Across Colonial Lines: Commodities, Networks and Empire Building 9781350327023, 9781350333864, 9781350327030

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of illustrations
List of tables
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Commodities, networks and empire building: An introduction Devyani Gupta and Purba Hossain
1 From commodity trade to ‘virtual’ empire: Venice in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries Andrew Blackler
2 West Africa, the Akan gold trade and Portugal’s global ambitions in the sixteenth century Edmond Smith
3 Tea and empire in the Asian interior, c. 1750–1900 Jagjeet Lally
4 Sailors as traders: Early modern seafarers in commodity chains, commercial practices and empire Richard J. Blakemore
5 The social locations of colonial knowledge: Indigo in Bengal, Java and Senegal Willem van Schendel
6 What Angolans got for their coffee: Connecting histories of labour and consumption in colonial Africa, c. 1860–1960 Jelmer Vos
7 ‘Docile, quiet, orderly’: Indian indenture trade and the ideal labourer Purba Hossain
8 Globalization gothic: Unpacking the commodity fetish in Caribbean tourism Lowell Woodcock
Conclusion: The chains of empire: Some thoughts on commodity history as method Erika Rappaport
Selected bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Across Colonial Lines

Empire’s Other Histories Series Editors: Victoria Haskins (University of Newcastle, Australia), Emily Manktelow (Royal Holloway, University of London, UK), Jonathan Saha (University of Durham, UK) and Fae Dussart (University of Sussex, UK) Editorial Board: Esme Cleall (University of Sheffield, UK), Swapna Banerjee (CUNY, USA), Lynette Russell (Monash, Australia), Tony Ballantyne (University of Otago, New Zealand), Samita Sen (Jadavpur University, India, and University of Cambridge, UK), Nurfadzilah Yahaya (National University of Singapore, Singapore), Onni Gust (University of Nottingham, UK), Martina Nguyen (CUNY, USA), Meleisa Ono-George (University of Oxford, UK) Empire’s Other Histories is an innovative series devoted to the shared and diverse experiences of the marginalised, dispossessed and disenfranchised in modern imperial and colonial histories. It responds to an ever-growing academic and popular interest in the histories of those erased, dismissed, or ignored in traditional historiographies of empire. It will elaborate on and analyse new questions of perspective, identity, agency, motilities, intersectionality and power relations. Published: Unhomely Empire: Whiteness and Belonging, c.1760–1830, Onni Gust Extreme Violence and the ‘British Way’: Colonial Warfare in Perak, Sierra Leone and Sudan, Michelle Gordon Unexpected Voices in Imperial Parliaments, edited by José María Portillo, Josep M. Fradera, Teresa Segura-Garcia The Making and Remaking of ‘Australasia’: Southern Circulations edited by Tony Ballantyne Across Colonial Lines: Commodities, Networks and Empire Building edited by Devyani Gupta and Purba Hossain Forthcoming: Spiritual Colonialism in a Globalizing World, Christina Petterson Vagrant Lives in Colonial Australasia: Regulating Mobility and Movement 1840–1920, Catherine Coleborne ­Arctic Circles and Imperial Knowledge: The Franklin Family, Indigenous Intermediaries, and the Politics of Truth, Annaliese Jacobs Claydon Imperial Gallows: Murder, Violence and the Death Penalty in British Colonial Africa, c.1915–60 Stacey Hynd

Across Colonial Lines Commodities, Networks and Empire Building Edited by Devyani Gupta & Purba Hossain

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Devyani Gupta and Purba Hossain, 2023 Devyani Gupta and Purba Hossain, have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Tjaša Krivec Cover Image © The British Library Board. Bird’s eye view from above the Opium Godown at Patna. Sita Ram (fl. c.1810–1822). All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3503-2702-3 ePDF: 978-1-3503-2703-0 eBook: 978-1-3503-2704-7 Series: Empire’s Other Histories Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.­

­Contents List of illustrations List of tables List of contributors Acknowledgements Commodities, networks and empire building: An introduction Devyani Gupta and Purba Hossain 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

From commodity trade to ‘virtual’ empire: Venice in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries  Andrew Blackler West Africa, the Akan gold trade and Portugal’s global ambitions in the sixteenth century  Edmond Smith Tea and empire in the Asian interior, c. 1750–1900  Jagjeet Lally Sailors as traders: Early modern seafarers in commodity chains, commercial practices and empire  Richard J. Blakemore The social locations of colonial knowledge: Indigo in Bengal, Java and Senegal  Willem van Schendel What Angolans got for their coffee: Connecting histories of labour and consumption in colonial Africa, c. 1860–1960  Jelmer Vos ‘Docile, quiet, orderly’: Indian indenture trade and the ideal labourer  Purba Hossain Globalization gothic: Unpacking the commodity fetish in Caribbean tourism  Lowell Woodcock

Conclusion: The chains of empire: Some thoughts on commodity history as method  Erika Rappaport Selected bibliography Index

vi viii ix xii

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13 33 55 81 111 157 179 199

225 234 253

Illustrations 1.1 Commodity flows within the Eastern Mediterranean. Source: Based partly on a map of Eastern Mediterranean product sources in John Haldon, The Palgrave Atlas of Byzantine History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 82–5 1.2 Map of Venetian convoy routes in the fourteenth century. Source: Based on information drawn from Doris Stockly, Le Système de l’Incanto Des Galées Du Marché À Venise (Fin Xiiie-Milieu Xve Siècle) (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 5 and 93–179 1.3 The Stato da Mar – A citizens’ view of the maritime empire 1.4 Venetian territory and effective empire in the fourteenth century 5.1 Title page of the English translation of Monnereau’s indigo manual (1769). Source: Élie Monnereau, Le Parfait Indigotier: ou Description de l’Indigo. Nouvelle Édition … augmentée par l’auteur (Amsterdam/ Marseille: J. Mossy, 1765). English translation: Elias Monnereau, The Complete Indigo-Maker, Containing an Accurate Account of the Indigo Plant … (London: P. Elmsly, 1769) 5.2 Dedication in the English translation of M. de Beauvais Raseau’s manual, 1761/1794. Source: M. de Beauvais Raseau, L’Art de l’Indigotier (Paris: Saillant et Nyon, 1761). Part of this manual, together with other writings on indigo production, was published in Calcutta as M. de Beauvais Raseau, Treatise on Indigo (translated by Richard Nowland) (Calcutta: James White, 1794) 5.3 An indigo drying house. Source: W.M. Reid, The Culture and Manufacture of Indigo; with a Description of a Planter’s Life … (Calcutta: Thacker & Co., 1887), facing page 63. 5.4 Cultivation and manufacture of indigo in Java. Source: First page of Ament, ‘Bereiding en Kultuur der Indigo op Java’ (1834), in De Cultuur en Behandeling der Westindische Koffij en Indigo, Beschreven en Vergeleken met die der Zelfde Producten in Oost-Indië, uitgegeven door de Redactie van den Oosterling (Kampen: K. van Hulst, 1836), 17–42

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5.5 Wooden wheels in action in an indigo factory in Klaten, Java, c. 1910. Source: Courtesy of Tropenmuseum, part of the National Museum of 142 World Cultures, The Netherlands 5.6 A sample of low-grade indigo from Senegal. S­ ource: Enclosure in ‘Président, Chambre de Commerce d’Exportation, à M. Etienne, Sous-Secrétaire d’Etat des Colonies’ (28 March 1890). Généralités, Affaires Economiques, Produits et Exploitations Industriels,’ Séries Documentaires, Ministère des Colonies or GEN/55, Dossier 530, 152 Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, France

T ­ ables 1.1 Selection of Products Traded/Transported in the Eastern Mediterranean according to Value/Weight and Category (Clothing, Food, People, Industrial). Source: Freddy Thiriet ed., Régestes des Délibérations du Sénat de Venice concernant la Romanie (Paris: Mouton, 3 vols., 1958), no. 471, no. 595, and no. 984 (1369) 4.1 Seafarers’ Ventures and Value of Wages, 1649–51. Source: The National Archives (Kew) HCA 13/71, fos 659r, 664r-6r, 668r-v, 670r-3r, 677r-8r, 680r-1v 4.2 Ventures and Wages Aboard the Mary & John, 1650–52. Source: The National Archives (Kew) HCA 13/71, fos 644r-55r 4.3 Tobacco Ventures Aboard the Propheet Samuel, 1644. Source: Stadsarchief Rotterdam (SAR) 5075, inv.nr. 848, pp. 936–7

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­Contributors Andrew Blackler is affiliated to the Hellenic Society for Near-Eastern Studies and is currently one of the principal investigators of a five-year study, in conjunction with the University of Leiden, of the hinterland of Chalkida (medieval Negroponte) on the Greek island of Euboea. His research interests include the development of the landscape, the social role of the tower, and the history of cartography and empire during the Late Medieval period in the Eastern Mediterranean. After studying classics at school and the economics of industry and trade at the London School of Economics, he followed an international career in engineering, commerce and construction. In 2020, he completed a PhD in the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman, and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham. Richard J. Blakemore is Associate Professor of Maritime and Social History at the University of Reading. His teaching and research focus on the social history of seafarers and maritime communities during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He has written, with Dr Elaine Murphy, The British Civil Wars at Sea, 1638–1653, and has co-edited Law, Labour, and Empire: Comparative Perspectives on Seafarers, c. 1500–1800 (with Prof. Maria Fusaro, Dr Bernard Allaire and Dr Tijl Vanneste) and The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain (with Dr James Davey). His articles include studies of navigation, Atlantic piracy, British trade with West Africa and the economic activities of seafarers. He is a consultant for British and European museums and research projects, international newspapers and the creative industries, and has appeared on historical programmes on the radio and TV. Devyani Gupta holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and is Associate Professor at O. P. Jindal Global University. She is Managing Editor of the Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies. She is also Research Associate with the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies (Gloknos), CRASSH, Cambridge. She has held fellowships awarded by the Leverhulme Trust and Volkswagen Stiftung at Leeds and Göttingen, respectively, and has taught at the Universities of Delhi and Leeds. She is completing a monograph on the history of postal communication

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in British India, and researching a project on the global and domestic histories of British Indian opium. Purba Hossain holds a PhD in History from the University of Leeds and is a Junior Research Fellow at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge. A historian of South Asia and the British Empire, she is completing her first monograph on Indian contributions to global indenture debates. Her research has appeared in South Asian Studies and The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, and she has held fellowships awarded by the Royal Historical Society and the Economic History Society. Jagjeet Lally is Associate Professor in the History of Early Modern and Modern India at University College London, where he is also Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of South Asia and the Indian Ocean World. His first book, India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World, was published by Hurst, Oxford University Press and HarperCollins India in 2021. Erika Rappaport is Professor of History at University of California, Santa Barbara. She has written extensively on how the history of consumption and commodities were integral to the construction of identities, politics and economies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (2000), Consuming Behaviours (2015; with Sandra T. Dawson and Mark Crowley), A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (2017) and A Cultural History of Shopping in the Age of Revolution and Empire (2022). Her current work focuses on the imperial history of public relations. Edmond Smith holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and is a Presidential Fellow in Economic Cultures at the University of Manchester. Their work focuses on commercial communities and the institutions of early modern global trade. Their work on Akan-Portuguese relations was funded by the British Academy and draws on archives and collaborations in Portugal, Spain, and Ghana. Their first book, Merchants: The Community That Shaped England’s Trade and Empire, 1550–1650, was published in 2021. Willem van Schendel (University of Amsterdam and International Institute of Social History; https://uva.academia.edu/WillemVanSchendel) works in the fields of history, anthropology and sociology of Asia. Some of his key publications

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on the theme of commodity include Embedding Agricultural Commodities: Using Historical Evidence, 1840s–1940s (Routledge, 2017); Global Blue: Indigo and Espionage in Colonial Bengal (University Press Ltd, 2006; with Pierre-Paul Darrac); A History of Bangladesh (Cambridge University Press, 2020); and ‘What Is Agrarian Labour? Contrasting  Indigo Production in Colonial India and Indonesia,’ International Review of Social History, 60.1 (2015), 1–23. Jelmer Vos is Lecturer in Global History at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Kongo in the Age of Empire, 1860–1913: The Breakdown of a Moral Order (University of Wisconsin Press, 2015). He has also published several articles and book chapters on the slave trade and slavery in Angola and West Africa, as well as on Kongo’s nineteenth-century rubber boom and the eighteenth-century ivory trade from Côte d’Ivoire. He is currently writing a monograph on the history of coffee cultivation in Angola and is co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Commodity History (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). Lowell Woodcock has a background in development studies with an interest in environment and development issues in the Caribbean. He is Research Associate of the Sussex Centre for World Environmental History (CWEH). He has worked as a freelance researcher in a variety of interdisciplinary fields on topics as diverse as migration studies, digital humanities and constitutional reform in Trinidad and Tobago.

A ­ cknowledgements This volume has been a long time in the making, and has witnessed its share of ups and downs during the global pandemic. Our conversations took place across varied geographical spaces and time zones. We thank our authors for their enthusiastic commitment to the project and their contributions to the book. We are especially grateful to Professor Erika Rappaport, who kindly agreed to write the concluding remarks. We are thankful to the editors of the Empire’s Other Histories book series, particularly Dr Jonathan Saha, with whom the idea for this book was first discussed. We are grateful to our anonymous reviewers and the editorial team at Bloomsbury for their guidance and support. Our commissioning editor Maddie Holder has been an absolute delight to work with, and our heartfelt gratitude is owed to her. Finally, as co-editors we have drawn inspiration and support from each other and have enjoyed working on this book project together. The idea for this edited collection first arose from conversations at the ‘Across Colonial Lines: Empires, Commodities, Movements’ conference, which was hosted by Purba Hossain and Emily Webb at the University of Leeds. Generously supported by the Past and Present Society, the Royal Historical Society, and the University of Leeds, this conference brought together scholars to explore the entangled history of commodities and empires. We are thankful to everyone who participated in the conference, and especially to Emily for her support in our initial conversations with Bloomsbury.

Commodities, networks and empire building: An introduction Devyani Gupta and Purba Hossain

This edited collection offers a multi-perspective approach to studying the relationship between empires and commodities across spatial and temporal boundaries, by bringing together chapters on Europe, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean world. Commodity histories have been long regarded as critical to conceptualizing the global political economy. Writings on commodities have often focused on the production and circulation of commodities within colonized spaces such as Latin America, Africa and Asia, linking up regional commodity networks with the history of consumption in the Western world. Consequently, commodity histories have been closely tied to scholarship on global trade and circulation.1 Histories of individual commodities have been especially popular, encompassing histories of production, circulation and consumption.2 The ‘commodity biography’ approach in fact has dominated the Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Gary Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewicz, eds., Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1994); Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present (Armonk, NY: ME Sharpe, 1999); Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal and Zephyr Frank, eds. From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Jennifer Bair, Frontiers of Commodity Chain Research (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Francesca Trivellato, Leor Halevi and Cátia Antunes, eds., Religion and Trade: Cross-Cultural Exchanges in World History, 1000–1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 2 Some key works include: Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1986); Stewart Lee Allen, The Devil’s Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History (London: Canongate, 2000); William Gervase Clarence-Smith, Cocoa and Chocolate, 1765–1914 (London and New York: Routledge, 2000); Mark Kurlansky, Salt: A World History (New York: Vintage, 2003); Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (London: Vintage, 2014); Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton, and Matthew Mauger, Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World (London: Reaktion Books, 2015); Erika Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 1

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historiographical discourse for many years. Histories of commodities have also seen a strong focus on the plantation complex, labour histories and the growth and consolidation of nation states, to name just a few themes.3 More recently, works on commodities have contributed to the growing corpus of scholarship on environment and ecology.4 With the growth of modern European empires, social spaces and habits of consumption became more globalized. This resulted in the emergence of political and economic structures that shaped commodity networks in contexts which were often intra-imperial, trans-regional and decidedly global. This inextricable link between commodities and empire building, however, has largely escaped scholarly attention until recently. Reinert and Røge’s 2013 volume explored the political economy of empire in the early modern world. It focused on commodity trade, economic relations and cultures of gift, thereby opening up space for the study of commodities and empires.5 Curry-Machado’s edited volume approached the history of commodities with an eye to exploring how imperial boundaries were transgressed by local agents.6 In doing so, this volume highlighted the importance of studying commodities within the fields of transnational and global history. Maat and Hazareesingh’s edited volume interrogated the linkages between commodities and colonialism by exploring

Works on plantation complex include: Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and on labour histories include: Christian Brannstrom, ‘Coffee Labor Regimes and Deforestation on a Brazilian Frontier, 1915–1965’, Economic Geography 76, no. 4 (2009): 326–46; Thomas D. Rogers, The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Aviva Chomsky, ‘Labour, Environmental History and Sugar Cane in Cuba and Brazil’, Social History 38, no. 4 (2013): 497–509; Aviva Chomsky and Steve Striffler, ‘Empire, Labor, and Environment: Coal Mining and Anticapitalist Environmentalism in the Americas’, International Labor and Working-Class History 85 (2014): 194–200. Key works on histories of commodities and nation-states include: Mauricio A. Font, Coffee, Contention and Change in the Making of Modern Brazil (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990); William Roseberry, Lowell Gudmundson and Mario Samper Kutschbach, Coffee, Society, and Power in Latin America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Marco Palacios, Coffee in Colombia, 1850–1970: An Economic, Social and Political History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Gillian McGillivray, Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class, and State Formation in Cuba, 1868–1959 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). 4 Jason W. Moore, ‘Sugar and the Expansion of the Early Modern World-Economy: Commodity Frontiers, Ecological Transformation, and Industrialization’, Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 23, no. 3 (2000): 409–33; Warren Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber: A Study in Environmental History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); John Tully, ‘A Victorian Ecological Disaster: Imperialism, the Telegraph, and Gutta-Percha’, Journal of World History 20, no. 4 (2009): 559–79; John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2021). 5 Sophus Reinert and Pernille Røge, eds., The Political Economy of Empire in the Early Modern World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 6 Jonathan Curry-Machado, ed., Global Histories, Imperial Commodities, Local Interactions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 3

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local subversions of colonial structures through the study of commodity production.7 These works helped develop our present understanding of colonial knowledge, local intervention and agency. Despite the existence of several excellent works which study commodities as part of a global history approach, there is immense scope for a detailed exploration of how commodities have been at the centre of imperial processes and have shaped colonial societies. Our edited collection contributes to these ongoing conversations. This volume focuses on commodities that moved between and within empires, and commodities that were themselves products of empire-building activities. Through individual case studies, this collection addresses the cyclical relationship between commodities and empires – whereby commodity trade sustained and expanded empires, and in turn, empires sustained, extended and often constructed the networks of commodity transmission. Thus, it goes beyond the commodity biography approach to address key questions on the entangled histories of commodities and empires. This collection also takes a decidedly different direction from the object-focused studies of material culture.8 It looks at commodities not just as tangible goods of consumption but also as experiences and practices that have been enabled by the process of commodification. As empires came to produce commodities, this aspect of commodification became apparent in the transformation of leisure and

Harro Maat and Sandip Hazareesingh, eds., Local Subversions of Colonial Cultures: Commodities and Anti-Commodities in Global History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 8 The materiality of commodities may be expressed through their physicality, their economic or/and symbolic volume, their social status, etc. Authors such as Maxine Berg, Zoltan Biedermann, Anne Gerritsen, Prasannan Parthasarthi, Giogio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, to name a few, have produced outstanding research on this subject. See Maxine Berg, ‘In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century’, Past & Present 182 (2004): 85–142; Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi, eds., The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Anne Gerritsen and Stephen McDowall, ‘Material Culture and the Other: European Encounters with Chinese Porcelain, ca. 1650–1800’, Journal of World History 23, no. 1 (2012): 87–113; Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World (London and New York: Routledge, 2016); Anne Gerritsen, ‘From Long-Distance Trade to the Global Lives of Things: Writing the History of Early Modern Trade and Material Culture’, Journal of Early Modern History 20, no. 6 (2016): 526–44; Anne Gerritsen, ‘Domesticating Goods from Overseas: Global Material Culture in the Early Modern Netherlands’, Journal of Design History 29, no. 3 (2016): 228–44; Peter McNeil and Giorgio Riello, Luxury: A Rich History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Zoltán Biedermann, Anne Gerritsen, and Giorgio Riello, eds., Global Gifts: The Material Culture of Diplomacy in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Anne Gerritsen, The City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, eds., Writing Material Culture History (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021). 7

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hospitality, in processes of urbanization, in experiences of travel, and through the observation of changes in landscapes.9 Put simply, a commodity is an object produced for sale, exchange and/or consumption. However, the conceptualization of the ‘commodity’ itself has been much more ambitious, as is evident in the pioneering scholarship of Karl Marx (Capital), Georg Simmel (The Philosophy of Money), Michael Taussig (The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America) and Arjun Appadurai (The Social Life of Things), to name a few.10 This collection brings together senior and early career scholars to engage with and respond to some of the defining works in this field. The idea of exchange is integral to the conceptualization and identification of the commodity, as this pertains not just to the world of objects but includes human society and human experience as well. The processes of interaction, perception, consumption, transfer, exchange and commodification extend beyond conventional relationships of money economy to include barter, gifts and life experiences. Commodities invent and reinvent their own definitions and milieux and are far from static descriptive categories. This is perhaps one of the most important considerations for this collection. The authors study commodities and commoditization through the interaction of attendant social, cultural, political and historical factors at work in seemingly individual, but clearly global contexts. They move beyond the mere physicality of commodities, to highlight the role played by commodity traders, commodity networks and knowledge systems.11 This allows commodities to assume multiple historical symbolisms, not merely because of how they are perceived but also on account of the contexts of their journeys and reinventions. Taken together, the chapters A few examples from this field include: Wim van Binsbergen and Peter Geschiere, eds. Commodification: Things, Agency, and Identities (The Social Life of Things Revisited) (Berlin; Munster: Lit Verlag, 2005); Robert Shepherd, ‘Commodification, Culture and Tourism’, Tourist Studies 2, no. 2 (2002): 183–201; Britt Baillie, Afroditi Chatzoglou and Shadia Taha, ‘Packaging the Past: The Commodification of Heritage’, Heritage Management 3, no. 1 (2010): 51–71; Alexander Dobeson, ‘The Politics of Value Revisited: Commodities, Assets, and the Gifts of Nature’, Journal of Cultural Economy 14, no. 3 (2021): 344–56; Davydd J. Greenwood, ‘Culture by the Pound: An Anthropological Perspective on Tourism as Cultural Commoditization’, in Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, ed. Valene L. Smith, 129–39 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977). 10 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One (London: Penguin, [1867] 1990); Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge Classics, 2011 [1900]); Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 11 This is in conversation with works such as Kirti N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ed., Merchant Networks in the Early Modern World (Aldershot: Routledge, 1996); Kirti N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company: 1660–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Claude Markovits, Merchants, Traders, Entrepreneurs: Indian Business in the Colonial Era (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 9

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in this collection challenge the study of empires in isolation; encourage readers to look at alternative geographies, chronologies, and human and material actors; and reflect on the construction and conceptualization of the ‘commodity’.

