Love your homemade ouilt? Thank capitalism. How industrialization keeps you warm at night.

• Author: Postrel, Virginia
• Position: HISTORY

A PATCHWORK QUILT covering a bed in a country B&B or hanging on a museum wall evokes nostalgia for simpler times. Using simple shapes--triangles, squares, trapezoids, octagons--and the clever arrangement of color and pattern, the quilters of a bygone era created beauty and utility from what we wasteful moderns might simply discard. Symbolizing handicraft and thrift, quilts seem simultaneously old-fashioned and countercultural, an authentic alternative to impersonal industry. Not surprisingly, American quilts enjoyed their first renaissance in the 1920s, their second in the 1970s--both periods of rapid social change.

In reality, though, patchwork quilts wouldn't exist without trade, industrialization, and material abundance. They are the physical embodiment of what economist Deirdre McCloskey calls the Great Enrichment: a bourgeois art par excellence.

Patching is as old as clothes, and sewing fibrous batting between two sheets for warmth is ancient. Patchwork quilts are much more recent. The earliest date back to the late 17th century, when vibrant cotton prints from India were all the rage among the European gentry. More than a century passed before ordinary people began sleeping under geometrical patterns created from small, colorful, precisely cut shapes. Patchwork quilts became common only after textile production surged and prices dropped thanks to the mechanical innovations we now call the Industrial Revolution.

By the early 19th century, cheap factory-made fabrics spread the luxury of tailored clothes beyond the rich and their liveried servants. Traditional peasant clothing is made up of rectangles that preserve as much cloth as possible for eventual reuse. Skirts are gathered rather than fitted with darts and seams; shirts and blouses hang away from the body; sleeves are billowy. These shapes reflect material constraints, not stylish silhouettes. As the price of fabric dropped, ordinary people's wardrobes grew and homemade clothing became more fashionable and fitted.

Cutting sleeves or bodices in curved pieces to fit the body inevitably produces leftover bits of fabric. These awkward leavings could go in the trash, or to the ragman. But with a snip here and there, they become the triangles or squares of a patchwork pattern.

As quilt-making grew in popularity, it generated new demand for fabric scraps. Women stored and swapped leftover bits. In an 1811 letter, Jane Austen nagged her sister to send her promised supplies: "Have you...