Agricultural History Review, Volume 67 Part 2 (2019), p. 330

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Great Lakes and northern Great Plains pioneers planted patches of newly ploughed land with purple-flowering plants. In Flax Americana: A history of the fibre and oil that covered a continent, Joshua MacFadyen uncovers the complicated story of a striking crop and vital commodity that historians have almost entirely overlooked. MacFadyen uses flax to weave together the interconnected social-ecological histories of agriculture, environment, business, science and technology, international trade, and commodities. Ironically, flax was almost always peripheral. It originated and underwent processing at the margins of the farmer’s fields, the agricultural frontier, and the industrial/capitalist marketplace. As MacFadyen points out, vital statistics in the census miss the ways flax fit into marginal landscapes, communities, and economies. The marvel of his research is the piecing-together of the history from the many fragments of flax found in the documentary record, including photographs, account books, trade publications, industry promotional material, and correspondence between farmers, manufacturers, and scientists. Like the plant itself, the history of flax branched many times, flourished in colourful ways, and transformed countless places where it was cultivated; little in the story of flax lends itself to a straightforward and easy-to-explain narrative.

MacFadyen’s study of the social and material complexities of flax offers an ideal environmental history. The story in Flax Americana hinges on the irreconcilable tension between the fibre’s potential value to the industrial economy, the frustrating process of converting the plant into cloth and cordage, and the ease with which converting its seed oil into paint created value for farmers, manufacturers, and modern society. Understanding the tension requires a careful explanation of why and where farmers and manufacturers expected to fit the fibre into local and the modern economies in the late nineteenth century; the material realities of the flax plant and its agency over humans; and finally the confluence of prairie colonization, an almost frictionless conversion of seeds into oil, and the cultural desire to cover the world in colour starting in the early twentieth century. By using the geography of flax to structure the organization of the book, MacFadyen avoids confusing the reader with multiple and overlapping threads of fibre and coats of oil, and allows the book to proceed chronologically. Originating in what MacFadyen calls the rural mill complex of south-western Ontario where tight-knit communities planted it at the edges of ‘new breaking’ (recently ploughed land) and sold it to small manufacturers, flax migrated with the colonizing land rush into the grasslands of the Dakotas, Montana, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan where farmers grew much larger acreages and supplied the urban industrial complex with raw materials for modern consumer products, including ready-mixed paints and linoleum. The transition from fibre to seed oil, cordage to paint, small mill to industrial processing, also pulled flax into commodity webs operating at multiple scales from the local to the global.

Drawing on the work of sustainability scientists Jianguo Liu et al., MacFadyen employs the concepts of telecoupling and social-ecological systems to explore the relationships between communities, agroecosystems, and the capitalist marketplace ‘over long distances, between diverse systems, and through complex interactions like feedbacks and trade-offs’ (p. 16). MacFadyen uses these concepts to provide an enhanced commodity chain analysis, which acknowledges and explains the complexity and nonlinearity of the stages flax moved through on its many paths from plant to product, from producer to consumer. By framing Flax Americana in this way, MacFadyen treats flax as one commodity networked into a wider constellation of others. Historians of agriculture, environment, and science and technology gain a more holistic view of commodities if, as MacFadyen argues, ‘we think of flax not as a standalone chain but as one section of a much larger web of all commodities’ (p. 18). MacFadyen dispenses with the approach that many other historians of commodities have taken, which is to isolate a single commodity and elevate its importance (warranted, or not) above that of others. Instead, MacFadyen engages in a very generous kind of scholarship that other historians, particularly agricultural and environmental historians might embrace. There is, after all, a substitute for almost every commodity, so looking for and explaining the interconnections between them is also just good storytelling.

Perhaps the biggest contribution MacFadyen makes to agricultural and environmental history with Flax Americana is one that he does not fully or clearly articulate. Almost precisely halfway through the book, MacFadyen asks why has flax ‘not attracted the attention of professional historians’? (p. 138). Without stating so outright, the clearest answer the book provides is because the material properties of flax never attracted much attention – from people in the past, let alone from historians who read the records they left behind.

Flax did not thrive on its own merits. As MacFadyen makes clear, flax ‘was an unexceptional part of life for rural people. Their records show that they did not treat flax as extraordinary or worthy of promotional fervour’ (p. 138). Indeed, flax products (cloth, rope, paint, linoleum, etc.) satisfied none of society’s needs, great or small. It became a part of industrial agriculture and modern society despite its material properties, not because of them. Processing the fibre was painstaking and laborious. Seed oil applications were capricious, if not conspicuous, consumption. The story MacFadyen tells, but seems hesitant to mention, is that flax had agency that resisted easy integration into anthropogenic social-ecological systems. Domesticated, certainly. But never indispensable. In fact, the history of flax provided by Flax Americana appears to be explained as the triumph of human agency over that of flax, but with many of the opening rounds of the contest going to flax. The farmers, manufacturers, and promoters who saw its potential and derived some smaller benefit from their effort to achieve it, worked very hard to overcome the materiality of flax. The social, economic, and political meanings that people attached to flax constantly ran up against its ecological and physical properties. Looking only at what was grown, harvested, bought, sold, discussed, and described only gets at part of the story. Assessing the agency of the plant itself fills the story out.