Alternative geographies, alternative temporalities Geographical and temporal divisions are rarely water-tight. While commodity trade has been a timeless feature of human history, conventional scholarship on commodity histories and colonialism has focused almost exclusively on European imperialism. This edited collection transcends this chronological demarcation in historiography by including late medieval and early modern examples. It demonstrates the importance of studying the premodern context of imperial commodity networks and exploring the deeper histories of commodification and empire building. Such an approach allows for a more nuanced understanding of what an empire entails, as well as an analysis of what is uniquely imperial about the ways in which political entities have historically controlled commodity networks and wielded power. Insofar, our collection also explores alternative geographical spaces of production and consumption. By countering the conceptualization of empires as geographically contained entities, it encourages readers to connect the peripheries of empires through networks of commodity exchange. In our inaugural chapter, Blackler expands the boundaries of the Venetian Empire beyond its territorial limits by fashioning an imperial context constructed through its commodity networks. He therefore demonstrates how the administrative and economic instruments developed to sustain this late-medieval trade provided the foundation for the establishment of later colonial empires. Smith’s chapter on early modern gold trade shows how Portuguese colonial intervention in West Africa was shaped by the demands of local trading partners, as well as by the threat of competition from other European players in what was becoming an increasingly trans-imperial space. Lally highlights the often-overlooked Eurasian experience, using a commodity lens to interrogate inter-imperial consumption patterns and to reframe what constitutes the boundaries and peripheries of empire. In positioning Asia as a space of consumption rather than production, Lally locates the history of tea in the context of alternative geographies. Meanwhile, by situating indigo within the cross-imperial context of British Bengal, Dutch Java and French Senegal, van Schendel makes a critical contribution to scholarship that has too often focused

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on intra-imperial perspectives. Consequently, his chapter encourages the reader to adopt a comparative history approach. For our authors, this focus on alternative geographies and alternative temporalities is also underlined by the interlinked networks of multiple commodities and their political economies. By studying these interwoven networks through newer perspectives, our volume makes a case for a more multi-layered reading of commodity histories. For example, Smith’s study of West Africa is rooted in the density of networks of gold, metal ware, woven fabric, spices and sugar – thus making a case for studying West Africa’s gold trade in the context of Portugal’s global imperialist ambitions in India and Brazil. Hossain demonstrates how commodity begets commodity. The production of sugar in the Caribbean and Indian Ocean region led to the commodification of Indian indentured labour, while debates over Indian indenture cemented sugar as an imperial commodity, and granted legitimacy to the position of sugar planters and merchants within the British Empire. Blakemore shows how British seafarers undermined the East India Company’s monopoly over global commodity networks by introducing new material possessions and forms of consumption that were rooted in their local social and economic networks. Vos’s chapter demonstrates how Brazilian coffee and Angolan slave trade networks were intertwined on account of the former’s dependence on the latter for a steady supply of labour. It focuses on the transformation of Angola’s colonized political economy from networks of slavery to coffee, palm oil, peanuts, cotton and consumer goods. This transformation is not just of the physical space but also of the demographic and social landscape. These successive transformations, playing out within particular regional contexts, re-insert local histories within global history narratives. Ultimately, these chapters provide further insights into the entangled relationship between imperial power, political and financial control, and commodity trade. By bringing together the history of commodities from across a wide temporal range, this edited collection also reflects the arc of development of globalization, that is, the historical movement from commodities-as-trade to commodities-as-service. By moving between Portuguese gold trade in the seventeenth century, Angolan coffee trade in the nineteenth century and Caribbean tourism in the twentieth century, this collection shows how the global political economy transformed from a trade-heavy structure of exchange to a service-heavy one. This collection thus helps recalibrate the ways in which geographies and periodization, frontiers and boundaries are considered in historical literature.

Introduction

7

Local knowledge, global connections Commodity histories are crucial for linking local actors to global structures of power. Commodity chain analyses, which track the production of commodities from the point of extraction to the point of consumption, often deny agency to the producers and workers at the bottom of the chain. In fact, commodity history often tends to privilege the ‘movers’ in economic systems at the expense of those actors who are less visible within historical records. In contrast, several chapters in this collection assign local agents a more central place in commodity histories. Blakemore, van Schendel and Vos’s chapters interrogate how local agents, knowledge and engagement had a global effect on commodity trading and on the social history of empires. They contribute to the study of commodity chains by introducing local knowledge, and the agency of local producers and traders within global commodity networks. They focus on individual producers, petty traders, sailors and others, who were involved in the operation of the empire but were not necessarily the architects of the imperialist vision. In doing so, our collection thus offers insights into the social histories of everyday colonialism and fractures top-down narratives of commodity networks. This volume also makes a critical contribution to scholarship on colonial knowledge production, demonstrating that local agents and indigenous knowledge sustained imperial commodity trade.12 Narratives of knowledge production in this collection include discussions on the centrality of cartography, both physical and cultural, on the colonial landscape. This encourages the colonial gaze to focus on the colonized landscape not only as a space criss-crossed by networks of trade and transmission but also as the space of the bazaar, the port, the sea, the court, the hotel, the plantation, the indigo factory and so on. Thus, while in Woodcock’s work the colonial gaze constructs the tourism industry in the Caribbean for the imperial traveller, the consumer of tea in Lally’s chapter is both an imperial subject and a colonial subaltern. Meanwhile, Vos sets out to empower the subaltern voices of the coffee-growers of Angola and proposes that they were not merely producers but also consumers, and it was in fact their latter identity which played an important role in their choice of commodity production. Consequently, the ordering of the physical and administrative space

A key work that critiques histories of colonial knowledge by focusing on indigenous knowledge and agents that informed colonial knowledge is: Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

12

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Across Colonial Lines

of the colonized territories becomes an important point of departure in our narratives of commodity production and circulation. Our collection therefore contributes to the larger corpus of historical writing on the colonial experience of subjugation, rule, governance and resistance, albeit from the perspective of commodity histories. This process of knowledge making and knowledge production has been integral to all exercises of imperial self-expression and colonial state-building activities. Smith’s study of the gold networks of the Akan merchants throws as much light on imperialist perceptions of colonized geography as it does on the ethnographic prejudices of the colonial gaze confronting the ‘native’ subject. In the case of Woodcock’s study, subjectivities built around labour identity and racism emerge as an important trope. In Lally’s story, the experience of viewing, tasting, smelling and even distinguishing various kinds of tea (and tea plants) makes for a pertinent example. Innovations within the fields of shipping and cartography provide the context for Blackler’s analysis of Venetian empire building. Similarly, van Schendel explores the criss-crossing networks of entrenched knowledge production within the geographically spread-out ‘blue fraternity’ of indigo specialists. But perhaps even more significantly, the chapters by Lally, van Schendel and Vos complicate the imperial-colonial narrative by exploring subaltern systems of knowledge production, a perspective of immense value to ongoing conversations on commodity histories.13

Commodification across empires Our volume adopts a multilayered approach to the construction and conceptualization of the commodity – as object, as networks and as experience. Insofar, the commodity is not just a tactile but an experiential category as well. In fact, as some of the chapters demonstrate, commodification or commoditization was an active part of empire building. Thus, Hossain’s chapter explores how the nexus of labour deficit, sugar trade and imperialism facilitated the commodification of indentured labour in nineteenth-century British Empire. Blakemore commodifies the seafaring skills of early modern British sailors within the sweeping context of regions encompassing the Mediterranean and the Baltic Seas, the Venetian and the Ottoman Empires, the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, and their voluminous commodity networks. Smith’s chapter See, for instance, Maat and Hazareesingh, Local Subversions of Colonial Cultures.

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Introduction

9

about Portuguese interests in the gold trade of West Africa encourages the reader to look at the role of mythification in producing the commodification of regions, communities and transmission chains. Woodcock looks at commodity networks through the experience of the travelling consumer-colonialist-tourist, where the tourist is the spectator, consumer, transporter and ethnographer, who partakes not only in the main commodity on offer – that is, tourism – but also in its subculture, made up of the local beer, the guidebook, the map and the advertisement image. Taken together, these chapters facilitate the understanding of commodification within imperial and post-imperial contexts, where the commodity is not always a tangible, material object. They demonstrate the crucial linkage between commodification and empire building by exploring objects and experiences that were commoditized in the process of colonization. A pitch for commodification begs the question, commodification for what purpose? The diverse and at times divergent scope of the various chapters in this volume is tied together when answering this query. Commodification – the making of a commodity, its production, consumption, transmission and its political economy – has worked in all these contexts to prop up the various guises of imperial ideology. For instance, commodity networks have an end destination in consumption patterns. The chapters of this volume add to the field of social history by situating the commodities within often competing networks of consumption. Consumer commodities do not circulate alone; what circulates with them are sociocultural practices associated with producing, transmitting, imbibing and even reformulating those commodities. Consequently, this collection emphasizes the transactional nature of both the transmission and exchange of goods and that of experiences, skills, technology, knowledge and know-how. Arguably, commodities owe their identity to the labour of the producer, and in imperial contexts, this labour is often part of extractive regimes of production. Slavery and the dismantling of slave economies of labour, for instance, emerge as a unifying trope in the chapters of Smith, Vos and Woodcock, with parallel contextualization evident in Hossain’s story of indenture. In the case of commodity histories, commodity chains emerge as important locations for placing local agency, as evident in van Schendel’s analysis of colonial indigo and Lally’s examination of tea networks. Blakemore’s study of the hierarchical organization of seafaring communities is a glimpse into the social histories of maritime labour and their economic networks. Woodcock’s study of the conversion of the Caribbean into a ‘tourist paradise’ is part of the neo-imperialist discourse of rescuing the collapsing economic and labour structures of former

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plantations, and reinventing them in the service of globalized capitalism and its trade structures. Labour historians will therefore identify themes of enquiry within our collection which converse with the larger debates of their discipline.

*** Andrew Blackler demonstrates that while commodities have always been the basis of imperial expansion, this was not just restricted to empires that arose globally after the Spanish Age of Exploration. Blackler uses the commodity lens to illuminate the political organization in late-medieval Venice and its control over commodity trade. He argues that the Venetians themselves viewed their empire as going beyond formal territorial limits – limits that were defined not by land or sea borders but by paper treaties, the perambulations of its merchant diaspora and the exercise of Venetian hard and soft diplomatic power. Edmond Smith interrogates two sixteenth-century reports on the West African gold trade to reveal how early modern people navigated colonial conditions that were reliant on, and responsive to, wider global processes. This chapter also demonstrates the cyclical relationship between colonial political control and commodity trade; Portugal established and sustained its imperial authority by controlling the early modern global commodity trade, and in turn, the movement of imperial commodities like gold came to define Portuguese practices of empire-making beyond West Africa as well. Jagjeet Lally offers an alternative history of tea that decentres attention from the Britain-China-India nexus. His chapter explores the creation of new markets for tea in the Russian Empire and in the more remote parts of Central and South Asia, thus interrogating histories of tea production and trade beyond the British imperial world. By positioning Asia as a space for consumption, this chapter fractures conventional narratives, where the Global South is seen almost exclusively as a site of production, and the Global North as a site of consumption. Moreover, by focusing on plantations and tea gardens established by indigenous collaborators, Lally moves histories of the plantation complex – a decidedly colonial institution – beyond the purview of European colonial systems. Richard Blakemore analyses how the early modern British seafaring community provided a conduit for the movement of new global commodities across varied social and economic contexts. As seafarers exercised their customary legal right to carry small parcels of trade goods, they created new consumers and

Introduction

11

personal trade networks which ran parallel to existing transnational commodity networks. Sailors exploited their unique position within early modern empires to take advantage of their access to commodity chains, even as that position carried with it enormous risk for individual seafarers. This chapter thus offers a nuanced exposition of the interlinking of histories of shipping and seafaring with multiple histories of commodity transmission. Willem van Schendel argues that British Bengal, Dutch Java and French Senegal benefited from cross-imperial flows of indigo knowledge, and that this knowledge was parcelled out in locally distinct ways. His chapter demonstrates that colonial indigo industries depended on a precarious pooling of ‘plant knowledge’, ‘dye knowledge’, ‘site knowledge’ and ‘chain knowledge’. His comparative analysis of indigo in three geographical spaces challenges the perceived distinction between European and indigenous knowledge systems in the production of the commodity, and underlines the need to map knowledge across colonial borders. In doing so, van Schendel moves the focus from colonial to indigenous knowledge systems, and shows that it was local knowledge that sustained indigo farming. Jelmer Vos investigates the crucial role of local coffee workers in sustaining the Angolan coffee trade. He explores how the Angolan coffee commodity chain was constructed from the bottom-up by local farmers interacting with foreign shopkeepers and coastal merchants. He argues that Angolan coffee farmers need to be seen not only as producers but also as consumers, whose economic behaviour was influenced by local cultures of consumption and their political economies. Therefore, Vos visualizes the history of Angolan coffee industry as not merely a by-product of imperialism or as a response to globalizing market forces alone. He instead situates his story within the inter-African context of the ‘cash crop revolution’ of the early twentieth century. By investigating how empires facilitated the commodification of labour, Purba Hossain takes histories of commodities beyond tangible objects. Hossain focuses her attention on Indian indentured labourers who migrated to Caribbean and Indian Ocean plantations. As indentured labourers contractually bound themselves to sugar plantations and offered their labour power in exchange for wages, labour emerged as a commodity and came to be framed within categories of race, gender and ‘free labour’. Hossain shows that the cross-imperial debate on Indian indenture not only defined plantation labour as an imperial commodity but also consolidated the image of the ideal post-Abolition plantation worker. Lowell Woodcock studies the commodification of Caribbean tourism. He argues that the romanticization of the Caribbean as an untouched, exotic and

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beautiful tourist paradise in guidebooks and museum-brochures represents the remnants of knowledge produced in the colonial period and sustained through to postcolonial times. In the case of the Caribbean, the emergence of tourism as a consumable experience is deeply rooted in the history of the regional political economy, the commodity networks of sugar plantations, as well as the region’s slave labour industry. Woodcock’s commodity is thus a social, cultural and even ideological experience, and not merely a material object. In her reflections, Erika Rappaport shows how this edited collection contributes to commodity historiography by interrogating processes of commodification and commodity fetishism in the staging of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition (London, 1886). Rappaport highlights the social history of commodities and commodity chains, and their role in the simultaneous fashioning of not just empires but capitalism as well. Crucially, she demonstrates that commodity history is not just an area of enquiry but also a method for understanding empires and the process of empire building.

­1

From commodity trade to ‘virtual’ empire: Venice in the twelfth to fifteenth centuries Andrew Blackler

Traditionally, the fifteenth century has been taken as the beginning of the colonial era, yet it can also be viewed as the culmination of a 300-year period of development that provided the essential tools for Portuguese expansion along the coast of Africa, and the discovery and exploitation of the new world. Some developments were technological – innovations in ship design, cartography and navigation – but others related to nascent processes of colonial organization and administration to exploit the opportunities for commodity trade and cabotage within the Mediterranean basin that emerged among the competing littoral city states of Italy – Amalfi, Pisa, Genoa and Venice.1 This trade, and the way in which it defined the structure and practical (as opposed to territorial) extent of the Venetian Republic’s maritime empire, the Stato da Mar, is the focus of this chapter.2 It draws on the author’s research into the history, topography and commodity exports of the Greek island of Euboea, known as Negroponte in the late medieval period, which grew under Venetian suzerainty into the leading city of the Aegean in the late fifteenth century and, following its capture by the Ottomans in 1470, their capital of central Greece. Few local records survive of this period, but the extensive archives of the various political organs of the Venetian state provide a rich resource for understanding the empire’s evolution and organization.3

Cabotage is the process by which goods or passengers are transported between two places in the same country by a transport operator from another country. 2 I am not studying the ‘Terra Firma’ second-phase expansion into northern Italy and mainland Greece, which occurred predominantly after the fourteenth century. 3 The minutes of the three main political organs of the Venetian Republic – the Council of Ten (the Dieci), the Senate (Pregadi), an elected group of sixty councillors and the Assembly (Consiglio Maggiore) are gazetted in four major works: G. L. F. Tafel and G. M. Thomas ed., Urkunden zur 1

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After a short summary of the historical background, I examine the trading flows of commodities within the Eastern Mediterranean, eschewing a focus on one (such as silk or spice), while demonstrating the complexities of their interdependence and then analyse the structures installed by the Venetians to exploit the profits from this trade. These can be understood within the framework of Foucault’s ‘governmentality’, which addresses what he calls ‘government rationality’ – the techniques and practices for governing populations of subjects. Study of the ‘technologies of risk’ followed, later expanded by colleagues to research into the welfare estate. By extension, this enables us to distinguish between what Foucault terms the modern ‘governmental’ state and the sovereign state, which he sees it as superseding.4 Foucault addresses this theme, commencing with the political treatises published from the sixteenth century – something generally followed by later writers. This chapter suggests, however, that discussions on modern government, commodity trade and empires need to encompass the much earlier practical developments in the political and economic institutions of the Italian merchant ‘communes’ – city states from which emerged many of the accounting, limited liability, banking and insurance concepts, which form the pillars of the modern free-market economy.5 It is further argued that the extent of the Venetian Empire cannot be explained simply by existing definitions of empire based on two-dimensional models. Since its wealth was essentially generated from commerce, its breadth needs to be understood by focusing not on physical boundaries (both land and sea) but on commercial transactions and relationships – by inference, the citizens of the empire. älteren Handelsund Staatsgeschichte der Republik Venedig (Vienna: Kaiserlich-Koniglichen HofUnd Staatsdruckerei, 1857. Reprinted by Cambridge University Press, 2012, 3 vols, 1856–7); Konstantinos N. Sathas ed., Documents inédits relatifs à l’histoire de la Grèce au Moyen Age (Paris: J. Maisonneuve Libraire-éditeur, 1890–1900); Freddy Thiriet, ed., Régestes des Délibérations du Sénat de Venice concernant la Romanie (Paris: Mouton, 3 vols, 1958); Freddy Thiriet, ed., Déliberations des assemblées venitiennes concernant la Romanie (Paris: Mouton, 2 vols, 1971). 4 Foucault presented his theories in a series of lectures given at the Collège de France in Paris in 1978 and 1979. For a fuller exposition, see Colin Gordon, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller eds. The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lectures and an Interview with Michel Foucault (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 1–51. For the full text of his lectures on ‘questions of method’ and ‘governmentality’, see ibid., 73–104. See also: Nikolas Rose, Pat O’Malley and Mariana Valverde, ‘Governmentality’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science 2, no. 1 (2009): 83–104. 5 Robert S. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Yadira Gonzalez De Lara, ‘Business Organization and Organizational Innovation in Late Medieval Italy’, in Research Handbook on the History of Corporate and Company Law, ed. Harwell Wells (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018).

