I honestly don’t know why I am getting downvoted for this. Europe and the europeans in colonized places often had elaborate clothing compared to other cultures especially in warmer places. I also remember bathing being more common in asia at the time? I might be misremembering that one though because I haven’t looked into this in a while. I know for certain that muslims put an emphasis on cleanliness atleast.
You don’t seem like you’re tripping. My money’s on white liberal fragility–this is a .world comm, so it’s a safe assumption that it really is everyone else whos wrong.
Well for starters that’s not how you phrased it. No mention of Europe or Europeans, just “white” which is an overly broad modern invention. There are people we’d consider white who had minimal influence from that era of European/Victorian culture.
Secondly, not all Europeans who wore such elaborate clothing were white. France, Spain, Italy, and most all of southern Europe had populations of varying degrees of melanin (not to mention foreign dignitaries, mixed families, etc…). The populations in their colonies sometimes adopted or were forced to wear these styles.
Thirdly, AFAIK there’s not much to back up the personal hygiene myth. It’s true that city sewage infrastructure was far behind some peers at the same tier of development, but you don’t need modern plumbing to wash yourself off when you stink. Other cultures did have different hygiene standards but there’s many unique factors (access to hot springs, religious ritual cleansing, climate, etc…) which weren’t mirrored in Europe.
Taken at face value you turned “it’s funny how people wore elaborate outfits and didn’t have our modern hygiene concepts” into “white people have dirty ancestors”
It actually makes total sense - I just changed my reaction to upvote. The problem with your comment is just that at the first sight it’s indistinguishable from a low-effort racist one, and they are much more common.
And the bathing traditions I know of in a handful of indigenous cultures across the Americas african Mediterranean and Asian cultures were almost universally either better or in extreme environments and not much worse.
White people are just filthy disgusting goblins. I’ll take a picture of my apartment if you need proof.
You’re trying to defend reflexively yelling “REVERSE RACISM!”–It’s not a good look.
Most people learned the lessons of racist societies that broad sweeping statements about arbitrary socially imposed categorisations of people are wrong, hurtful and more disgusting than anyone’s bathing habits.
Yeah, I acknowledge that my ancestors (and apparently england to this day) shit in their drinking water because of being disgusting subhuman monsters, plus a self deprecating joke about my housekeeping or lack thereof.
Clearly I am a ‘self hating white’. See, @comradesharkfucker@lemmy.ml ? They hate you because they’re Nazis. Wear their disapproval as a badge of honor. Revel in their hate. Let it nourish you–the knowledge that you made a bunch of Nazi snowflake bitch babies piss themselves in apoplectic rage.
Textiles (clothing items) were primarily imported from Asia to Europe prior to the colonial era. Colonial mercantilism, the industrial revolution and eventual mechanisation changed that.
See my comment on the origins of shampoo with regard to bathing.
You aren’t tripping, you’re on the right track! Its important that we all aim to be historically informed.
Most textiles were homespun - everywhere, because shipping was very expensive, and since textiles could be made anywhere there was a source of fibre (sheep, cotton, flax, you name it) that’s what people did.
Spinning and weaving have been practiced since pre-historical times, and the spinning wheel was invented before colonial times.
Yes the wording of my post could be clearer. The direction of trade flow for textiles was primarily from South Asia to Europe.
In the late‑17th and early‑18th centuries about 95 % of British imports from Asia were Indian textiles, while the Dutch sourced ≈80 % of the silks and >50 % of the textiles they bought from Asia from Bengal. Bengal alone supplied ~ 25 % of global textile trade in the early 1700s.
Merchants, diplomats and travelers brought Indian garments back to Europe, where tailors reproduced the silhouettes but still relied on imported fabric because the raw material itself (the cloth) was what held value.
In Bengal, whole villages specialised in spinning, dyeing and weaving. The division of labour, combined with abundant cheap labour, kept costs low.
The Mughal administration encouraged cash‑crop agriculture (especially cotton) and provided infrastructure (river transport, ports) that allowed massive export surpluses. European producers, still largely artisanal, could not compete on price for the same quality of cotton.
Until the late‑18th century Europe lacked efficient cotton‑spinning machines. The water‑frame (1769) and later the spinning‑jenny only began to close the gap. Before that, Indian hand‑spun and hand‑loomed cotton was widely known to be of superior quality and consistency.
