King Cotton on the Middle Sea: aCCliMatization projeCtS and the FrenCh linKS to the early Modern Mediterranean

horan, joseph;

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.