From Commodity Trade to ‘Virtual’ Empire

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The emergence of Venice as an imperial power In 1204 the Republic of Venice, a city in northern Italy of about 60,000 citizens, suddenly became a reluctant colonial power. Its Doge, Enrico Dandolo, acting not so much in a public but in a private capacity, bequeathed to it a vast tract of land – defined as ‘a fourth part and a half of the whole Empire of Romania’ under the Treaty of Partition signed between the victorious forces of the Fourth Crusade.6 Considering that it had neither the economic capacity nor the military manpower to conquer and control such a huge area, through various agreements, it limited its aspirations to the acquisition of strategic ports vital for supporting its trading network, annexed the island of Crete in 1211 and allowed its citizens to privately take control of a package of islands in the Aegean Sea.7 This, including its holdings in the Adriatic, was the skeleton of the so-called Stato da Mar. Over the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Republic slowly built on the foundations established in 1204 despite setbacks following the demise of the short-lived Latin Empire of the Aegean in 1261, war with Genoa, defeat of its Frankish allies by the Catalan company in 1311, attacks by Turkish corsairs on its littoral possessions and successive bouts of the plague.8 By the early fifteenth century, the Republic had recovered and was pre-eminent in the Eastern Mediterranean: it had formally incorporated Negroponte and many smaller islands into its empire, had finally seen off Genoa and was recognized as the leading Christian state in an emerging alliance against the growing Ottoman threat.9 In 1453, Constantinople, by now an ally, fell to the Turks. Shortly thereafter in 1470, Negroponte was annexed by Sultan Mehmed II. As a result,

Tafel and Thomas, Urkunden zur älteren Handelsund Staatsgeschichte der Republik Venedig, CXXI, 464. 7 Three basic agreements were signed – the Treaty of Partition, a second private agreement called the Compact of Adrianople, by which Venice gave up direct rights to the mainland but purchased the island of Crete, and a third compact with Geoffrey de Vilhardouin, by which it gained the key ports of Modon and Corone in the south-western Peloponnese: Thomas F. Madden, Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 183–8. 8 In one Turkish attack (1416) on the north of Negroponte, 1,500 inhabitants were taken captive: Thiriet, Régestes des Délibérations du Sénat de Venice concernant la Romanie, no. 1958. The plague first struck in 1347/8, killing over 30 per cent of the population. 9 Ruth Gertwagen, ‘The Contribution of Venice’s Colonies to Its Naval Warfare in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Fifteenth Century’, in Mediterraneo in armi (secc. XV–XVIII), ed. Rossella Cancila (Palermo: Quaderni di Mediterranea, 2007). 6

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most Aegean islands were forced to come to some sort of accommodation with the Turks, but Crete, Cyprus, a few small islands and areas of the Peloponnese remained in Venetian hands. Thus ended the first republican phase of the Venetian Empire.

Commodity flows Maritime tramping – stopping off at a port to buy and sell goods then moving on to another with no fixed schedule – is a simple process requiring minimal infrastructure and has been practised from a very early date. Large-scale international trade in commodities, however, is complex and involves many interacting players. It depends first on agreements (or at least an unwritten acknowledgement) by states to allow free passage for merchants and their wares. It requires agents, warehousing, contracts (and therefore lawyers), judges (to adjudicate disputes), financing and banking facilities, insurance (security), methods of communication and – only when these are all in place – transport. It entails a sophistication, which we might term ‘modern’, and implies that the institutions involved in this trade – in our case the Italian communes – are also ‘modern’. The eleventh century gave birth to this commercial revolution, something probably first developed by Italian merchant houses trading luxury Mediterranean goods at the Champagne markets in France.10 The literature has tended to focus on the importance of luxury trade in silk and spices in the growth of the Venetian Empire and, by extension, that of long-distance trade between the Levant and northern Italy. By doing this, it overlooks the relative importance of commerce in other goods, often required as ballast – food to feed the burgeoning population of the island city, wood for its shipyards and cullet for its nascent glass industry. Within the Eastern Mediterranean (Figure 1.1), Venetian vessels (probably using colonial crews or owned by colonial citizens) also provided extensive shipping services within and between the Byzantine and Arab empires.

Avner Greif, ‘Institutions and International Trade: Lessons from the Commercial Revolution’, The American Economic Review 82, no. 2 (1992): 128–33; Avner Greif, ‘Political Organizations, Social Structure, and Institutional Success: Reflections from Genoa and Venice during the Commercial Revolution’, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE) / Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft 151, no. 4 (1995): 734–40; Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350.

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From Commodity Trade to ‘Virtual’ Empire

17

Figure 1.1  Commodity flows within the Eastern Mediterranean.11

Salt was a state monopoly, and we see numerous references in Venetian assembly minutes to its pricing and production.12 Other foods were frequently shipped long distances: sugar was already being exported from the Arab regions at an early date, and by the fifteenth century, we see its large-scale production in Venetian Crete and Cyprus.13 Islands such as Negroponte were well known for their wine, while surprisingly, there is evidence of substantial shipments of

Based on original Venetian documents, secondary references quoted later in the chapter, and on a map of Eastern Mediterranean product sources in John Haldon, The Palgrave Atlas of Byzantine History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 82–5. This and later maps were created using ArcGIS software and basemap, onto which cities were plotted. Historical population levels are notoriously difficult to define, so the size categorization is my own based on multiple sources. 12 Thiriet, Régestes des Délibérations du Sénat de Venice concernant la Romanie, no. 900 (1389), no. 916 (1391), no. 1187 (1414), no. 2672 (1444). 13 Marina Solomidou-Ieronymidou, ‘The Medieval Sugar-Mills of Episkopi-Serayia and Kolossi and Sugar Production in Medieval Cyprus’, in The Origins of the Sugar Cane Industry and the Transmission of Ancient Greek and Medieval Arab Science and Technology from the Near East to Europe: Proceedings of the International Conference Athens 23 May 2015, ed. Konstantinos Politis (Athens: National and Kapodistriako University of Athens, 2015). 11

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cheese from Crete – 342 tonnes in one year!14 Lumber, especially that suitable for the construction of ships and manufacture of weapons, was in persistent short supply in the Arab countries.15 We should also not ignore the transport of human cargo. As tensions eased with the Muslim territories to the south during the tenth century, there was a growing demand from pilgrims seeking passage to the Holy Lands. The slave trade, while much diminished compared to the Classical era, still existed, but differed from that of the later colonial period: it was not the transport of African or Asian slaves to lands under European control but predominantly that of white Caucasians or northern and eastern Europeans to the Arab lands of North Africa. While there were increasingly moral issues over the enslavement of members of one’s own religion, Muslim prisoners of war were marketed in Christian lands and vice-versa.16 Even the silk market was much more complex than is generally understood. Drapes of the highest quality silk produced in central Greece we find exported to Constantinople, other types from Constantinople travelled south to Cairo and Damascus, and Syrian fabric north to Constantinople.17 These regions were major markets in the twelfth century and still included by far the most Michailis Choniates, writing in the late twelfth century, notes the wheat grown in Macedonia, Thrace and Thessaly, the wines of Euboea, Ptelion, Chios and Rhodes, and the fine garments made in Thebes and Corinth: Michaelis Choniatae Epistulae (Berlin: De Gruyter XLI, 2001), epist.50: 60–6. The lumber resources of Euboea are noted in Marino Sanudo Torsello, The Book of the Secrets of the Faithful of the Cross – Liber Secretorum Fidelium Crucis, ed. and trans. Peter Lock (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 116. Malvoisie wine was shipped as far north as Flanders: Thiriet, Déliberations des assemblées venitiennes concernant la Romanie, no. 509 (1372). 15 Sometimes also very profitable, especially since in times of war between Christian and Muslim forces, there was often prohibition in its trade. The Fatimids of Egypt had previously imported from Sicily, when it had been under their control: David Bramoullé, ‘La Sicile dans la Méditerranée fatimide (Xe-XIe siècle)’, in les dynamiques de l’islamisation en méditerranée centrale et en sicile, ed. Annliese Nef and Fabiola Ardizzone (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2014), 30–1. In 1414, the export of wood was banned from Crete, because of the destruction of the forests there: Thiriet, Régestes des Délibérations du Sénat de Venice concernant la Romanie, no. 1539. There is also some evidence, despite the good availability of local lumber, that the larch roof trusses of the Latin church of Agia Paraskevi in Negroponte were even imported from Venice: C. Bertolini, P. Touliatos, N. Miltiadou, N. Delinikolas, A. Crivellaro, T. Marzi, E. Tsakanika, O. Pignatelli, G. Biglione, ‘The timber roof of Hagia Paraskevi Basilica in Halkida, Greece: Multi-disciplinary methodological approaches for the understanding of the structural behaviour. Analysis and diagnosis’, ICOMOS (Wood Committee), 16th International Conference and Symposium ‘From Material to Structure’, Florence, Venice and Vicenza, November 2007. 16 Ben Raffield, ‘The Slave Markets of the Viking World: Comparative Perspectives on an “Invisible Archaeology”’, Slavery & Abolition 40, no. 4 (2019): 682–705; Hannah Barker, That Most Precious Merchandise: The Mediterranean Trade in Black Sea Slaves, 1260–1500 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). 17 Shortly after the annexation of Negroponte by Frankish forces, in 1211 the Frankish Lord of the island acknowledged his status as a feudal vassal of the Republic. Part of this agreement entailed the delivery to the Doge each year of a cloak of the highest-grade Samite silk cloth: Tafel and Thomas, Urkunden zur älteren Handelsund Staatsgeschichte der Republik Venedig, 93–6, folio CCV; David Jacoby, ‘Silk Economics and Cross-Cultural Artistic Interaction: Byzantium, the Muslim World, and the Christian West’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 58 (2004): 219. 14

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19

economically powerful and sophisticated polities of the Mediterranean basin, the cities of which in population terms dwarfed those of Western Europe.18 To put the long-distance silk and spice trade into context, while there were probably thousands of vessels operating in the Eastern Mediterranean transporting medium- or low-value goods, those in the official convoys from Venice are numbered in their tens (see Table 1.1). Marino Sanudo Torsello, for instance, writing in the early fourteenth century, notes a fleet of 100 ships in the mid-thirteenth century capable of open sea passage operating out of the island of Negroponte alone.19 These vessels, with about 30–50 tonnes capacity, were used to attack the coastal settlements of the eastern Aegean, but most of the time probably acted as local transport. Table 1.1  Selection of Products Traded/Transported in the Eastern Mediterranean according to Value/Weight and Category (Clothing, Food, People, Industrial).20 High Value Silk cloth Dyes Rugs Furs Spices Mastic Sugar Salt Slaves

Weapons

Medium Value Raw silk Alum Flax Cotton Acorns Wool

Cheese Salted fish Pilgrims Wax Iron Pitch

Low Value

Grain Wine Olive oil

Silica Glass cullet Wood Marble

Population levels are notoriously difficult to estimate but it appears that at the beginning of the thirteenth century, there were only fourteen cities in Western Europe with a population over 50,000, of which 40 per cent were in Italy. In Sicily, Palermo had about 150,000, while the three cities of Constantinople, Baghdad and Cairo had over 200,000. In the west, the Arab cities of Fez and Cordoba were smaller but still much larger than any city to the north. 19 Marino-Sanudo-Torsello [Μαρίνος-Σανούδος-Τορσέλλο], Ιστορία της Ρωμανίας: εισαγωγή, έκδοσημετάφραση, σχόλια [L᾽Istoria Di Romania De Marino Sanudo Torsello], ed. Evtichia Papadopoulou (Athens: Institute of Historical Research, Department of Byzantine Studies, 2000), 143. 20 Cotton production was introduced to Negroponte during the fourteenth century: Thiriet, Régestes des Délibérations du Sénat de Venice concernant la Romanie, no. 471 (1369); Skins and acorns (Velania – for use in the tanning industry) were exported from the island (ibid. no. 595), as was probably pitch made from conifer resin (still produced on the island) for caulking ships’ hulls. Wax and Alum is noted for export in 1400: Ibid., no. 984. 18

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From the tenth century, Venetian merchant vessels had increasingly exploited the potential of this market and, following the 1082 treaty signed with the emperor Alexios I, had gained special commercial advantages within the Byzantine Empire even over indigenous merchants.21 Utilizing the prevalent winds to sail a triangular route south-east to the Arab world, north to Constantinople and then home, their vessels laid the foundations for the maritime empire.

Th ­ e Encanto system: A watershed From the fourteenth century, an important innovation was the establishment of a fixed schedule of protected convoys (the Encanto system – Figure  1.2).22 Superficially, the convoy system offered greater security for merchants,

Figure 1.2  Map of Venetian convoy routes in the fourteenth century.23

The chrysobull of 1082 noted that thirty-two ports throughout the Byzantine empire opened to the Venetians for free trade, suggesting that this was a significant part of their business: Tafel and Thomas, Urkunden zur älteren Handelsund Staatsgeschichte der Republik Venedig, 51–3. 22 Ships were constructed in the Venetian arsenal (from early fifteenth century, also in Crete) and auctioned annually to those of patrician rank: John H. Pryor, Geography, Technology and War: Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean 649–1571 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 23 The map shows major stops for simplicity, but, for instance, from Alexandria to Attaleia there are ten possible other ports of call, depending on availability of cargo and opportunities for cabotage. Based on information drawn from Doris Stockly, Le Système de l’Incanto Des Galées Du Marché À Venise (Fin Xiiie-Milieu Xve Siècle) (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 5 and 93–179. 21

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21

but it also provided the base for much tighter government control over the Republic’s far-flung administrators, and indirectly those they administered, on the periphery – ‘the conduct of the extended population’s conduct’ to use the framework of Foucault’s governmentality.24 The state was promoting the good of its colonial citizens, from whom it gained its own strength, but in parallel, the better communication achieved through the convoy system ensured that the citizenry’s aims and actions aligned with the Republic’s own. It was also mandated that goods despatched to Venice should only be shipped in these convoys, to which the elite in Venice had exclusive access. We thus have the emergence of a rentier class to whom accrued the monopoly profits of long-distance trade and lower costs in terms of reduced insurance premiums.25 Nominally, the convoy system created very real opportunities for secondary suppliers and a Venetian naval presence to ward off pirates. Colonial subjects, however, henceforward not only were excluded from the profits of direct commodity sales to Venice but also suddenly faced competition from the convoys in their own local market.26 Here was a delicate balancing act between providing an incentive for the nominally free colonial population while effectively introducing an indirect tax on their income. This was a consensual relationship, which sometimes even worked in the opposite direction: in the early fifteenth century taxes were cut on Negroponte following the exodus of large numbers of peasants apparently due to the burden of high taxation, only to be reinstituted a few years later as their situation improved. This action indirectly created a second-class colonial citizenry. It demoted a group within the empire who had previously been part of a sophisticated Byzantine empire, a state theoretically equal to or even superior to Venice in terms of its military and administrative systems and of which the Republic had once formed a part. Yet we must also ask what enabled the Venetian Republic For instance, the costs of maintenance of the fortresses at Larmena and Carystos on Negroponte were audited in 1366: Thiriet, Déliberations des assemblées venitiennes concernant la Romanie, no. 432; in 1430 a vote was passed to audit the books of Negroponte: Thiriet, Régestes des Délibérations du Sénat de Venice concernant la Romanie, no. 2188. 25 These might vary from a low of 1.5 per cent to as high as 10 per cent in times of international crisis or high level of corsair activity: Ioanna Iordanou, Venice’s Secret Service: Organizing Intelligence in the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 35. 26 Tramping was also undertaken by Venetian convoys, and we see a note on three large sailing coques of over 400 tonnes capacity each collecting silk, furs, spices (large and small) and hemp from Tana in the eastern Black Sea for possible sale in Constantinople and the use of the money generated to buy other goods in the market there: Thiriet, Régestes des Délibérations du Sénat de Venice concernant la Romanie, no. 974 (1400). See also David Jacoby, ‘Western Commercial and Colonial Expansion in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea in the Late Middle Ages’ (Rapporti mediterranei, pratiche documentarie, presenze veneziane: Le reti economiche e culturali (XIV–XVI sec.), venezia, 10–12 settembre 2015, 2017). 24

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to prosper to the detriment of the Byzantine state. When Constantinople was annexed, and the emperor deposed by a relatively weak alliance of Latin forces in 1204, much of the Byzantine empire dissolved. Historians have argued in great detail over the events leading up to this, but we might posit that Venetian success was partly due to its essential modernity – the move from Foucault’s sovereign to governmental state. The republic’s multiple institutions provided a continuity lacking in sovereign states and a flexibility (at least up to the fifteenth century) which allowed them to evolve to grasp opportunity – in this case the contest for the Byzantine throne – while reacting quickly and effectively to changing external circumstances. Can we also identify in this act of demotion of their colonial citizens by the controlling power the first steps in a process of division, something Chatterjee calls the ‘rule of colonial difference’?27 We might argue that the Republic’s move was motivated not by racism or a feeling of moral superiority – often a hallmark of later colonial empires – but by a simple economic target, the desire to maximize the profits from commodity trade. Yet it must be recognized that, despite an apparent pragmatic approach by Venice to the government of its possessions, two major divides already existed – those of language and the antipathy of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches.28

The Venetian Stato da Mar The Venetian maritime state was a somewhat amorphous construct, which is best described by focusing not on its territory but its citizenry. Three general levels of citizenship can be identified: the citizen class (about 5 per cent of the total), members of which formed the ruling oligarchy in Venice, had access to high office and possessed, as noted above, the right of direct overseas trade with the city of Venice; a second ill-defined colonial group (subjects) who had rights within the colonies but not in Venice; and a lower ‘protected’ class, most of whom were probably in some form of bonded service.29 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 16. 28 When Negroponte was first annexed by Latin powers in 1204, Venice, withstanding significant Papal pressure, had allowed the local Orthodox Bishop to remain in his position. 29 The terms ‘Intra’ and ‘Extra’ were used to define the first two groups. The subjects are best described by what they are not – neither citizen nor ‘protected’. Prime within this group were the gasmouloi and basmouloi, legitimate and illegitimate children of Venetian citizen fathers. Greeks made up the majority. Jews had particular rights but were also subject to close control: in Negroponte we see them being forced to live within their allocated quarter, forbidden to own property outside this 27

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Figure 1.3 The Stato da Mar – A citizens’ view of the maritime empire.

Figure  1.3 summarizes the various organs of government and the services that its population enjoyed in various degrees. It is not the place here to describe these in detail, yet my use of the term ‘services’ is significant. Willaert speaks of ‘governmentality as the power of freedom and conduct in relation to colonial domination’.30 The colonial citizens of the Venetian Empire appeared generally to have fitted within this definition: they voluntarily acquiesced to the state’s power because of the benefits and services it brought them despite their exclusion from certain rights.31 In fact, there was a queue of independent polities desiring to

and having to pay special tax levies. Foreigners of extra-colonial birth formed a further group: for most of the period manpower (especially with the recurring bouts of plague) was at a premium and various enticements, including colonial citizenship, were offered to immigrants, whether on the land or in the army: David Jacoby, ‘Citoyens, sujets et protégés de Venise et de Gênes en Chypre du XIIIe au XVe siècle’, in Recherches sur la Méditerranée orientale du XIIe au XVe siécle: peuples, sociétés, économies (London: Variorum, 1979), 159–88; Francisco Apellániz, ‘Venetian Trading Networks in the Medieval Mediterranean’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History xliv, no. 2 (2013): 157–79. 30 Thijs Willaert, ‘Postcolonial Studies after Foucault: Discourse, Discipline, Biopower, and Governmentality as Travelling Concepts’ (PhD diss., Justus-Liebig University, 2012), 163. 31 Francisco Apellániz has used network analysis of an archive of notarial documents from Alexandria in 1418–22 to analyse the connections between those mentioned in the documents and how Greek and Jewish merchants were key to the functioning of the commodity-trading system: Francisco Apellániz, ‘Venetian Trading Networks in the Medieval Mediterranean’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History xliv, no. 2 (2013): 157–79.

