Unravelled Dreams: Silk and the Atlantic World, c.1500-1840

Unravelled Dreams addresses the history of the pursuit of sericulture (silk production) in the Atlantic world, attempted by Spanish, French, British, and American empires and populations between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. It shows that in spite of repeated failures, silkworms were at the cutting edge of Atlantic imperialism. By taking the commercial failure of silk seriously, historicising it, and examining the numerous experiments (large and small) across New Spain, New France, many small corners of northern Europe, and especially British North America and the early United States, we can locate new insights into the determinative matrix of aspiration, labour, environment, and economy in these societies. Each devised its own dreams and plans of cultivation, framed by the compound particularities of cultures and landscapes. Writ large, these dreams would unravel one by one: the attempts to introduce silkworms to new regions around the Atlantic world – powered by Europeans’ consuming appetite for their fibre – ultimately constituted a step too far, marking out the limits of Europeans’ seemingly unbounded power. That they were bewildered by this failure, and for over three hundred years sought to counter environmental and demographic odds stacked against them, turning from one site to another, and mobilising every theory and workforce that they could muster, was a profoundly energising force. It opened up creative models of colonialism, exchange, domestic production and regional interconnection – some of which would disappear altogether, some fall into myths that would be recycled, and others which would become spurs to more commercially successful projects as people, policies, and ideas were recycled from silk to other more competitive and achievable products.