This chapter explores how colonial authorities and settlers, in first Carolina and later Georgia, made substantial efforts to introduce silkworms to the southern boundaries of British America across the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These attempts at sericulture played a significant part in influencing schemes for and arguments about economic development in the Lower South. They generated innovation in the justification and practice of state investment; taxes paid for public enslaved labourers and their training, bounties, filatures; and the global sourcing of technical knowledge, experts, and technology. As with the French and Armenian immigrants to Virginia, stretching towards silk helped to bring Huguenots, Swiss, and Italians to the Lower South, to shape schemes for westward expansion, and to broaden the employment of enslaved people. The investment left cultural, material, and environmental legacies within many households, markets, and estates in the region, as mulberries proliferated. The depth of interest ensured that these well-supported initiatives generated noteworthy output, centralised in dedicated buildings (filatures), through which agents sought to control quality and improve proficiency. The conquest of silkworms appealed to many planters in search of metropolitan recognition, who in spite of later racialised claims, deployed their bondspeople widely in the pursuit.

Pennsylvania was one of the latest American regions to pursue sericulture, and offers the best illustration of how silken ambitions survived and were reshaped to fit new political and economic environments in the Revolutionary era. Pennsylvanian silk swung from being a dutiful imperial pursuit, albeit one with particular local characteristics, to being an objective very much in step with American independence. It constituted a unique kind of homespun that came to embody not only domestic elegance but also provided ammunition for broader debates over political economy and the future identity of American industrial development. Philadelphia, situated in the heart of the North American colonies, was the first home of the Continental Congress, the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, and the site of the federal capital for ten years between 1790 and 1800. Before all that, it was also the location of the mid-Atlantic’s first silk filature. The production owed much to the creation of a Silk Society by progressive gentlemen, but much of the labour was performed by women in households and communities in the city’s hinterlands.