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join the empire.32 Security was their prime concern, but opportunities for trade, competent administration and a seemingly just legal system – there was the right of appeal direct to the Venetian assembly by colonial citizens – must have played their part.33 The acceptance of Venetian commercial law by citizens of other states, in a way very similar to the use of British maritime law in modern shipping contracts, provides one more example of how we must look at networks and non-physical powers beyond territorial borders in defining the extent of the empire. Very early in the twelfth century the Republic, if we define an empire only by its land borders, was also already extending taxation in an extra-territorial way through the introduction of Venetian weights and measures – a service for which there was a charge – wherever it could, even within the powerful Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem in the twelfth century and Mamluk Egypt in the thirteenth century.34 On Negroponte, this occurred over a century before the incorporation of the island into the empire as a formal colony in 1390.35

The extent of the empire Having considered the factors that tied the Stato da Mar together, focusing on its population and their acceptance of extra-territorial Venetian jurisdiction, not simply its territory, we are now faced with the challenge of defining its bounds. Exclusive Venetian quarters, where its merchants held lodging and warehouses, existed in cities from Constantinople to Alexandria. The focus of the expatriate community in each was the mercantile ‘loggia’, a place where patricians and In the early fourteenth century, the area of Ptelion (on the mainland north of Negroponte), threatened by the Catalans to the south, came under Venetian protection; in 1392 Tinos and Mykonos; in 1489 Cyprus was absorbed by the Republic. Monemvasia in the Southern Peloponnese was refused its protection; even the large city of Byzantine Thessaloniki came under the empire’s protection in 1423, although to little avail. 33 Thus, in 1452 a delegation from the Jewish population on Negroponte travelled to Venice: Thiriet, Régestes des Délibérations du Sénat de Venice concernant la Romanie, no. 2867. In 1413, a committee representing citizens petitioned to seek greater protection for the island, reduction of enforced labour on state works and hunting expeditions by state officials, to report on abuses of power by administrators, and to restrict state positions to those with at least five years residence on the island: Thiriet, Régestes des Délibérations du Sénat de Venice concernant la Romanie, no. 1475. 34 By 1107, this was being imposed on Venetian merchants in Constantinople. In 1145 it had been introduced in Rhaidostos in the Marmara Sea; by 1185 a judge had also been appointed: David Jacoby, ‘The Expansion of Venetian Government in the Eastern Mediterranean until the Late Thirteenth Century’, in Il Commonwealth veneziano tra 1204 e la fine della Repubblica: Venezia 6–9, March 2013, ed. Gherardo Ortalli et al. (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, 2015), 73–106. 35 Andrew Blackler, ‘The Medieval Landscape of Euboea (Negroponte): A Framework for Interpreting the Byzantine and Frankish Towers of Greece’ (PhD diss., University of Birmingham, 2020), 67. 32

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merchants mingled, and official business was transacted.36 An inscription on a fresco of one in the northern Italian town of Rovereto is instructive:37 I am the lion of whom no one controls an empire of broader territory The land and the sea are subject to me, and I administer justice Beware to whoever is of evil: He who commits crimes I punish with my sword

This sums up in a few words how the Venetians viewed their empire, and how it functioned. Their claim to have the broadest territorial empire, because of the relative lack of land under their direct control, can only be sustained by looking beyond territorial boundaries to the extent of their commodity trade. In this context, the use of the Latin word fretum meaning a bounded sea or strait (the Mediterranean?) rather than the simple mare is significant. The established routes of the encanto convoys provide a general structure to delineate the empire but are insufficient. Trade of itself does not define national borders. As the inscription emphasizes, we must also look at the practical reach of the Venetian administrative and judicial system, and its naval power to enforce justice: in this way we have what Venetian citizens and merchants would have seen as the pillars of their empire. The exclusive Venetian quarter in each region was in modern parlance effectively a ‘free-trade zone’, but it possessed critically (as noted above) something in addition – an extra-territorial legal jurisdiction, which for commercial transactions the Byzantine empire had even granted over its own citizens.38 The decisions of its judges were accepted by citizen and foreign merchant alike because of the value of access to its trading network (or rather the penalties of exclusion), the extensive web of its secret service, and, in an era when the sea provided the highways of commerce, the coercive factor of

One is recorded in Negroponte: Sathas, Documents inédits relatifs à l’histoire de la Grèce au Moyen Age, II, no. 326 (1403). Such buildings were common and by the fifteenth century were documented in nearly all the Venetian possessions in the eastern Mediterranean: Patricia Fortini-Brown, ‘The Venetian Loggia: Representation, Exchange, and Identity in Venice’s Colonial Empire’, in Viewing Greece: Cultural and Political Agency in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean, ed. Sharon J. Gerstel (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016). 37 My translation: ‘Sum Leo quo nullus possedit latius orbe / imperium: paret terra fretumque mihi / et justiciam facio: caveat sibi quisque malorum: / Ulciscor scelera qui secat ense meo’ – recorded in the travelogue of Marin Sanuto (1473). Although slightly stilted, I have tried to stay close to the original; ‘territory’ rather than ‘world’ is used for the translation of orbe: Itineraro di Marin Sanuto per la Terraferma Veneziana nell’anno MCCCCLXXIII [1473], ed. Andrea de Conti Giovanelli (Padova: Tipografia del Seminario, 1847), 94. 38 By the treaty of 1198. This was possibly inspired by similar powers in its quarter of Acre and in its section of the Lordship of Tyre in 1125: Jacoby, The Expansion of Venetian Government in the Eastern Mediterranean until the Late Thirteenth Century. 36

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Figure 1.4  Venetian territory and effective empire in the fourteenth century.39

Venetian naval power.40 In effect, it was the economic interrelationship between the citizen and the state based on commodity trade as opposed to the extent of its physical territory that defined the frontiers of the empire, its breadth being limited only by the Republic’s protective naval umbrella. Figure 1.4 shows the extent of the Venetian Empire – the practical Stato da Mar – based on this definition. The huge disparity between this and the extent of Venetian territorial holdings is immediately clear. A simple two-dimensional map, marking out Venetian holdings in a method similar to the ‘red’ used to distinguish territories of the British Empire on many early twentieth-century world maps, cannot do justice to its practical size. Possible alternative approaches exist. In a Cyprus is included here as a Venetian possession, but it only fully became part of the empire in 1489. Similarly, the island of Tenedos was lost in 1381 following the war of Choggia with Genoa, and Negroponte was annexed by the Ottomans in 1470. I have also not included the Black Sea, where trading posts existed, yet the projection of Venetian naval power was limited. The delineation of the empire is therefore only indicative of its size. 40 Yadira González de Lara has postulated that the economic rents generated from being a member of Venice’s merchant class obviated the need for public coercion (as in Genoa) to enforce legal decisions. She also argues that this was accompanied by an information system network of Venetian administrators, scribes on voyages and other public officers, which provided the investors back in the city with the information necessary to verify the veracity of merchant accounts. In this the role of the Venetian Secret Service was critical: Yadira Gonzalez De Lara, ‘The Secret of Venetian Success: A Public-order, Reputation-Based Institution’, European Review of Economic History 12, no. 3 (2008): 247–85. 39

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recent book, Anne Reinhardt has utilized the term semi-colonialism to describe the extent of European colonial powers’ control and influence on nineteenth-century China beyond the territories they had formally colonized.41 Yet the territories under direct Venetian control are so small relative to its total practical reach that while using such an approach, we must define it as a semi-colonial empire – an obvious absurdity. Similarly, we might be tempted to use descriptions such as indirect rule or informal empire, both terms Ann Stoler has termed ‘unhelpful euphemisms, not working concepts’.42 Should we redefine ‘formal’? Portuguese contemporaries also saw their emerging empire as extending beyond simple territorial limits, but to do so would require a wholesale redefinition of ‘empire’.43 One way that may best encapsulate the empire’s breadth without falling foul of a theoretical exceptionalism is to think of it as a ‘virtual’ entity. It may seem anachronistic to use a word that we automatically link to the modern internet, and it was used in just this way to describe Microsoft’s dominant position in a 1999 US court judgement.44 Three years later, however, it was utilized in an article by Martin Walker to describe the reach of the United States’ own power beyond its borders.45 He argued that the country had outgrown the brisk dictum of Lord Palmerston, twice British prime minister in the mid-nineteenth century – ‘Trade without rule where possible; trade with rule where necessary’: simply its supra-national power and the international demand for its products had made ‘rule’ unnecessary. In this, we have the cusp of an idea. The Venetian Republic had deliberately eschewed the creation of a continental empire in 1204 to follow a tenet expounded 650 years later. It had decided to focus on the profits from commodity trade despite the fact that the conquest of continental Greece was achieved with an army numbering only 1,500 men, an investment which it could easily have underwritten, and had in fact indirectly paid for.46 This term is not new and was first used by early twentieth-century Marxist critics of imperialism to designate those areas of the world – including China, Persia, Siam and the Ottoman Empire – that were not formal colonies yet under the control of an external power or powers: Anne Reinhardt, Navigating Semi-colonialism: Shipping, Sovereignity, and Nation Building in China, 1860–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2018). 42 Ann Stoler, ‘On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty’, Public Culture 18, no. 1 (2006): 125–46. For a discussion of the term as regards the British Empire, see Antony G. Hopkins, ‘British Imperialism: A Review and a Revision’, Refresh, Economic History Society 7 (1988): 5–8. 43 They included items (the oceans, trading monopolies) which today are viewed as outside the bounds of national sovereignty. Malyn Newitt, ‘Formal and Informal Empire in the History of Portuguese Expansion’, Portuguese Studies, 17, ‘Homage to Charles Boxer’ (2001). 44 Debbie Lee and Tim Fulford, ‘Virtual Empires’, Cultural Critique 44 (2000): 3–28. 45 Martin Walker, ‘America’s Virtual Empire’, World Policy Journal 19, no. 2 (2002): 13–20. 46 Its only substantial formal territorial expansion up to the mid-fifteenth century was its settler colonization of Crete, the rights to which it purchased from Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat, who used the money to finance his own campaign of conquest of Central Greece. 41

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Empires comprise many links that unite them.47 In the feudal and mercantile society of this period possibly the strongest was the family.48 But religious ties were as important, and the Venetians used (and abused) their power over the church to great effect.49 The Republic had identified that the essence of the Stato da Mar was not its territorial extent but its merchant population. Its structure, reflecting Foucault’s definition of the modern state, was provided at a base level by citizens’ commercial interrelationships, at a secondary level by how they related to the state and it to them, and finally in the joint interface of state and population with neighbouring polities. These created effective borders in what, to continue the ‘virtual’ analogy, we might term a ‘fourth dimension’.

The empire in context In the above section, I have constructed the image of a broad powerful Eastern Mediterranean empire, yet it seems to have remained essentially a footnote in major historical works and analyses. It is lost in the ‘medieval’ void between the Late Antique and Renaissance periods. Can we consider it the first ‘modern’ empire? This semi-democratic republic broke away from the centralized sovereign empire of the Byzantines in the ninth century, and for the first time established an economy prioritizing commodity trade over agricultural exploitation, thus allowing for the emergence of the merchant above the traditional landed patrician and military classes. It introduced, additionally, a new apparatus of government and professional administration to manage and control this new complex economy. But its development also included other innovations driven by the international nature of its commodity trade. Merchants and mariners alike needed to understand the connections in this maritime network of ports, polities, suppliers and customers. From the See, for instance, ‘Webs of Empire’, which suggests that there is an importance in understanding the ‘history of connections’: Tony Ballantyne, Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past (Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2012), 296–7. 48 Territories were also tightly controlled by monitoring marriages, especially of widows. One Assembly minute forbade the widow of the Duke of Naxos from remarrying without its consent: Thiriet, Déliberations des assemblées venitiennes concernant la Romanie, no. 642 (1383). 49 Following the conquest of Constantinople, they insisted that not only their candidate, Morosini, be appointed as Latin (Catholic) Patriarch but enjoined on him (forcibly, it appears) to elect only Venetians or Venetian residents of ten-year standing into the clergy of Hagia Sophia, thus potentially indirectly controlling the vast ecclesiastical and monastic holdings throughout the Aegean. They are reputed to have said in the partition negotiations ‘Imperium est vestrum, nos habebimus patriarchatum’ [the empire is yours; we have the Patriarchate]: Annales Herbipolenses, ad annum 1204, ed. Georg Heinrich Pertz [Monumenta Germaniae historica Scriptores xvi, 1859], 12, ll.37–38; Madden, Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice, 182. 47

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beginning of the fourteenth century the Republic, developing the portolan chart, began to map its maritime realm – the Mediterranean basin. This was not a Venetian invention – this accolade probably rests with the Genoese – and its roots possibly lay in the Ptolemaic cartography of Alexandria and sea maps of the Byzantine naval commands stretched out between Asia Minor and Sicily.50 Such charts, however, were to provide the foundations for Portuguese and Spanish colonial expansion around the Atlantic Ocean, and prototypes for British and French nautical charts of the eighteenth century.51 The outbreak of the Plague of 1347–8 and recurring bouts over the following centuries are carefully noted in the minutes of the Assembly and Senate.52 The Venetians must have been acutely aware of the natural dangers of disease created by the maritime empire for their densely populated island city. Such risks prompted the establishment of quarantine stations and probably acted as a modernizing catalyst in healthcare in the city itself (possibly drawing on contact with, and institutions in, the Arab world), just as Covid-19 is affecting twentyfirst-century international trade and leading to evolution of our economic and social life.53 This is a theme taken up by Alexander More, who argues that Venice instituted the first comprehensive public health and welfare system in the Western world, which brings us back again to Foucault’s focus on the ‘modern’ state’s preoccupation with the security and welfare of its population and analyses of later colonial empires.54 While nothing can compare to the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century in north-western Europe, the manufacture of products such as silk and glass was already being undertaken on a large scale around the Mediterranean in the Late Medieval period and one significant, but subtle, change was promoting further international commodity trade at this time. Unlike Constantinople and Baghdad, whose urban population and political elite effectively consumed

The surviving early fourteenth-century Venetian portolan charts were made by Pietro Vesconte, who had emigrated from Genoa to work in the city. For an analysis of possibly the earliest portolan chart, the Carte Pisane, see Evangelos Livieratos and Chrysoula Boutoura, ‘Carte Pisane and Its Coastline Shape’, e-Perimetron 13, no. 3 (2018): 161–81. 51 Joaquim Filipe Figueiredo Alves Gaspar, ‘From the Portolan Chart of the Mediterranean to the Latitude Chart of the Atlantic: Cartometric Analysis and Modeling’ (PhD diss., Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2010); William Boelhower, ‘Framing a New Ocean Genealogy: The Case of Venetian Cartography in the Early Modern Period’, Atlantic Studies 15, no. 2 (2018): 279–97. 52 These are noted for 1347–9, 1426, 1448 and 1458: Blackler, ‘The Medieval Landscape of Euboea’, 298–9. 53 A short distance from the central port of Negroponte, a small island is shown on the early fourteenthcentury portolan charts of Pietro Vesconte with a name derived from Male Mesa (the Plague house): Blackler, ‘Euboea During the 14th Century’ (In Press). 54 Alexander More, ‘At the Origins of Welfare Policy: Law and the Economy in the Pre-modern Mediterranean’ (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2014). 50

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the products of their empires, the growing Italian cities were producers – a differentiation categorized in the literature by the terms ‘political’ and ‘economic’, the latter applicable to most modern cities.55 Already in the tenth century, Venetian vessels were encouraged to ship raw materials back to the city – at first cullet, then raw silk and dyes for their own nascent glass and silk industries. The mass construction of vessels in a new shipyard followed, facilitating a further virtuous spiral of growth and improvement. This whole process can be linked to what some historians refer to as the Twelfth Century Renaissance.56 It can thus be seen that the establishment of the Venetian ‘modern’ colonial empire was not taking place within a vacuum but as part of a general wave of progress. Much of this was founded on the (re)discovery of ancient and medieval theoretical and technical texts well known in the East, but a great deal was also due to new tools of business and organization developed in the ongoing commercial revolution of the period. Chris Wickham, echoing Edward Said, writes of ‘the western European construction of the East as the history-less Other’.57 Recent work on colonial empires in a similar vein appears to ignore the role of commodity trade in this early Renaissance period. The focus has been on ‘exclusion of the colonized from humanity (colonialism’s racism), or their exclusion from the institutions of political sovereignty (colonialism’s false liberalism)’.58 Yet, the study of the Venetian Empire reminds us that empires need not always be the imperialist systems that followed the Spanish age of exploration in the fifteenth century, and that many of the seemingly ‘modern’ management and control systems had been invented 500 years earlier.

Conclusion The Venetian Republic by the twelfth century already possessed an informal network of merchants involved in exploitation of the opportunities for cabotage within the Byzantine Empire, and international commodity trade in the Eastern Michael E. Smith and José Lobo, ‘Cities through the Ages: One Thing or Many?’, Frontiers in Digital Humanities 6 (2019). [https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fdigh.2019.00012/full, accessed December 2021]. 56 Charles Burnett, ‘The Twelfth Century Renaissance’, in The Cambridge History of Science, eds. David C. Lindberg and Michael H. Shank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 365–85. 57 He sees this as even more important as regards the treatment of the Arab world: Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400–800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3; Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1979). 58 David Scott, ‘Colonial Governmentality’, in Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality, and Life Politics, ed. Jonathan Xavier Inda (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 25–49. 55

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Mediterranean between Italy, Asia Minor and the Arab states to the south. The capture of Constantinople in 1204 provided the catalyst for its metamorphosis into a colonial empire, although the formalities of this were not fully evolved until the fourteenth century. The Republic’s semi-democratic constitution, relatively tiny population and extended lines of communication to peripheral trading posts promoted a focus on consensus rather than force as the cement that bound this empire together, something which can be analysed utilizing the concepts of security and governmentality expounded by Foucault. Political appointees were transformed into a professional cadre of administrators, new financing instruments were created that effectively increased the money supply available for the expansion of commodity trade, and commercial risk was reduced by the introduction of the Encanto system, the concept of limited liability, and the emergence of an insurance market. With a network of tentacles extending from the island-city, double-entry book-keeping and the new profession of accounting developed to record and control the complexities of this evolving economic system.59 In parallel, Venetian weights and measures, and commercial law grew to transcend political boundaries and provide recourse for shortfalls in the international system of exchange. The Venetians themselves viewed their empire as going beyond formal territorial limits. In effect, it was defined not by land or sea borders but by paper treaties, the perambulations of its merchant diaspora and the exercise of Venetian hard and soft diplomatic power. The colonial citizenry and their commercial relationships, guided and supported by an omnipresent network of state-appointed administrators and jurists, effectively delineated the empire’s boundaries. By defining this as a ‘virtual’ empire, viewing commercial relationships and their associated support and control networks as a fourth dimension, we can treat the empire as a unity, potentially reconciling twodimensional analyses that artificially separate imperial sea and land possessions, distinguish between formal and informal connections or attempt to describe empires by creating an ‘exceptional’ framework. This chapter, arising from my research into the medieval landscape and the social and economic evolution of the island of Euboea, set out to demonstrate that commodity trade was an essential defining feature of the Venetian empire

The origins and invention of all these are largely unknown but can generally be allocated to the Italian city states: Alan Sangster, ‘The Genesis of Double Entry Bookkeeping’, The Accounting Review 91, no. 1 (2016): 299–315.

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and that the administrative and economic instruments developed to support and exploit this trade provided the foundations for the establishment of later colonial empires. It has shown in parallel, however, that the concepts of Foucault, whether as a toolkit to analyse a modern state or in utilizing his term ‘governmentality’ to define a post-sovereign ‘modern’ political system, can be applied to this Late Medieval republican empire. Yet this is directly at odds with Foucault himself, who sees the processes of governmentality in the sixteenth century as ‘shattering the structures of feudalism [leading] to the establishment of the great territorial, administrative and colonial states’.60 He thus ignores how the commercial revolution had affected governmental institutions and private organizations over the previous 500 years, and even the existence of the Venetian Empire. The Venetian Empire’s longevity, stretching from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries, and study of the colonial activities of other Italian Communes (primarily Genoa and Florence) within the framework of governmentality, may thus provide a bridge between the modern state – bypassing the feudal period and reducing its relevance – and the organizational, technological and structural features of the ancient sovereign Byzantine and Arab empires, with which its commodity trading network had brought it into intimate contact.

Burchell et al., The Foucault Effect, 87.

