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Trish FitzSimons and Madelyn Shaw, "Fleeced: Unraveling the History of Wool and War" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
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- [00:01]
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with both of the authors of a book published by Bloomsbury in 2025 titled Unraveling the History of Wool and War. Now that's a really intriguing title, right, because those are both things that have all sorts of centuries, really, of history of their own, but aren't necessarily put together, which is really surprising because as this book suggests, they have been intertwined for quite a long time. And so this is really a history in plain sight, in many cases on our bodies, and yet not one necessarily that gets a lot of attention. Thankfully, this book helps us fix that problem. So I have, as I said, both of the authors, Trish Fitzsimons and Madeline Shaw, are both with me today to take us through this history over a lot of time, a lot of different places. And we're not talking about one flock of sheep or one war. It is a much bigger and more interesting history than that. So, Trish and Madeline, thank you so much both for joining me on the podcast.
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Trish Fitzsimons
Thank you so much, Miranda, for having us.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Could we start off with each of you introducing yourselves a little bit and tell us why you decided to write the book and do it together. And perhaps Madeline, you can start us off.
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Madeline Shaw
Hi. Madeline Shaw, and I'm a curator, museum curator of costume and textiles for 40 years or so and retired most recently from the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian, but have worked in a number of other art and history museums along the east coast of the US And I'm going to turn it over to Trish to not only introduce herself, but to sort of explain how we met, me being in Rhode island and she being in Brisbane, Australia, and how we came to do this.
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Trish Fitzsimons
Thank you, Madeline. So I'm a documentary filmmaker and a social historian and an academic, a longtime academic at Griffith University in Brisbane in Australia. And how Madeleine and I met is slightly convoluted. But my grandfather was a wool buyer, Frederick Harper Booth. I had letters that he'd written as he was learning the wool trade in the UK and the US and in July 2014, I finally was reading the transcript of his letters. And then as I flew into New York the next day, my husband and I went into the New York City Museum and my husband Gary said, there's an exhibition there I think you might like. The exhibition was called Home Front and Battlefield Quilts and Contexts in the Civil War, with none other than Madeleine Shaw being one of two curators. I loved the exhibition. It made me realize that the theme of wool and war that had really struck me in my grandfather's letters and in a couple of key documents was not just specific to my grandfather's life, but was something much bigger, common, because I could see it woven in through this Civil War exhibition. I tracked Madeleine down. We were going to Boston anyway. I went to the American Textile History Museum in Lowell in Massachusetts. They gave me Madeline's address and I found her as a captive audience. Madeline, over to you.
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Madeline Shaw
Well, I had broken my foot and so I couldn't meet Trish and Lowell. And so she kind of erupted into my kitchen, told me to sit down, put my foot up and asked where my knives were, carrying giant bag of food. And so what was started out to be a sort of an hour long conversation of, you know, can I come talk to you about the contents of my grandfather's letters became this four hour marathon. Oh, my God, we've got, we've got an interesting idea here. And Trish went home and within about what, two months I, I'd gotten something like that. She'd gotten me a six week fellowship at Griffith Uni in Brisbane to see if the idea had legs. And that was in fall of 2015. No. Yeah, fall of 2015. And then we have gotten a series of various fellowships. I had Fulbright in Australia in 2019 and a National Library of Australia Fellowship in 2022. Trish had a Smithsonian, Queensland Smithsonian Fellowship in 2019. So it's been a long journey and
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Trish Fitzsimons
Neither of us could have written this book alone. I think that's what's fabulous. We've got such a sort of a broad angle on this topic and we've got separate but complementary skills. So we've been, if I say so myself, we've been a fabulous team.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
It certainly sounds like it. And what an epic story of a team coming together. Thank you both so much for sharing that and giving us, I think, a lovely beginning of our discussion, discussion about the book. I do want to make sure we have some other kind of introductory aspects sorted out. So obviously one key part of this is the two of you and how you came together. The other key part of this is just making sure we know a bit more about wool so that we can have this discussion with some knowledge. So to clear up potentially some myths, all wool is not the same, right. And we need to know a little bit about kind of different kinds of wool in terms of how they can be used.
