King Cotton on the Middle Sea: acclimatization projects and the French links to the early modern Mediterranean (2015)
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.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Star, Paul;
(2014)
Human Agency and Exotic Birds in New Zealand
Thesis
Horan, Joseph;
(2013)
Fibers of Empire: Cotton Cultivation in France and Italy during the Age of Napoleon
Book
Stephen L. Harp;
(2022)
The Riviera, Exposed: An Ecohistory of Postwar Tourism and North African Labor
Book
Sureshkumar Muthukumaran;
(2023)
The Tropical Turn: Agricultural Innovation in the Ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean
Article
Osborne, Michael A.;
(2000)
Acclimatizing the World: A History of the Paradigmatic Colonial Science
Book
Pete Minard;
(2019)
All Things Harmless, Useful, and Ornamental: Environmental Transformation Through Species Acclimatization, from Colonial Australia to the World
Thesis
Hanna Elisabeth Helvig Martinsen;
(2015)
Fashionable Chemistry: The History of Printing Cotton in France in the Second Half of the Eighteenth and First Decades of the Nineteenth Century
Book
Zachary Dorner;
(2020)
Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain’s Long Eighteenth Century
Book
Robert Hellyer;
(2021)
Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America’s Tea Cups
Article
Tello, Enric;
Valldepera, Natàlia;
, Anna Ollés;
Marull, Joan;
Coll, Francesc;
Warde, Paul;
Wilcox, Paul Thomas;
(2014)
Looking Backwards into a Mediterranean Edge Environment: Landscape Changes in El Congost Valley (Catalonia), 1850--2005
Article
Giesen, James C.;
(2009)
“The Truth about the Boll Weevil”: The Nature of Planter Power in the Mississippi Delta
Book
Cornel Zwierlein;
(2018)
Imperial Unknowns: The French and British in the Mediterranean, 1650–1750
Article
Canabal, Manuela;
(2010)
De la découverte scientifique à l'occultation du savoir: Isaac-Bénédict Prévost et la carie du blé (1798--1807)
Article
Alice Shepherd;
Steven Toms;
(Autumn 2019)
Entrepreneurship, Strategy, and Business Philanthropy: Cotton Textiles in the British Industrial Revolution
Article
Margaret Cook;
(2022)
Australia's Entanglement in Global Cotton
Article
Peter Maw;
Peter Solar;
Aidan Kane;
John S. Lyons;
(2022)
After the great inventions: technological change in UK cotton spinning, 1780–1835
Article
Catherine Casson;
Mark Dodgson;
(Summer 2019)
Designing for Innovation: Cooperation and Competition in English Cotton, Silk, and Pottery Firms, 1750–1860
Article
Stewart, Mart A.;
(2007)
From King Cane to King Cotton: Razing Cane in the Old South
Article
Zurndorfer, Harriet T.;
(2011)
Cotton Textile Manufacture and Marketing in Late Imperial China and the “Great Divergence”
Book
Cooke, Anthony;
(2010)
The Rise and Fall of the Scottish Cotton Industry, 1778--1914: “The Secret Spring”
Be the first to comment!