The History of the Matter: Wool production and the elision of colonial imprints in textile traceability schemes

The European Union’s new traceability regime for sustainable textiles pledges to make every stitch transparent, yet its spotlight on present-day supply chains leaves the long shadows of colonial production in the dark. This article probes that blind spot through fifteen months of ethnographic and archival research that follows merino wool from Patagonian estancias and Mapuche smallholdings to European markets. Tracking the fibre’s journey reveals how imperial land seizures, fenced rangelands and breed “improvements” are literally spun into the structure of today’s wool industry, shaping who can comply with responsible wool standards and who cannot. By linking the EU’s new traceability technologies, such as digital product passports, with the durable fences, soils and sheep bodies bequeathed by nineteenth-century conquest, we ask how histories become materialised – and then erased – in contemporary notions of “ethical” production. Re-centering multispecies landscapes rather than QR-coded commodities, the article argues that genuine sustainability demands tracing across time as well as space: confronting how past expropriations, animal control and ecological degradation continue to govern which producers gain or lose from traceability logics. In doing so, we call for a historically attuned, more-than- human methodology that can expose and rework the colonial durabilities hidden within today’s ostensibly transparent textile chains.