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West Africa, the Akan gold trade and Portugal’s global ambitions in the sixteenth century Edmond Smith

Gold is not the first commodity that springs to mind when we think of the early modern Portuguese empire – we are more familiar with the transport of pepper and other spices from Asia, or the production of sugar in America. Yet, in the sixteenth century, gold played a key role in how the Portuguese Empire was conceived as a connected, global system. Gold provided not just a valued commodity that could be returned to Portugal for consumption or manufacture but was a vital part of the machinery of international trade, sought after by states and merchants to fund activities at home and abroad. As well as supplying the Portuguese metropole with currency and various luxury objects, gold was also required by merchants seeking to break into trading networks across the world.1 In this way, the Portuguese interest in and approach to the gold trade in West Africa was necessitated and shaped by entanglements between imperial networks and commodities across the world. Focusing on the gold trade in West Africa encourages us, therefore, to ask different questions about the practices and directions of Portuguese colonial and imperial development.2 However, Portuguese empire building is only part of the story and the commodity chains that stemmed from the gold mines of West Africa were also In a similar vein, silver would become integral to the shape and structure of the Spanish world economy, albeit in radically different circumstances to the conquest of Potosi (and other mines) in South America, rather than through primarily commercial exchange as was the case in West Africa. For how bullion could shape economic and colonial systems, see Jesús Bohorquez, ‘Linking the Atlantic and Indian Oceans: Asian textiles, Spanish Silver, Global Capital, and the Financing of the Portuguese-Brazilian Slave Trade (c. 1760–1808)’, Journal of Global History 15, no. 1 (2020): 19–38. 2 For broader studies of Portugal’s global empire, see Francisco Bethencourt and Kirti Chaudhuri, eds., História da Expansão Portuguesa, 5 vols (Lisbon: Circulo de Leitores, 1998); Diogo Ramada Curto and Francisco Bethencourt, eds., Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, Os Descobrimentos e a Economia Mundial (Lisbon: Arcadia, 1963). 1

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shaped by the specific, local conditions of the Akan gold trade, whereby Akan rulers and traders were vital participants.3 Gold, extracted from the land but traditionally serving the Akan as a high-value trade product, is a commodity that served to complicate and expand on traditional interpretations of imperial economies. Throughout the sixteenth century and indeed into the nineteenth century, when the British conquered the inland Ashanti state, the ‘highly auriferous area in the forest country between the Komoe and Volta rivers’ – known more accessibly as the Akan goldfields – remained beyond the reach of European colonial powers.4 This meant that, in this part of West Africa, rather than seeing ‘local people … engaging with the new commercial crop imperatives fostered by European colonial rule’, we instead see local people expanding the production of existing goods and using their control of this valuable commodity to influence and shape the Portuguese imperial system that developed on their boundaries.5 Consequently, this generated a system of exchange and imperial activity that had much in common with the wider Portuguese Empire, but was also uniquely influenced by the demands of local actors who maintained such a strong hold over the sources of gold in the Akan interior. Gold therefore serves as a useful medium for analysing how entanglements between colonial and non-colonial networks contributed to shaping not only the Portuguese imperial system but also practices of trade and exchange within this locality that co-existed alongside more exploitative practices on the part of the Portuguese Empire elsewhere in the world. The Akan gold trade therefore presents an important point of contestation and entanglement at a key point within the networks of exchange that made gold such an important part of commercial systems across the globe. As Gary Gereffi, Miguel Korzeniewicz and Roberto Korzeniewicz have elucidated, global commodity chains consist ‘of a set of interorganisational networks clustered

The Akan (which include the Acanes, Fante, Ashanti, Akwamu, Akyem and Wassa) were the predominant ethnic group in this region of West Africa, connected by a common dialect (Twi) and culture. Other ethnic groups, such as the Dangme, were also present, especially along the Atlantic coast, and would have been part of the local and regional commercial and political landscape. Other African merchants present may have included Wangara or Hausa traders from further to the north and north-east. For the most detailed account of the ethnic and political make-up of the region, see Bato’ora Ballong-Wen-Mewuda, São Jorge da Mina, 1482–1637: la vie d’un comptoir portugais en Afrique occidentale (Lisbon and Paris: Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, 1993). 4 Ivor Wilks, ‘Wangara, Akan and Portuguese in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: 1, The Matter of Bitu’, The Journal of African History 23, no. 3 (1982): 336–7. 5 The endurance of similar practices in relation to indigenous agricultural commodities as a form of subverting colonial designs is recognized in: Haaro Maat and Sandip Hazareesingh, ‘Introduction’, in Local Subversions of Colonial Cultures: Commodities and Anti-Commodities in Global History, eds. Haaro Maat and Sandip Hazareesingh (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 1, 1–9. 3

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around one commodity or product, linking households, enterprises and states to one another within the world-economy’.6 This is complicated further in the case of gold, which, as well as being a material used in manufacture, was also used for currency and as a prominent display object in its own right. Consequently, the interconnection generated by gold can easily be seen not only to cross households, enterprises and states, but also as a lubricating factor within the movement of other commodities on the early modern global stage.7 Yet, as well as providing liquidity that served an array of markets, the practical control of gold production on the part of the Akan, as noted above, generated in this context a commodity chain that was deeply contested. Akan and Portuguese actors sought to create the conditions for orderly, stable trade, but strict borders and a sometimes oppositional relationship between an, at times, expansionist Portuguese Empire and local rulers meant that ‘interorganizational networks’ in the region were required to operate in a cross-cultural and trans-imperial environment. This sort of commercial environment was not uncommon in the early modern world and commerce often took place within contested spaces, where overlapping commercial networks were not underpinned by a single set of rules, regulations, laws, behaviours, customs or institutions.8 In these sites, exchange depended on personal relationships, communal governance and local institutions as much as it did on imperial government. Rather than ‘instantaneous transaction between two strangers’, global, cross-cultural trade depended on ‘prolonged credit relations and business cooperation between merchants who shared implicit and explicit agreements about the rules of exchange’, and these could not be enforced easily by the Portuguese Empire in West Africa.9 Thus, while there has been considerable focus on Europe’s imperial expansion in terms of describing the practices of global trade, empires could often do little to enforce common practices within their dominions,

Gary Gereffi, Miguel Korzeniewicz and Roberto Korzeniewicz, ‘Introduction’, in Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism, eds. Gary Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewicz (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 1994), 2, 1–14. 7 The role of commodities in shaping not only trade but also gift giving, diplomacy and political economy is explored in Sophus Reinert and Pernille Røge, eds., The Political Economy of Empire in the Early Modern World (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013). 8 Edmond Smith, ‘Commercial Culture’, in Merchant Cultures: A Global Approach to Spaces, Representations and Worlds of Trade, 1500–1800, eds. Francisco Bethencourt and Catia Antunes (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 70–90. 9 Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and CrossCultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 1–2. 6

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let  alone globally.10 Instead, practices of trade in contested spaces created hybridized commercial cultures, wherein economic actors’ behaviours were influenced through their participation in cross-cultural exchange rather than being imposed by powerful states or empires. Indeed, Sebouh Aslanian has suggested that until such contested spaces began to disappear in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘for the most part after the erection of cultural, linguistic and national boundaries’, communities that were most successful at crossing jurisdictional boundaries were uniquely competitive in international commerce.11 In West Africa, Akan control of gold enabled local merchants to transgress imperial boundaries, both in terms of choosing where and with whom to trade, but also by refusing to participate in imperial structures at all when they were deemed unsuitable. This relationship between participation and transgression is a key asset in using commodities as a focal point for global history – gold’s value to the Portuguese depended on it crossing borders between non-colonial and colonial world systems.12 Empire building in West Africa, then, was shaped to a significant degree by Portuguese demand for a commodity that could not be produced within the specific territory that they controlled. This was not an uncommon experience, and ‘jurisdictional conflicts were ubiquitous in early modern Europe and its overseas empires’, meaning that merchants often operated in or across imperial boundaries.13 As Ana Crespo Solana has suggested, in reference to the Iberian Atlantic experience, these structures created ‘network-based merchant empire[s]’ that depended on transnational participation from merchants.14 In contexts like this, the colonial presence was shaped by the ways early modern merchants ‘worked across geopolitical, linguistic, and religious boundaries’.15 With this in mind, to understand spaces such as West Africa and the Akan gold trade, our interpretation should not rest on anachronistic attempts to identify ‘modernity’ through ‘the creation of impersonal markets in which contracts

Catia Antunes and Amelia Polónia, eds., Beyond Empires: Global, Self-Organising, Cross-Imperial Networks, 1500–1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2015). 11 Sebouh Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 66. 12 Jonathan Curry-Machado, ed., The Global and Local History of Commodities of Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013). 13 Trivellato, Familiarity of Strangers, 157–61. 14 Ana Crespo Solana, ‘A Network-Based Merchant Empire: Dutch Trade in the Hispanic Atlantic (1680–1740)’, in Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680–1800: Linking Empires, Bridging Borders, eds. Gert Oostindie and Jessica V. Roitman (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 139–58. 15 Trivellato, Familiarity of Strangers, 1. 10

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and enforcing institutions inspired buyers and sellers to bargain’.16 Commercial actors in such spaces were commonly operating as ‘trans-imperial subjects’, ‘men and women who straddled and brokered political, linguistic, and religious boundaries between’ different imperial and cultural regimes.17 Through these means, merchants ‘operated simultaneously in different colonial settings’ and contributed to complex inter-imperial and cross-cultural commodity networks that were rarely controlled by European empires overseas.18 Yet, even as these practices shaped the commercial conditions and commodity chains that functioned in West Africa, they also butted against the experience and expectations of Portuguese colonial administrators in other parts of the world. In this chapter, the aspirations and approaches of the Portuguese Empire in relation to the Akan gold trade in West Africa are examined as a foundation for examining two reports from the 1570s, whose authors drew on experiences in India and Brazil to respond to competition with other European empires, to recommend the establishment of a much stricter level of colonial control over the region. In this way, the reports not only are a rich source of information about existing practices of exchange in relation to the gold trade but also show how changing ideas about empire building within a wider, global context of Portuguese imperialism were changing how these commentators understood not just the gold trade, but also how it connected and was influenced by wider trans-imperial interests and inter-linking commodity chains across the empire. These two reports, the first written by an anonymous commentator likely stationed in Africa and the second by Lisbon resident Jorge da Silva, and both held at the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal in Lisbon, reveal how this transitional moment in this history of the Portuguese Empire was interpreted by interested contemporaries.19 They show how early modern conceptualization of global trading and colonial activity shaped how these authors understood the West African gold trade. Through examining these reports, we can interrogate Portuguese ideas about the relationship between trade and empire, the ways imperial and private activity interlinked, and how the movement of Ibid., 1. Natalie Rothman, ‘Between Venice and Istanbul: Trans-Imperial Subjects and Cultural Mediation in the Early Modern Mediterranean’ (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2006), xiv, 40–81. 18 Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, ‘Crossing Empires: Portuguese, Sephardic, and Dutch Business Networks in the Atlantic Slave Trade’, The Americas 68, no. 1 (2011): 7, 17. 19 The first report: Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon (BNL), Ms 8457, ff. 100–10. Information about Elmina, 29  September 1572 (reproduced in Antonio Brasio, ed., Monumenta Missionaria Africana, vols. 1–6 (Lisbon: Agencia Geral Do Ultramar, 1952–5) [henceforth, MMA], vol. 3, pp. 89–119). The second report: BNL, Ms 8048, ff. 107–11. Memorandum of Jorge da Silva to Sebastião I, 22 August 1573 (MMA, vol. 3, pp. 114–18). 16 17

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administrators and information across the Portuguese Empire contributed to changing perceptions about the relative values of different commodities across the Portuguese Empire. As much as Portuguese colonial activity had been initially defined on the Costa da Mina by their relations with the Akan, in these texts we can see how Portuguese consideration of the gold trade took place within a connected, competitive international trading system. As part of the wider Portuguese Empire’s ‘reorientation’, these recommendations reflect changing ambitions on the part of the Portuguese in West Africa, but also how efforts to impose colonial boundaries and authority could serve to undermine their position within local commercial networks. As we will see, however, Portuguese imperial interests did not define the shape of Portugal’s engagement with the gold trade alone; empire building in West Africa was also shaped by the demands of Akan trading partners, and the threat of competition from other Europeans operating in what would become an increasingly trans-imperial space.20 In reference to the Akan, especially, this example highlights how local commercial practices transgressed the institutions of formal empire established on Africa’s Atlantic coast. The reach of imperial elites was dramatically limited by the local environment, the agency of local actors to choose where and with whom they traded, and the limitations of maritime empires in directly controlling and exploiting sources of production that were distant from the coast. The Portuguese soon learned that controlling West Africa’s gold trade in a globalizing world was not possible and their colonial efforts in Africa were not self-contained. Instead, their efforts to control trade and their proposals to mitigate the effects when they accepted they could not, reveal how early modern people navigated colonial conditions that were reliant on, and responsive to, wider movement and global processes.

The Akan gold trade Known in Portuguese sources as the Costa do Ouro [Gold Coast] and Costa da Mina [Coast of the Mine], the region of West Africa stretching from Axim to the Volta delta was quickly defined by its first European visitors in recognition of its most valuable commodity: gold. Knowledge of the great wealth of gold

This aligns with the experience of Portuguese imperial actors in Asia, who were similarly constrained by local demands and expectations. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500– 1700: A Political and Economic History, 2nd edn. (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), 115–52.

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that flowed from the region was known to Europeans at least by the middle of the fifteenth century – but the precise source remained a mystery. For instance, the Genoese merchant Antonius Malfante, who was based at Timbuktu as an agent for a major commercial house in his home city, reported that he ‘often enquired where the gold was found and collected’, but was only told by his local patron that ‘I was fourteen years in the land of the blacks, and I have never heard nor seen anyone who could reply from definite knowledge’.21 Similarly, when the Portuguese merchant João Rodrigues wrote from Arguim in 1495 that Timbuktu was where ‘the merchants come who go to the gold mines’ to the south, he was unable to identify a precise location for the source, or even whether it was close to the Atlantic coast.22 Some travellers to the region, such as the Venetian trader Alvise Cadamosto, shared wild rumours in an effort to explain the trade – in his case an account of so-called silent trade, where gold was obtained from traders who were neither seen nor heard.23 Exploration along the African coast was, in part, driven by a desire to access this precious commodity and eventually, in the 1470s, Portuguese traders reached sites on the coast where local Akan people had access to gold and were willing to trade. The coast itself, as the Portuguese would soon discover, was not the source of gold mines themselves, but represented the southernmost terminus of a longdistance trading network (dominated by the gold trade) that connected Akan merchants with markets as far away as Bitu, Timbuktu and even Morocco and Egypt.24 It was these Akan merchants, who carried gold from the interior to the coast to trade with the Portuguese, who had access to the ‘highly auriferous area in the forest country between the Komoe and Volta rivers and known more accessibly as the Akan goldfields’, that were, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, one of the most consistently high producing sources of gold in the world.25 In 1481, on reaching the Atlantic coast nearest to these inland ‘mines’, a Portuguese expedition led by Diogo de Azambuja with the intention of establishing a permanent trading post, met with the Caramança, the ruler of the

Translated in Gerald R. Crone, ed., The Voyages of Cadamosto and Other Documents on Western Africa in the Second Half of the Fifteenth Century (London: Hakluyt Society, 1937), 85–91. 22 Translated in Wilks, ‘The Matter of Bitu’, 340–1. 23 For Cadamosto’s account, Crone, Voyages of Cadamosto, 22–3. 24 For an overview of the Akan commercial economy, see Kwame Y. Daaku, ‘Aspects of Precolonial Akan Economy’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies 5, no. 2 (1972): 235–47. For the northern Akan trading centres, see Merrick Posnansky, ‘Begho: Life and Times’, Journal of West African History 1, no. 2 (2015): 95–118; Ann Stahl, ‘The Archaeology of Global Encounters Viewed from Banda, Ghana’, African Archaeological Review 16 (1999): 5–81. 25 Wilks, ‘The Matter of Bitu’, 336–7. 21

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local village, who arrived with an extensive escort. Accounts of this first meeting highlighted the focus of Portuguese interest in the region. The chronicler Rui de Pina later recorded how ‘the king came naked, and his arms and legs were covered with chains and trinkets of gold in many shapes, and countless bells and large beads of gold were handing from the hair of his beard and his head’.26 Joáo de Barros similarly described how the noblemen ‘wore rings and golden jewels on their heads and beards’ and ‘their king, Caramança, came in their midst, his legs and arms covered with golden bracelets and rings, a collar round his neck, from which hung some small bells, and in his plaited beard golden bars’.27 Quite literally, in these accounts, the African ruler was a physical embodiment of the commodity chains leading into the Akan interior. For both Pina and Barros, whether or not their accounts were exaggerated, their representations of this African ruler left little to the imagination about the source of wealth in the region or how limited Portuguese knowledge was about how regional trading networks functioned. Textual material like this helped to generate and stereotype the idea of the region’s wealth in the Portuguese imperial world view. It also served to highlight the value of pre-existing commodity networks that required Portuguese actors to shape their approach to empire in order to access them. In the following year, an agreement with the local ruler facilitated the Portuguese establishment of São Jorge da Mina, a fortress and trading hub on the Atlantic coast, which was intended to allow the Portuguese regular and secure access to the sources of this gold.28 Despite the challenges of catering to their Akan partners, the trade was a success and between 1500 and 1520, upwards of 14,000 ounces of gold was exported each year by the Portuguese.29 This trajectory seems to have been maintained for much of the sixteenth century and looking back in the 1610s, one commentator lamented how, in the past, the trade had returned ‘five hundred, six hundred thousand cruzados in gold’ to Portugal – equivalent

Rui da Pina’s description of ‘The Foundation of the Castle and City of São Jorge da Mina: 1482’ is translated in John Blake, ed. Europeans in West Africa, 1450–1560: Documents to Illustrate the Nature and Scope of Portuguese Enterprise in West Africa, the Abortive Attempt of Castilians to Create an Empire There, and the Early English Voyages to Barbary and Guinea (London: Hakluyt Society, 1942), 73. 27 Joáo de Barros, ‘The Asia of Joáo de Barros’ translated in Crone, Voyages of Cadamosto, 107–18. 28 The most authoritative account of life at São Jorge da Mina remains: Christopher DeCorse, An Archaeology of Elmina: Africans and Europeans on the Gold Coast, 1400–1900 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2001). For the most extensive study of Portuguese activity in the Costa da Mina, see Ballong-Wen-Mewuda, São Jorge da Mina. 29 Alberto da Costa e Silva, A Manilha e o Libambo: a África e a escravidão, de 1500 a 1700 (Rio de Janeiro: Ministério da Cultura, Fundação Biblioteca Nacional, 2002), 156. Ivor Wilks, ‘Wangara, Akan and Portuguese in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: II. The Struggle for Trade’, Journal of African History 23, no. 4 (1982): 463–72. 26

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to approximately 80,000 ounces of gold.30 Despite ambiguity regarding the regularity of these volumes, the dates such returns were realized, and difficulties in calculating approximate value, reports like this do suggest how the gold trade from the Costa da Mina was, at the very least, perceived in Portugal as highly profitable during much of the sixteenth century.31 Although we do not have precise figures for the volume of gold traded across the sixteenth century, we do have snap shots that reveal the practices and exchanges that made the gold trade possible. As Ivor Wilks has shown, the Portuguese on the Costa da Mina were the new entrants in a commercial network that connected the Atlantic and trans-Saharan world systems.32 The Akan and other African traders that they did business with were familiar with trading practices and commodities that flowed from the Malian and Songhai empires to the north, and they were demanding customers. For instance, in 1518, Captain Fernão Lopez Correia complained that Akan traders were not interested in Portuguese products at the low quality and high prices demanded. Thus, when the trader Gonçalo Vaz sought to sell algeravias tenezes (burnouses or hooded cloaks popular in North Africa), he was rebuffed by Akan merchants ‘because the tenezes are made with another pattern’ that they wanted and were not ‘soft and warm, [which was] what they really enjoy, because they use it as during the day as evening’.33 As Vogt has noted, both metalware and textiles sold by the Portuguese were most popular when they could be ‘melted and recast into objects of local design’ or ‘dyed to conform to traditional patterns and colours’ respectively – the Akan traders knew what they traded themselves across the regions and would only part with their gold if they received it.34 However, when goods were offered that did cater to Akan requirements, demand at the fortress was so high that a fully laden ship carrying ‘three thousand manilhas and two hundred and fifty algeravias and two hundred bacyas de myjar’ only provided enough goods as could be ‘taken in one day’.35 A detailed surviving ledger from 1529 to 1531 reveals the range and volume of goods provided by

Biblioteca da Ajuda [BA], 51-IX-25, f. 1. Relation of the discoveries of Costa da Guiné (undated, c. 1613–6). 31 For details of the conversion of currency-to-gold, see ‘Prices, Wages and Rents in Portugal 1300–1910’ project materials at http://pwr-portugal.ics.ul.pt/, accessed 27 January 2021. 32 Wilks, ‘The Struggle for Trade’, 463–72. 33 Arquivo Nacional da Torre de Tombo [ATT], CM, Maço 3, n. 179. Letter from Fernão Lopes Correia to the King, 8 October 1518. 34 John Vogt, ‘Portuguese Gold Trade: An Account Ledger from Elmina, 1529–1531’, Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 14, no. 1 (1973): 94. 35 ATT, CM, Maço 3, n. 180. Letter from Fernão Lopes Correia to the King, 23 June 151[8]. 30

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the Portuguese at São Jorge da Mina. Here, we can see that commodities offered by the Portuguese composed of four main categories: metal hardware (that accounted for 50 per cent of sales); woven fabric (25 per cent); enslaved captives (19 per cent); and a miscellaneous grouping of wine, coris shells, wooden chests, purses and belts that accounted for the rest.36 The Portuguese trade depended on importing commodities from Portugal, the Maghreb and other parts of Africa; goods that were joined by spices and sugar obtained through transcontinental traffic.37 The success of Portuguese merchants in São Jorge da Mina depended on meeting the demands of traders from across the Costa da Mina region, and accessing gold depended not on an extractive relationship but on the encouragement of movement of goods and people through the Portuguese colony. For much of the sixteenth century, these relationships were established and maintained with relative success. However, the establishment and expansion of the gold trade on the Costa da Mina was not happening in isolation and gold was far from the only commodity sought after within the Portuguese empire. In Africa, the Portuguese had already established a number of commercial and colonial possessions, such as Cabo Verde, along the Atlantic coast, and established a more extensive territorial dominion around Luanda after 1575 – sites that would come to dominate the trans-Atlantic slave trade over the coming century, serving both Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas.38 During the same period, Portuguese settlement in India, established at Goa in 1505, and at sites including Kochi (1503), Sofala (1505), Ormuz (1507) and Malacca (1511), embedded the Portuguese Empire into vast, wealthy trading networks that spanned the Indian Ocean world. Here, engagement in diverse trades brought a cornucopia of produce into the Portuguese remit – most famously pepper – and required a careful management of trade to ensure that the demands of new trading partners across the region could be met.39 Extensive Portuguese colonization in Brazil soon followed, especially after the founding of Olinda in 1536, where extractive plantation economies were established, often