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Madeline Shaw
That's very true. Wool is really the most complex natural fiber. And since most people don't today aren't really versed in this, the natural fibers are naturally occurring, either plant or animal, so that the most common ones are wool and silk in the animal world and cotton and linen in the vegetable world. Wool comes from many different breeds of sheep, and sheep occur in many different places in the world, but they're not all the same. And some of them produce more of a hairy kind of fiber and others produce more of a what we would consider a woolly, fluffy kind of fiber. All of these, all natural fibers respond to the same kinds of environment, nutrition, handling issues. That includes drought, flood, heat, cold food sources. But in wool, not only is the animal what it grows, it responding to all of those, but the wool fiber itself is dependent on which part of the animal it grows on. And also the care that is taking in shearing the animal, in grading the wool, and then again in all of these long processes of packing and processing the wool fiber into actually yarn that can then be used in knitting and weaving, rug making, whatever. So the hairier animals produce what's called carpet wools and the woolier animals produce clothing wools. These are terms that we use in the book. And it's the crossbreeding that has happened in, in, in sheep for clothing wools is largely to make them less prickly for people to wear, to be comfortable. That's why contemporary merino from, you know, Australia and also, I guess New Zealand primarily at this point are really important in the, in the clothing business. The garment Industry. The length and strength of the wool fibers are affected by all of these environmental factors and all of these processing factors. But what's also really interesting about wool is the complexity is also the individual fibers, the scaliness of the fibers, whether they're wavy or straight or kinked. So all these have to be taken into account for the, the purpose of and of the end use. Fine wool is, is really good for things that need to be felted because they have their lots of scales, they get together really well. Cloth like the cloth used for uniform coats and things that could just be cut off and not have to be hemmed. And also the other kinds of the longer woolsthe what's called the, the crossbred woolsthey tend to be longer and a little bit more glossy. And those tend to be things that are used for hard wearing uniform things like the men's uniforms and the serge and the different kinds of fabrics that are used for things that are closer to the body. And then the carpet wools, of course, you really do find for rugs, but they're also in, they tend to be moved into other aspects, especially in wartime, where they can be used to eke out limited quantities of the better quality wools, like blankets.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, this is very helpful to understand the many different kind of kinds of wool that are being used. And I think this starts to maybe foreshadow a little bit sort of why we're going to be talking about so many different places and trade networks, because. And there are these sort of differentiated uses being made clear to us. So can we talk a bit about the trade aspect of this? I mean, for one thing in the book, it becomes clear that the international wool trade is a pretty big deal in the 19th century. So where are we talking, like how international, how big a deal? And is this just because of war?
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Madeline Shaw
Wool trading was a big deal for millennia, really, and especially in Europe and between Europe and the UK, Europe and Britain for at least 800 years. But the 19th century begins with a war inherited from the 18th century. And it also is the conjunction of the beginning of the Industrial revolution. So when you get the Napoleonic wars, which is a huge war covering, you know, Europe and it's got aspects in the rest of the world and you know, North America and India, the size of the army starts to grow. And one of the things that we discovered was that while Napoleon didn't invade Russia in the winter, he retreated from Russia in the winter. And that was a real problem in terms of how his soldiers were dressed. And at the same time, Britain is cut off from its trading partners on the continent and in North America, and it's really thrown back on its. On itself and it doesn't have that much land. It starts, you know, the Clearances have pushed a lot of of crofters off their land and being replaced by sheep, in some instances cattle, but they don't have enough. And so they start to look into their Southern hemisphere colonies. And that becomes really important for Australia and New Zealand. Eventually it becomes important for South Africa. And it also becomes important for places that are not necessarily British by governing, but are influenced by British capital.
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Trish Fitzsimons
Trish, can I come in here with one more part of that? The wool trade before the 19th century and in the 19th century, Spain and Spanish merinos have been the world's finest wool, absolutely tightly controlled by the Spanish Crown. But the Napoleonic wars really disrupt that and those genes get out and are able to travel around the world. Pirates will pirate merinos off ships in order to get that fine fleece. There's still. Madeleine has been talking about the variation in wool and in sheep's wool in the previous question. What we call, what I, as an Australian call a merino now is very different than those original Spanish merinos. Those original Spanish merinos were little animals and would never have survived in the Australian continent, the driest on earth. But when we come to talk about the British Empire, a critical part of wool becoming so central to the British Empire and its strength was sheep husbandry, coming up with hybrids of sheep that would survive in the places they needed to survive and meanwhile produce wool of the quality that was required by the ever growing international wool wool market.
- [15:56]
Madeline Shaw
And the reason for the change in longer fibers, stronger fibers, but also fine fibers, was that as the wool industry, the textile industry, mechanized, which was a couple of decades later than the cotton industry, they needed longer and stronger fibers to be able to handle the processing the fibers by machine. So these things work as a kind of triple helix.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's really helpful and makes a lot of sense. Right. Nothing can be that dominant for only one reason. It's usually a combination of reasons that come together. And obviously the Napoleonic Wars. Right. From a military history point of view, we definitely know about the size of the armies going on. So this makes sense as all coming sort of together, but of course with some pretty intense consequences. Right. So, Madeleine, you already mentioned the link between the demand for wool domestically and the Highland clearances. Can we talk about imperial expansion in Australia and New Zealand as a result of this increased demand for Wool.
