Silk: A History in Three Metamorphoses Weaving Together Biography, Global History and Science Writing

by Aarathi Prasad

There is not just one story of silk. In silk is science, history and mythology. In silk is the future.

Aarathi Prasad’s Silk is a gorgeous new history weaving together the story of a unique material that has fascinated the world for millennia.

Through the scientists who have studied silk, and the biology of the animals from which it has been drawn, Prasad explores the global history, natural history, and future of a unique material that has fascinated the world for millennia.

For silk, prized for its lightness, luminosity, and beauty is also one of the strongest biological materials ever known. More than a century ago, it was used to make the first bulletproof vest, and yet science has barely even begun to tap its potential. As the technologies it has inspired – from sutures to pharmaceuticals, replacement body parts to holograms – continue to be developed in laboratories around the world, they are now also beginning to offer a desperately needed, sustainable alternative to the plastics choking our planet.

Prasad's Silk is a cultural and biological history from the origins and ancient routes of silk to the biologists who learned the secrets of silk-producing animals, manipulating the habitats and physiologies of moths, spiders and molluscs. Because there is more than one silk, there is more than one story of silk. More than one road, more than one people who discovered it, and wove its threads.

From the moths of China, Indonesia and India to the spiders of South America and Madagascar, to the silk-producing molluscs of the Mediterranean, Silk is a book rich in the passionate connections made by women and men of science to the diversity of the animal world. It is an intoxicating mix of biography, intellectual history and science writing that brings to life the human obsession with silk.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Nature, Biology, Science

385 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 6, 2023

About the author

Aarathi Prasad was born in London to an Indian mother and a Trinidadian father and was educated in the West Indies and the UK. After a PhD in genetics she worked in research, science policy, and communication. She has presented documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4, National Geographic and the Discovery Channel. She is the author of Like A Virgin: How Science is Redesigning the Rules of Sex; and In the Bonesetter’s Waiting Room: travels through Indian Medicine. She works at University College London.

Reviews

[Charlotte Mylifeinbooks · Rating 3 out of 5]

We start in 1699 and work our way through history, the book explores the origin of silk and the journey silk worms made from Eastern Asia to the rest of the world. The Silkworm is the only insect to ever truly be domesticated, in fact the species is no longer found in the wild.

The most mind blowing fact in this book is how unaffected silk is when faced with bullets. A bullet can travel through most textiles meeting no resistance, silk however acts as more of a deterrent and most often will be unscathed when faced with bullets. Crazy, right?!

I really enjoyed the back story of Chinese and Indian trade and the imports of silk into the west. I had no idea that there was a mollusc called Pinna nobilis which also produces silk, or sea silk as it is more commonly known, and let’s not forget the silk spiders. The book also discusses the future of silk and scientific engineering, which was so interesting. All in all this book has been so informative and was written in such an engaging format with beautiful illustrations, it was an absolute pleasure to read.

[Arie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Possibly I just hadn't understood what this book was intended to be (as much biography of multiple silk-enthusiasts through history as about the material history itself) but I found the frequent fact-and-date-strewn detours into the lives of the scientists disjointed and often vey dull. An example: at one points there are multiple lines on how, if this particular American president had been wearing a particular silk armour he had been offered earlier and declined to wear when he was assassinated, perhaps he would not have died! And then this other person who also was not wearing silk may have also not died! And the guy who was wearing the silk, well, if he had not been shot at a point on his body above where the silk was forming a protective barrier, maybe he would not have died either. ??? The moments where the material itself took the spotlight were fascinating — from Bombyx mori to tussah to Pinna nobilis (mollusc! Sea-silk!) to spider-silk — and if the focus had been more restrained to those aspects (or if the digressions had actually been interesting) I would have found this a far more engaging read.

[CPE · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aarathi Prasad’s Silk: A History in Three Metamorphoses is not a light read. Dr Prasad is a writer and broadcaster, so she knows how to convey information in a way that draws the reader in. She also has a PhD in Genetics, so she really knows her technical stuff.

The three metamorphoses in the sub-title are significant. We may all know that silkworms produce the silk thread that’s woven to make fabric but I hadn’t associated spider webs and threads with silk (I don’t know why, it just hadn’t clicked with me); and I was completely unaware that some molluscs also produce thread. As Dr Prasad writes, “Because there is not just one silk, there is not just one story of silk.” She covers the three families of creatures that produce silk in immense detail, explaining who first studied each family; what they discovered; and taking each story up to the present day. Silkworms get the greatest coverage although molluscs and spiders still get a few chapters each. And when I say “present day”, Dr Prasad includes research that was published in 2022: this really is cutting-edge stuff. I felt privileged to be shown what scientists (and the military) are currently researching and what challenges they face. They have achieved amazing things, e.g. growing mycelium (fungal threads) and using them to create handbags and trainers, but, as Dr Prasad emphasises, it’s essential to be able to do those things on a commercial scale.

