Abstract
This dissertation compares flax cultivation and linen production in Anglo-America and Hessen-Kassel during the long eighteenth century to explain how polities embarked on political projects attempting to build and display coherence, capacity, capability, competence, and credibility, through ordinary work on land, labor, and exchange. Treating “flax-linen” as a single complex of production and meaning, it links field ecologies (such as rotations, manures, retting waters), labor regimes (such as household discipline, gendered time, guild rules, coercive exemptions), and quality/market infrastructures (such as inspection marks, warehouses, export corridors, Atlantic re-exports). This bundled political project was made persuasive by visible practices such as homespun mobilizations or stamped, graded cloth. Yet neither polity escaped entanglement: short-haul input circuits, shipping regimes, and Atlantic price systems repeatedly exposed the limits of mastery. By tracing off-ledger subsidies (such as women’s labor, commons, woodlands, non-human labor) and ecological burdens (such as polluted waters, polluted air, resource extraction), the dissertation shows that these political projects functioned as credibility machines that often displaced costs and accumulated hidden vulnerabilities even when they generated real coordination and output.
Committee Chair
Christine Johnson
Committee Members
Diana Montaño; Peter Kastor; Steve Hindle; Tanya Kevorkian
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Author's Department
History
Document Type
Dissertation
Date of Award
4-28-2026
Language
English (en)
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7936/09e3-qn69
Recommended Citation
Schmidt, Josiah William, "Entangled Landscapes and Political Projects: Germans and Americans in Networks of Ecology, Economy, and Ideology in the Long Eighteenth Century" (2026). Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations. 3778.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.7936/09e3-qn69