Unravelled Dreams

Ben Marsh is Reader in History at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He is the author of the award-winning Georgia's Frontier Women: Female Fortunes in a Southern Colony (2007) and Understanding and Teaching the Age of Revolutions (2017), and has published widely on early and revolutionary American history. His research on silk has featured in several exhibitions, including Enlightened Princesses: Britain and Europe, 1700-1820 (Yale Center for British Art and Historical Royal Palaces, 2017), and won the UK Textile Society's Natalie Rothstein Memorial Prize (2013).

• List of figures; List of colour plates; List of maps; List of tables; Acknowledgements; 1. Prologue; Part I. Emergence: 2. Spain and New Spain; 3. England and Virginia; 4. France and New France; Part II. Persistence; 5. Persistence; 6. Lower South: South Carolina and Georgia; 7. New England; Part III. Convergence; 8. Convergence; 9. Pennsylvania and sericultural revolution; 10. Silk production in the wake of revolution; 11. Epilogue; Selected bibliography; Index.

'Written with verve and wit, Marsh's strikingly original commodity study reshapes our understanding of the Atlantic World. Marsh masterfully employs both macro and micro history to detail the importance of silk making efforts – and its failures – to colony, empire, and nation building. Sophisticated yet accessible, Unravelled Dreams is a magisterial must read.' Zara Anishanslin, author of Portrait of a Woman in Silk