I’m in two minds about this book. One the one hand, it is incredibly well researched and Dr Prasad shares a lot of information without either talking down to the reader or blinding them with science. I was fascinated to read that “It would need about sixty miles of spider silk to knit one thin shirt.” On the other hand, some of the phrasing reminds me of an eighteenth century book, e.g. “But it is not Arianna’s impression that it is impossible that this silk had been used in antiquity.” I had to read that sentence several times to understand it. It’s valid; it’s unambiguous; it’s over-complicated with too many negatives. Why not say “Arianna thinks it is possible that this silk had been used in antiquity.”?

On balance, the positives outweigh the negatives and I do recommend this book, but be aware that some sections are easier to read than others!

[Meg Misiak · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unsurprisingly… a lot about silk. So detailed… I wish there were more interweaving of the stories, but it’s simply a lot of details about the individual people, places, etc. that doesn’t seem to come fully together.

[Lloyd Downey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yep, I used to keep silk worm larvae and feed the mulberry leaves from my Grandmother’s huge mulberry tree. (And, as an aside, I built wonderful treehouses in that very same tree and spent idyllic days there reading with the spring breezes rustling the new leaves). And as the tiny grubs munched up the mulberry leaves and spun their cocoons, I was fascinated but it kind of stopped there. Yes, I had a go at unwinding the silk but didn’t know all the techniques like boiling with the chrysalis still inside to avoid the fibres being cut by the emerging moth. But Prasad takes us on a journey that far surpasses the humble Bombyx mori...the common silk worm. She takes us to India, and Assam, and South America and the jungles of SE Asia to introduce us to a whole host of lepidoptera that produce silk cocoons. And to the people who researched them and promoted their use as alternative sources of silk.
Not content with confining herself to the fibres produce by the lepidoptera moths she studies the fibres produced by meter-high molluscs in deep water. There is a fascinating history here with all of these fibres. They were sufficiently rare and difficult to process that the articles produced from them were always luxury items; one-offs produced for kings and queens. And therein, lies the major difficulty that has faced all the would-be entrepreneurs; the raw material was just too rare, too difficult to collect and process that it would always be too difficult to generate economic scale operations.
The same problem bedevilled attempts to use spiders for the same end. Yes. Spider webs are extraordinary constructions and a single spider can extrude up to seven different types of silk thread. I was a little disappointed that Prasad did not go into the chemistry of silk a little more. Though I’ve consulted various of my Biochemistry text books and found that not much is included there about it. But the structures of the proteins laid down are quite complex;..anti-parallel (beta) sheets of fibroin protein linked up by short alanine and glycine side chains and by Hydrogen bonding between the pleated sheets. As I delved into the chemistry, I can see why Prasad avoided it. The truth is that it is very complex and not easily described. Here is an explanation from the European Protein data Base of spider silk:

“The spider silk fluid inside the spider's body is a liquid solution where the fibroin molecules retain a certain order, resulting in crystalline properties. It is believed that during their passage through the spinneret, the spider's silk-spinning organ, the fibroin molecules align, and partial crystallization occurs parallel to the fiber's axis. This is made possible through the self-assembly of the fibroin molecules, where their repetitive sequences contain polyalanine regions that cross-link together via hydrogen bonds to form pleated beta sheets, conferring the high strength of the silk. It is therefore not a coincidence that 50% of fibroin's amino acid content is alanine and glycine, as they are the smallest amino acids so are able to pack together tightly. The crystalline regions are also very hydrophobic, allowing the loss of water during the solidification of spider silk.”.......And that’s the clearest description I could find. And no mention there of the fact that the spider can extrude seven different kinds of silk. Diagrams help a bit but not that much. I really enjoyed reading the book and learned a lot. Especially about the large number of vey special people that did thinks like breeding spiders and placing them in little holders (how do you do this with a spider??) and then wound the thread off on a spool. And people experimenting with dying and weaving etc. really a fascinating tale. I’ve extracted some snippets below which caught my attention.

