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.

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.

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.