5 - Persistence

Summary

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.