“At that time [1878] European manufacturers were discovering that there were more silks–ancient silks–than they had imagined, fabrics that had long been in local use in many parts of the world......What was more, silks were not just sourced from silk moths, either domesticated or wild, but from other organisms, too. Principal among them was an enormous mollusc that sat, immobile, on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea, from where it was harvested for its meat and its threads; as well as a startling type of spider, reports of which had begun flooding in from Africa, the Pacific and from the Americas. Its silken threads bore truly extraordinary biological properties that meant they would far surpass the strength of that of any other animal.
These products were commodities through which wealth could be accumulated, transported, and because of their value, monopolised, by emerging elites....In the early Chinese empires, silk was the most precious of all textiles. It could be exchanged for other items of high value,
What quickly became clear to me was that the knowledge and use of silk, in all its wonderful varieties, is a global story.
Part I – Moths
On 18 February 1668, almost exactly one year later, Malpighi’s new communication on the silkworm was read at the Royal Society. ‘The silkworm … is the most well-known insect among our countrymen’, it began, much as Merian had, ‘… in which so wonderful Metamorphoses happens,
Although there are now more than a thousand strains of Bombyx mori kept across the world, and this caterpillar is the creator of the vast majority of silk used today, not only was modern Bombyx mori not the only silkworm known to the Neolithic people of China–but for some part of the two thousand years during which the early Yangshao culture thrived it would not even have existed at all.
In a find dated to 3500 BCE, around 5,500 thousand years ago [some silk] was found instead to have been the creation of another silk moth......The scientific name it would be given was Rondotia menciana......In China, its silk must already have been in use by the time it began being farmed. The most likely origin of Bombyx mori seems to have been
A Chinese variant of a wild moth found across Asia, in Korea and Japan. [The transition to the modern moth] was initiated around 7,500 years ago
Domestication led to the cocoon shell of Bombyx mori becoming ten times heavier than that of Bombyx mandarina, and creating a silken thread that would reach up to a kilometre or more from a single cocoon. This genetic engineering, started by Neolithic Chinese farmers, and the technology that would be developed by their descendants, made the new silk not just easier to control and harvest but to spin and to dye into vibrant colours,
The stifling or heating of the pupal stage of the domesticated silk moth so that it could not break apart the cocoon had been an age-old Chinese innovation; that, and the use of an alkali to strip the silk’s fibroin protein of its gummy sericin glue, was what had given the fabrics they created their coruscant, fluid-like gloss. It was also what made the silk more able to take, and hold, the dyes......The silkworm itself reached Iran rather later than its silk, starting, it seems, in the sixth century, up along the borders of the Caspian Sea. Four hundred years later, it had spread across most of the regions of the Iranian Plateau....Come the seventh century, the Islamic Empire would see the establishment of silkworm rearing across North Africa and all the way to Spain, which, later, in 1530, the conquistadors would take to Mexico.
Not until the thirteenth century would the breeding of silkworms be established in Malpighi’s Bologna, at roughly the same time as it also began, if more modestly, in France.
Across the globe were other animals creating other tantalizing threads......
......fabrics made from the giant cocoons of the Saturniidae–wonderful cloths of wild silks–had been in use in very ancient times, too.......[ in another Indus city were found] forty or fifty strands of silk that some fine-fingered artisan had, sometime between 2450 and 2000 BCE, twisted together in order to string them.........These silks were not those of the famed domestic silkworm. Instead, they had been extracted ...from the large, wonderfully coloured wild Saturniidae family. Those threads suggested that silk had never been an exclusively Chinese invention.
Roxburgh ....But by] April 1798.. penned a letter to Joseph Banks to let him know that he had finally ‘completed an account of the Tasseh silk worm’.....It was not to be the only silk moth that would be rediscovered by the new wave of naturalists from the West who made India their laboratory.....Silk from the Antheraea assama had indeed been produced since time immemorial.......Among those was an astonishing, delicate cocoon of bright yellow silk, by the caterpillars of Cricula trifenestrata.....Far earlier than Roman trade records, muga would appear among the silks described in the Arthaśāstra, a Sanskrit text on domestic politics and foreign affairs probably dating to between 321 and 297 BCE,
The cloths made from the silks of all of these moths were valued not just for their beauty, but because their colours did not fade, but improved with use and with age
.....Because of the irregular way in which naturally brown tasar took up dyes, his and others’ attempts were ultimately abandoned.. .....None of that wild silk had been used since. William Morris......The struggles with the use of tasar in Europe, Wardle had found, had resulted from the structure of its threads to which others who worked silk had paid no attention....His patient observations of the structure and the chemistry of tasar was what helped him to do what no one else had yet done: to break tasar’s resistance to dyes and create his gem-coloured wild silks.
Part II – Silken Shells, Golden Orbs
Pinna nobilis, with its byssus. The noble pen is an enormous marine mollusc, reaching over a metre at its zenith. It narrows to a sharp point at its base and fans out into a semi-oval above, like a gigantic quill penAt its sharp-pointed base is a shock of long, fine filaments disturbingly like auburn locks of human hair, but up to three times finer. They spill from its ‘foot’,.....Pinna nobilis is not unique among its relatives in having anchoring threads. There are many mussels that live in the sea, or in bodies of freshwater, that create hair-like strands of protein...... Sea silk is sometimes called byssus. And Pinna nobilis is not its only source.......other Pinna,....Pinna carnea, and Pinna rudis also produce the fibres....Byssus is the biological term for the filaments, the ‘beards’, of all of these mussels, whether woven or not.
What is truly remarkable is that the anchoring threads of Pinna nobilis are still used in Sulcis. It is the last place in the Mediterranean where the knowledge of weaving textiles from sea silk is being kept alive.
Alinari wrote of the beautiful effect produced by the Pinna nobilis silk. It was ‘of a beautiful metallic colour that approaches copper’....though they have suffered recently from an infection: ......What is more, the mycobacterium thought to be killing them was also found in Pinna nobilis and Pinna rudis that were living quite healthily in the sea.....These parasitic infections are not working alone.....They are linked with changes in the opportunities that pathogens have to interact with a number of animals, including people.....
Their loss represents more than that of a legendary animal of the Mediterranean Sea. It is the loss of an ecosystem.

