Flax Americana: A History of the Fibre and Oil that Covered a Continent by Joshua MacFadyen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Flax Americana: A History of the Fibre and Oil that Covered a Continent by Joshua MacFadyen Brian Payne MacFadyen, Joshua – Flax Americana: A History of the Fibre and Oil that Covered a Continent. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2019. Pp. 350. MacFadyen's Flax Americana is a book about one plant that produced two basic raw materials (fibre and oil) that became a host of consumer goods (upholstery, bags, cordage, paints, varnishes, and others), but it is not a commodity history in the sense that it traces how a single commodity transformed human society. Rather, it is more about how politics, economics, and culture transformed the human understanding of a plant, its cultivation, and the agroecology upon which it grew. As MacFadyen states, "it is a story of a specialty crop that a concentrated group produced and practically everyone consumed. It is about how plants and humans were co-constituted during the Industrial Revolution—how one plant was shaped by the social-ecological system it inhabited, and how human society and even human desire were shaped by the plant" (p. 5). Needless to say, there is a lot going on in this book. MacFadyen organizes his book around the complex "Flax Web," which seeks to explain and analyze the connections between the environment upon which the plant grew; the farmers who grew it; the processors who transformed it into market commodities (typically fibre and oil); the industries that combined those commodities with other ingredients to make consumer goods for ready (if evershifting) markets; the consumers themselves who used the final products (linens products or paint, for example); the scientist who studied the plant, its environment, [End Page 703] and its products; the government agents who controlled or manipulated the political and economic structures in which the plant and its products operated; and, finally, all the other variable intercedents into the web that could alter any one part of the web via competitive materials, products, or changing consumer demands. There are a lot of moving parts in this book and it is somewhat difficult to follow, but, probably no more difficult than it was for all those original actors who worked with flax and its products through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The complexity of the narrative, which often refers to previous and forthcoming chapters and sections, can be at times frustrating, but it is hard to imagine a more accurate structure for this story. Considering how important the theory and methodology of the "flax web" is to MacFadyen's contribution to the scholarship (beyond just a history of flax), this complexity and confusion is worthwhile. Most of the introduction focuses on explaining this methodology and identifying how it fits within, yet expands on, the traditional historiography of commodities studies. Much of this focuses on differentiating more popular and deterministic approaches to commodities histories of the complex methodological and theoretical approaches of more nuanced studies. MacFadyen builds upon the theory of telecoupling as presented by several scholars who collectively, according to MacFadyen, "encourage more scholars to compare social-ecological systems (SES) over long distances, between diverse systems, and through complex interactions like feedbacks and trade-offs" (p. 16). He also incorporates world system scholarship by embracing commodity chain theory in which the entire life of a commodity is considered, but not in a simplistic linear model. MacFadyen states, "The flax industry was not a closed system or a series of boxes, but a web of intersections, a social network of transformative stages connecting people within and between multiple industries" (p. 18). The whole system, which was global and local, was shaped by many decision-makers who based those decisions on an assessment of not just flax but the entire agricultural or commodities systems and options they worked within. The highlights of the book are the various turning points that transformed this flax web, the most significant being the development of ready-mix paint and the new consumer demand for colour (p. 22). The shift from flax as primarily a fibre plant to primarily an oil plant transformed the agriculture of flax production as oil required a shift from rural milling operations to...