Silk cultivation in the Atlantic world, c.1500-1830: a history of imperial attempts, scientific & technological exchange, and political economy

This project will unveil the extent to which colonial empires competed to grow silk in their outposts around the Atlantic world between c.1500-1830. Seeking to outdo one another, and bypass the expense of trading with the great silk regions in the East (specially China), European powers tried desperately to encourage the cultivation of silk in the Americas - bringing to bear cutting-edge scientific and botanical knowledge, as well as organised labour. Silk was outshone by a range of other New World products over the course of the Early Modern era: sugar, tobacco, rice, and slaves. But while these successful commodities have attracted a large amount of scholarship, the study of silk's failure has not, though it can also shed a great deal of light on contemporary societies (both in Old and New Worlds). The project will demonstrate that silk connected the desires of monarchs and courts to the designers of new colonies and their settlers. It connected the science of proto-industrial engines to the 'mystery' and art of specialised experts in winding and weaving. It witnessed the transformation of landscapes as thousands of mulberry trees and millions of silkworms were raised in New Spain, New France, British America, and across the fledgling United States. And more than anything else, the cultivation of silk in the Atlantic world connected people - from different countries, religions, races, and backgrounds.

The prospective research will be comparative, investigating the many attempts made by a range of nations, colonies, corporations, communities and entrepreneurs to foster silk in their territories. It will address both the theory of silk cultivation (utopianism, colonial ideology, mercantilism and botany) and the practice of silk cultivation (environmental history, productivity, proto-industrialisation, and labour history). It will outline the commonalities that inspired attempts to cultivate silk in places as diverse as Sweden, the Caribbean, Ireland, Mexico, Prussia, Virginia, and Louisiana, as well as the different problems that were faced in transferring the knowledge and materials. A wide range of sources will be deployed to underpin this research, including colonial records, Board of Trade minutes, customs reports, correspondence, published tracts on silk, mercantilist propaganda, and surviving fabric. Together, they will help answer questions such as: who was involved in silk cultivation? Could silk have succeeded as a New World product, and why did it fail? How did early modern administrators try to bend people and landscapes to their designs?

This research will have an impact in several ways on the many fields that the broad subject touches upon. For instance, the history of silk production both supports and defies popular geographical and chronological models. The notion of an integrating 'Atlantic world' between 1500-1830 seems to be upheld by tracing the connections between silk experts through their writings and employment history. But the obsession with home-grown silk also grew out of 'Pacific' interactions and global patterns in the exchange of goods and ideas, thereby challenging the integrity of an 'Atlantic' orientation. Silk, frequently a heavily-protected commodity, stood at the forefront of new ideas about technology, industrialism, empire, and trade. But if it was, on the one hand, a herald of modernisation (generating new factories and machines in Britain, and new schemes in the Americas), it was on the other hand an archaic, ancient craft whose workers - many of them female and most non-British - were secretive and unresponsive to pressure. Finally, in considering how (in)effectively man was able to deliberately reshape his environment, the project will have much to offer in the field of environmental history and political economy. Overall, I hope to show that a careful scrutiny of the theories, practices, and realities of silk cultivation can tell us much about the nature of the early modern world.

Who will benefit?

A wide range of academics, postgraduates, and research users will benefit from the completion of the primary output of this research project, whereby they will be provided with an accessible, wide-ranging, and integrative survey of imperial attempts to direct and accelerate the establishment of a textile industry. Historians from a broad range of fields will find useful insights, contextual analysis, and challenges to conceptual and historiographical orthodoxies. Curators, museum researchers, collectors, archivists, and people working in the field of material culture (whether contemporary or historical) will discover linkages and discontinuities that stimulate further research, and encourage them to conceptualise new activities and cultural events (such as exhibitions) based around the rediscovered connections between many Atlantic regions and silk. Finally, in constructing a regionally-based narrative of silk cultivation, and devoting close attention to the ingredients of success or failure, the project would be of interest and use to individuals (amateur entomologists) and companies exploring the possibility of raising silkworms - either as a past-time or a business - in both the US and the UK. To this day, a number of businesses sell silkworm eggs and equipment in North Carolina, California, Canada, and Cornwall ('Worldwide Butterflies'), and it is often demonstrated in schools in the US though without awareness of their earlier history between 1500-1830 (see, for instance, http://www.suekayton.com/Silkworms/teacher.htm).

How will they benefit?

The research, by bringing to light and inter-connecting early modern initiatives around the Atlantic Ocean, will make a valuable cultural contribution to society, particularly though not exclusively in the UK and the US. In effect, it will salvage and rehabilitate the longstanding love-fail relationship that these polities had in the past with sericulture, and in so doing, deepen our appreciation of our complicated textile history, and our interdependence on global trade. The benefits that will accrue most visibly are liable to be found particularly in the fields of material culture, museum exhibitions, and amateur entomology, wherein practitioners will be enthused to discover innovative linkages and information that insists that Spitalfields, the Royal Court, and the East India Company were not the only sites of interest for British silk. Less visibly, but arguably more substantively, the research will nuance future discussions of a host of exciting and important subjects. To take one example, this research allows us to categorically refute the suggestion made by a number of nineteenth-century writers that silk failed because of the inadequacies of African-Americans as worm-raisers and cocoon-reelers. It provides grist for debates over the nature of slavery, the process of industrialisation, the efficacy of mercantilism or sumptuary legislation, the cultural symbolism of the American Revolution, the creolisation of Hispanic settlers, and many others. Ultimately, in forcing us to confront the failures of a myriad of commercial projects in the past, that had been sponsored by a wide spectrum of individuals, companies, and nations, it helps explain why and where commercial projecting has been successful.