a vision of an America in which the white patriarchs have stopped voting and have left all the voting to be done by members of previously victimized groups, people who have somehow come into possession of more foresight and imagination than the selfish suburbanites. These formerly oppressed and newly powerful people are expected to be as angelic as the straight white males were diabolical. If I shared this expectation, I too would want to live under this new dispensation. Since I see no reason to share it, I think that the left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy. This was the business the American Left was in during the first two-thirds of the century. Someday, perhaps, cumulative piecemeal reforms will be found to have brought about revolutionary change. Such reforms might someday produce a presently unimaginable non market economy, and much more widely distributed powers of decision making. […] But in the meantime, we should not let the abstractly described best be the enemy of the better. We should not let speculation about a totally changed system, and a totally different way of thinking about human life and affairs, replace step-by-step reform of the system we presently have.

Strong European states had simultaneously created barriers to the import of foreign textiles just as they built a system for the appropriation of foreign technology. By orchestrating economic processes in Asia, Africa, and the Americas as well as in Europe, Europeans gained the paradoxical ability to direct the global trade in Indian textiles while at the same time keeping Asian cloth increasingly out of Europe, instead trading the products in Africa and elsewhere beyond Europe’s shores.

executives at America’s largest energy companies began late in 1995 to imagine the future by studying historical maps. Across Afghanistan travelers along the Silk Road had created fortunes for centuries by moving spice, jewels, and textiles to new markets. The profitable game now—created by the Soviet Union’s collapse—was oil and natural gas. The key trade routes were the same as they had been for centuries. Many led through Afghanistan. Robin Raphel and others at the State Department and the White House believed that for American oil companies, too, the Taliban could be an important part of a new Afghan solution.

When “free trade” was imposed upon the Ottoman Empire in 1838 and British cloth “flooded the market in Izmir,” local cotton workers lost their ability to maintain their old production regime. In coastal southeastern Africa, cotton yarn and cloth imports also began to devastate the local cotton textile industry. In Mexico, European cotton imports had a serious impact on local manufacturing—before tariffs enabled Mexican industrialization, Guadalajara’s industry had been, as one historian found, “virtually eliminated.” In Oaxaca, 450 out of 500 looms ceased operating. In China, the 1842 Treaty of Nanking forced the opening of markets, and the subsequent influx of European and North American yarn and cloth had a “devastating” effect, especially on China’s hand spinners.22

To begin with, even though the rich countries have low average protection, they tend to disproportionately protect products that poor countries export, especially garments and textiles. This means that, when exporting to a rich country market, poor countries face higher tariffs than other rich countries. An Oxfam report points out that 'The overall import tax rate for the USA is 1.6 percent. That rate rises steeply for a large number of developing countries: average import taxes range from around four per cent for India and Peru, to seven per cent for Nicaragua, and as much as 14-15 percent for Bangladesh, Cambodia and Nepal. As a result, in 2002, India paid more tariffs to the US government than Britain did, despite the fact that the size of its economy was less than one-third that of the UK. Even more strikingly, in the same year, Bangladesh paid almost as much in tariffs to the US government as France, despite the fact that the size of its economy was only 3% that of France.

OCCUPATIONAL SAFETY I don’t know of people who do everything from going to school, learning different skills and basically develop themselves so that they stay at home. It’s ingrained in every kid that they should study hard and excel so that they can get good jobs and live well. With that said, working is what makes us build nations and fulfill some our dreams so it’s important to ensure that the work environment is kept safe and comfortable for workers so that they can remain productive for the longest time. However as long as we are living there will SWMS always be greedy employers who will take short cuts or fail to protect their employees and this is where OSHA(occupational safety and health administration)comes in to rectify these issues. Occupational safety is ensuring that employees work in danger free environment. There are many industries of different nature and hence the possible hazards vary. For example in the textile and clothing industry, employees deal with dyes, chemicals and machines that spin , knit and weave to ensure production. In some countries there have been cases of sweatshops where people make clothes in poorly ventilated places for long hours. The tools of trade in all industries are still the ones that cause hazards e.g. machines can cut people, chemicals emit poisonous fumes or burn the skin and clothes etc. Its therefore the mandate of employers to ensure work places are safe for workers and incase the industry uses chemicals or equipments that may harm the workers in any way, they should provide protective gear. Employers can also seek the services of occupational safety specialists who can inspect their companies to ensure they adhere to the set health and safety standards. These specialists can also help formulate programs that will prevent hazards and injuries. Workers should report employers to OSHA if they fail to comply. As a worker you now know it’s partly your duty to hold your employer accountable so do not agree to work in a hazardous environment.

