Ep 9: The Loom and the Empire

In 1302, a Flemish weaver named Pieter de Coninck led a militia of guild craftsmen against the French cavalry. Their weapon was called the Goedendag, which means "Good Day." Seven centuries later, we're still asking the same question they were fighting over: who owns the cloth?

This is Part 1 of a three-episode documentary special. Almost all of the history in this episode happened before sound recording was invented, so series co-creator Shawn Dearn steps in front of the microphone to narrate the history. Ian connects that history to the artists you've already met across this series. And a cast of actors and friends from the Quilty Nook read directly from primary historic sources.

The episode traces a single thread from the textile cities of medieval Flanders through the colonial destruction of Indian cloth, the spinning bees of the American Revolution, the Luddite uprisings, the Jacquard loom's punch cards, the cotton economy built on slavery, and two women who used needle and thread to document what empires tried to erase: Harriet Powers and Queen Liliuokalani.

"It felt like a really heavy thing in my stomach when I first saw that, because my eyes couldn't make sense of what I was reading. I was looking for quilts in that inventory. So when I started seeing human names, it just really hit hard."

Zak Foster, Quilter and Family Historian

The Flemish Crucible (1200-1382)

By 1200, the cities of Ghent and Ypres were the most industrialized places in medieval Europe. Between one-third and one-half of the entire population worked in cloth production. The fullers, who cleaned and finished wool by stamping it in vats of hot water and human urine, were considered the lowest workers in the industry. They were also the first to revolt. Anti-strike legislation appeared in France and Belgium as early as 1245, five hundred years before the Combination Acts. The same playbook was already being written: criminalize worker organizing.

On July 11, 1302, a militia army of guild craftsmen defeated the French cavalry at the Battle of Courtrai. Artisans won seats in government for the first time. The people who made the cloth now had a say in who owned it.

The Calico Wars and Colonial Destruction

Before the Industrial Revolution, the world's greatest textile producers weren't in England. They were in India. The finest muslin from Dhaka was so sheer that European traders called it "woven air." The British response was protectionism: the Calico Acts of 1700 and 1720 banned Indian cloth imports. When protectionism wasn't enough, they turned to destruction. India went from producing a quarter of the world's manufactured goods to two percent. The British didn't just out-compete Indian weavers. They broke their looms.

"The Mad in England thing came about because when I set that up, nothing was made in England. The entire ceramics had been shipped off to China."

Carrie Reichardt, Mosaic Artist (Ep 8)

The Daughters of Liberty (1766-1776)

In 1766, eighteen women gathered at the home of Doctor Ephraim Bowen to spin together in an act of protest. Every thread of homespun cloth was a thread of revenue denied to British textile manufacturers. By 1769, twenty-year-old Charity Clarke was writing to her cousin in London about "a number of ladies armed with spinning wheels." By 1774, the women of Edenton, North Carolina were being called "female artillery."

The Luddites (1811-1816)

In November 1811, framework knitters in Nottingham began destroying stocking frames. By 1812, the British government had deployed more troops against the Luddites than it had against Napoleon on the Iberian Peninsula. The Luddites weren't anti-technology. They used technology every day. What they opposed was the specific use of technology to undermine their skill, their wages, and their autonomy.

Lord Byron's maiden speech in the House of Lords, at age twenty-four, was a furious defence of the Luddites. Parliament didn't listen. On January 8, 1813, George Mellor and thirteen other men were executed at York.

"I am an out and proud Luddite. And it's a very considered choice."

Jathan Sadowski, Author (Ep 11 preview)

The Jacquard Bridge (1804-1843)

In 1804, Joseph-Marie Jacquard perfected a system that used punch cards to automate complex weaving patterns. Twenty-seven years later, forty thousand silk weavers in the same city revolted, marching under a black flag with the words "Live working or die fighting." But another decade passed, and mathematician Ada Lovelace looked at a Jacquard loom and saw something else entirely: "The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves." The loom IS the computer. That thread runs all the way to Episode 11.

Cotton, Slavery, and Southern White Amnesia

Zak Foster, the quilter you hear at the top of this episode, started researching his family tree. He's from the South. He's queer, and he thinks that's not a coincidence, that queer people are drawn to family history. Along the way, he found something his family had forgotten: they had enslaved people. Their names appeared in inventories, sandwiched between goats and bedroom furniture. Zak's body of work, "Southern White Amnesia," uses quilts to trace the direct connection between slavery and present-day privilege. He's raised over forty-three thousand dollars for the Thurgood Marshall College Fund through sales of those quilts.

Harriet Powers (1837-1910)

In 1886, a white artist named Jennie Smith saw a quilt at the Northeast Georgia Fair that stopped her in her tracks. She tried to buy it from the maker, a formerly enslaved woman named Harriet Powers. Powers refused. It wasn't until 1891, in financial distress, that she agreed to sell it for five dollars. Smith wrote in her diary that Powers visited the quilt several times, "always treating it as an old and much loved friend." In 1896, Powers wrote a letter in her own hand, proving she was literate, overturning decades of assumption. Her two surviving quilts are now held by the Smithsonian and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Queen Liliuokalani (1893-1898)

On January 17, 1893, the Kingdom of Hawaii was overthrown in a coup backed by American sugar plantation owners. Queen Liliuokalani, the last sovereign ruler of Hawaii, was deposed. Imprisoned in an upstairs bedroom of her own palace, permitted nothing but a lead pencil, paper, and needle and thread, the queen and her companions made a crazy quilt over ten months. They stitched the dates of the overthrow, her arrest, and her trial into the fabric, and embroidered in the center: "Imprisoned at Iolani Palace. We began the quilt here."

"When I start, I often look at the clothes and think, I've got no idea what to do here. And I've learned that that's okay. And that's how people feel when they're grieving."

Mary Burgess, Hand Weaver (Ep 7)

A queen. A formerly enslaved woman. A twenty-year-old revolutionary with a spinning wheel. A Flemish weaver with a club. Different centuries, different continents, same question: who owns the cloth?