Agricultural History Review, Volume 70 Part 2 (2022), p. 327

In Unravelled dreams Ben Marsh explores the history of the encounter with silk production and consumption in the Atlantic world in the period 1500 to 1840. He points out that silkworms were ‘at the cutting edge of Atlantic imperialism’ in this period not because of any commercial success in silk production but precisely for the reverse. He shows that silk production enjoyed wide ranging encouragement from colonial powers, yet did not succeed. In this way the book differs from other commodity histories in that it portrays the history of commodity that failed. Marsh argues that ‘the history of failure is a something of an in-built blind spot for historians’ and as such stands in the way of deeper understanding of the contributions that ‘failures’ or rather ‘commercial failures’ had on the wider social and economic development. In the case of silk, he cites the numerous contributions that silk made and argues that despite the failure of this commercial venture, silk paid ‘testament to the experimental spirit, profound adaptability, and indomitable conviction of early American communities’. Moreover, as he shows Atlantic silk’s history has always been bound with the more global history of the silk industry and consumption on the world market. In this way the history of failed projects can assist in studying the global and the global history needs to be taken into account when explaining the local failure. Since the book compares silk production in the French, English, Spanish and early American contexts the comparative element further aids to reveal the global and regional paths silk production took in the Americas.

The book is divided into three parts – Part I, Emergence, Part II, Persistence, and Part III, Convergence – and each part is then divided into chapters according to the region that they explore. Part I, Emergence, sets the progress of silk culture into the context of the spread of silk production and consumption around the globe and into the framework of early colonization efforts. Chapter 2 focuses on sericulture (the process of mulberry cultivation and silkworm rearing) and the ensuing silk production in Spain and the process of the transfer to New Spain. This process, as Marsh shows, started with the first voyages across the Atlantic. Marsh shows that this project was successful in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries thanks to three factors that occurred simultaneously – something that did not happen in Atlantic regions. These were availability of Old-World silk experts, committed colonial authorities, and a labour force with experience in textile production and insect harvesting. Chapter 3 explores a significantly less successful project and that is the transfer of silk from England to Virginia. The chapter shows the great interest that the colonial centre, particularly King James I, put on silk production. Yet, the English did not have a great experience in silk production themselves and had to rely on importation of silkworms and mulberries from Continental Europe as well as on French silk experts for the knowledge transmission. Moreover, in the early seventeenth century the silk industry was affected by the plight of colonists in Virginia and their lack of expertise. Once tobacco dominated the economy, silk lost out to the already-present commercial success of tobacco planting, despite the continued interest it commanded in the political circles. Chapter 4 explores the French tradition of silk production and the experimental transfers of silk to New France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Marsh argues that the French never achieved such success as the Spanish with silk production in the Atlantic because they were not so pressured to get supplies for their domestic silk industry from their colonies and because the lack of settler population in the French America did not allow for a large-scale silk production.

Part II, Persistence, sets the efforts of the colonial powers at expanding silk production in the Atlantic in the context of colonial competition and the quest for new supplies of raw silk for the growing silk weaving industries in Europe. In chapter 5 Marsh maps out the attempts at expanding sericulture in Europe itself. Chapter 6 focuses on the attempts to transplant sericulture to South Carolina and Georgia in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Chapter 7 studies the efforts to establish silk cultivation in New England in the eighteenth century. Both chapters show the challenges that a lack of expertise, the need to get silk specialists from Europe, the configuration of labour, and competition with other ventures posed to silk production in the British Atlantic colonies. These challenges were not easy to overcome despite a political economy encouraging silk production.

Part III, Convergence, explores how silk production in the British Atlantic colonies fared in the eighteenth century at the backdrop of the revolution and independence. Chapter 8 studies the eighteenth-century silk consumption and taste in the framework of colonial boycotts and perceptions of British goods. Chapter 9 studies the pursuit of silk production in Pennsylvania, which aimed at solving the dichotomy between the perception of silks as ‘symptom of Old World decadence’ and the perceived virtues of the fibre itself. Chapter 10 looks at the renewed efforts at silk production in the newly independent United States. Both chapters show that although interest in silk production was not missing the pre-existing challenges did not disappear and US remained far from becoming one of the main world silk producing regions.

The monograph presents a unique study of commercial failure in a very long timeframe and in this way breaks ground as commodity histories almost exclusively focus on successes. Moreover, the book views the history of silk in the Atlantic through the lens of global connections and encounters and in this way presents a much more holistic portrayal of the transfer of silk production and its successes (and predominately failures) in this new environment and market. The story of silk in the Atlantic is very well weaved into the framework of political and cultural history of the area and thus forms an intricate history of a commodity in a specific geographical setting but also pays minute attention to the global events that shaped this regional history. The monograph relied on a very wide range of both primary and secondary literature and makes a great contribution to the history of silk as a global commodity. Unravelled dreams presents a wealth of information on silk in the context of culture, society, and economy and would be of great interest to cultural and global historians, scholars focusing on material culture as well as historians focusing on the Americas. Having more contributions to the history of failures such as Marsh presents in his Unravelled dreams would undoubtedly help to expand our understanding of the factors that facilitate commercial successes and failures.