In Unravelled Dreams: Silk and the Atlantic World, 1500–1840, Ben Marsh writes a history of failure. Silk failed to become an iconic commodity in the Atlantic World, so centuries of experiments with sericulture in Europe and America have long gone unnoticed or underestimated as a dream. However, refusing to solely focus on such winners as silver, sugar, or cotton in the Atlantic economy, Marsh argues that failed endeavors also reveal the complexity and cultural hybridity—the defining features—of the Atlantic World. Therefore, unraveling the challenges and consequences of sericulture in European countries, their American colonies, and the early United States, Marsh seeks to highlight the social and cultural significance of a commercial failure.

In eleven chapters, challenges that sustained or jeopardized the stability of the Atlantic sericulture constitute the warp of the silk dream. Marsh categorizes them into five natural and human factors: state support, access to silkworm stocks, environment conducive to mulberry trees, expertise, and a reliable labor pool (29–31, 423). All the regions in the Old and New World enjoyed strong state support, including not only governments, church bodies, and governors but also proprietors and trustees, who lavished bounties in the form of money, land, and slaves to entice silk experts and planters into moriculture and sericulture. However, such natural elements as shipping silkworm eggs across the Atlantic Ocean and cultivating black, red, or imported white mulberry trees in unreliable weather conditions posed tremendous difficulties to the initiatives of producing and procuring raw silk.

The limited human resources were more constraining. The Spanish and the French were especially blessed with the Old World’s expertise at home. Under the encomienda system, the Spanish exploited a reservoir of Indigenous labor in Central America. However, diseases and natural disasters decimated Indigenous populations between 1580 and 1640, and the colonization of the Philippines provided access to Chinese silk that discouraged local sericulture. Compared with Spain, the shortage of labor haunted French colonists from the beginning. Even though they drew free Europeans from France and Germany to America and enslaved Africans to raise silk in French Louisiana, many laborers perished due to diseases and lack of supplies. Native Americans not only offered little help, but the Natchez Indians’ attacks resulted in the collapse of the Louisiana silk production.

England was the most disadvantaged by insufficient knowledge about sericulture. The worsened relations with Native Americans also shattered English pioneers’ agenda to integrate the Indigenous people into their silk dream. However, the diverse English colonies in New England, the Mid-Atlantic states, and the Lower South, which boasted female workers, European immigrants, and a vast enslaved population, rendered the persistence of sericulture possible in the New World, even after American independence from Great Britain. However, domestic rival economies—tobacco in Virginia, rice in the Carolinas, and cotton in Georgia as well as silk from Asia and Europe—undermined the validity of American silk, which started to fade from the U.S. economy and collective memory in the late 1840s.

These broad strokes cannot do justice to the sophistication of Marsh’s examination, which meticulously depicts so many individuals’ experimental spirits inspired by the silk dream. However, the approach of the book—very often a top-down perspective and a narrative driven by summaries of the historical sources pertaining to sericulture—restricts Marsh from fully disentangling the threads of gender, race, and class and threading them into the weft of the text. To illustrate the advance of silk dream in the Atlantic World, most pages of the book are dedicated to the kings, governors, proprietors, and planters that funded, publicized, and promoted the silk projects. Marsh has realized that it was female silk experts, Indigenous weavers, enslaved African workers, orphaned children, and convicts who put the silk agendas into practice; as he emphasizes, “Much of the talking up of silk was done by men, while most of the taking up of silk was done by women” (445). Native Americans were the real pioneers of sericulture in New Spain; the exploitation and vilification of enslaved Africans were not uncommon in colonial silk production; and numerous middling silk producers were the main force of silk raising in Pennsylvania. However, the portion that specifically covers these aspects is disproportionately small, and the sections seldom spin complete stories around these groups of people, unless they were planters’ and governors’ wives or daughters or prize winners (137–149, 199–200, 382–383). Consequently, the nameless and marginalized actors’ experiences in, contributions to, and influences on Atlantic sericulture scatter in the words of the propagators, planters, and writers, waiting to be sewn into the fabric.

Besides the social significance, Marsh also reconstructs Atlantic sericulture as a fascinating cultural space, such as its impact on early American nationalism. Unfortunately, the approach of the book also offers Marsh little help to thoroughly interpret the “intertwining of the international and the local” cultures (7). The diverse populations of silk workers brought distinctive religions, ideologies, and technologies into the Atlantic World. Marsh mentions the heterogeneous silk raisers, including Catholics, French Huguenots, German speakers, Italian immigrants, and Scots-Irish Presbyterians, in Europe and the New World. The author notices the collective modes of production within Meso-American communities and the Spanish Viceroy’s insistence on channeling the profits of sericulture to individual Native Americans (68–69, 74). He also touches on transnational networks of knowledge when discussing Jesuits’ transmitting Asian silk practices to France or Ezra Stiles’s reading theories from China and Italy. However, the book seldom explicates whether or how the wild array of cultures and ideas clashed and integrated, thus (re)shaping the landscape of the Atlantic sericulture. Weaving these treads more tightly into the narrative might have helped prove that commercial failures could also facilitate cultural hybridization.

In general, Unravelled Dreams recovers the causes and consequences of a forgotten history, highlights contemporaries’ coping and compromising with contingencies, and, like all good books, inspires the readers to think and explore more into the story. Thus, while Marsh’s point of departure was a commercial failure, the unique perspective renders the book a success.