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Reveals how commodity failure, as much as success, can shed light on aspirations, environment, and economic life in colonial societies.
List of contents
List of figures; List of colour plates; List of maps; List of tables; Acknowledgements; 1. Prologue; Part I. Emergence: 2. Spain and New Spain; 3. England and Virginia; 4. France and New France; Part II. Persistence; 5. Persistence; 6. Lower South: South Carolina and Georgia; 7. New England; Part III. Convergence; 8. Convergence; 9. Pennsylvania and sericultural revolution; 10. Silk production in the wake of revolution; 11. Epilogue; Selected bibliography; Index.
About the author
Ben Marsh is Reader in History at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He is the author of the award-winning Georgia's Frontier Women: Female Fortunes in a Southern Colony (2007) and Understanding and Teaching the Age of Revolutions (2017), and has published widely on early and revolutionary American history. His research on silk has featured in several exhibitions, including Enlightened Princesses: Britain and Europe, 1700-1820 (Yale Center for British Art and Historical Royal Palaces, 2017), and won the UK Textile Society's Natalie Rothstein Memorial Prize (2013).
Summary
A fascinating account of attempts to cultivate silk across New Spain, New France, British North America and the early United States. Ben Marsh shows how commodity failure, as much as success, can offer new insights into the aspirations, environment, and economic life in colonial societies.
Additional text
'Rarely has a history of 'failure' been so skilfully evoked. Ben Marsh explores the western imperial hopes for silk production in the colonial Atlantic world – the stuff of competing politics, regional ecologies and assorted adventures. His sharp analyses reveal vital new perspectives, set within globally entangled material histories.' Beverly Lemire, author of Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures
