30 April 2026 sees the launch in Leeds of a new book – Humanitarian Handicraft: History, Materiality and Trade, c. 1840-1980 (Manchester University Press, 2025).  If you’d like to attend, details are on eventbrite here.  The editors – Claire Barber, Helen Dampier, Rebecca Gill and Bertrand Taithe – argue that hand-crafted textiles are an important part of humanitarian aesthetics, ethics and campaigning. We are all familiar with ‘fair trade’ shops which celebrate the skills, creativity and authenticity of (mostly) female artisans.  This kind of activity has a long history, and as the contributions to this volume explain, that history has a lot to do with lace.

The book has chapters from the convenors of this site, David Hopkin and Nicolette Makovicky – on literary encouragements to lace revivals and cottage industry in Communist Poland respectively, as well as from our occasional contributor Wendy Wiertz, expanding on the theme of Belgian war lace.  But it also has chapters from Janice Helland on philanthropic encouragement to Home Arts and Industries in Britain and Ireland, Helen Dampier and Rebecca Gill on Emily Hobhouse’s attempt to reintegrate Afrikaans women and children after the horrors of Boer War concentration camps through the Koppies Lace School, and Elizaveta Berezina on Russian social activism and the organisation of the Vologda lacemakers.

Some of the academic books we’ve covered on this website are very expensive or difficult to access, but Humanitarian Handicraft is available for free as an ‘Open Access’ publication, just follow this link.  Or for individual chapters, click on the links in the table of contents, reproduced below.

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS: Humanitarian Handicraft: History, Materiality and Trade, c. 1840-1980 (Manchester University Press, 2025

List of contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction: the meanings and making of humanitarian handicraft – Claire Barber, Helen Dampier, Rebecca Gill and Bertrand Taithe

Literary visions of craft and cooperation in the European handmade lace revival, c. 1840–1914 – David Hopkin

Work of hands: humanitarian craft and fair trade in Britain and Ireland, 1885–1914 – Janice Helland

Thinking Anglo-American industrial relief through Armenian needlework in the late 1890s: humanitarian marketing ethics, agency and identity – Stéphanie Prévost

Emily Hobhouse and the Koppies Lace School, 1908–1926 – Helen Dampier and Rebecca Gill

Beyond gratitude: Belgian women, humanitarian organisations and lace-aid programmes in the First World War – Wendy Wiertz

Threads of friendship: Quaker women, ‘peasant handicrafts’ and educational reconstruction in Russia and Poland, 1916–1939 – Siân Roberts

Politics woven as missionary craft: the carpets of the White Fathers and Sisters from the 1920s – Bertrand Taithe

Caught in the net: cooperation of lacemakers in the Vologda region, 1880s–1930s – Elizaveta Berezina

Crafting communist paternalism: the voices of lacemakers in Koniaków, Poland, 1947–1962 – Nicolette Makovicky

Humanitarian handicrafts as (dis)empowerment of women ‘left behind’: a Swedish help to self-help project in the northern Greek village of Vlasti, 1963–1988 – Maria Småberg

Humanitarian handicrafts: in conversation – Catherine Bertola, Claire Barber, Helen Dampier, Rebecca Gill and June Hill

Afterword – Jessica Hemmings

Index

Postcard advertising the Burano lace school. Cencia Scarpariola was the last practitioner of Burano lace before the industry was revived, under the patronage of Queen Margaret of Savoy and others, in 1872: a famous example of philanthropic intervention in the craft textile market.