Vogt, ‘Portuguese Gold Trade’, 93–103. For the international range of commodities purchased by the Akan with gold, see Wilks, ‘The Struggle for Trade’, 463; Merrick Posnansky, ‘Archaeology, Technology and Akan Civilisation’, Journal of African Studies 2, no. 1 (1975): 33–54. 38 In the earlier fifteenth century, Cabo Verde (or the Upper Guinea Coast in general) was the most common source of enslaved captives, but from the 1570s onwards, Angola and São Tomé became more typical. Marc Eagle, ‘The Early Slave Trade to Spanish America: Caribbean Pathways, 1530–1580’, in The Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic World in the Long Sixteenth Century, eds. Ida Altman and David Wheat (Nebraska: Nebraska University Press, 2019), 139–62. 39 Subrahmanyam, Portuguese Empire, 115–52. 36 37

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dependent on enslaved labour sourced via Portuguese activities in other parts of Africa.40 Together, these imperial acquisitions meant that by the middle of the sixteenth century, the rich gold deposits accessed through trade with the Akan on the Costa da Mina, despite their very considerable returns, were increasingly understood not as a single point of trade, but as one node within a Portuguese imperial network.41 As Subrahmanyam has noted in reference to Portugal’s Asian empire, by the mid-sixteenth century there were considerable debates about whether or not the Crown should maintain its prominent role in organizing (and paying for) the maritime empire. After 1570, corresponding with the period in which the reports about the Costa da Mina discussed below were written, shifting policies contributed to a ‘reorientation’ during which Portuguese actors showed ‘a far greater predilection for territorial adventurism than in any earlier period’.42 This reorientation towards colonial activity contributed towards a ‘gradual retreat from Asia’, that ‘following the initial expansion and the ensuing repositioning to Brazil, changed Portugal’s colonial vocation, from trade and navigation to tropical slave plantations and mineral extraction. It also increased relative gains from overseas activity significantly’.43 These trends had a considerable impact on how contemporaries understood the Portuguese colonial presence in West Africa. However, rather than considering colonial activities in Brazil (or the Americas) as distinct to the more typically trading activity in the Indian Ocean world, the West African experience presents an opportunity for connecting these regions and showing how early modern participants in empire recognized the interrelated concerns of each. Simply put, if the gold trade was de-prioritized in favour of providing enslaved labour for the Brazilian colonies, then the essential supply of bullion to Goa and Malacca would have to be taken into account as an acceptable loss. This connectivity brought with it new competition for resources from the Portuguese state, and changing priorities about how colonial

Daniel Barros Domingues da Silva and David Eltis, ‘The Slave Trade to Pernambuco, 1561–1851’, in Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, eds. David Eltis and David Richardson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 95–129. 41 The period from 1520 to 1570 was characterized by ‘intensive growth’ in Portugal’s domestic economy, an increase that at least in part stemmed from its colonial and transcontinental commercial activities. See Nuno Palma and Jaime Reis, ‘From Convergence to Divergence: Portuguese Economic Growth, 1527–1850’, Journal of Economic History 79, no. 2 (2019): 477–506; Leonor Freire Costa, Nuno Palma and Jaime Reis, ‘The Great Escape? The Contribution of the Empire to Portugal’s Economic Growth, 1500–1800’, European Review of Economic History 19, no. 1 (2015): 1–22. 42 Subrahmanyam, Portuguese Empire, 115–19. 43 Freire Costa et al., ‘The Great Escape?’, 15. 40

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possessions could serve the crown. Soon, a new question was asked about the Costa da Mina: was the gold trade enough? This question was made more difficult by the question of competition in the Costa da Mina itself, and the inability of the Portuguese to secure their access to Akan traders, who were willing to travel to other sites along the coast to trade with lançados and other Europeans.44 The gold trade and increasingly, possibilities for trade in enslaved captives and goods like ivory, made Portuguese Costa da Mina an attractive target for competitors. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese position in the Costa da Mina had started to deteriorate as competition from more adept, or at least better supplied or more flexible, traders in the region started to take its toll. The lançados, especially, whose close integration with Portuguese trading networks across the Portuguese Atlantic world provided access to Akan gold markets despite their separation from the King’s interests and authority, are revealing as to how Portuguese efforts to strictly regulate the trade could be detrimental. Through personal relationships, and often with the benefit of Luso-African descent, lançados had been able to penetrate deeper into the Akan hinterland and had established networks with traders across the region that made them well suited to act as brokers between Akan traders and other European merchants who began to visit the region.45 Even though the Portuguese would commonly claim that local peoples were willing to keep friendship with and serve the King of Portugal, there is little to suggest they actively avoided or resisted the participation of other Europeans in trade across the Atlantic coast – especially if they brought in-demand goods and respected local commercial practices. Thus, with the arrival of Castilian, French, English and Dutch ships, the price of imported goods was brought down, the importance of the market at São Jorge da Mina diminished and Portuguese access to gold curtailed with it.46 However, despite the wealth of trade with the region and the intense trans-imperial competition that it generated, the Costa da Mina has remained marginalized in comparison to studies of the trans-Atlantic slave trade or of more territorially expansive colonies such as Angola.47 Yet, as this The so-called Lançados, known also as tangomao, tangomano or tangomão, participated in illicit trade with African merchants in contravention of Portuguese efforts for control. Maria da Graça Silva, Subsídios para o Estudo dos ‘Lançados’ na Guiné (Lisbon: Boletim cultural da Guiné Portuguesa, 1967), 59. 45 Ibid., 39. 46 Da Costa e Silva, A Manilha e o Libambo, 152. 47 Recent work has highlighted the shortcomings of this limited focus for understanding the history of empire in Africa. Notably, Michael Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); François-Xavier Fauvelle, The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 44

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chapter demonstrates, the gold trade through the Costa da Mina was understood by contemporaries not as a distinct and separated part of the Portuguese Empire, but one that could be shaped (although not necessarily with positive outcomes) by drawing on the experiences of Portuguese imperial activity across the globe.

The Akan gold trade and the Portuguese Empire It was in this context that two detailed reports were collated for King Sebastião I of Portugal in 1572 and 1573 that set out some of the challenges facing the Portuguese Empire on the Costa da Mina and presented strategies for how they might be rectified.48 As well as responding to international competition, the beginning of Dom Sebastião’s direct rule in 1570 also contributed to radical changes in Portugal’s imperial administration. Suddenly, private individuals were permitted to trade freely in pepper, spices and other previously contraband goods, so long as they were purchased from Portuguese factories at fixed prices. As Subrahmanyam has suggested, these were ‘the first clear signs of the Crown’s desire to divest itself of responsibility for trade’ within its Asian possessions – and it seems likely that our commentators had similar ideas regarding the Costa da Mina.49 Written after almost a century of profitable activity at the fortressmarket of São Jorge da Mina, these reports were written in response to changing demands from other parts of the Portuguese Empire and increased competition with other European empires, that together meant that serious action was required if the gold trade was to be sustained, and if not, what commodities, imperial practices or colonial projects might be suitable to replace it (most notably related to enslaved labour). Essentially, the reports envisaged a practice of empire building that would radically reshape Portuguese colonial presence in West Africa, while simultaneously linking up commodity networks across different colonial activities in America and Asia.50 A starting point for both reports was reflecting on the ineffectiveness of recent efforts to protect the Portuguese territory through naval means alone – especially the armada of Martim Afonso and Antonio de Sá, a recent, massive naval expedition intended to solidify the Portuguese position on the Costa da BNL, Ms 8457, ff. 100–10 [MMA, vol. 3, pp.  89–119]; BNL, Ms 8048, ff. 107–11 [MMA, vol. 3, pp. 114–18]. 49 Subrahmanyam, Portuguese Empire, 120–4. 50 Similar patterns are noted, for a much later period, in Gary Gereffi and Miguel Korzeniewicz, eds., Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994). 48

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Mina – which they concluded had been costly and ineffective.51 The inability to establish a secure colonial border across the entire Costa da Mina region meant that controlling, let alone monopolizing trade with the Akan was simply impossible. According to the author of the 1572 report, the biggest challenge the Portuguese faced was that Dutch merchants newly active in the region, especially between Cabo das Palmas and Axim, approached the trade very differently to the Portuguese. Rather than establishing a permanent trading factory and enticing traders to them, the Dutch ‘with the small ship they will use to enter the rivers that there are in that region’ engaged with riverine commercial networks that were so common in western Africa. In doing so, they reached locations where ‘the people are our friend’ who ‘usually come to Axim selling their ivory’, but would now trade with the Dutch directly for ivory in return for bronze manilhas and porcelain, diverting traffic from the Portuguese market and undermining long-standing trading relationships in the region.52 Likewise, increasing competition from ‘the French, English, Xarife [local rulers], and Moors of Africa’, led Silva to claim in his 1573 report that the Portuguese Crown had lost ‘two and half contos [2.5 million reis] of gold’ since the 1550s by failing to monopolize the gold trade.53 In light of these conditions, it was clear that a new approach was needed. How could the Portuguese state most benefit from a gold trade that it was unable to dominate? Rather than drawing back from the Costa da Mina, the 1572 report recommended two options. Either the Portuguese state could adopt fairly limited reforms, so ‘that with less cost we will be able to have more advantage’, or it could accept that competition from other European empires demanded a more ambitious strategy for ‘expanding it, for people to live here’.54 While in the past further colonization in the region had been deemed either too costly or too deleterious on relations with the Akan, whom the Portuguese had depended on for access to the gold trade, the author suggested that changing global conditions meant that it was now the most viable option for securing gold in this particular locality. A colony on the Costa da Mina, they argued, would improve Portuguese access to the gold trade while undermining European competitors. Jorge da Silva’s 1573 report was written from a similar perspective and drew even more belligerent conclusions. Considering increased competition and the Silva suggested these activities had cost as much as 400,000 cruzados. BNL, Ms 8048, f. 107 (MMA, vol. 3, p. 114). 52 BNL, Ms 8457, ff. 100–10 [MMA, vol. 3, p. 93]. 53 BNL, Ms 8048, f. 107 [MMA, vol. 3, pp. 114, 118]. 54 BNL, Ms 8457, ff. 100–10 [MMA, vol. 3, pp. 89–119]. 51

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successful example of Brazilian colonization to draw on, he argued that territorial acquisitions must be made hand-in-hand with proselytization efforts and the integration of the African territories into Portugal’s wider Atlantic empire.55 This would mean constraining the gold trade further into Portuguese hands, but also shifting the focus of the Costa da Mina away from trading for gold and towards a more extractive colonial economy. To achieve these aims, both authors recognized that colonization on the Costa da Mina would only be possible if it was undertaken alongside further militarization of the region. A central incentive for such a plan was, of course, to limit the access that other Europeans might have to the gold trade, but it was also a means to seize and secure a more expansive Portuguese territory, allowing in turn the imposition of Portuguese authority over local people and their economic activities, at least in some places. With this in mind, the author of the 1572 report recommended that ‘it will be very useful to ordain the construction of a fortress, not where there was the one of Cará [Accra], which I heard they want to rebuild, but close to some salt flats that are nearby’. In doing so, the Portuguese could ‘repair the salt flats with slaves [from elsewhere in Africa] governed by the white people’ and ‘if the land was inhabited’ they could forbid ‘the black people to make salt cooking sea water, as they do at the moment’.56 This recommendation showed the combination of interests at work in reorientating the Costa da Mina – the new fortress provided further defence against European competitors, but by controlling local salt production, the Portuguese might monopolize a vital resource that the local economy depended upon. Silva, in his 1573 report, was similarly enamoured with the idea of further Portuguese colonization on the Costa da Mina and like the earlier report, he understood that this depended on the establishment of an economically sustainable model. For Silva, however, rather than only locally produced goods, he envisioned West African plantations producing ‘sugar, cotton, slaves, and it may be ginger and other rich goods’.57 He suggested that, if Sebastião I would ‘return to the first two principles: to take care of the conversion of souls, and to populate the land’, then ‘he will have the profit with the gold’. Furthermore, by adopting a more expansive colonial policy, Silva suggested that the Portuguese would continue to benefit ‘when there is no gold, or if it is finished’, as ‘other goods that will be made with time will add to the income from the customs’ of

BNL, Ms 8048, ff. 107–11 [MMA, vol. 3, pp. 114–18]. BNL, Ms 8457, ff. 100–10 [MMA, vol. 3, p. 92]. 57 BNL, Ms 8048, f. 107 [MMA, vol. 3, pp. 114]. 55 56

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the state.58 This was important to Silva, who understood that if ‘the mines being dry run out the silver and gold, they never come back to exist again for many years: but the pepper is a fruit of the land, which gives every year, and which will last as long as the world lasts’.59 In this way, Portuguese possessions in Africa could learn from their imperial experience on the other side of the Atlantic, where they had been ‘making profit in Brazil with sugar, and cotton, wood and parrots’.60 Yet, even as the report sought to mentally re-shape Africa’s economy and environment, colonial understanding and expectations butted against the reality of local conditions and knowledge, both in terms of how to fruitfully exploit the region’s natural resources and, essentially, how to actually access the gold-producing regions further inland.61 Silva’s recommendations regarding the Costa da Mina reflected the wider reorientation taking place across the Portuguese Empire – rather than seeking to control maritime traffic and trade, conquest and colonization were increasingly seen as preferable alternatives for profiting from the world’s commodities. By applying this logic in West Africa, Silva argued, the region could become ‘very easily a new Portugal, or new Indies, richer than those of Castile’.62 Such international comparisons were not lost on the author of the 1572 report either, who suggested that the colonization of the Costa da Mina should draw directly on the experiences of the Portuguese Empire globally. In order to take advantage of the possibilities that remained in the region, they therefore proposed that the government of Portuguese Africa should be reformed ‘as it was done in the government of India’, and ‘that this land should have a great fidalgo in the name of Vice-King of Ethiopia, as in India, and as in Brazil, with succession of the government if God allows it, as it is done in India’.63 To more effectively establish their control in West Africa, there were a number of global experiences that the Portuguese could draw on. Unlike Silva however, the author of the 1572 report maintained a hope that, as well as a more profitable and self-supporting colony, efforts to expand Portugal’s dominion in the Costa da Mina would ultimately allow them to finally claim and maintain control over a gold mine. The author insisted that ‘it did not seem to

60 61

Ibid., f. 107 [pp. 115, 117]. Ibid., f. 107 [pp. 115, 118]. Ibid., f. 107 [p. 115]. Similar patterns are identified as a common feature in other colonial projects across the globe: Maat and Hazareesingh, ‘Introduction’, 4. 62 BNL, Ms 8457, ff. 100–10 [MMA, vol. 3, p. 99]. 63 Ibid., ff. 100–10 [p. 100]. 58 59

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me without purpose, existing mines as there are, that when the mine is found’, the Portuguese should build a fortress at the site.64 Although not found in the previous ninety years of Portuguese activity in the region, the author explained, one of the reasons to make me believe in this [that they would find a mine] is to see that almost everywhere where they said the black people are searching out to find it they have found it, and if they do not know more mines than there are, it is because they do not search, do not have industry, neither diligence.65

The Portuguese surely would have no such difficulty. Having spoken to local traders and travellers, he believed the gold mines were ‘a hundred or a hundred and ten leagues, which are not many’ from São Jorge da Mina.66 Here, a substantial distance from their coastal fortresses that would necessitate a dramatic expansion of controlled territory, the author suggested they would build ‘house[s] capable for the white people’ and ‘huts, in which the blacks who will work would live’. It seemed reasonable, he continued, that ‘besides the blacks who are going to work in the mines’, it would be suitable for ‘others who could dig the land together with them, and sow corn and yams, and bring palm wine, carouço, and any other thing to sustain themselves’. A mixed-economy site such as this, he argued, would require little supply from Portugal and would alleviate some of the risk that stemmed from an imperial possession dependent, currently, on a single trade good – gold. The report proposed that this ‘could be done with little cost and work’, and with a more diversified colonial economy would depend less on future provisions from Portugal.67 As this proposal suggests, Portuguese ideas about colonization for extractive purposes, rather than as a means of facilitating commercial exchange, flew in the face of efforts from earlier in the century to effectively meet the demands of Akan traders. Rather than encouraging trade, these two reports from 1572 and 1573 encouraged a perspective of the Costa da Mina that would be detrimental to trade, and made it easier still for competitors to build relationships with local people that could provide access to gold supplies from the interior. This perspective was clearer still when the author of the 1572 report outlined how relations with ‘blacks’ would be affected by the expansion of Portuguese colonial presence. While he argued that it would be a ‘good thing’ if ‘the people intermingled one with the other, because as such the blacks would be more 66 67 64 65

Ibid., ff. 100–10 [p. 94]. Ibid., ff. 100–10 [p. 109]. Ibid., ff. 100–10 [p. 111]. Ibid., ff. 100–10 [p. 94].

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adjusted to the human manner’ and would learn from the Portuguese about ‘cultivating the lands, and in raising the cattle, and also in the Christian religion, raising the black children with the white ones, and learning the language’, he believed that stronger government would be necessary.68 He proposed that the colony should be racially segregated and predicated on violence. Proposing ‘that if this land were to expand to be inhabited’, the Portuguese should seize the territory of the King of Cara and ‘make there the main village, without admitting any blacks in that part’, the author believed they could quickly obtain territory ‘richer than this, and more abundant of all things’ and issue ‘a punishment’ so strong that it would leave ‘the other blacks to tremble’.69 Indeed, the proposal to establish and sustain Portuguese authority by controlling the trade, their territory and the local population under direct imperial jurisdiction would result in the wider diminishing of the role of local leaders. In this sense, the author wrote that ‘it would be good to order that none of the black cabeceira [principals] have jurisdiction to punish any crime, nor order, nor sentence as judge’.70 As this description suggests, the report makes clear how Portuguese (or at least this observer’s) perception of local rulers had shifted from earlier in the century. No longer essential partners, the Akan were now understood as potential vassals, necessary but problematic allies who needed to be more effectively drawn into the Portuguese imperial apparatus, or enemies. Indeed, although these plans were never implemented, they illuminate changing Portuguese perceptions about how their activities along the Costa da Mina should be structured and governed, and the shifting dynamic in Portuguese imperial ideas and the relative importance of their relations with local peoples. Changing attitudes towards the Akan took place during a period when colonial expansion in Brazil and India, especially, but also the expansion of the Portuguese colonial footprint across the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds, altered the importance of the Akan gold trade within wider, interlinking commodity chains. Whereas in 1500, the gold trade had presented an opportunity for the Portuguese to exploit a new trading opportunity that could support and supplement their global commercial interests, by the 1570s, increasing international competition and greater Akan intransigence to Portuguese demands had altered the dynamic of the trade. Soon, and perhaps in light of the failings of the Portuguese to understand the local conditions at play in West Africa, the Portuguese position

Ibid., ff. 100–10 [p. 106]. Ibid., ff. 100–10 [p. 111]. 70 Ibid., ff. 100–10 [p. 92]. 68 69

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would be further diminished as they were replaced first by the Dutch and then English, Swedish and Danish merchants as key partners for the Akan in this part of West Africa. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the centralization of Ashanti and other Akan states in the region, and their adoption of European military technology, would significantly limit later efforts by European powers to expand in the region.71 Consequently, by the middle of the seventeenth century, European colonial actors were still limited to many of the same sites as the Portuguese had been, on the very fringes of the Akan trading network along the Atlantic coast. By the eighteenth century, powerful Akan polities, such as the Ashanti state, had emerged through their control of the gold trade and steady consolidation of power over other Akan polities in the region. Gold remained, as it was when the Portuguese first arrived on the Costa da Mina, the key source of the region’s wealth and power. However, despite the efforts of the Portuguese to re-imagine and re-shape the coastline as their own imperial domain, it was instead the Akan, whose control of its valuable commodity meant they were able to maintain a key role in shaping how, where and when trade would be conducted in the region.

Conclusion The examples from the 1572 and 1573 reports show how Portuguese considerations of colonization in the Costa da Mina were driven by efforts to control the movement of commodities in and out of the region. Combined with anxieties about competition, the financial viability of the Portuguese presence on the Costa da Mina, and changing ideas about the efficacy of direct imperial control, Portuguese conceptions about trade and empire in the region shifted dramatically. The Portuguese conceptualization of global trading and colonial activity, and their experience or understanding of empire in India and Brazil, shaped how they understood the West African trade – without much regard for the specific local context or environmental and commercial conditions. In turn, they also reveal how competition and the mobility of commodities could define Portuguese practices of empire – the ability of Akan traders to carry their goods across the boundaries of different polities made it possible for other European traders and lançados to attract them to unsecured, imperial-free marketplaces – a For the classic interpretation of this process, see Kwame Arhin, ‘The Political Economy of the Expansionist State’, Revue Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer 68 (1981): 13–36.