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Trish Fitzsimons
Absolutely. So Australia begins. Australia, which has had the oldest continuing human culture on earth. Aboriginal people have been on this continent for about 60,000 years. Years. But as it is invaded by settler colonialists, Australia, in the first instance, is a convict colony. And it's a convict colony partly because the US War of Independence has made the US As a place for dumping British convicts much harder. But that can't go on forever. And the very earliest sheep in Australia are mostly here for meat to feed the convicts and their jailers. But very soon you've got people like Samuel Marsden and John MacArthur and his wife Elizabeth, start this sheep husbandry, start exploring sheep on the Australian continent. From fairly quickly it gets established that Britain wants to be the manufacturing powerhouse, and Britain wants its colonies to provide the raw materials. And so suddenly or over a period of decades, actually the whole of the Australian continent and to an equivalent but slightly lesser extent, New Zealand, becomes like the sheepwalk for British manufacturing. That, of course, this continent is not the terra nullius that the invaders tell themselves it is. It's inhabited. So frontier wars and frontier warfare become another huge part of the early history of Australia. Less so in New Zealand because there is a treaty of Waitangi in 1840 between the British Crown and the Mori chiefs. And although there's warfare as well between the British and the Mori, it's not over the land that the British find best for wool in New Zealand, but between them. Australia and New Zealand. By the end of the 19th century, we are producing a huge percentage of the world's apparel wolves. And it's one critical dimension of the British Empire, a critical part of what. Builds wealth in Britain and the British Empire and to a considerable, but I would say lesser degree and to in Australia. So it's John Bigg who does a report into what's to become of Australia when convicts are no longer the center of the economy. John Biggs says, oh, well, wool is going to be the great staple export. And of course, in a world where there aren't yet steamships, so you can't export me meat or many other raw materials, but you can get wool from across the Australian continent. You can bring it to the coast via camel or by steamer or eventually railway becomes part of the story as well. But you can put it on ships and head it in the direction of Britain and the. And the commodity will last.
- [20:59]
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely a key part of this, right, that it's not going to spoil on the voyage. Right.
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Madeline Shaw
There's a wonderful section of the Cutty Sark in London that that talks about the wool trade that the Cutty Sark was part of.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hmm. Yeah. No, a global trade, indeed. Yeah. That's a great way to kind of get a picture of how this is all going. But of course, it does continue into Trish, as you mentioned, the age of the steamship. And of course war continues too. So thinking obviously the Napoleonic Wars, a big war of the 1800s, and we get obviously on the US side, the American Civil War, the kind of obvious big one as we're going into the 1900s would be World War I. This is a whole interconnected network that sounds great when there's lots of trade and economy going on, but doesn't work that well if everyone's sort of trying to blockade each other. So, like, how does this transnational network operate in the context of World War I?
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Trish Fitzsimons
Well, it is indeed complex, Miranda. Part of my whole way into this topic was finding a document where in 1915, my grandfather is buying wool for an American wool company and they're asking him what percentage of the wool, the Australian wool he buys for them, he wants. And he says, well, so much profit was made last year that at a time such as this, any amount I ask will seem too much. In other words, indeed, there's a lot of money to be made buying and selling wool in war. But it's also, of course, war absolutely bedevils that trade. So leading up to World War I, both Britain and Germany are madly stockpiling wool, even as neither of them can quite imagine how long the war will go on for quite how many. There's 65 or 70 million personnel, armed personnel in World War I. But from August 1914, Britain makes military clothing contraband. By March 1915, ditto for new wool. Meanwhile, Britain is blockading German ports to stop British them stop wool getting through to them. So from early in the war, wool is really recognized as a strategic commodity. Germany, for its part, the German ship Emden, who's out in the South Pacific late in 1914, sinks SS Troilus that's come from Western Australia laden with wool. And Troilus sinks to the depths complete with all its wool. And soon afterwards Emden is shot down. So wool is a great strategic commodity. Britain early in the war tries all manner of ways to kind of control who gets that wool. And Madeleine will tell you about the, the American dimensions of that. But by November 1916 Britain has announced, with it must be said, the acceptance of the Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes. Britain announces that it will compulsorily acquire not only its whole domestic clip but also all the wool of Australia and New Zealand. And it will do so at a fixed price. And said price does not go up again from November 1916 till the end of the war in 1918. So there's many shenanigans. And as Madeleine will tell you, the US is part of those complex negotiations.