Indian dyers mastered natural dyes (indigo, madder, cochineal) and mordant techniques produced vivid, colour‑fast fabrics. European dyers were still developing comparable processes during this era.
Europeans had wool, linen and hemp in abundance locally but not cotton or silk, which was a major barrier to mass producing “luxurious” clothing indigineously.
This was a limitation of being in a colder climate. Gossypium cotton species require a long frost‑free period, plenty of sunshine and moderate humidity. Much of Europe’s temperate zone fails those requirements.
Gossypium needs ≥ 150 – 180 days of temperatures above 20 °C to flower, set seed and mature the boll. Most of Europe’s latitudes did not provide such a window at that time.
Europeans were eventually able to source a surplus of cotton from the Americas, which was cultivated via bonded labor ie the Atlantic slave trade.
Right, there was a period of time where this trade imbalance held. Before cotton started to be imported at scale into Europe, domestic fibres like wool dominated.
At first I read it as “People are still unchanged and don’t wash unless you are in Europe” but then realized this isn’t reddit and had to think of any alternative meanings lmao.
Is that actually true, or was it just that plumbing was prohibitively expensive? I ask genuinely, as I don’t know anything about this specifically, but I would imagine they at least knew about plumbing, given that the Romans knew about and had plumbing, and the Romans controlled most of England for a good while.
This will be long because I want to mention how plumbing problems were the reason tea became popular in England.
Indoor plumbing is expensive so general solution was to have the toilet outside in an outhouse. Once it’s filled farmers would collect it as a convenient bucket of manure.
After fall of Rome, they continued with dumping their shit into rivers they drink from or outside their windows as people walk by.
The rivers part is interesting because that means average English had better chance of surviving and reproducing if they liked taste of boiling water with medicinal herbs in it.
Tea is popular in England slightly because of the generations of purging anyone that doesn’t like it.
Ok in this person’s defense England did discover plumbing awfully late compared to other civilizations.
I honestly don’t know why I am getting downvoted for this. Europe and the europeans in colonized places often had elaborate clothing compared to other cultures especially in warmer places. I also remember bathing being more common in asia at the time? I might be misremembering that one though because I haven’t looked into this in a while. I know for certain that muslims put an emphasis on cleanliness atleast.
Am I tripping here?
You don’t seem like you’re tripping. My money’s on white liberal fragility–this is a .world comm, so it’s a safe assumption that it really is everyone else whos wrong.
Well for starters that’s not how you phrased it. No mention of Europe or Europeans, just “white” which is an overly broad modern invention. There are people we’d consider white who had minimal influence from that era of European/Victorian culture.
Secondly, not all Europeans who wore such elaborate clothing were white. France, Spain, Italy, and most all of southern Europe had populations of varying degrees of melanin (not to mention foreign dignitaries, mixed families, etc…). The populations in their colonies sometimes adopted or were forced to wear these styles.
Thirdly, AFAIK there’s not much to back up the personal hygiene myth. It’s true that city sewage infrastructure was far behind some peers at the same tier of development, but you don’t need modern plumbing to wash yourself off when you stink. Other cultures did have different hygiene standards but there’s many unique factors (access to hot springs, religious ritual cleansing, climate, etc…) which weren’t mirrored in Europe.
Taken at face value you turned “it’s funny how people wore elaborate outfits and didn’t have our modern hygiene concepts” into “white people have dirty ancestors”
It actually makes total sense - I just changed my reaction to upvote. The problem with your comment is just that at the first sight it’s indistinguishable from a low-effort racist one, and they are much more common.
It is still low effort and racist, “asians bathed more” is weak cope because the world isn’t “white people and asians”
It’s a truly ignorant statement.
The original is ‘unless you’re white’
And the bathing traditions I know of in a handful of indigenous cultures across the Americas african Mediterranean and Asian cultures were almost universally either better or in extreme environments and not much worse.
White people are just filthy disgusting goblins. I’ll take a picture of my apartment if you need proof.
You’re trying to defend reflexively yelling “REVERSE RACISM!”–It’s not a good look.
Take your self loathing somewhere else.
Most people learned the lessons of racist societies that broad sweeping statements about arbitrary socially imposed categorisations of people are wrong, hurtful and more disgusting than anyone’s bathing habits.
Yeah, I acknowledge that my ancestors (and apparently england to this day) shit in their drinking water because of being disgusting subhuman monsters, plus a self deprecating joke about my housekeeping or lack thereof.