How many important industries—the textiles, iron, sugar, etc.—without mentioning all sorts of short-lived trades, have we not seen decline or come to a standstill on account of speculations, or in consequence of natural displacement of work, or from the effects of competition amongst the capitalists themselves!

My inspiration comes from many sources. Clearly, Mother Nature has always occupied an important position in this regard, which is tied up to my early experiences in Mexico. In addition, the patterns used in Mexican arts and crafts—ceramics, textiles, tiles, masks, etc.—also have been present in the development of my mental and artistic imaginary from the very beginning. Other elements that I can mention are indigenous myths and legends, the expressions of other artists from various cultures, iconic historical figures, and the works of poets and other writers, some of whom are my friends. Obviously, my surroundings are also a big source of inspiration, as my series of paintings on the Pacific Northwest clearly show. (Interview in Artophilia)

It is comforting to be in a business where some mistakes can be made and yet a quite satisfactory overall performance can be achieved. In a sense, this is the opposite case from our textile business where even very good management probably can average only modest results. One of the lessons your management has learned—and, unfortunately, sometimes re-learned—is the importance of being in businesses where tailwinds prevail rather than headwinds.

There seems no reason why a Textile industry on the grand scale should be a success in Palestine, with labour paid at the rates fixed by the General Federation of Jewish Labour, while the mills of Japan and of Bombay, equipped with the most modern machinery, and employing the cheapest of labour, are unable to find sufficient markets for their goods. From the point of view of those whose ardent desire it is to import Jews from Poland and Russia and the Yemen into Palestine in large numbers, and whose object is gained when the immigrant has arrived in Palestine, it may be sufficient that temporary employment is assured. But the Government is responsible not only for the present, while the imported capital is supporting the new population, but for the future, when spending of the imported capital will be at an end and the immigrant will have to live on employment, which will then be dependent on the success of the mill in competition with the mills of the world.

For example, Japan is far better than we are at recycling plastic. They recycle a very respectable 77 percent of plastic consumed. Which makes our 7 to 8 percent percent look pretty shameful. Japan’s recycled plastic is sent overseas to make toys and used in production of textiles, bottles, packaging, industrial parts, and a whole host of other products. Sweden also steps up the game when it comes to using waste as a fuel. In fact, they’ve become so efficient at converting waste into fuel that only 4 percent of their trash winds up in landfills. They even started running out of trash to convert, and began importing around 800,000 tons of garbage per year to create power and heat for homes.

As with Japanese keiretsu, the member firms in a Korean chaebol own shares in each other and tend to collaborate with each other on what is often a nonprice basis. The Korean chaebol differs from the Japanese prewar zaibatsu or postwar keiretsu, however, in a number of significant ways. First and perhaps most important, Korean network organizations were not centered around a private bank or other financial institution in the way the Japanese keiretsu are.8 This is because Korean commercial banks were all state owned until their privatization in the early 1970s, while Korean industrial firms were prohibited by law from acquiring more than an eight percent equity stake in any bank. The large Japanese city banks that were at the core of the postwar keiretsu worked closely with the Finance Ministry, of course, through the process of overloaning (i.e., providing subsidized credit), but the Korean chaebol were controlled by the government in a much more direct way through the latter’s ownership of the banking system. Thus, the networks that emerged more or less spontaneously in Japan were created much more deliberately as the result of government policy in Korea. A second difference is that the Korean chaebol resemble the Japanese intermarket keiretsu more than the vertical ones (see p. 197). That is, each of the large chaebol groups has holdings in very different sectors, from heavy manufacturing and electronics to textiles, insurance, and retail. As Korean manufacturers grew and branched out into related businesses, they started to pull suppliers and subcontractors into their networks. But these relationships resembled simple vertical integration more than the relational contracting that links Japanese suppliers with assemblers. The elaborate multitiered supplier networks of a Japanese parent firm like Toyota do not have ready counterparts in Korea.9

Neither Britain nor any other country that followed it down the path of textile-based industrialization could have accomplished an economic transformation without the millions of acres of cotton fields of the expanding American South. To replace the fiber imported from American slaver labor camps with an equivalent amount of wool, Britain in 1830 would have had to devote 23 million acres to sheep pasture—more than the sum total of the island's agricultural land.

