Flax Americana: A History of the Fibre and Oil that Covered a Continent. 2018. (Rural, Wildland, and Resource Studies Series, 9). 43 photogr. 11 maps. 9 tabs. 4 diagr. 368 p. Paper bd.

Initially a specialty cropgrown by Mennonites and other communities on contracts for small-town mill complexes, flax became big business in the late nineteenth century as multinational linseed oil companies quickly displaced rural mills. Flax cultivation spread across the northern plains and prairies, particularly along the edges of dryland settlement, and then into similar ecosystems in South Americas Pampas. Joshua MacFadyens detailed examination of archival records reveals the complexity of a global commodity and its impact on the eastern Great Lakes and northern Great Plains. He demonstrates how international networks of scientists, businesses, and regulators attempted to predict and control the crops frontier geography, how evolving consumer concerns about product quality and safety shaped the market and its regulations, and how the nature of each region encouraged some forms of business and limited others.