🎉 New to MixCache.com? Sign up now and get $5.00 FREE CREDIT towards any ebook purchase!* Create Account →

The Silkworm Rescue: How Four Nations Fought the Great Pebrine Plague
France, Italy, Japan, and China in the Race to Save Silk, 1850-1870

Book Details
About this book:

The Silkworm Rescue: How Four Nations Fought the Great Pebrine Plague A microscopic assassin brought the world's most lucrative industry to its knees. In 1853, *la pébrine*—the "pepper disease"—began slaughtering silkworms across France and Italy, threatening millions of livelihoods, the treasury of Napoleon III, and the very fabric of European fashion. With domestic eggs poisoned, desperate merchants launched a frantic, globe-spanning hunt for healthy seed, racing steamships fitted with primitive refrigeration from the burning silk districts of Taiping China to the sealed, alpine hatcheries of Tokugawa Japan. The stakes were existential: the gold from Japanese cocoons would bankroll the fall of the shogunate and the birth of modern Japan, while in a drafty laboratory in Alès, a chemist named Louis Pasteur—who had never touched a silkworm—waged a five-year war against scientific orthodoxy to invent the germ theory of disease.

*The Silkworm Rescue* is a gripping narrative history that reads like a thriller, weaving together peasant women incubating eggs in their bodices, samurai guarding mountain mulberry groves, spies smuggling microscopic life across oceans, and Pasteur hunched over a microscope, shattering centuries of superstition. Drawing on consular archives, merchant ledgers, and scientific notebooks across four civilizations, it reveals how an invisible parasite redrew the map of East Asia, pioneered the global cold chain, and forged the tools of modern biology. This is the forgotten world war fought not with armies, but with microscopes, mulberry leaves, and the relentless biology of *Bombyx mori*—the caterpillar that spun the thread connecting empires.

Table of Contents:
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1 The Golden Thread: Global Silk at Mid-Century
  • Chapter 2 Shadows in the Cévennes: The Outbreak of the Pepper Disease
  • Chapter 3 The Dying Magnaneries: Ruin in the French Countryside
  • Chapter 4 A Microscopic Phantom: Early Theories and Failed Cures
  • Chapter 5 Lombardy in Peril: The Epidemic Crosses the Alps
  • Chapter 6 The Italian Response: Sericulture Under Austrian Rule
  • Chapter 7 Desperate Argonauts: The Merchant Quest for Healthy Seed
  • Chapter 8 Beyond the Mediterranean: The Ottoman and Persian Silk Roads
  • Chapter 9 The Enigma of the Middle Kingdom: China’s Rural Defenses
  • Chapter 10 An Empire in Turmoil: Silk in the Shadow of the Taiping Rebellion
  • Chapter 11 Traditional Wisdom: Qing Agronomists and Micro-Climates
  • Chapter 12 The Opening of the Ports: European Traders in Shanghai
  • Chapter 13 The Bakumatsu Crisis: Japan’s Reclusion Comes to an End
  • Chapter 14 The Yokohama Silk Boom: Samurai, Merchants, and Foreign Gold
  • Chapter 15 High Mountain Hatcheries: Japan’s Pristine Graineurs
  • Chapter 16 Imperial Summons: Louis Pasteur Takes the Case
  • Chapter 17 The Laboratory at Alès: Science Confronts Pebrine
  • Chapter 18 Through the Lens: The Cellular Hunt for the Corpuscles
  • Chapter 19 Pasteur’s Method: The Rigors of Microscopic Selection
  • Chapter 20 Sceptics and Rivals: The Scientific Clashes of Western Europe
  • Chapter 21 The Global Egg Trade: Steamships, Cool Rooms, and Speculation
  • Chapter 22 The Silk Mission: European Envoys in the Ports of East Asia
  • Chapter 23 The Meiji Modernizers: Embracing Western Biology
  • Chapter 24 The Rebirth of the Magnaneries: Disease Yields to the Microscope
  • Chapter 25 The Modern Loom: The Lasting Legacy of the Silk Wars
Extended Catalog title. This book is part of our extended catalog and is sourced after you order. Usually this process takes less than an hour to a few hours. We'll email you when your ebook is ready.
Author:

Russell Q. Barnes

Published By:

MixCache.com Extended Catalog

Type:

Nonfiction

Sample:

Read Sample

🎁 Includes the ebook FREE
Read it the moment it's ready, while you wait for your paperback — no extra charge.
🚚 FREE Shipping in the USA
$7 flat rate per book to all other countries
Order:

Click to order this paperback:

Buy Now
Ebook included · Printed to order Secure Payment