Silk: a thread of unparalleled beauty and strength with very rich traditions of textiles spanning various countries of East and South Asia. How does it look like when a biologist chooses to tell the story of this material? Silk: A World History by Aarathi Prasad tells a fascinating story of the global fascination with silk thread spanning many centuries and parts of the world.
This is not a book about silk weaving traditions as much as it is about the biology of silk production and the long history of our collective human effort to harvest it. While the book starts out with accounts of traditional silk harvesting practices, we learn that the quest for silk-like material continues to drive artists and scientists to experiment with creatures as diverse as sea mollusks in the Mediterranean Sea to web-spinning spiders in the English countryside.
This quest is fueled both by a desire to produce objects of great beauty and the drive towards finding biodegradable materials for modern surgeries and eco-friendly polymers. Silk reads partly like a story of the production colonial science, and part like a science fiction with futuristic tales of DNA manipulations across species to create the strongest thread with the maximum sheen. It’s a product of many hours of research, with interesting sagas for curious minds.
Silk starts with an account of European curiosity with silkworms in the 17th to 19th centuries. The early chapters resemble similar stories of the early days of colonial science wherein the excitement of the discovery of tropical biodiversity and the desire to secure biological resources for possible commercial use for the empire went hand in hand. This lead many amateur botanists, naturalists, and nature illustrators to venture into what to them was unchartered territories in search of unique specimens.
Prasad writes about the place that Bombyx mori — or the moth that produced silk in Southeast Asia – held in the scientific and zoological imaginations of many amateur scientists and European travelers in Asia. Focusing primarily on the perception of the silkworks through the eyes of the European empires, Prasad traces evidence of early European attempts of cultivating Bombyx mori much closer to home, with experiments ending in failure. We also learn about another type of moth, Rondotia menciana, whose silk was found in a 5,500 year old cloth sample in a funeral in the Zhejiang province of southern China. Prasad covers how the domestication of silkworms in China is perhaps the precursor of the genetic manipulation of silkworms that occurs today.
Much of the book is pieced together from archival evidence — from scientific notes of self-taught scientists, travel journals of curious naturalists, and the anatomically correct drawings of nature illustrators, many of whom followed the trade routes set by the Dutch East India company or the British East India Company. While it is evident that Prasad had done meticulous research to collect the data, the pieced-together narratives from archival sources and the sheer volume of detailed descriptions of the lives and careers of these colonial naturalists can be a bit too dense to navigate for the lay reader. One wishes perhaps to learn a bit more about the perspectives of the local artisans who had been nurturing the art and science of tending these moths and producing the fabrics, along with the colonial perspectives that Prasad focuses on.
Halfway through the book, Silk becomes much more accessible to all readers, as Prasad shifts her attention to Europe. Here we learn about the fascinating tradition of harvesting sea silk from a mollusk called Pinna nobilis that grows in the Mediterranean Sea. Along with Prasad, we engage in a journey to delve into archaeological evidence from places such as Sardinia, Sicily, Cyprus, and Crete to learn about the earliest use of Pinna. Prasad also writes that due to an unknown reason, though possibly due to environmental changes caused by climate change, Pinna nobilis are now dying. This makes it almost impossible for Pinna to become an alternative silk source.
Prasad’s narrative about human adventures with silk/silk-like materials takes a wild turn in the last few chapters of the book, giving it almost the feeling of reading a scientific fiction. While the story of the 18th century French naturalist François Xavier Bon and his obsession with spider eggs seems a bit bizarre, we learn that this obsession with spiders continued to fascinate male European scientists for the next two centuries.
This is a book that is well-researched, tells a comprehensive story of the human love affair with a material, and has a gorgeous jacket that will add to the aesthetic appeal of any bookshelf.
