Michael: The average person is wearing about nine miles of thread right now. And here’s the crazy part: that thread tells a bigger story about human history than the Pyramids, the Great Wall, or every gold coin ever minted. It’s a story of empires, rebellion, and survival. Kevin: Nine miles? I feel personally attacked by my own t-shirt. But that’s a wild thought. We think of history as this grand, hard thing—stone castles, steel swords. You’re saying the real story is in something soft, something we completely take for granted? Michael: That’s precisely the argument. It’s this invisible architecture that has shaped everything. And that's the incredible world we're diving into today with Kassia St Clair's book, The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History. Kevin: Right, and St Clair is the perfect guide for this. She's a cultural historian who actually specialized in 18th-century dress at Oxford. So she’s not just looking at fabric as a material, but as a language of power and identity. Michael: Exactly. And the book has been widely praised for making this seemingly niche topic feel epic and deeply relevant. It forces you to see the world differently, starting from the very dawn of human ingenuity. Kevin: I’m in. So where do we start? Are we talking about the first loincloth? Michael: We’re going way, way earlier than that. And it starts not with a piece of clothing, but with a simple piece of string.

Michael: So, let's set the scene. It’s a cave in the Republic of Georgia, called Dzudzuana. A botanist named Eliso Kvavadze is analyzing soil samples from 34,000 years ago, looking for ancient pollen. Standard stuff. But under her microscope, she sees something else. Tiny, microscopic fibers. Kevin: Okay, so, ancient dust bunnies? What’s the big deal? Michael: Well, she and her team looked closer. These weren't just random plant fibers. They were flax fibers—the stuff linen is made from—and they had been deliberately twisted together. Some were even dyed. We're talking black, grey, and a kind of turquoise. Kevin: Hold on. 34,000 years ago? That’s more than 20,000 years before we thought sophisticated weaving even existed. So we’re talking about prehistoric fashionistas with a taste for turquoise? Michael: It's less about fashion and more about a technological explosion. This wasn't just for decoration. The author Elizabeth Wayland Barber calls this the "String Revolution." Before you can weave cloth, you need thread. And once you have thread, you can do incredible things. Kevin: Like what? What did they do with it? I’m picturing a caveman struggling to thread a needle. Michael: Think bigger. You can make nets to catch fish and birds, so you eat better. You can make snares to trap animals. You can tie sharp stones to sticks to make better spears. You can create bags and slings to carry your baby, your food, your tools. It allows you to be mobile, to carry more, to hunt more effectively. String was the prehistoric internet—it connected everything and enabled a huge leap in human capability. Kevin: Wow. So it’s not about clothes, it’s about infrastructure. Thread is the original tool that builds other tools. That completely reframes it. It’s not a 'soft' craft; it’s hardcore survival technology. Michael: Exactly. And this technology just scales up throughout history. Fast forward thousands of years to the Vikings. We picture them as these brutal warriors with axes and horned helmets—which they didn't actually wear, by the way. But their real superpower wasn't the axe; it was the sail. Kevin: The longboat, right. The ultimate getaway vehicle. Michael: The ultimate vehicle, powered by an enormous piece of fabric. The Gokstad ship, a famous Viking vessel they unearthed in Norway, was a masterpiece of engineering. But the sail that powered it was just as impressive. To make one single woollen sail for a longship, it would take the wool from hundreds of sheep and years of labor from an entire community. Kevin: Years? For one sail? Michael: Oh yeah. Textile historian Lise Bender Jørgensen estimated that to outfit the entire Norwegian Viking-era fleet, you would have needed the wool from up to two million sheep. It was a massive national industry. That woollen sail was the engine of their empire. It let them trade, raid, and explore all the way to North America, 500 years before Columbus. Their dominance was built on the back of sheep and the skill of their weavers. Kevin: That's incredible. It connects something as mundane as sheep farming directly to empire-building. This is where the book is brilliant, but I have to bring up a point some readers have made. The chapters, especially the one on wool, can feel a bit all over the place. It jumps from Robin Hood's Lincoln Green cloth, to Cistercian monks getting rich off wool, to King Richard the Lionheart's ransom being paid in wool sacks. Does St Clair manage to tie it all together? Michael: I think that's actually her point. The "scatter," as you put it, is the evidence. Wool wasn't a neat, single-threaded story. It was so fundamental to medieval England that it was tangled up in everything: folklore, religion, war, and royal finance. The fact that it appears in all these seemingly disconnected areas proves how deeply it was woven into the very fabric of society. The thread connects them all. Kevin: That’s a fair defense. So the messiness is the message. It wasn't a sidebar to history; it was the main stage, just hidden in plain sight. Michael: Precisely. And that brings us to the other side of the coin. Fabric doesn't just build empires on a grand scale. It operates on a deeply personal, and intensely political, level too.

