Flax Americana: A History of the Fibre and Oil that Covered a Continent (McGill-Queen's Rural, Wildland, and Resource Studies Series) (Volume 10) - Softcover

MacFadyen, Joshua

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0773553479 ISBN 13: 9780773553477

Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2018

Synopsis

Farmers feed cities, but starting in the nineteenth century they painted them too. Flax from Canada and the northern United States produced fibre for textiles and linseed oil for paint ? critical commodities in a century when wars were fought over fibre and when increased urbanization demanded expanded paint markets. Flax Americana re-examines the changing relationships between farmers, urban consumers, and the land through a narrative of Canada's first and most important industrial crop. Initially a specialty crop grown by Mennonites and other communities on contracts for small-town mill complexes, flax became big business in the late nineteenth century as multinational linseed oil companies quickly displaced rural mills. Flax cultivation spread across the northern plains and prairies, particularly along the edges of dryland settlement, and then into similar ecosystems in South America's Pampas. Joshua MacFadyen's detailed examination of archival records reveals the complexity of a global commodity and its impact on the eastern Great Lakes and northern Great Plains. He demonstrates how international networks of scientists, businesses, and regulators attempted to predict and control the crop's frontier geography, how evolving consumer concerns about product quality and safety shaped the market and its regulations, and how the nature of each region encouraged some forms of business and limited others. The northern flax industry emerged because of border-crossing communities. By following the plant across countries and over time Flax Americana sheds new light on the ways that commodities, frontiers, and industrial capitalism shaped the modern world.

About this title

About the Author

Joshua MacFadyen is Canada Research Chair in Geospatial Humanities and associate professor in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Prince Edward Island.

From the Back Cover

Series editors: Jennifer Bonnell, James Murton, and R.W. Sandwell

The Rural, Wildland, and Resource Studies Series includes monographs, thematically unified edited collections, and rare out-of-print classics. Inspired by Canadian Papers in Rural History, Donald H. Akenson's influential occasional papers series, it seeks to catalyze reconsideration of communities and places lying beyond city limits, outside centres of urban political and cultural power, and located at past and present sites of resource procurement and environmental change. Scholarly and popular interest in the environment, climate change, food, and a seemingly deepening divide between city and country, is drawing non-urban places back into the mainstream. The series seeks to present the best environmentally contextualized research on topics such as agriculture, cottage living, fishing, the gathering of wild foods, mining, power generation, and rural commerce, within and beyond Canada's borders.

Edition details

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0773553479
• ISBN 13: 9780773553477
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368