71

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situation that provided a constant challenge to efforts by the Portuguese to impose their imperial authority. For these Portuguese commentators, these conditions were poorly suited to an imperial structure that was, in many locations, built on practices designed to control the passage of goods as much as it was to control the means of production – in West Africa, neither option was possible. As Portuguese relations with Akan rulers declined towards the end of the sixteenth century, fears that they too might pose a military threat when they ‘learn (if they can) how they will protect themselves from us, and how they will expel us from their lands’, also increased.72 By recognizing these conflicting priorities, an examination of the Portuguese gold trade in West Africa can show how efforts to impose and enforce colonial boundaries drew on conceptions about empire and transcontinental trade, which developed through activities elsewhere that came to overwhelm earlier, more successful efforts on the part of the Portuguese that had rested on a narrower and more local interpretative framework. Even though the Costa da Mina was no longer receiving ‘more attention than all the others overseas because of the high profit and benefit’ like it once had, its changing position within the wider Portuguese Empire can help us reflect on changing ways of thinking about commodities, empire and a globalizing world.73 The Portuguese trade for gold, always part of an interconnected system of exchange due to its role as currency, contributed to the expansion and development of other global commodity networks. In West Africa too, the Akan had used gold to trade for an array of goods sourced across Europe and North Africa, as well as further afield, embedding the region into interlinked networks long before the Portuguese recognized the array of potential commodities that could be obtained via the Akan. Eventually, Portuguese commentators came to accept that declining trade from the region was not only of ‘a lot of gold’, but also ‘ivory, silver, chili pepper, amime, cotton, ducks, wax, [and] slaves’.74 Indeed, recognition that there was more to offer on the Costa da Mina than gold alone, had helped the Dutch break down the Portuguese efforts at establishing a monopoly – trading for ivory and enslaved peoples had allowed them to more effectively integrate into commercial networks that spread across colonial lines and access a larger marketplace. For the Portuguese, failure to respond to more

BNL, Ms 8457, ff. 100–10 [p. 99]. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the centralization of Ashanti and other Akan states in the region, and their adoption of European military technology, would significantly limit later efforts by European powers to expand in the region. 73 BA, 51-IX-25, f. 1. 74 BNL, CM, Caixa 207, n. 88. Description of the coast of Guinea and the villages and captaincies of the Portuguese (undated, c. 1610s). 72

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agile competitors and to recognize that it was the movement of commodities across colonial boundaries that made trade possible, meant that efforts to impose their authority over the gold trade were ultimately futile. By the early seventeenth century, aspirations of an African empire had dissipated, and Portuguese commentators were left to lament that the Dutch had taken ‘such a control that the gold that once came to this Kingdom’, now ‘goes to Flanders’.75 Of course, what both the Portuguese and Dutch struggled to comprehend was that controlling the production of this valuable commodity remained strictly in the hands of the Akan producers, whose selection of trading partners had and would continue to shape practices of empire building on the Costa da Mina.

Ibid.

75

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Tea and empire in the Asian interior, c. 1750–1900 Jagjeet Lally

That chai began its progress to becoming India’s national beverage only in the late nineteenth century may be taken to underscore the transformative potential of empire and commodity – tea, in this case.1 This history has been told many times over to become emblematic in popular culture of the seemingly ‘benign’ and supposedly ‘civilizing’ impact of British imperialism, although the truth of labour exploitation and violence tells a different story. It can all be rehearsed in a few lines to establish the point of departure for the very different narratives presented in what follows.2 British merchants started to purchase Chinese tea in the seventeenth century, although the fashion for tea consumption really took off in the eighteenth century, while the East India Company’s acquisition of Bengal in 1757 meant that an illegal trade in Indian opium to China financed a legal trade in Chinese tea to the West. By the 1800s, the Company was tiring with China’s monopoly. But an additional problem was the Qing government’s clamping down in the 1830s on opium imported illegally from British India into China, for the purchase of tea was financed through the sale of the drug. With the future of the tea trade thrown into flux, the Company’s governor-general established the Tea Committee in 1834, its task, the experiment in tea cultivation in Assam.3 And so began Indian cultivation (to be followed

On the process by which tea became India’s ‘national beverage’, paying attention to marketing strategies, see Philip Lutgendorf, ‘Making Tea in India: Chai, Capitalism, Culture’, Thesis Eleven 113, no. 1 (2012): 11–31. 2 Against this, see, recently: Erika Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire. How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton and Matthew Mauger, Empire of Tea. The Asian Leaf That Conquered the World (London: Reaktion Books, 2015). 3 The history of this enterprise has most recently been analysed by Jayeeta Sharma, Empire’s Garden: Assam and the Making of India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 1

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by plantations in such places as Ceylon, where Thomas Lipton established his plantation, and Kenya), with Indian exports of tea to Britain surpassing those from China by 1888. Only a very few Indians drank tea until the dawn of the twentieth century, however, when British expatriate firms started to more seriously consider the ‘market at our door’.4 By stages, therefore, the creation of new production centres and new markets for tea, not to mention the exaltation of tea as a coveted global commodity, progressed in tandem with the expansion of Britain’s empire and the development of British economic interests. This stylized fact of the tremendous growth of Indian tea exports in the late colonial period relative to the stagnation of China’s tea trade has long been at the heart of triumphalist accounts of the role of Western intellect, technologies and modernity in the making and success of the modern capitalist system. This has not gone unchallenged, however, with a number of recent works attacking such ideas from different sides. Andrew B. Liu, for instance, has drawn attention to the way ‘world competition gave rise to a set of shared, mutually constitutive pressures and uneven rates of profit and accumulation’.5 At stake for Liu is not only the overly simplistic nature of thinking in terms of one site (India) trumping another (China), but the larger implication; what we must reckon with is the fact of China and India being inextricably linked sites internal to the development of modern capitalism (i.e. rather than subsumed by the forces of capitalist modernity supposedly emanating from the West). Erika Rappaport’s critical interventions are wide-ranging, but she has valuably drawn attention to, on the one hand, the role of indigenous actors in (successfully) shaping the global market for tea and resisting the impact of British enterprise for several decades against, on the other hand, the resultantly late success of the British on the production side, with success coming only when the British possessed the advantages of new regimes of labour and techniques of labour discipline, new scientific ideas and technologies of warfare and violence and a global empire (and hence access to worldwide markets).6 During the slow and unsteady journey of Indian tea towards dominating the greater bulk of British imports, Russia became the most important market for Chinese tea. This alternative stylized fact serves as the departure point for alternative historical narratives.7 This chapter seeks to contribute to recent

Lutgendorf, ‘Making Tea’, 13 and passim. Andrew B. Liu, Tea War. A History of Capitalism in China and India (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), here 374. 6 Rappaport, Thirst for Empire. 7 Chinyun Lee, ‘From Kiachta to Vladivostok: Russian Merchants and the Tea Trade’, Region 3, no. 2 (2014): 196. 4 5

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scholarship on tea, and to the aims of the present volume, by decentring attention from the Britain-China-India nexus. It examines sites of production and networks of trade within the Eurasian continental interior, which were largely beyond the British imperial world forged by trans-oceanic trade, and which British imperial agents struggled to grapple with. It calls attention to preferences for particular types or preparations of tea, forms of material culture and modes of consumption in Russia, Central Asia, parts of China and Burma, which were rather different from those more familiar to British merchants and their customers. In so doing, this chapter brings to light different connections of commodity and empire to present, instead, something of this commodity’s other histories. In pursuit of these endeavours and arguments, the present chapter largely makes use of British sources from archives in London, New Delhi and Yangon (Rangoon). This affords an opportunity to highlight how British imperial interests stimulated knowledge production of these other networks and markets, and how empire and commodity thereby became entangled epistemologically – within the archive left behind by these endeavours, not least. The first section explores what was not known to the British and of which they learnt only in time – namely, Russia’s tea trade with China – bringing to light the organization of trade and different routes, the importance of trade to Russia’s economy and the role of tea in Britain’s rivalry with Russia for hegemony in later nineteenthcentury Asia. The second and third sections rove across Burma, conquered in stages by Britain, whose inquiries regarding the new colony revealed the commodification of a familiar substance (tea) markedly different from that overseen by the British in other parts of their empire. Though steadily improving, it was nevertheless the defectiveness or deficiency of knowledge that fuelled fantasies of the spread of the plantation complex to the Eurasian interior, thereby bringing the commodity chain into line with the empire at large. This was desirable so long as it was under the aegis of Europeans; unease about allowing indigenous collaborators to establish plantations or ‘tea gardens’ arose because the plantation was a central institution of the ‘agricultural racial capitalism’ in the Tropics upon which European rule was premised. The final section focuses on a relatively neglected part of Britain’s empire in South Asia, where plantations were established – namely, the hilly parts of Punjab – and returns to the matter of geopolitical rivalry. The (poor) quality and (parlous) stock of knowledge also had the effect of palpitating fear of invasion from across the landward border and concerns for imperial security and prestige, yet also suggested the prospect for penetrating new ‘trans-frontier’

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markets with products such as tea to stymie or offset the (commercial) advances of imperial rivals. In consequence, India’s tea gardens did not merely service a primary market in the metropolitan core and a secondary one in the colonies. Indian tea was also implicated in checking the advance of rivals, in the making of borderlands and in the defence of empire. By moving away from the commonplace history of tea told from the British point of view – in which Asia is the producer and the West the consumer of tea – this chapter sheds new light on an alternative set of geographies of production and exchange, and of modes of consumption. By fixing attention on tea within a particular set of archives, therefore, this chapter also reveals some of the British Empire’s other histories – ones that not only connect empire and commodity via movements of global capital and (local or international) labour but also connect tangible or material substance with the more vaporous matters of Great Power rivalry, imperial prestige and feelings of insecurity in the British colonial world. The conclusion mulls over the methodological implications of such an approach for commodity histories of empire, focusing particularly on the concern with colonial knowledge-creation that runs through this chapter.

T ­ rade networks Canton has become famous as the primary site of China’s interchange with British and other European merchants in the period before the Opium War (1839–42). Canton, however, was not the only place where Chinese merchants could (legally) do business with foreigners, merely the only maritime port. Kiakhta, situated roughly halfway between Lake Baikal in Siberia and the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, emerged after 1727 as the primary entrepot of Russian trade with China. Tea was not only a mainstay of the ‘Canton trade’ with the north Atlantic economies; it was also as important, perhaps more so, to this terrestrial trans-Eurasian network of exchange. Over the eighteenth century, Russia’s thirst for tea developed to the extent that it became the main import from China (alongside gold, silver, rhubarb, silks, porcelain and precious stones) in return for pelts and cloth, and was critical to China’s ‘domestication’ within Russia.8 Russians drank both flower tea and black tea formed into bricks in the eighteenth century, with a taste for Mark Gamsa, ‘Refractions of China in Russia, and of Russia in China: Ideas and Things’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 60, no. 5 (2017): 549–84.

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yellow, green and black loose-leaf teas also firmly established by the close of the nineteenth century.9 From the tea-production regions, Chinese traders transported tea some 3,400 miles to Maimachen (Altanbulag) on the RussianMongolian frontier, where merchants belonging to Russian guilds purchased the tea and took it to Kiakhta.10 From Kiakhta, most of this tea was delivered 3,800 miles away by land, lake and river routes to the great fair at Nizhnii Novgorod (and latterly to minor markets, such as Kazan or Irbit), the value of which by the 1840s–1860s has been estimated to range from four to ten million roubles, with the 60,000 chests of tea delivered each August in the 1860s accounting for around 40 per cent of national imports.11 Once arrived in Nizhnii Novgorod, merchants – mostly from Moscow – made the initial viewing, smelling and tasting of tea in the ‘Chinese Rows’ of the fair, before bargaining commenced with the wholesalers, all of which was part and parcel of the transformation of substance into commodity in the distinctive domain of the Russian Empire.12 Tea was not only significant to the national economy, however; it was of such singular importance as to have practically become a medium of exchange, the profits from which indexed the liquidity of the Russia-China trade.13 After the Opium War, the overland trade via Kiakhta was gradually supplanted.14 Among the mitigating factors were Russians’ suspicion towards Canton tea, its taste deemed inferior, whereas the desert journey was held to render the flavour of ‘caravan tea’ superior; and new riverine-coastal transport networks that boosted, rather than unequivocally undermining, terrestrial networks for a time.15 Yet, the Treaty of Tientsin (1858) paved the way for Russian access to seven commercial ports while the opening of the Suez Canal (1869) – and the associated growth of traffic at the Black Sea port of Odessa – reduced the distance, cost and time taken for shipments to reach the Russian Empire from China. To this may be added the permission granted to Russians to move about within China from 1862, with a number of Russian entrepreneurs establishing tea factories from 1863 onward, foremost at Hankow, with that of Molchanoff, Anne Lincoln Fitzpatrick, The Great Russian Fair. Nizhnii Novgorod, 1840–90 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), 48; National Archives of India, New Delhi, Foreign Department Proceedings (henceforth: NAI-F), Frontier A, November 1884, Nos. 27–34, 2. 10 Lee, ‘From Kiachta’, 197, 201–5. 11 Fitzpatrick, Nizhnii Novgorod, 48, 50. These figures correspond fairly well with those found in a British intelligence source (of the sort discussed, below): NAI-F, S.I., June 1869, No. 52, 3–4. 12 Fitzpatrick, Nizhnii Novgorod, 52. 13 Ibid., 48–53. 14 For the impact of the Taiping Rebellion on the geography of tea production and trade with Russia, see Lee, ‘From Kiachta’, 198. 15 Fitzpatrick, Nizhnii Novgorod, 49, 53–4; Lee, ‘From Kiachta’, 197, 203–6. 9

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Pechatnoff and Company (est. 1874) being the largest.16 By 1866, these effects were so great as to be felt at Nizhnii Novgorod, where three-quarters of all tea sales in 1866 were of ‘Canton tea’ (maritime, via London) rather than ‘Kiakhta tea’ (terrestrial).17 Imperial rivalry lay at the very core of Russia’s maritime enterprise in an unexpected way, as noted by Chinyun Lee. It was the entrepreneur, Molchanoff, who assisted in the construction of Russia’s ‘Society of the Volunteer Fleet’ to promote Russian trade as ‘a merchant fleet to convey settlers and assist the naval forces’.18 Inspiration came from the Russo-Turkish War (1877–8), when Russia nearly came to the brink of conflict with Britain, and when Russian merchants and patriots raised some six million roubles to support cargo and the navy. From 1880, the Fleet chartered German vessels to ply the Hankow-Fuzhou-CeylonOdessa route, which thereby became the backbone of rivalry with the ‘Canton tea’ trade.19 For its part, Britain took an interest in trans-Eurasian trade networks from the late 1860s, around the time the Kiakhta merchants’ fortunes started to fade but before the dramatic expansion of these Russian maritime networks. This interest came not from the metropole but from a colonial government (India). Tellingly of what is to come in the rest of this chapter, the impetus was India’s security in the context of Anglo-Russian rivalry in Asia. Around the time tea seeds were smuggled out of China and plans for the establishment of ‘tea gardens’ in Assam in north-east India began to take shape, Company men were beginning to explore the swathe of territory north-west of Delhi all the way to the oasis states of Central Asia. They spotted what was salient in context of the commercial and geopolitical rivalry mounting gradually between the two powers from the 1830s. They duly noted and described all those Russian and English goods they found in various marts, therefore, including a range of Russian and Chinese goods available in the Kabul bazaar – tea being among them.20 This sign of Russian presence at India’s borders seemed increasingly less innocuous in the coming decades. By the late 1860s, not only had British India’s north-western frontier extended to the border with Afghanistan; Russia’s conquest of the khanates of

Ibid., 199–201 for details of their operations. Fitzpatrick, Nizhnii Novgorod, 54–5. 18 Lee, ‘From Kiachta’, 207. 19 Ibid., 207–9. 20 National Archives of India, New Delhi, Foreign Department Proceedings (henceforth: NAI-F), Political, 9  May 1836, No. 42, paragraph  13; NAI-F, Political, 11  April 1838, No. 30, 11; NAI-F, Political, 17 July 1839, Nos. 22–4, 9. 16 17

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Khiva and Khokand – and the transformation of Bukhara into a suzerainty – meant that Russia and Britain were near neighbours in Asia. This was the backdrop to closer British interest in trans-Eurasian terrestrial networks, including in tea.21 British political agents and ambassadors in Russia, Iran and Afghanistan were enjoined to supply information to the government of British India, which relayed the pertinent details to London.22 One side of this interest was in Russia’s tea culture and its involvement in trade within the Eurasian interior, with information supplied in a tract first published in 1867 – as Russia’s advance into Central Asia was unfolding – by John Lumley-Savile, then secretary to the British ambassador to the Tsar’s court in St Petersburg. Tea was to all classes in Russia, Lumley asserted, as ‘tobacco to an inveterate smoker’.23 The distance from China’s tea-producing regions to Moscow via Kiakhta was estimated at 7,291 miles, a journey of six months (or less if the ice could be contended with more easily), but the journey to Central Asian markets via Kiakhta or other terrestrial routes were far shorter.24 Lumley declared that it was not the current meagre state of trade via Eastern or Chinese Turkestan to Central Asia and Orenburg – a Russian frontier post on the Kazakh Steppe – but its future prospects that warranted the ‘interest of tea cultivators in the Himalayas, to whom an extensive market now appears to be open’.25 Lumley noted the preference for green and brick teas and the prices prevailing for these articles in Bukhara and Tashkent while advocating for the establishment of a British Indian tea trade with Central Asia.26 Russia’s involvement in supplying Central Asian markets reflected one aspect of British Indian inquiries; another concerned the headway made by merchants from the British Indian side of the border with Afghanistan – or other states under Britain’s sphere of influence, such as Nepal or Qajar Iran – into the same markets. Only in the aftermath of the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–80), however, could the Government of India finally enumerate the various routes by

See Jagjeet Lally, India and the Silk Roads. The History of a Trading World (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2021), 161–215 for the process of colonial conquest and the tapping of intelligence and knowledge networks. 22 NAI-F, S.I., June 1869, Nos. 49–57. 23 John Lumley, Report of Mr. Lumley on the Tea Trade of Russia (Calcutta: Foreign Department Press, 1869), 1. 24 Ibid., 41. 25 Ibid., 66 for citation, and 67–112 for details about the main routes, the major entrepots, the character and value of trade at these places and so forth. 26 Ibid., 113, 118–51 for an exposition of the prospects of such an enterprise, taking in routes, costs of transport, tariffs and the types of tea preferred, and the prices at which substitutes would find sale. 21

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which it believed tea reached Central Asian bazaars.27 First, there was Chinese tea transported by caravan, as already described. Second, there were Chinese teas that made their way by maritime channels into Punjab, and then by caravan across the Indo-Afghan frontier and via Kabul, alongside a small proportion of Indian teas (although these were probably purchased for final consumption in Afghanistan, not Central Asia). The preponderance of Chinese over Indian teas is corroborated by the decanal returns submitted to government in 1887.28 Third, there were Chinese teas – and some Java and Ceylon tea – re-exported from the port of Bombay to ports on the Persian Gulf, and from thence overland on camels to Central Asia.29 Green tea – not black – continued to dominate in such entrepots as Bukhara, Tashkent and Kabul.30 In 1888, there followed an inquiry into the costs associated with the latter two routes – for these were, to an extent, under the aegis of British imperialism in Asia – revealing that the routes via Afghanistan were shorter and cheaper but for the ‘exorbitant’ exactions made by the Afghan king (a subject to which this chapter returns).31 By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, trade from China to Russia and Central Asia was very well established, therefore, the latter probably of much longer pedigree. Around the same time, the dual impact of new transport technologies and the springing up of new sites of production was to shift and make more intricate the networks of the global tea trade. Although the terrestrial, trans-Eurasian networks were at something of a remove from the trans-oceanic ones, they were not unaffected by these shifts (and other more ‘domestic’ changes). Sino-Russian-Central Asian tea trade became more complex as new routes developed, which were additionally infused with an increasingly wider variety of teas. Such experience was not limited to the Eurasian interior; the networks of trans-Saharan trade were also suffused with new goods – including green tea and sugar, which ‘filtered into western African markets with tremendous cultural as well as physiological repercussions’ – in the era after the NAI-F, Frontier A, December 1885, Nos. 3–8, frontmatter, 3. Updated and more detailed information followed at the end of the century, occasioned by growth of the Black Sea port of Batoum: NAI-F, Frontier, May 1896, 1–16. For the petition lodged by Central Asian merchants with the Russian authorities regarding trade in tea from China and India via Bombay and Batoum, see NAI-F, Secret F, April 1890, Nos. 150–92. 28 NAI-F, August 1887, No. 37. 29 See, also: NAI-F, Secret F, January 1891, Nos. 141–2, 81. 30 NAI-F, SH, 1869, Nos. 69–70. This was also the case in Persia: NAI-F, Frontier A, December 1888, No. 103, 3–4. 31 NAI-F, Frontier A, December 1888, Nos. 102–3. See also NAI-F, Secret F, May 1888, No.40, the (very detailed) contents of which are of the same tenor and which are drawn from numerous sources, from newspaper articles to official trade returns from various provinces, as well as despatches from frontier agents. 27

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abolition of the slave trade, when new exchanges necessarily developed in place of human trafficking and in tandem with the steady globalization of the world economy.32 The global is certainly an appropriate framework for this inquiry, yet what also emerges from the attention paid, above, to imperial rivalry is the relevance of the trans-imperial terrain of analysis. The chapter returns to these matters, but first makes a detour to another interior space to consider the very identity of tea and tea culture.