Silk from spiders:.....‘by reason of spiders bags, in respect of their lightness, afford much more silk than the others, as proof of which, thirteen ounces yield near four ounces of clean silk; three ounces of which will make a pair of stockings for the largest-sized man.’
by the end of his trials [around 1709] Bon had made not just textiles from his spiders’ silk, he had also distilled a large quantity of spirit and a volatile salt from it, .....changes had shown the by-products of his extracts of spider silk to be not just ‘very active’, but so much more so than the extracts of Bombyx mori cocoons,
It was high time that the ‘despicable’ and ‘common’ spider ceased to be overlooked..... Réaumur [some 7 years later] confirmed Bon’s observation that spiders in fact appeared to have many different silks, of varied thicknesses, some with which they made their webs, and others for the egg cases that his predecessor had so coveted. But Réaumur tested the strength of these silks.......To produce one pound of silk would need some 55,296 spiders, In the end, Réaumur did not close the possibility of spider silk entirely. His suggestion was to look elsewhere, to different sorts of spiders, and in particular to the Americas.
The Araneae have made silk for some 380 million years........While it is only the larvae of insects that are able to produce silk and not their adults, spiders retain that ability throughout their lives......Many insects produce silk, but each one only of one type, while a single spider might make as many as seven different types of silk thread,
Termeyer caught the end of the silk, and attached it to a little reel precisely four and a half inches in diameter, equipped with cylindrical glass arms that he slowly turned, winding onto the reel perfect strands of thread......Termeyer died not long after 1814, by which time he had induced his reluctant spiders to produce for him items not so dissimilar to those made with such pride by Bon just over a hundred years earlier......There were the stockings made of Aranea diadema silk sent to grace the royal legs of King Charles III.....And he would even produce a shawl for Napoleon’s first empress, Josephine, which was put on show in Milan.
The various silk glands of the females and males of spiders like these [black widows] appeared to produce some fifty proteins creating at least three major types of silk, as well as others related to the formation of silk,
Camboué then put away his studies with the wild silk moths, quickly, he moved on to working with the threads of spiders instead. ......And Cambour set out to attempt breeding with the giant Nephilia.....Camboué . And by spinning these threads he developed a machine so efficient that it generated 200,000 metres of twelve-strand silken skeins every year......It was from these threads that an enormous bed canopy, were made and sent from the Indian Ocean to the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle.......But as the journalists marvelled, the passing visitors simply walked by, and noticed nothing much at all.
Part III – Reinvention
In Chicago, [a Polish priest invented], and submitted the first patent for, a bulletproof vest of silk, armour that was to be acquired by the kind of men who brought a glint to the eyes of assassins......raw silk had the technical capacity to resist the puncture of a fast-travelling missile designed to kill, so long as it was correctly woven and thick enough.
In the wondrous metamorphosis of Bombyx mori.......by the time they craft their cocoons, they will have produced ten kinds of silk. These have distinct strengths and qualities.
are particular sequences and complexes of tiny building blocks that coalesce to build the chains of its fibroin protein......Fibroin strands are the primary source of such strength and ability to stretch that allowed even the finest of woven silks to avert arrows, and then bullets–strands at a scale a thousand times smaller than a millimetre, at least four times smaller than the human eye is able to see.
On 18 January 2002, a group of scientists published a study in which they had sought to mimic the process of spider silk production.....The mammary cells of cows were selected......and also the kidney cells of baby hamsters,....Using only a partial sequence of the MaSpI and MaSpII spidroin genes, rather than the full run utilized by an actual spider, white goats selected to be modified......The idea was that those quantities would also include the spider proteins the goats’ genes had been modified to carry, from which the strongest fibres of spider silk were formed, which could then be easily harvested when the animals were milked. The end result was that the mechanical properties of the silk they got out of it were very similar to those of the dragline silk of the spider. But–the silk itself.... was only ‘30–40% spider silk and roughly 60% silkworm silk’.
But,....as history has shown only too well, ‘until you can produce it cheap enough, it’s not gonna do the job’........Alternative formats like films and adhesives were anticipated, so that a variety of materials with numerous technological applications might be moulded, printed or formulated...... except for using the fibres, really inexpensive production of any other applications is still not possible yet.
Spider silk, however, does not have sericin......‘out of studying a strange silk in a spider you come up with a new class of material. And that has all sorts of potential applications for microtechnology for soft robotics.
For Fritz Vollrath it has a future both in biomedical and in smart materials.’....An artificial, implanted silk cornea would also need to be porous enough to allow our own cells to enter it to allow it to regrow by using the shape of the silk as a scaffold, or mould......It was found that silk film had a near-perfect transparency–superior to anything made of glass, or indeed any synthetic material available.
David Kaplan had....decided If he could get hold of the silk fluid itself, he could mould it into whatever shape he needed..... with possible replacements for cartilage, and bone; packages for safely delivering medications deep into the body; artificial blood vessels made of silk for the repair of the heart and other organs; and dissolvable nuts, gears and bolts that could be implanted in the body for surgical repair.
Omenetto’s lab has also developed a soft-tissue filler based on silk fibroin protein. That is in clinical trials for cosmetic use, to fill wrinkles. But it is already approved for the treatment of vocal cord paralysis,
Another group of researchers, co-developed in 2022 a silk-based replacement for a type of
Another positive is that if you have a million tonnes, roughly the annual production of raw silk cocoons–that’s a lot of carbon that is bound for a very long time.’
So what's my overall take on the book? I'm very impressed. She covers a lot of ground. Maybe I would have liked to understand the chemistry a little better and maybe that could be placed in an appendix. But an easy five stars from me.

[CJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Silk. It isn’t necessarily what you think it is! This is a well researched and informative book which looks at silk in its many guises. The historical narratives were very engaging but other parts of the book felt a little more pedestrian, and I struggled to maintain my interest in parts. I had the audiobook version and had to check to see if the narrator was an AI or human. No spoilers… but check out the sample and let me know what you think.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Silk by Aarathi Prasad covers a lot of ground as they explore the historical development of silk production across a wide range of geography and time, as well as types of silk. The book does a good job of explaining the basics and brings in a number of often interesting biographical, cultural, and scientific vignettes. If it does all flow smoothly together or fully coalesce into a unified whole, it remains an informative, interesting, and often fascination book.
Prasad basically divides the book into three sources of silk: moths/silkworms, “sea silk” from marine creatures, , and spiders. For each they explain the source’s physical nuts and bolts of silk production—it’s evolutionary/biological purpose, such as anchoring in ocean waves or web construction and the mechanism and chemistry of the production, such as use of spinnerets, types of proteins, difference in types of silk, etc. The sections also explain how the silk naturally extruded by whatever creature (moth, mollusk, spider) became part of human culture. For the most ancient usage, Prasad turns to archaeological evidence and ancient texts, though each as they take pains to detail, can be unreliable and at times new information throws things into a different light. For more recent (relatively, we’re talking centuries here rather than millennia, they bring in primary texts, journals, reports, etc. often of the naturalists who did the work of collecting, illustrating, experimenting, gathering silk by hand from the creatures, inventing machines to gather silk, and so on. Prasad is careful to point out the imperialistic/colonialist attitude that underlay much of said collecting when it comes to the Europeans. And while they point out the difficulty of giving due credit to indigenous people and women who were involved, thanks to how they were often disappeared, they note who they can, such as Maria Merian, an integral collector, experimenter, and illustrator when it came to silkworms/moths. Finally (for this review at least), each section also explains the uses silk was put to: clothing obviously, but also wound health, parachutes, and perhaps most surprisingly bulletproof vests(no, really).