- [25:45]
Madeline Shaw
Well it interesting the, the Battle of the Somme in July 1916 through September into October I think really sobers the British government in terms of the, the length of the war and how much they're going to need to get through the war. And that I think the compulsory purchase of the Dominion's wool I think is really influenced by the losses both in men and material in the Battle of the Somme. The US is neutral until April of 1917 and for a long time they're pretty annoyed with the UK blockade of German ports as a kind of restraint of trade. And there are some efforts to try and push back against the British blockade. But contrary to what was and to some extent still is believed by many in the UK in the Commonwealth there's a very strong German descent woolen company business industry centered around Prosaic New Jersey in the US and there's a lot of talk in the, in the newspapers by diplomats and people that the you, these companies, these German companies were buying up and trans shipping wool to Germany through kind of back doors. In fact some of them were, some of them were also buying wool to stockpile because the Germans knew they couldn't get it through the they through the blockade. And everybody what's really interesting about this is that everybody is not just trying to figure out how to win the war, they're trying to figure out how to stockpile enough wool so that they can start up their industries again for trade after the war. That was a surprise to me. But really the backdoor shipping is also coming from all of these Boston centered American woolen companies that are much more British Allied. That is notable through the trade journals and the things that you see in the journals we Talk about that a bit in the book, but it's so hard to get through this, the shipping, because the availability of shipping. Britain controls quite a lot of the world's cargo trade, cargo ships. And even though South Africa, for example, has a lot of. Of wool and that they did not compulsorily acquire, that they control who can get it. And the same with South America. I mean, the US is trying desperately to get all kinds of wool from South America. They just don't have the shipping and insurance costs. So as a neutral, but one that in response to these massive increases in demand and the loss of both manufacturing capacity in the Allied nations and manpower for operating the textile industries, the US finds itself in 1915 becoming the supplier of textile goods to neutrals and combatants alike. But it's still beholden to UK control of both the raw wool and the shipping. So that complexity and the tentacles of how the trade worked is one of the things that we really try and explore, particularly in this chapter.
- [29:31]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Can we talk a little bit more about the kind of personal or individual side, I suppose, of those tentacles? I mean, Trish, thinking, for example, about your grandfather, how did the various people involved in this, either during World War I or in the network beforehand, how did they communicate with each other? How did they make these decisions about kind of, I'll purchase next year's crop? Like, these distances are massive and the money is too. So how did that work?
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Trish Fitzsimons
Well, telegraph. The telegraph initially, certainly for the world's. The biggest wool markets in the world, move to Australia by the end of the 19th century, having previously been in London. Because once you've got the overseas telegraph, which links up from Britain to Australia by the very early 1870s, then you can have telegrams, but not just any old, how you doing? How's your mother? It's code and there are really intricate codes. The wool buyers, confidential ones, of course. The wool buyers, who are primarily in the southern hemisphere, because that's where the main sources of wool are, communicate via telegraphic codes with the end users, the wool manufacturers that are primarily in the northern hemisphere. And we found these extraordinary code books, including one used by my grandfather's companies. But each company will have individual codes for communicating with its key clients. Some of those codes can be very funny, but I'm not sure I'm going to be able to pull any humorous ones off the top of my head. But yes, it only struck me today because of this commandeer of wool, the actual auctions shut down during wartime. I presume that the wool codes and telegraphy continue. But I don't actually know that, do you, Madeleine? The
- [31:56]
Madeline Shaw
communication did continue during the war with the codes. But what's interesting also about the way that this works is that the buyers in the south were not necessarily only selling to individual clients that were manufacturers. They were also selling to brokers and they were selling to the governments of these nations through brokers. And so that's why they still needed these, these codes to communicate not so much about price, but about quantities. And because the prices tended to be at, at least the original prices tended to be the fixed price. But one of the things that happens in the US is that, that the, the there's so much competition for that wool because as I said earlier, that the US Is now supplier to the world. Their textile industry is running at frantic paces to try and keep up. They just can't get the wool. And until, I guess, Trish, it's almost the end of 1917 when Britain finally relents and gets the US the amount of wool that it needs to really supply. You know, Belgium and France and Italy
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Trish Fitzsimons
and, and itself, yes, there's a kind of back and forth, an arm wrestle between the US and the uk but it's partly the UK is worried about America as a commercial competitor, but they also, the harder heads realize that they're utterly dependent as well on that US increasing and in better and better quality textile capacity.
