Agricultural History Review, Volume 52 Part 2 (2004), p. 227

This book is the result of a conference, ‘Linen in Europe’, held at Lisburn in Northern Ireland in 1998. Compared to the woollen cloth industry, linens have been neglected by historians of economic and social history, at least in the United Kingdom, so it is a pleasure to read a volume that provides a useful, northern Europe-wide perspective of the linen industry from the late medieval period to the early twenty-first century. A survey of archaeological finds of linen and the tools used in its making from a wide range of sites from Russia to north-west Europe underlines how widespread was the production of linen.

The study of the technology of producing high quality linen damask explains why some areas were less successful than others in making this material so sought after by the rich. Brian Mackey traces the foundation of the linen industry in Ireland and debunks the myth that Cromwell and the Huguenots introduced linen making there. It was not until the 1690s that Protestants from northern France and Holland were invited to settle in Ireland. Chapters by Robert DuPlessis and Adrienne D.Hood show that there were strong links between the manufacture of linen in Pennsylvania and Ireland between 1700 and 1830, but in the nineteenth century cotton replaced flax in North America. Jane Gray’s discussion of the linen industries of Flanders, Ireland and Scotland during the long eighteenth century points up their differences. By 1815 half of the yarn used in Scotland was produced in spinning mills, while hand spinning was still common in the other two countries. Migration from Ireland, especially Ulster, grew in the first half of the nineteenth century. Men were in a minority in the Irish linen industry and women’s wages were low.

In England the period 1660–1800 saw changes in the market for linens. Strikingly large quantities of calico and muslin were imported from India in the later seventeenth century, which led to English manufacturers copying Indian prints. In an attempt to protect the local industry, an Act of 1700 barred imported printed cottons and all cotton imports were banned in 1721. In the 1750s linen still dominated the English market, but twenty years on there was a great increase in cotton textiles at the expense of linen. This was the period when cotton manufacture in Lancashire was growing fast. In a chapter discussing these changes, Beverley Lemire observes that ‘offered the choice, consumers turned to cotton wares and in so doing they changed the material culture of their society’.

In other chapters Inger Jonsson contrasts wealthy flax-growing farmers and poor female flax-dressers in early nineteenth-century Sweden, Alistair J.Durie examines the effects of government policy on the Scottish linen industry before 1840, Peter M.Solar charts the birth and death of spinning firms in Ireland and Belgium in the nineteenth century, and Karl Ditt the rise and fall of the German linen industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A final chapter by Philip Ollerenshaw analyzes the effects of stagnation, war and depression in the UK linen industry between 1900 and 1930. There was a brief revival of the industry during World War I due to the demand for linen for uniforms and tents, and a second short-lived revival occurred in Germany in the 1930s. But these were mere interruptions in a course of long-term decline.