Clearly I am a ‘self hating white’. See, @comradesharkfucker@lemmy.ml ? They hate you because they’re Nazis. Wear their disapproval as a badge of honor. Revel in their hate. Let it nourish you–the knowledge that you made a bunch of Nazi snowflake bitch babies piss themselves in apoplectic rage.
Yeah, the people articulating anti-racism are Nazis. That makes total sense. /s
‘300 years ago sex must have been awful. People wore like a thousand layers and didnt bathe’
‘I think that was just a white people thing. I think most people bathed more often and basically nobody else wore that many buttons.’
‘Anti-racists’:
See, the difference between you and me is I don’t believe in judging entire racial groups by the lowest among them.
Okay so I still think you’re on team asshole but I need to offer you a high five (I’ll wear gloves)
Textiles (clothing items) were primarily imported from Asia to Europe prior to the colonial era. Colonial mercantilism, the industrial revolution and eventual mechanisation changed that.
See my comment on the origins of shampoo with regard to bathing.
You aren’t tripping, you’re on the right track! Its important that we all aim to be historically informed.
Sorry what? Most textiles were imported?
Most textiles were homespun - everywhere, because shipping was very expensive, and since textiles could be made anywhere there was a source of fibre (sheep, cotton, flax, you name it) that’s what people did.
Spinning and weaving have been practiced since pre-historical times, and the spinning wheel was invented before colonial times.
Yes the wording of my post could be clearer. The direction of trade flow for textiles was primarily from South Asia to Europe.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_India
Merchants, diplomats and travelers brought Indian garments back to Europe, where tailors reproduced the silhouettes but still relied on imported fabric because the raw material itself (the cloth) was what held value.
In Bengal, whole villages specialised in spinning, dyeing and weaving. The division of labour, combined with abundant cheap labour, kept costs low.
The Mughal administration encouraged cash‑crop agriculture (especially cotton) and provided infrastructure (river transport, ports) that allowed massive export surpluses. European producers, still largely artisanal, could not compete on price for the same quality of cotton.
Until the late‑18th century Europe lacked efficient cotton‑spinning machines. The water‑frame (1769) and later the spinning‑jenny only began to close the gap. Before that, Indian hand‑spun and hand‑loomed cotton was widely known to be of superior quality and consistency.
Indian dyers mastered natural dyes (indigo, madder, cochineal) and mordant techniques produced vivid, colour‑fast fabrics. European dyers were still developing comparable processes during this era.
Europeans had wool, linen and hemp in abundance locally but not cotton or silk, which was a major barrier to mass producing “luxurious” clothing indigineously.
This was a limitation of being in a colder climate. Gossypium cotton species require a long frost‑free period, plenty of sunshine and moderate humidity. Much of Europe’s temperate zone fails those requirements.
Gossypium needs ≥ 150 – 180 days of temperatures above 20 °C to flower, set seed and mature the boll. Most of Europe’s latitudes did not provide such a window at that time.
Europeans were eventually able to source a surplus of cotton from the Americas, which was cultivated via bonded labor ie the Atlantic slave trade.
Right, there was a period of time where this trade imbalance held. Before cotton started to be imported at scale into Europe, domestic fibres like wool dominated.
At first I read it as “People are still unchanged and don’t wash unless you are in Europe” but then realized this isn’t reddit and had to think of any alternative meanings lmao.
Is that actually true, or was it just that plumbing was prohibitively expensive? I ask genuinely, as I don’t know anything about this specifically, but I would imagine they at least knew about plumbing, given that the Romans knew about and had plumbing, and the Romans controlled most of England for a good while.
This will be long because I want to mention how plumbing problems were the reason tea became popular in England.
Indoor plumbing is expensive so general solution was to have the toilet outside in an outhouse. Once it’s filled farmers would collect it as a convenient bucket of manure.
(If lemmy compresses too much, click image to get better resolution)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plumbing
After fall of Rome, they continued with dumping their shit into rivers they drink from or outside their windows as people walk by.
The rivers part is interesting because that means average English had better chance of surviving and reproducing if they liked taste of boiling water with medicinal herbs in it.
Tea is popular in England slightly because of the generations of purging anyone that doesn’t like it.
Think of it this way. Versailles had elaborate fountains and zero indoor plumbing.
Yes but that doesn’t mean they were shitting all around the place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groom_of_the_Stool
Historical reenactment
https://youtu.be/7OWMB3ewpNM