This chapter deals primarily with the Company commercial policy in East Asia and mainland Southeast Asia but also discusses extensively the first territorial Dutch colony in Taiwan. It highlights the crucial position of Japan where the Dutch could build on their exclusive trading rights in Deshima to procure the precious metals that were necessary for the India trade. The China trade is discussed in connection with the restrictive policies of the Ming and Qing states as well as in the context of the trading interests of the Dutch headquarters in Batavia. In conclusion, a comparison is made between the Dutch position in Mughal India and Qing China as well as between the Dutch Empire and other European empires in Asia.

The sixteenth century would witness the remarkable rise of silk production in the Spanish Empire, as Iberian conquistadors and caterpillars converged upon Meso-American Indians and mountain forests. By the 1560s, amidst the brutal extraction of gold and silver, silk production had blossomed into one of the Americas’ first post-Columbian cash crops, and for a time it sustained a manufacturing industry that helped satiate the growing markets of a Latinising America. Perhaps strangely, this first colonial attempt at establishing silk cultivation across the Atlantic – rooting in Oaxaca – would prove unquestionably the most successful of all those in the Americas, linking the victims of the European Reconquista with those of the American Conquista: a Moorish speciality became a Mixtecan Indian opportunity. But it was a function of the dramatic pace of global interconnection in the sixteenth century that, within four decades of the first harvesting of American raw silk in the 1540s, the first Asian raw silk in bulk arrived from the other direction, across the Pacific. A commercial battle followed between the valuable fibrous proteins emitted by the silkworms of Granada (in Spain and New Spain), and those of their long-distant ancestors in China. Its result, the collapse of raw silk production in New Spain, was heavily influenced by the decline of Indian populations and the paranoia of the Spanish Crown in terms of protecting peninsular interests.

The independence of the United States blew apart the projected formula that had held sway for over 150 years in British regions persisting with sericulture – namely, that raw silk might be produced on the western side of the Atlantic and then manufactured on the eastern side of the Atlantic. Opportunistic schemes were proposed to create silk manufactures and to reorganise trade in silks, as American and European merchants and entrepreneurs sought to take advantage of the fraying of Anglo-American links, and to create new systems of production and distribution. Their earnest efforts revealed that there remained a lively appetite for silk goods amongst American consumers that soon re-emerged in the early 1780s: self-denial had been a means of revolution, but it was not an end. In the final quarter of the eighteenth century, political economists and silk producers alike made important strides towards ensuring a future for silk production, and they largely did so by linking it to American manufacturing. In contrast to the imperial regression in Atlantic domains, new expectations and new pressures developed among those regions of Europe that continued to fulfil sericulture’s prerequisites in the early nineteenth century.

France’s introduction of mulberries and silkworms originated in the pincer-like arrival of resources and expertise across both its Spanish and Italian borders, and production would last through to the end of the nineteenth century, concentrated in southern regions. This chapter considers the moments of acceleration in the seventeenth century when French schemes (pushed by agronomists and political economists) sought to carry production to new regions. The fact that French domestic production of raw silk never came close to the quantity or quality required by its silk industry encouraged new ambitions overseas. The chapter tracks in turn the idiosyncratic projects in the French Caribbean in the late seventeenth century, and the more concerted ambitions and undertakings in Louisiana in the early eighteenth century – in both of which cases, enslaved labourers were mobilised for a time to nurture silkworms and reel silk, and women played prominent roles. French efforts around the Caribbean basin were compromised by competition with other crops, by the instability of the region’s geopolitics, and by a host of commodity-specific threats which showed up the fragility of silkworms. Even while French New World prospects of sericulture retreated, however, production was consolidated and deepened at home, thanks to environmental and labour advantages.

This chapter explores the convergence of colonial political protests with the worlds of textile production and textile consumption. In the decades that preceded the American Revolution, Atlantic purchases of European-made silks and of Asian-made silks transported by European trading companies and merchants had reached new heights. But long-held sensibilities and systems were about to be thrown into disarray by the enveloping imperial crisis, with which the rapidly increasing American outlay on finished silks coincided. As fibres and fabrics accrued new moral and commercial values during the Age of Revolution, silk was initially selected as a salient, bellwether commodity inimical to republicanism. In the heated debates about dependency, representation, and identity that followed, the place of silk in American life and the potential of raw silk in an American economy would both be repositioned. Disrupted patterns of imperial consumption encouraged both the pursuit of new sites of raw silk production and the pursuit of new trade and manufacturing opportunities. These possessed a different character to the dutiful imperial projects that had preceded them, as once-separate colonies and colonists increasingly came together, and began to articulate homespun silken ambitions in new ways.

Between the late sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries, England’s dramatic enlargement in commerce, manufacturing, and territory encouraged this peripheral north-western European power to view it as not only desirable but practicable to secure to itself a silk industry and to supply itself with homegrown silk. This chapter considers firstly the increasing familiarity with silk within the British Isles, and the motivations and incentives that followed for producing silk domestically – paying close attention to the experimentation and measures introduced under James I, who offered particular patronage to sericulture. While novel initiatives and flagship projects brought some attention and investment, low temperatures and issues with expertise compromised production in England. The trials did constitute a breakthrough in understanding however, and stimulated extensive projection in new colonies under the auspices of the Virginia Company in North America. The goal of silk production prompted Virginians to introduce international experts, new buildings and literature, and new policy initiatives – albeit in the face of the dramatic and all-consuming rise of tobacco culture. The final part of the chapter highlights how a second wave of Virginian experimentation in the 1650s and 1660s brought more focus to women’s roles and embedded sericulture within economic and scientific ideas about English colonialism.

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.