8 - Convergence

Summary

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.