Michael: The power of fabric to build civilizations is one thing, but St Clair shows it's just as powerful in defining and controlling individuals. And there's no starker example of this than in the American South during the era of slavery. Kevin: Okay, so how does that work? I assume slave owners provided the cheapest, most basic clothing possible. Michael: They did. It was called "Negro cloth"—a coarse, cheap, deliberately uncomfortable fabric, usually undyed or a drab grey. The goal was uniformity. It was a visual marker to strip away individuality and enforce a low status. But enslaved people fought back, and their main weapon was clothing. Kevin: How? If you're given a uniform, how do you fight it? Michael: This is where the story of Solomon, a runaway slave from Georgia in 1851, is so powerful. His owner placed a runaway ad in the paper, and what's fascinating is the incredible detail he gives about Solomon's clothes. He didn't just run with the clothes on his back. The ad lists "a black cloth coat," "a pair of black cassimere pants," "a green blanket overcoat," and several other specific, quality garments. Kevin: Wow. So he took his entire wardrobe. Why was that so important? Michael: For three reasons. First, clothing was currency. You could trade a good coat for food, shelter, or passage. Second, it was a disguise. If you're dressed in fine clothes, you don't look like a runaway field hand; you might pass as a free man. But the third reason is the most profound. Kevin: What’s that? Michael: It was about reclaiming his humanity. The system was designed to make him anonymous, a piece of property in drab cloth. By acquiring, caring for, and choosing to wear his own clothes, Solomon was making a powerful statement: "I am an individual. I have taste. I have self-respect. I am a man." Kevin: That’s… incredibly moving. So the very act of choosing your own clothes was an act of rebellion. It's not just fabric; it's a declaration of selfhood. It’s a political act. Michael: It was a huge political act. There are accounts of white slave owners being deeply unsettled, even angered, by seeing enslaved people dressed well. A southern lady was overheard in 1862 complaining, "We let them dress too much. It led them astray. We will be punished for it." It upset the entire social order. Kevin: That's fascinating. Is this part of St Clair's larger project? Because the book also talks a lot about how textile work has been dismissed as "women's work." Is she trying to show that these 'domestic' or 'personal' things like clothing are actually central to the biggest historical forces, like slavery and freedom? Michael: I think that's the core of the book. She's elevating the history of fabric from a footnote to a headline. It's the same force at play during the Industrial Revolution with the Luddites. We remember them as simple-minded thugs who hated machines. Kevin: Right, they just went around smashing things because they were afraid of the future. Michael: But that's not the full story. Many Luddites were highly skilled weavers. Their craft was their identity, their community, their "social fabric." The new power looms didn't just threaten their jobs; they threatened their entire way of life and their sense of self-worth. They weren't smashing machines because they hated technology; they were smashing machines that were destroying their world and their identity. It was a fight over who controlled the means of production, and by extension, their lives. Kevin: So whether it's a slave's coat or a weaver's loom, the thread is always tied to dignity and control. Michael: Always. From the dawn of humanity to the modern day. Even the spacesuit that walked on the moon—the Apollo Omega suit—was a marvel of high-tech materials. But who stitched it together with incredible precision? Seamstresses from Playtex, the women's underwear company. They adapted their skills from making bras and girdles to create a garment that could withstand the vacuum of space. The thread of human ingenuity, often held in female hands, runs through it all.

Kevin: So when you pull it all together, this book is arguing that history isn't just written in stone, it's woven in thread. From a 34,000-year-old piece of flax in a cave, to a Viking sail powering an empire, to a slave's coat as a symbol of freedom. Michael: Exactly. St Clair's 'Golden Thread' is the idea that textiles are the hidden infrastructure of human civilization. They enabled our survival and exploration, they funded empires and sparked revolutions. But they also tell our most intimate stories—of who we are, what we value, and how we fight for our dignity. Kevin: It’s a powerful re-framing. It makes you realize that the most world-changing technologies aren't always the ones that make the loudest noise. Sometimes they're as quiet and as essential as a needle and thread. Michael: And the story isn't over. The book touches on fast fashion, the environmental cost of synthetics, the exploitation in modern garment factories. The same themes of technology, power, and identity are playing out right now in the clothes we’re all wearing. Kevin: It really makes you look at your own clothes completely differently. What story is that nine miles of thread you're wearing telling? Michael: That's a great question for our listeners. Take a look at the tag on your shirt. Where was it made? What's it made of? Let us know what you find and what you think about it on our social channels. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Kevin: A fantastic, eye-opening book. A must-read. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.