New Books in Military History · Marshall Poe

Trish FitzSimons and Madelyn Shaw, "Fleeced: Unraveling the History of Wool and War" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

·1 hr 9 min·5 clips

The conversation treats wool as a strategic wartime material from the start. Trish FitzSimons and Madeline Shaw frame the British move to secure domestic fleece, along with wool from Australia and New Zealand, as a fixed-price arrangement that lasted from November 1916 to the war's end in 1918. The Battle of the Somme hangs over that decision, with heavy losses in men and material helping explain why the British government looked harder at how long the war might last and what would be needed to finish it. The United States enters the story as a neutral power until April 1917. Its anger at the British blockade of German ports, and the efforts to push back against that blockade, add the American side of the picture. The episode then turns to the woolen business in the United States, where a strong German-descended sector drew newspaper attention and diplomatic suspicion. Some firms were thought to be buying and transshipping wool to Germany through back doors, while also stockpiling wool because the blockade meant they would not get it later. That makes the wartime scramble feel like preparation for the peace to come. The guests also point to Boston-centered American woolen companies, described as more British allied. Trade journals help make those movements visible, and that record-based method matters as much as the argument itself. The episode keeps returning to the journals, the newspapers, and the diplomatic talk as evidence. Near the end, the subject shifts to Leavers Lace. Madeline Shaw describes visiting the last remaining Leavers Lace company in Rhode Island during COVID, before it shut down, and mentions having bad iPad video of the machines running and some of the people there. The host treats that detour as a possible future project rather than a break from the main conversation. The result is a study of wartime procurement, industrial history, and the records that preserve both.

As heard by us

Wool, blockade politics, and wartime buying turn the war into an industrial supply story.

Trish FitzSimons and Madeline Shaw treat wool as a wartime resource with real strategic weight, following the British choice to secure the domestic clip and all the wool of Australia and New Zealand at a fixed price from November 1916 until the war ended in 1918.

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Why you'd press play

You want wool and war to sound oddly inseparable, and this episode obliges without much fuss.

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