Connecting Threads: Textiles, Trade, and ‘Social Technologies’
From time immemorial, textiles have been among the most important traded goods. As we're often reminded, the history of textiles contains many terrible stories of war, captivity, slavery, and conquest. But it also includes the examples of peaceful exchange and cooperation--and of the inventions and institutions that make them possible. Virginia will share some of the ways in which the textile trade stitched the world together, giving rise to "social technologies" as important as the inventions found in laboratories and factories.