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Madeline Shaw
Yeah, because the US Never was an exporter of wool textiles until the war, until World War I.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, that's helpful to understand kind of how big an impact this has. And I'm getting a sense as well of sort of desperation in some of these battles back and forth around kind of who gets to control the commodity. So what, what kinds of substitutes existed if one couldn't get the wool that they needed in time? Was that even an option?
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Madeline Shaw
Well, it was an option. And there are two substitutes that we go into the war knowing about. And one is called shoddy, which is simply a textile industry term for recycled wool. And the other one is a kind of Peruvian cotton called espero cotton. And when I read about this, the Australians were horrified because a merino yarn in 1914America was a yarn made of wool, not necessarily merino sheep. And this kind of aspero cotton, it's a mixed, it's a blended yarn. And that is something that does appear particularly in civilian clothing during World War I. But the shoddy is the bigger deal. And the shoddy scandals of the Civil War happened when the US army ballooned from the Union army, the US army ballooned from about 18,000 men in December 1860 to over 250,000 in July of 61. And the Northern manufacturers are like, oh, yeah, yeah, we can make enough uniform cloth to close these guys. Well, they couldn't because they didn't have the wool. And so they start to incorporate a little more recycled wool than they ever had before. And that does not go well. So they. But. But they need to use Shoddy. And it is used in World War I. It's used mostly in things that don't touch the body immediately. So they'll be like blankets and overcoats. And Shoddy can't be used on its own. It has to be reworked with new wool because it's not strong enough. But it can also, for a long time, can only be used as a weft yarn because it can't stand the strain of being of the tension of the warp yarn. And so the. The use of it because it comes from rags, the use of it becomes a sort of, oh, it's coming from diseased people and foreigners and we don't want it. So they have to kind of use it in a. In an undercover kind of way. And so they try not to use it in things that are closest to a soldier's body, like underwear or the actual uniform. And. But there's a huge salvage operation that goes on on the battlefield to recover the cast off clothing and blankets. And that all goes back and is recycled into what can't be repaired and reissued, gets recycled into Shoddy, that then gets sold to the textile manufacturers, the yarn manufacturers. So that's the first two that come into the war. But then there's also a whole slew of other plant fibers. There's something called posidonia, which comes from a kind of seagrass that only unfortunately grows in around New guinea and Australia. So that didn't work so well. It didn't last for very long. There's ramie or China grass. There's jute. The Germans do a process called woolenizing jute. Now jute is what you use for roping and for. For gunny sacks that can't be good, that can't be comfortable. And they also try to do things like the US And Germany are experimenting with things like cattail fiber and milkweed fiber. They're pretty desperate for trying to figure this out. But the most important substitute in World War I for the Germans and the Austrians was paper. And the amount of paper yarn that they had been producing for sacking and for things like, like covers for tables or wall coverings. The amount of paper yarn that is produced for things like canvas bags for the cavalry, feeding horses, for cargo netting, for clothing, for civilian clothing, for trench tool covers is phenomenal. And it we think, I mean after researching how much of this there was, we think that actually the use of paper in Germany allowed them to fight for a fair amount longer than they otherwise would have been able to. It's not warm, but at least it covered you.
- [39:14]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's really helpful to understand the alternatives before and during the war. I mean some of those really don't sound great, but interesting to hear about. However, Madeleine, I'd love to pick up on the idea that those were the alternatives known going, going into the war, which hints at some new options coming up. So if we move to the interwar period, we've got the rise of raion. Is that part of why you both argue in the book that wool lost the peace of the interwar period?
