Ebook: Flax Americana: a history of the fibre and oil that covered a continent

The edge of industrialization : finding a northern fibre -- Everyday exchanges : growing and harvesting flax in Ontario -- Flax fabrications : selling the promoter's plant -- Covering the earth : North American flax and paint to 1878 -- Saving the surface : flax in the urban industrial complex -- Cover crop : growing flax for linseed oil and paint -- Saving flax : industry, science, and the tariff;"It is said that farmers feed cities, but starting in the nineteenth century they painted cities, too. Flax Americana reexamines the changing relationships between farmers, urban consumers, and the land through a narrative of Canada's first and most important industrial crop--flax. Canadian and northern US flax produced both fibre for textiles and linseed oil for paint. These were critical commodities in a century when wars were fought over fibre and when urban paint markets drove the production of a new flax seed industry prairie west. Flax was initially a specialty crop grown by Mennonite or other localized communities on contracts for small town mill complexes. But flax seed became big business in the late nineteenth century, and multinational linseed oil companies quickly displaced the rural mill complex and began to influence environments in a much larger hinterland. Flax cultivation spread across the northern Plains and Prairies, particularly along the edges of dryland settlement, and then into similar ecosystems in the South American Pampas. Through detailed examination of business, geospatial, and archival records, Flax Americana reveals the complexity of a global commodity's web and its impact on two very different regions: the eastern Great Lakes and northern Great Plains. International networks of scientists, business, and regulators attempted to predict and control the crop's frontier geography ; evolving consumer concerns about product quality and safety shaped the market and its regulations ; and the nature of each region encouraged some forms of business and limited others. The northern flax industry emerged because of these transborder communities, and by following the plant across borders and through time this book sheds new light on the ways that commodities, frontiers, and industrial capitalism shaped the modern world."--