Contrary to the impression left by toga party costumes, the toga was closer to the size of a bedroom than a bedsheet, about 20 square meters (24 square yards). Assuming 20 threads to the centimeter (about 130 to the inch), historian Mary Harlow calculates that a toga required about 40 kilometers (25 miles) of wool yarn—enough to reach from Central Park to Greenwich, Connecticut. Spinning that much yarn would take some nine hundred hours, or more than four months of labor, working eight hours a day, six days a week. Ignoring textiles, Harlow cautions, blinds classical scholars to some of the most important economic, political, and organizational challenges that ancient societies faced. Cloth isn’t just for clothes, after all. “Increasingly complex societies required more and more textiles,” she writes. The Roman army, for instance, was a mass consumer of textiles.… Building a fleet required long term planning as woven sails required large amounts of raw material and time to produce. The raw materials needed to be bred, pastured, shorn or grown, harvested, and processed before they reached the spinners. Textile production for both domestic and wider needs demanded time and planning.

Up to now, gold bullion had represented 75 per cent of the EIC’s imports to Bengal, and was the source for much of the ‘prodigious ancient riches of the province’. But now the Company no longer had to ship anything from Britain in order to pay for the textiles, spices and saltpetre it wished to buy and export: Indian tax revenues were now being used to provide the finance for all such purchases. India would henceforth be treated as if it were a vast plantation to be milked and exploited, with all its profits shipped overseas to London

Textile production was so important to the British economy that a new act was passed making it illegal to export textile machinery or designs.

The Ancient Britons’ secret weapon? Woad could be mixed with yellow from the meadow plant weld, or from another native plant, dyer’s greenweed (genista tinctoria; despite its English name it dyed yellow), to give the green that Robin Hood and his merry men famously wore. Red, another favourite medieval colour, could be obtained from the roots of another native plant, madder. Mixed with woad it produced a soft purple. A deeper purple came from a lichen, orchil, imported from Norway, or ‘brasil’, a wood imported from the East Indies and correspondingly expensive. The deepest purple came from kermes, derived from insects from the Mediterranean basin called by the Italians ‘vermilium’ (‘little worms’, hence vermilion) and by the English ‘grains’. Its cost limited it to the most luxurious textiles. A good pink could be had from the resin of dragon’s blood trees, although some medieval authorities traced it to the product of a battle between elephants and dragons in which both protagonists died. Most of these dyestuffs needed a mordant to give some degree of light-fastness – usually alum, imported from Turkey and Greece.

However anomalous to European eyes, this form of writing has deep roots in Andean culture. Knotted-string communication was but one aspect of these societies’ exploration of textile technology (see Chapter 3). In these cultures, Heather Lechtman, of MIT, has argued, cloth “was the most important carrier of status, the material of choice for the communication of message, whether religious, political, or scientific.

Civilized human beings wear clothes, therefore there can be no portraiture, no mythological or historical storytelling without representations of folded textiles. But though it may account for the origins, mere tailoring can never explain the luxuriant development of drapery as a major theme of all the plastic arts. Artists, it is obvious, have always loved drapery for its own sake—or, rather, for their own. When you paint or carve drapery, you are painting or carving forms which, for all practical purposes, are non-representational-the kind of unconditioned forms on which artists even in the most naturalistic tradition like to let themselves go. In the average Madonna or Apostle the strictly human, fully representational element accounts for about ten per cent of the whole. All the rest consists of many coloured variations on the inexhaustible theme of crumpled wool or linen. And these non-representational nine-tenths of a Madonna or an Apostle may be just as important qualitatively as they are in quantity. Very often they set the tone of the whole work of art, they state the key in which the theme is being rendered, they express the mood, the temperament, the attitude to life of the artist.

But here I come back to Deleuze’s “right to say nothing,” and just because this right is denied to many people doesn’t make it any less of a right or any less important. As far back as 1886, decades before it would finally be guaranteed, workers in the United States pushed for an eight-hour workday: “eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, and eight hours of what we will.” The famous graphic by the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions shows this motto corresponding to three sections of the day: a textile worker at her station, a sleeping person’s feet sticking out of a blanket, and a couple sitting in a boat on a lake, reading a union newspaper. The movement also had its own song: We mean to make things over; we’re tired of toil for naught but bare enough to live on: never an hour for thought. We want to feel the sunshine; we want to smell the flowers; We’re sure that God has willed it, and we mean to have eight hours. We’re summoning our forces from shipyard, shop and mill: Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will!11

Calcutta had quickly grown to become the jewel among the Company’s overseas trading stations: it was by far the EIC’s most important trading post in India and the major source of British textile imports. Indeed, 60 per cent of all EIC exports from Asia were now passing through Calcutta.23

Importantly, the demand for day-care services to be provided by social insurance came from textile workers and not from the Mexican feminist movement.