- [39:46]
Madeline Shaw
Well, yeah, because these primarily naturally occurring fibers are don't really work. They're not practical in terms of the kinds of things that wool provides, which is flame resistance, warmth, even when it's wet. They're trying to figure out what else they can use. We need more innovation in fibers now. The only man made fiber that existed before World War I was called artificial silk. And it's what's now called a semi synthetic because it's made from a sort of bubbling bath cauldron of cellulose fiber that's reduced from various kinds of trees and can be reduced from other kinds of plants. But Before World War I it has a mid 19th century origin but it only really becomes commercial commercially viable in about 1910. And it's very, very slick and very shiny when it first comes out. It's artificial silk is what it's called then by 1924 in America they call it rayon because they want to lose the association with the word artificial and they want it to be seen as this new modern contemporary solution. And it's not all that cheap to begin with. But as the production expands across the globe, Japan becomes a player. Italy, France, Germany, all of the countries that had had trouble acquiring textile fibers during World War I start to play with rayon and, and try and innovate new fibers so that they don't have these huge supply chains. I mean the trying to get wool from Australia to the US or to Britain, trying to even get rags, I mean rags rad business was huge to produce shoddy, but you still had to get the rags to the companies. So we're looking for things that can be done from our own resources. And, you know, lots of people have forests, so that's why rayon becomes a thing. But it's not. It's shiny and it's slick and it's terrible stuff. And they start to work on it. And by 1930 they've produced a fiber that's in German is called staple phaser and, or staple fiber. And it's, it can be, it's got a matte finish, it can be cut down and spun like wool. It can be given a little bit of a crimp, but it's still not warm and it still isn't going to keep you warm when it's wet. But it becomes a really important fiber to blend with other things with wool, with, with cotton to try and eke out resources across the world, across the globe. So I think interwar is when the lack of this wool substitute culminates in this rayon that had more wool like qualities. And civilian blends start to be mandated in most nations during, even before World War II, in the mid-30s for what would become the Axis nations start to mandate that these are blended in fabrics for the civilians because they're trying to stockpile wool for the military.
- [43:47]
Trish Fitzsimons
What's also happening is that the, the wool market does recover after World War I. They have to first clear a big stockpile, but they get through that by the kind of the mid-1920s. And in fact, nations like Japan start to buy huge quantities of Australian wool. And Germany by the mid-20s is back to buying lots of Australian and New Zealand wool. But the politics of the British Empire in particular complicates that wool production and that wool trade. So you can imagine Japan invading Manchuria, Manchukuo in 1931. They've got lots of soldiers in cold climates that need wool, clothing. But Japan, meanwhile, is starting to really push and compete with Britain in producing cotton more cheaply than Britain can and in producing very good quality rayon as well. From the early 30s, Britain starts to ask its dominions of Australia and New Zealand and probably South Africa as well, to privilege sort of fellow nations within the empire. Australia resists for quite a while, but by 1936, Britain says, Listen, you know, we won't buy your beef if you keep selling your wool to Japan. And so there comes to be a whole kind of. The Japanese respond by a brief embargo in 1936 that complicates the trade. Meanwhile, once Hitler comes to power in Germany, there's great attention paid to the fact that the Versailles reparations were requiring Germany to come up with punishing amounts of hard currency that were very hard to put together whilst they're spending lots of cash on raw wool. So Germany tries to bring in systems of barter. Essentially we'll buy Australian wool if Australia will buy German cars, that kind of thing. So wool wins the war but loses the peace because global power politics complicate the wool trade. And meanwhile, as Madeline's just explained, rayon is this fierce new competitor that, especially in blends, can start to give wool a run for its money.
- [46:44]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So talking then about those geopolitical factors and the key actors of Germany and Japan in the interwar period, obviously that continues into World War II II itself. So how much does that conflict in the immediate post war period in the late 1940s, does that confirm this decline of wool that you've just Described?
- [47:05]
Madeline Shaw
World War II, in many respects is a replay politically in terms of the wool of World War I, because the US doesn't join the war for a couple of years after it starts between Britain and Germany and the rest of Europe. And so the US again is in the position of needing wool because it is again supplying. Now it's supplying the Soviet Union with, with wool and with uniforms and it's also supplying the various other allies around the world. So it's still trying to get wool. It. It's a little more congenial, I would say, Trish, than then in World War I, they do negotiate a kind of stockpile of British Empire wool that the US can draw on before the US enters the war. But there is still a compulsory purchase. Britain has learned in World War I that they can't wait to compulsorily purchase for two years. They purchase purchase, like the day they declare war, that's it, we get your wool again, a fixed price. So the. It is, I think, a little more congenial in terms of how the U.S. and, and the British Empire relate. But essentially they have the same issues. Shipping is an issue and now it's worse because the Japanese are out in the Pacific and so there are more difficulties in getting the wool. This leads again to shortages because you need it, you can't get it, it's half a world away. And so we're going to try and tell civilians, again, you've got to cut back. We're going to make. Your woolens are going to be 50% rayon. What was really interesting to us is that we found a couple of sources that talked about German uniforms in World War II that started out in 1939. As probably being about 15% rayon and 85% wool. And by 1945 were the opposite. So by 1943, they were half rayon and half wool. We know we don't think this bodes well for surviving winters in Russia. So I think that there are similarities. But what happens at the end of the war is also a little. You still have stockpiles you have to get rid of. But we also have to understand that the number of people in the world increases quite a bit over that half century. And so what we find is that the same amount of wool is being used, but it's being used by many, many more people are. Are involved in consuming that amount. So the amount per person goes down significantly.
