from Part II - Persistence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 October 2020
Between the mid-seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries, the ambition to domesticate sericulture was carried to all corners of northern Europe and the Atlantic world in a range of different polities: Sweden, New England, Russia, Ireland, Prussia, the Carolinas, Poland. The attempts to bring forth a new domestic sericulture in these regions were driven by the same core cultural and economic impulses that had long helped silk to spread, often stimulated by investment from state authorities interested in import substitution. The heightened sense of investment opportunity that characterised these efforts, however, was new. It was magnified in the century after 1650 by the dramatic acceleration in the global consumption of silk goods, and by the opening of new agricultural lands across the Atlantic and new textile markets in Africa and the East Indies. This chapter explains that few European states persisted with the project across time and space as extensively as did the British, whose case for introducing sericulture was relentlessly reinforced over the long eighteenth century because of Britain’s distinctive territorial reach into the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, and its simultaneous development of an expansive hybrid silk industry at home that serviced global markets.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.