Article ID: CBB992011886

King Cotton on the Middle Sea: acclimatization projects and the French links to the early modern Mediterranean (2015)

unapi

As the French cotton industry expanded during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the desire to create a secure source of material inspired several concerted efforts to promote the cultivation of cotton in Mediterranean France. These projects drew upon longstanding French links to cotton production along the shores of the ‘middle sea’, presenting a sharp contrast to the increasingly global networks of exchange that came to characterize European industrialization during the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, these experiments were more than simply an atavistic legacy of the more localized systems of cotton production from the pre-modern era. Closer analysis demonstrates the extent to which the vision of a ‘cotton kingdom’ in Mediterranean France was inspired by confidence in the capacity for modern human expertise to manipulate the natural environment to better suit human interests, thus signaling an important trend in the environmental history of the modern era.

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Authors & Contributors
Canabal, Manuela
Cooke, Anthony
Giesen, James C
Levere, Trevor H.
Maw, Peter
Minard, Peter
Journals
Business History Review
Environment and History
Environmental History
Agricultural History
Economic History Review
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
Publishers
University of Toronto
Cambridge University Press
Columbia University Press
Cornell University Press
Florida State University
Manchester University Press
Concepts
Cotton and cotton industry
Agriculture
Environmental history
Technological innovation
Great Britain, colonies
Industrial revolution
People
Arkwright, Richard
Napoleon I, Emperor of France
Prévost, Isaac-Bénédict
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
20th century
17th century
20th century, early
21st century
Places
France
United States
Mediterranean region
Great Britain
Australia
England
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