- [50:21]
Trish Fitzsimons
I think we also need here to start talking about full synthetics, the very first of which is nylon that Dupont has brought in in 1939, just before World War II. But during World War II, Dupont develops what comes to be called acrylic fiber. First they call it fiber A. After the war, it comes to be called Orlon. These. And meanwhile, Britain with some of the dupont knowledge. But the British firm ICI develops what we now know as polyester. Now, all of these fully synthetic fibers are made from petroleum, and they're infinitely simpler. I mean, developing them is not simple. Developing them requires incredibly clever chemists and industrial processes and formatting and reformatting the formula. But once you've got synthetic fibers, they're much cheaper to produce because there's not the same complexity over where the raw materials come from. So by the time things really get crunchy in the early 1950s with the Korean War. The Korean War starts in June 1950. It's much smaller in terms of the number of soldiers and number of countries involved, much smaller than World War II. But it really creates huge problems for the wool industry because you've got these newly developed synthetic fibers, as well as rayon, the semi synthetic out there, starting to provide alternatives. Meanwhile, the Korean War is a very cold winter. The US Wants to have the same privileged relationship to the wool of Australia and New Zealand that Britain had had in the previous two war world wars. There's a whole lot of diplomatic argy bargy about that that I won't go into. But what happens is by November 1950, there's fear that the Cold War has begun in Europe as well. And there's fear that we could have another hot war. The U.S. congress says, okay, here's $100 million quartermasters, just go and buy the wool that the U.S. army needs at whatever price is required. That's boom time for Australian and New Zealand wool growers. It becomes kind of the opposite of boom time. It becomes a source of considerable industrial collapse for Summer street in Boston and the other parts of the wool manufacturing industry in the us. And so this great bubble in the price of wool occasioned by the Korean War really is an important part of what has synthetics start to sort of come through on the inside lane. As the carbon economy really takes off in the US with centrally heated houses and cars and clothes dryers, the US market for wool really starts to decline from the 50s. Mercifully, says she, whose family circumstances depended upon selling wool. Mercifully, there are still clients for wool going on through the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, but not so much the US got it.
- [54:34]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay. That's helpful to understand now, obviously asking you to sort of fast forward and generalise for the decades from then until now, but maybe you could give us a brief sense of where wool is at now and what you hope readers today take from this history.
- [54:50]
Trish Fitzsimons
So wool now is a tiny percentage. Like in 1900, wool was about 20% of all global textiles. Now it's less than 1% and falling. And there are still some military uses, because, of course, if anywhere where you're going to be close to fire, then synthetics are going to kind of melt onto your flesh, and wool simply doesn't do that. Extreme sports, of course, are an important market for wool. But now the real relationship of wool war and textiles is a different kind of war, the war on waste, because we now live in a fast fashion universe where polyester is about 60% of the global textile market and Australia and the US are the worst. I'm not sure which of us is currently the worst culprit, but we're just using way too many clothes of much too low a quality. What I want you to want readers to take from our book is that wool is not all warm and fuzzy. That wool very much has a history as a strategic commodity, that it had that history because it is such a. I love wool. I think it is a most wonderful fiber, even though it is now much more expensive than synthetic fibers. You know, wool is a fiber that is wonderful for heat as well as cold, but really what we've got to do is use fewer textiles and make those textiles be the best possible quality and hang onto them until there's no more life in them. Madeline, what do you want our readers?
- [57:11]
Madeline Shaw
Well, essentially, we want people to just rework their entire relationship to textiles. What are the odds of that happening? But it's important. We cannot. It is unsustainable for the future of the planet to keep consuming the way that we consume. Fast fashion and the mountains, mountains of textile waste and the problem of polyester and an acrylic microplastic pollution around the world. These are not small issues. These are huge problems. And the thing about wool, I mean, natural fibers have their own issues. You know, sheep produce methane. They have. And one of the things we talk about in the book is that, you know, the introduction of sheep around the world has in many cases destroyed native ecologies, has pushed back indigenous peoples. There are problems with it. You know, the agriculture of cotton. Agriculture has reduced the Aral Sea because of the water that it consumes. So it's not that natural fibers are the answer, but they are part of the answer. And the solution has got to be consume less. And it's consume things that can be reused. When you can't reuse your wool,
- [58:43]
Trish Fitzsimons
you
- [58:44]
Madeline Shaw
can turn it into insulation or you can turn it into. Now they're putting it on gardens as mulch because as it degrades, it will re. Give those nutrients back to the soil. And the biodegradable quality of natural fibers is really important.
