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
Sureshkumar Muthukumaran
Margaret Cook
Zwierlein, Cornel
Dodgson, Mark
Shepherd, Alice
Hanna Elisabeth Helvig Martinsen
Journals
Environment and History
Business History Review
Revue d'Histoire des Sciences
Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
International Journal for the History of Engineering and Technology
Publishers
Cambridge University Press
University of North Carolina Press
University of Chicago Press
University of California Press
Manchester University Press
Florida State University
Concepts
Cotton and cotton industry
Agriculture
Textile industry
Environmental history
Acclimatization
Industrial revolution
People
William Horrocks
Cartwright, Edmund
Roberts, Richard
Prévost, Isaac-Bénédict
Napoleon I, Emperor of France
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
20th century
17th century
21st century
Ancient
Places
France
Mediterranean region
United States
Great Britain
England
Australia
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