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This Page: hemp, ramie, cotton, linen
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Although cloth is rarely preserved in the archaeological record, it is likely that cloth of various kinds has been used as long as animal skins to keep humans warm and protect them from insects, thorns, sunburn, and other harm.
This page includes some basic background about the nature of some of the commonest fibers that we know to have been used through much of human history. Although most cloth is made from plant fibers, silk is a significant exception. I have included silk because of its importance in East Asia.
The word "hemp" is loosely used to refer to a wide range of fibrous plants grown in various parts of the world, but in its strict usage it refers to Cannabis sativa, a plant native to Asia and used from prehistoric times to produce rope and cloth.
If one consumes them, usually by smoking, the dried leaves or flower clusters of hemp (called marijuana, bhang, or various other names) are mildly mood-altering, producing a sense of euphoria. Marijuana production and/or consumption is illegal in some parts of the modern world, and the prohibition has extended so far as to make the import of most hempen products illegal in the United States.
The fibers of hemp, while coarse and tough, are thin enough that, if carefully separated, they are thread-like, making them accessible to spinning and weaving techniques.
The process is not particularly easy, however. Hemp is processed by soaking and steaming the branches, which makes it possible to peel off the skin and split, beat, and comb the fibrous core into very thin strands. The "comb" is made of spikes, preferably of metal. The process is labor-intensive, often requiring multiple repetitions of the soaking, steaming, drying, beating, and combing processes before appropriate fibers are produced..
The strands can then be twisted (spun) into yarn. The yarn, however, is quite coarse and cannot be used for comfortable clothing. It is softened by being boiled in caustic soda water to soften the fibers, then soaked in plain water for several days to remove the caustic chemical build-up.
At this point, the yarn, after being sun dried, can be woven, which was often done on a backstrap or other loom.
From prehistoric times, hemp (or ramie, mentioned below) was the principal material used to make cloth in eastern Asia, although silk was used for the finest garments. Not all hemp is equally good as a raw material for clothing, so not surprisingly there were grades of hemp, and some regions considered better or worse for hemp production than others. In ancient Korea, for example, there seems to have been a preference for hemp grown along the Tumen river, running along part of the modern border between China and Korea.
From antiquity, a similar but slightly superior plant, jute (cochorus), was grown in eastern India, and its introduction into Europe in the early 1800s displaced hemp for burlap and other kinds of coarse cloth in that region. (The picture here shows different Scottish jute weaves.)
In the Americas, "hemp" was made from a wide range of fibrous plants, especially including henequen or sisal (Agave fourcroydes) and related agave species or the similar genus Furcraea. (The generic Mexican term is for these plants is maguey, a word sometimes used also in English. In English the broadly applied term "century plant" is also used when the plant is grown in gardens for decoration.)
Another Asian plant used in ways roughly similar to hemp is ramie (Boehmeria nivea). Ramie is a broad-leafed, woody plant in the nettle family found further south than hemp in wetter, warmer climates. In these growing conditions each unit of land could produce more than twice as much ramie as the northern climates could hemp. Ramie, where it could be grown, was thus typically a more economically advantageous crop than hemp.
For ramie, as for hemp, the basic technique for working it includes splitting the stalks and separating the fibers, which are then twisted into yarn for weaving.
The finer ramie fibers are about the thickness of a human hair and more delicate (and easily broken) than hemp fibers. To avoid breaking them, they were sometimes separated with one's teeth rather than drawn, like hemp, over a coarse comb.
To avoid breakage during the spinning and weaving process, ramie is kept damp. In dry areas like Korea, it was sometimes processed in semi-underground huts to increase the humidity, and it was always hand woven to avoid breaking the strands. Cloth made from ramie has been valued for at least the last thousand years or so for summer garments because of its lightness and its ability to pass light and air and to absorb perspiration.
The word "cotton" is used to refer to various species of the genus Gossypium, widely distributed around the world. Gossypium is characterized by seed pods containing soft, downy fibers attached to the individual seeds. It is these fibers that are used to make cloth once they are successfully removed from the pods and from the seeds.
Although used quite early in the Near East, cotton was a comparative late-comer to eastern Asia, where it was popularized during China's Yuán 元 ("Mongul") dynasty (1279-1368), arriving in Japan and Korea by the mid-14th century. Good quality cotton grown in southern Korea became a significant trade commodity to Japan and China.
The fineness and strength of cotton fibers produces a smoother surface than is possible with hemp, expanding such artistic expression as embroidery and batik (although not equalling the medium of silk, with its much finer fibers). But a more important quality of cotton is that its tough even fibers allowed the expansion of weaving technology beyond the limitations of the backstrap loom and ultimately permitted the standardization necessary for machine weaving and therefore for .
Cotton plants are less drought-resistant than most kinds of hemp or henequen, and are confined to moister areas. That is why it is considered wasteful to grow cotton in California, where crops require irrigation. It is also why cotton became an important crop in the American southeast, where there is ample rainfall and a long, warm growing season.
But even in areas where it can be grown, cotton requires a substantial labor force. The labor input per square meter of finished cloth has often placed it beyond the reach of poorest segments of the population. In pre-Columbian Mexico, for example, cotton was regarded as appropriate only for elite use, and sumptuary laws confined the majority of the population to hempen (maguey) garments.
Linen is made from fibers of the flax plant (any of several species of the genus Linum, usually Linum usitatissimum), from which linseed oil is also obtained.
Native to the Near East, like cotton, linen was in competition with cotton (with which it is sometimes interwoven) as a plant fiber for the production of clothing.
Linen is still used for clothing, and is valued for its its stiff, "starched" quality in some uses, but it is limited in its popularity because of the ease with which it wrinkles when used for ordinary clothing.
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