- [59:08]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely worth adding in to our takeaways as well. I know. Madeline, you mentioned something earlier. Earlier you were sort of surprised by. In figuring all this out, is there anything else either of you want to add in as sort of a fun thing you came across or something that still stuck with you?
- [59:24]
Madeline Shaw
I was surprised at just how involved governments around the world were in promoting rayon, which is a big part of the story that we tell in the book. But I also found it surprising and unsettling in a way that the woolen industry history of the US has been so little studied since its decline. There were very few sources written in the last decade and a half or so, and hardly nothing, really, that I could look to for the impact of sheep pastoralism on indigenous peoples in the United States. There were occasional mentions of that in studies of individual regions or on individual tribal communities. And we know about the impact of sheep in the Navajo community, for example, where it became a really important part of their culture. But all of that, it's like wool has been so important here, but so overshadowed by the role that cotton has played in the American story. And I really would love for other historians to just sort of pick up where we couldn't go. You know, we covered a lot of ground in this book, and there are a lot of loose ends. I think that other people could pick up and run with. And I hope they do.
- [61:02]
Trish Fitzsimons
And from my part, certainly we were some years into this project before we really realized that these contrived shortages of wool during wartime were so central to what drove the refinement of rayon and the creation of the various fully synthetic fragments fibers. That was remarkable. And it's remarkable that nobody's done a really full history of where synthetics have come from before. So that was extraordinary. From a personal front, I had no idea at all, although it was my grandfather that was the wool buyer. I had no idea, no idea that the source of the money that paid for my education was so much tied up with selling wool. Not to the US anymore because that market radically diminishes after Korea. But the countries of Eastern Europe, the countries behind the Iron Curtain, the Egypt and its army, actually the whole, the nations of the Cold War, the nations of the Iron Curtain are really huge clients still for wool until of course, the end of the 80s, everything collapses. So everything collapses with the breakup of the Soviet Union, Tiananmen and meanwhile there's a ludicrously high reserve price scheme has been set by the Australian Wool Board. So the. Huge international wool market really suffers very strongly in the late 80s, right. As polar fleece really takes off. And those kinds of complementarities were fascinating to discover as we wrote this book. But as Madeleine says, there's plenty of work for other people to build on what we've done and I hope they do well.
- [63:27]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Are either of you continuing to work on these sorts of things or moving on to other projects, whether or not they're book related? Anything either of you want to give us a sneak preview of I'm early
- [63:38]
Trish Fitzsimons
in in a project I'm calling Quenched, which is about sculptural drinking fountains of the second half of the 19th century. And it's really about. It's a design dead end because these are beautiful fountains, typically for some great man, or sometimes it's the Women's Christian Temperance Union that promote the them. But they're a design dead end because they're built with common cups, a shared cup. By the end of the 19th century, when we really understand germ theory and we know what a virus is and so on. A fountain with a common cup just doesn't cut it anymore. But anyway, it's early days for that project and I'm not sure yet what its outcomes will be. But just like with Fleeced, I'm really enjoying going down that rabbit hole. And if any of your listeners have knowledge about this from their part of the globe. Track me down. Love to talk to you.
- [64:48]
Madeline Shaw
And I've been taking a little bit of a breather after 11 years of woolen war. But I've got I'm pondering whether to go back to a project that I did 20 years ago on an American silk manufacturer as part of a book called American Entrepreneurs and Artifacts on a company called HR Mallinson that was active in the first third of the 20th century. And most people don't know that the US had a really important silk industry as well as wool industry. I was not happy with the outcome of the first project where my part of it was a third of the book. And I'm kind of pondering whether I want to go back and redo that in a better way. But I also, since I've lived in Rhode island, have discovered that Rhode island, because of Senator Nelson Aldrich in the early part of the 20th century, creating a little window of opportunity in the Payne Aldrich Tariff act, allowed the free duty free importation of Lever's lace machines into the US and surprisingly enough, Rhode island became the lever's lace capital of the of America. During COVID I was able to go and visit the last remaining Liebers lace company in Rhode island, which is now sadly shuttered. And I have some really bad iPad video of the machines running and some of the people. So I'm pondering whether that needs to be a project as well.
- [66:33]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, that certainly sounds very interesting on both of your plates. So best of luck with the projects as you go down the rabbit holes. But of course, in the meantime, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Unraveling the History of Wool and War, published by Bloomsbury in 2025. Trish and Madeline, thank you both so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [66:53]
Madeline Shaw
Thank you for having us. Thank you Miranda, and respect for this podcast.