The last section moves us into more speculative mode, as Prasad explores ongoing experiments, particularly attempts to mass produce silk via genetic engineering, direct synthesis of proteins, and other such as-yet-not-fully-successful work.

As noted, there’s a wealth of information here. Sometimes I think Prasad could have been more selective in the details, as I’m not sure all were relevant, at least in their degree of detail. And at times the book felt disjointed as we moved back and forth in time and space or between subjects. But overall, a solid exploration of the topic. Recommended with those few caveats.

[Brenda Greene · Rating 1 out of 5]

The lyrical writing style and repetitiveness with no coherent theme or storyline meant I gave up after 3 chapters.

In that space Prasad mentions the range of moth species and other species that made silk, how bombus made the highest quality silk, how bombus got its name, where other silks were produced geographically, the range of natural silk colours, the dyes from silk moth excreta, the enzymes that dissolve silk and domestication of bombus, emperors that wore the cloth, moth lack mouthparts and the number of caterpillar legs (10 - a fact she likes to state several times over) and women who weave.

All of this was obviously fascinating to the author, but to the reader it comes across as an endless gush of disparate anecdotes, facts, images, locations and people.

It is like reading history, geography, science, economics and art all at once while embedded in dreams.

The content is there for an interesting read, but it needs a good editor to get rid of the extraneous minutae, expand on the interesting stuff and make it comprehensible. Currently it is comprehensive but unintelligible.

[Titas Choudhury · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

This book comprehensively charts the history of the material Silk, something that's marked by its luxury and feel. It happens to be one of those historical things that have inadvertently shaped our past and present. This book not only explores the scientific side of it, but also the socio-historical and political ones.

My favourite takeaway from this book is the role women play in history, and are often overlooked. Behind the loom of silk is definitely the hands of women, but it was also the science of silk that was first deciphered by a woman, and so it spread to other areas.

One remarkable feature of this book is its language. Nowhere does it read unnecessarily long, nor does it say less than enough. Even as a non-fiction it's written in a way that you'd get lost in the story. The narrative is shaped well, making the book a great read. It was also refreshing to read about something different, and silk made me think about the long forged trade routes across the world, of which India has long been part

[Cath Higgins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impeccably researched, artfully told and all-encompassing in its scope, this book leaves no cocoon unturned in its quest to unravel the threads behind the story of silk in all its glory. It perfectly balances a near exhaustive level of detail on the history, sociology and biology of silk with an enthralling and illuminating seemingly worldwide journey of discovery. A beguiling and enchanting read.

With thanks to the publisher for the complementary advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.

[Nishant · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is a exhaustive and informative information on Silk. Though most of it is history.

Although it us history on silk.. It is just exploitation of nature by west.. Unapologetic about how I feel about western atrocities on India.. I believe there is more to Indian weaving and silk that was destroyed by the colonizers.

A part is written but not much in details... Because most it was destroyed systematically to benefit economically the empire where sun never set.

Still a 4 star because it is a very interesting read about silk.

[Suraya Barbaro · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe it was my expectation of the book but I found it very confusing, too many names and details that in my view are not so important. Maybe because I am not a Silk expert. Maybe this book is for people who know quite a lot about silk and it’s history?

[Boronia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well researched, this book is about the insects that produce silk, the cultures that used silk in their textiles and the naturalists who dedicated their lives to the silk producing insects.
I thoroughly enjoyed the learning experience.

[Tina Price · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are interested in textiles this is simply fascinating. Detailed, carefully researched and so interesting.

[Susie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating read, I learnt so much and would recommend this book.

Thank you NetGalley for my complimentary copy in return for my honest review.

[Eleanor Gravestock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting content.

[Katie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Did not finish as it as after 2 chapters (I forget as it was so repetitive!) it was just the same information over and over again about the caterpillars so very, very boring.🥱

[Shilpa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Picked it up seeing the topic and cover page (I love indian design, prints and color combination) but didn't enjoy reading as such. Maybe silk wearers and lovers like it :-)

[History Today]

This was chosen by Patricia Fara, Emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and columnist at History Today, as one of History Today’s Books of the Year 2023.

Find out why at HistoryToday.com.