Material culture I believe, indeed, that none of the tea sold in Amarapoora is the produce of China. And it is a remarkable fact, that large quantities of tea are imported into the province of Yunan from the Shan states between the Irawadi and the Cambodia River. The Burmese Governor and his followers […] treated as preposterous the […] assertion that tea grew in China. They looked on China as purely a tea-importing country.33

­ ased on their knowledge, members of this British delegation to the Burmese B court in 1855 took it for granted that tea was ‘Chinese’ – a plant originating and cultivated in China, transformed in China into a substance for consumption and exported from China to other parts of the world. But their knowledge emerged from a particular set of encounters, predicated on a particular set of networks, productive of very particular travails – namely, those sketched at the very beginning of this chapter. This was all about to change, however. The so-called New Imperialism of the second half of the nineteenth century involved the spread of European imperialisms from the maritime rimlands to the continental interior of Afro-Eurasia; the final defeat of the Burmese court in 1885 and the conquest of ‘Upper Burma’ was part of this process.34 In turn, European knowledges widened, now witness to societies, economies and trade from new vantage points. By the 1890s, as British knowledge of the interior parts of Burma and of Burma-China trade developed through official inquiry, so tea also came to be Ghislaine Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails. Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 108–9, 136–37. 33 Henry Yule, Narrative of the Mission Sent by the Governor-General of India to the Court of Ava in 1855,  with Notices of the Country, Government, and People (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1858), 150. 34 Lally, Silk Roads, 217–56. 32

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seen by some eyes as to some extent ‘Burmese’. Tea plants – sometimes expressly cultivated for the leaves – were found in the uplands inhabited by the Kachin and Wa peoples in and around the Burma-China borderland.35 The earliest reports deemed this inferior to what was by then grown in Assam; much as Assam teas had once been deemed inferior to those of China, although such prejudices were gradually diluted away.36 Tea was an important article of production in the Shan highlands, with merchants carrying Shan tea to markets in the Irrawaddy valley and neighbouring regions. A group of Shan traders lodged a complaint following the conquest of 1885, for instance, for not only had they been forced to flee without their goods amid the disarray, but were fraudulently represented in the case of Queen Empress vs. E. M. Pascal and Moung Ye, with the eponymous Mr Pascal making off with the sum of over 20,000 rupees paid in reparation.37 Trade statistics compiled in the years following the conquest indeed suggested tea was important to local economies in the Shan territories in Upper Burma, even as it was sufficiently mysterious to the colonial administration based in Lower Burma.38 In 1890, more detailed information was collated in a note penned by the local European officer based on evidence collected through the inquiries of Maung Ne Dun and Shan Pweôk with Shan tea dealers.39 On the one hand, it should come as no surprise that tea was cultivated in the Kachin, Wa and especially Shan territories, given their proximity to China’s tea hills and to Assam, respectively home to the Camellia sinensis (so-called true tea) and Camellia assamica (so-called wild tea) plants, not to mention the similarity of the terroir.40 On the other hand, it was curious that tea was not merely cultivated in  the Shan country but also taken by merchants plying the

John Anderson, Mandalay to Momien: A Narrative of the Two Expeditions to Western China of 1868 and 1875 under Colonel Edward B. Sladen and Colonel Horace Browne (London: Macmillan and Co., 1876), 129–30; C. E. K. Macquoid, Report of the Intelligence Officer on Tour with the Superintendent, Northern Shan States, 1895–96 (Rangoon: Government Printing, 1896), 26–7. 36 NAI-F, PC, 18 July 1836, Nos. 84–5, ff. 4–16. 37 National Archives of Myanmar (henceforth: NAM), Chief Secretary’s Office (British Burma), Foreign Department, 1891, 2C, 8803, especially 10–15, 18, 32–8 (where it is alleged that the present case is also partly built upon a fraud by the Shan traders themselves), and 41. 38 Thant Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 147, 183–4, 225. 39 The note merited printing in full within the appendix to the following: Anon., Report on the Trade between Burma and the Adjoining Foreign Countries for the Three Years Ending the 31st March 1890 (Rangoon: Government Printing, 1890). 40 Tea found in the jungle of the Kachin Hills was alleged to be a wild type like that of Assam: Sketch of the Singphos, or the Kakhyens of Burmah: The Position of This Tribe as Regards Baumo, and the Inland Trade of the Valley of the Irrawaddy with Yuman and their Connection with the North-eastern Frontier of Assam (Calcutta: W. Ridsdale, Military Orphan Press, 1847), 28. For a detailed description of both Yunnan tea plantations and manufacture, and Shan tea cultivation, see NAI-F, K.W./External, December 1892, Nos. 113–18, Part B. 35

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caravan routes straddling the Irrawaddy valley and southern China. Across the (un-demarcated) border lay important centres of tea production in southern Yunnan – especially those of Sipsongpanna (Xishuangbanna) prefecture, including Puer – not that these were much frequented by the Chinese until the Qing conquest of Yunnan and its violent incorporation into Imperial China as a largely extractive periphery-cum-colony in the eighteenth century.41 Around 500 kilometres due east of Mandalay, Simao was an important trade town in southern Yunnan province, its markets receiving Burmese cotton, for instance, a staple of long standing. Among the goods despatched from Simao was the fine tea of the surrounding Puer district, seven-tenths of which allegedly sold within eastern Yunnan and Sichuan.42 The remainder found its way not to Burma but to western Yunnan and to Tibet. One early twentieth-century observer saw a ‘Tibetan caravan of 300 or 400 mules, all laden with tea’ – the trade brisk in festal years ‘when it would be necessary to make presents of tea to the Lamas’, with tea also ‘so indispensable to the Tibetans that the disc shaped “bricks” will pass current everywhere, and are often preferred to silver’.43 Others noted that tea was used as currency in upland Burma too, for tea was ‘paid in lieu of revenue to the Burmese Government’ but also as payment of fees ‘to Priests on all occasions such as deaths marriages divorcement &c.’ or to ‘state officials on the settling of disputes’.44 What of Burmese tea? Burmese teas were mainly consumed in the BurmaChina borderland and in Burma itself, where they arrived in a variety of preparations rather than being of a single type.45 In their encounter with Burmese teas, British observers were struck by the transformation of a familiar substance into a wholly unfamiliar commodity in terms of the manner of preparation, overall appearance, sale, consumption and material culture – its entire commodification, in other words, differing from what prevailed in Britishcontrolled exchange networks. A number of sources focus not on the sale of tea in loose leaf form, as might have been more familiar to European drinkers, and certainly available, but that more commonly sold in discs, balls or bricks.46 In

Charles P. Giersch, Asian Borderlands. The Transformation of Qing China’s Yunnan Frontier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 52–8, and 178–80 (for details of Sipsongpanna’s tea economy and the Qing-era government and commercial interest in it), and passim (for the conquest and colonization of Yunnan). 42 Henry R. Davies, Yün-nan. The Link between India and the Yangtze (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909), 96–7. 43 Ibid., citations 99 and 279, respectively. 44 NAI-F, PC, 18 July 1836, Nos. 84–5, ff. 12–13. 45 Report on the Trade […] 1890, xxvi. 46 Sketch of the Singphos, 72–3. 41

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Puer, for example, tea was ‘made up into disc-shaped cakes some eight inches in diameter and one inch thick, weighing about 12 ozs. […] [called] yüan’ and ‘then put together in packets of seven, placed one on top of the other, and done up with strips of the outer bark of bamboo’ into a packet called a ‘t’ung’, in which form it was taken to market.47 One commentator, who submitted samples of black tea from China found in Upper Burma (and reportedly traded as far as Tenasserim) in the 1830s, stated that the ‘mucilaginous substances’ used to form it into cakes and balls gave it a ‘peculiar flavour’ to which one could become ‘accustomed’. Its main advantage was its affordability relative to tea brought by maritime routes to the Bay of Bengal.48 Although cakes of loosely pressed tea could also be found for sale in Burma, the ‘greater part of the tea sold in Ava, and thence carried to the lower provinces’, was ‘in the form of hard balls, rather larger than cricket-balls’ and was ‘the produce of the Shan states and of the hills inhabited by the people called Paloungs’.49 These ‘round hard balls cemented together by paddy starch water’ were described as constituted of tea ‘of a coarse Bohea kind’ – Bohea serving as an umbrella term for black tea in the British imperial world at large, the lexicon deriving from the China trade.50 The preparation of tea into a beverage seems to have attracted insufficient attention, probably because the method was sufficiently familiar to Western onlookers.51 The exception was in parts of the countryside, such as the Kachin Hills, where the Singpho (Jingpo) method of decoction was ‘very simple’ and described in some detail.52 In Burma, tea was not only decocted into a beverage but also eaten. According to the historian, Thant Myint-U, ‘[d]rinking of alcohol was replaced to an extent’ by the nineteenth century ‘by the consumption of stimulants such as pickled tea and betel nut and the smoking of opium’.53 A mainstay of Burmese cuisine

Davies, Yün-nan, 97; Yule, Mission, 149, suggests a diameter of nine to ten inches. NAI-F, SC, 10 December 1830, Nos. 1–5, f.1616. 49 Yule, Mission, 149. Note that the Palaung figure their ancestors migrated to this region in the eighteenth century (around the time of the Qing-sponsored military and civilian movement into the region), making their involvement in tea cultivation in the uplands and its sale in valley markets of relatively recent vintage, rather than part of some ‘timeless’ lifestyle often ascribed to peoples in remote places or Zomias: Giersch, Asian Borderlands, 22. 50 Sketch of the Singphos, 72–3. 51 See, for example, the familiarity of the preparation described in Anderson, Mandalay to Momien, 195. 52 Ibid., 28. For an earlier notice of the discovery of tea in the ‘Singhpoo country’, see NAI-F, 4 April 1838, Nos. 112–13. 53 Myint-U, Making of Modern Burma, 50. 47 48

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from ‘Ava to Rangoon’, lahpet (or variously letpet, lepek, hlepet and ‘wet tea’ in contemporary British sources) was noted by a contemporary observer as ‘much esteemed by the Burmans, being eaten on all occasions as a condiment, sometimes fried in oil with garlic’.54 Another said it was made into ‘a salled of the green leaves with a little salt pepper and oil’.55 It was a substance ‘without which […] [his informants] said they could not exist’ and was reportedly ‘taken in a small quantity like our cheese after Dinner & the Burmese think that it promotes digestion as well as removes the flavour of the different articles of food which they may have been eating’.56 Such observers recounted how lahpet was prepared, one stating that the Palaung took ‘the young twigs and leaves of the tea tree’, which were then ‘subjected in large masses to a half state of fermentation by being buried in the ground in pits moistened and well pressed down’, and then ‘packed into large bamboo baskets’ to be taken to market. Venders sliced as much as buyers wished to purchase, so that ‘[k]ept thus in large masses it seems to retain its moisture, and is in appearance exactly like boiled tea leaves’.57 It was not only the peculiar transformation from the tea plant to the teapot that marked out a distinct chain of commodification from that prevailing in the British imperial economy; the very substance itself was sometimes held to be different. In the early nineteenth century, observers (often spuriously) rejected the authenticity of tea bushes – or degraded specimens as wild and thus inferior to Camellia sinensis – as part of the process of creating the value of certain teas qua commodities. In tandem, there was some sniffing over the plant used in the manufacture of lahpet.58 One account – published only a few decades after the transplantation of tea bushes to north-east India, when that juvenile enterprise still needed nurturing as the singular alternative to China tea and shielding from the possibility tea might grow in other places – ventured that lahpet was not ‘made from the true tea plant’ but from Elaeodendron persicum.59 Value creation, as the next section shows, was a critically important part of the entanglement of tea and empire, even in those places and amongst those peoples marked by their alterity to the imperial commodity regime at large.

Sketch of the Singphos, 72–3. NAI-F, PC, 18 July 1836, Nos. 84–5, ff. 12–13. NAI-F, SC, 10 December 1830, Nos. 1–5, f. 1661. Sketch of the Singphos, 72–3. On the analogous relationship of discourses about technology and product quality to the creation of value and market rapport for indigo produced in Company Bengal after c. 1760, see Prakash Kumar, Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 59 Anderson, Mandalay to Momien, 15. 56 57 58 54 55

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Plantations and labour Another natural production is the tea plant (Camellia thea), which grows freely on the eastern side of the hills [in the Kachin states], and suggested dreams of future tea plantations, cultivated by improved Kakhyens or imported Shans and Paloungs.60

Soaked in language central to the plantation complex – that of modernity, natural improvement and human progress – this excitement with undiscovered and untapped possibilities reveals how widely the tangled net of commodity, plantation and empire were cast, even if only in the hopes of the few Englishmen who travelled to the remote uplands of the Burma-China borderland. The Kachin could be ‘improved’. The Shan and Palaung were not merely rendered as ‘labour’ but stripped of their agency into abstract units of human effort that could be ‘imported’ – moved about (against their will?) according to the logic and priorities of plantation capitalism.61 The landscape could be transformed into one that was more productive, ignoring not only that it was fruitful to indigenes but that their system of working the land was less detrimental in the long term to local ecosystems than the intensive monoculture of the seemingly innocuous and rather pleasing-sounding ‘tea garden’. In all this, therefore, was the imprint of a historical sequence of a great many enterprises, stretching from the first slave plantations either side of the Atlantic in the early modern period to those worked by free, coerced and indentured labourers in the nineteenthcentury Indian Ocean world, not least the most direct point of reference – the tea gardens of Assam.62

Ibid., 129–30. The archive yields the case of tea being ‘made this season [in 1840] under superintendence of ’ a Jingpo named ‘Gaum Ningroolee’ (the ‘Chief of Ningroolla’). The hope – relayed by an expatriate Briton – was that the tea might be sold, regarding which the government in Calcutta replied that it ‘may perhaps be well to intimate to him that the price to be paid to him in next year will be regulated by that which may be obtained this year in Calcutta upon his present consignment’: NAI-F, FC, 28 September 1840, Nos. 101–2, 1. What became of this endeavour is unclear, but it perhaps sowed the seeds of the kind of sentiments described above. 62 Kris Manjapra, ‘Plantation Dispossessions. The Global Travel of Agricultural Racial Capitalism’, in American Capitalism. New Histories, ed. Sven Beckert and Christine Desan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), which includes discussion on 370 that links Assam tea directly to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. See also Kris Manjapra, ‘Asian Plantation Histories at the Frontiers of Nation and Globalization’, Modern Asian Studies 52, no. 6 (2018): 2137–58, a review essay which takes in Jayeeta Sharma’s work, which is also discussed below. For slightly different articulations of the relationship of British industrialization, imperialism, plantations and capitalism, see Mark Harvey, ‘Slavery, Indenture and the Development of British Industrial Capitalism’, History Workshop Journal 88 (2019): 66–88; Zach Sell, ‘Asian Indentured Labor in the Age of African American Emancipation’, International Labor and Working-Class History 91 (2017): 8–27. 60 61

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A half-century later, this vision of the future for Burma’s uplands had not come to fruition, though not for continued want of trying. A file from the archives of the erstwhile colonial Burma government offers insight into a renewed effort of 1922 to establish a tea garden in the hills. Three men, Sir Hector Dennys, Colonel Edward Coke and Captain J. P. Wilkins (‘a well known Indian tea planter’), wished to form a small private company. Their aim was not to establish a tea garden but to set up factories close to source where green tea leaves could be delivered to produce what they described as ‘European tea’ (i.e. the sort of preparations favoured in Europe, rather than those – described in the previous section – that serviced Burmese demand). They hoped to deal in said tea and to do so without interfering with the production or trade of lahpet and Burmese dry tea for local consumption.63 The death of Hector Dennys was no cause for the other men to cease; within two months, it was reported that Coke and Wilkins had joined forces with one E. Beadnell (formerly employed at the British Burmah Trading Company Ltd) and Sao On Kya (heir of the sawbwa or hereditary ruler of the Shan States of Hsipaw) to form the Shan States Tea and Produce Company Ltd on Sule Pagoda Road in Rangoon.64 Quite unlike the formal empire that existed in other locales in which Europeans spread the plantation complex (India and Ceylon, in the case of tea), indirect rule prevailed in Upper Burma. In this context, where colonial knowledge was poor and power was relatively weak and labile, indigenous powerholders became vital collaborators. The conquest of 1885 replaced rule by the Konbaung dynasty over ‘Upper Burma’ with colonial government, the former bequeathing to the latter a centralized polity in the valley with relatively looser control over the upland periphery. The Konbaung court exercised its authority by forging alliances and granting a degree of autonomy to local lords, such as the Shan sawbwas, and the colonial Burma government could only ever hope to do the same, given the distance from the political centre in Rangoon (or even Mandalay), the remoteness of the country and disinclination to establish a firmer presence in the jungle.65 ‘These Shan sawbwas are of course British subjects and not Ruling Chiefs, but in matters of this sort’, it was concluded, ‘one generally follows Indian Political Practice’.66 This meant drawing an equivalence

NAM, Chief Secretary’s Office (British Burma), Political Department, 1922, 282B, 4481, 2. Ibid., 15. 65 For discussion of the impact of environmental and other factors on the lumpy topography of colonial sovereignty in Burma, see Jagjeet Lally, ‘Salt and Sovereignty in Colonial Burma’, The Historical Journal 64, no. 3 (2021): 650–73. 66 NAM, Chief Secretary’s Office (British Burma), Political Department, 1922, 282B, 4481, 20. 63 64

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between the sawbwas and the hereditary dynasts of India’s ‘princely states’, who relinquished foreign policy autonomy and accepted British suzerainty in return for freedom – including the sovereign powers of taxation and revenue collection – within their kingdoms. Yet, vice versa, the proposed enterprise held the potential to enrich and thereby draw attention to the very collaborators upon whom the Burma government was embarrassingly dependent. Indeed, the colonial government had no objection to the commercial plans of these men per se. In its characteristic small-mindedness, however, it could not allow the sawbwa of Hsipaw state to press his ‘pecuniary interest’ – that is, the royalty he wished to be paid by the company (his shallow and only real motive, according to the various voices that can be heard in the back and forth of the correspondence).67 Thus, much of the file consists of communications between different layers and branches of the colonial government as it sought to wring out an answer to how much the company should pay as a royalty, whether a royalty ought to be paid at all and whether it was improper for the sawbwa’s heir to be a company director and thus hold shares and receive dividend payments.68 It was not the colonial government but the sawbwa who lamented the limited market opportunities for ordinary Shans within the status quo: at present, he stated, tea could be sold only four times a year and at very little profit. It was the sawbwa who impressed the commercial prospects to be had upon the colonial government, rather than vice versa: were the company to be formed, local people ‘would be able to sell the picked green tea leaves for the industry when market for tea of local consumption is not so good’. It was also the sawbwa who recited the language of the plantation complex, of technological modernity, natural improvement and human progress: the establishment of the European company would allow locals to ‘learn the proper method of caring the tea plants’ so that ‘there would be an increase of produce’. In his letter to the chief secretary to the Government of Burma, he concluded that ‘[w]ith proper caring of the plants our planters would be able to pick 9 months out of the year and when there is demand all the year round plantations would increase […] revenue apart

Ibid., 12. In the end, it was concluded that the Government of India had lately had no objection to an Indian ruler being granted shares in a European firm with his Diwan (revenue minister) as ex-officio company director as part of the granting of a mining lease, and that ultimately, there was little that could be done to stop the sawbwa from squeezing profit from European free enterprise in his territory: ibid., 21–2.

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from the royalty offered by the would-be Company’.69 In this last, he presented the creation of the company as the spark to rationalizing production and land use and to disciplining labour along the lines of India’s tea gardens.70 In so doing, he strived to woo his nominal overlords by signalling the mutual benefit arising from the imbrication and compatibility of his authority with that of the colonial state, of free enterprise with colonial political economy, and of global markets with Shan life and livelihood. He sought to collaborate not only in the deliverance of imperial government but in capitalist modernity, too. The plantation was a mode and site of production central to the development of capitalism. The plantation – as a site of historical inquiry – is a place where the connection of empire, commodity and race thinking can be ‘seen’ or made manifest. This has been brought to critical attention most recently by Kris Manjapra in what he describes as the longue durée history of ‘racialised labour regimes’ (slavery, indenture) and ‘political ecologies’ (plantations) from the early modern period to the twentieth century.71 Implicit within his analysis is the notion and operation of ‘whiteness’, whether in Europeans’ racialized ideas of alterity/difference or in the essential form of European capital and its agency in spurring on global commodity production via systems of exploitation. In contrast, the ‘failure’ to establish tea gardens in the Burma uplands shows that the expansion in tandem of whiteness and exploitation was not always so seamless or successful. More importantly, ‘whiteness’ itself became an obstacle to the spread of the plantation complex when the latter posed a possible upset to the racial hierarchy so central to empire; hence the colonial state’s distaste for the Shan sawbwa’s entrepreneurialism, the success of which threatened the very ideological foundations of British power.72 What Manjapra terms ‘agricultural racial capitalism’ possessed its limits, therefore, but these – rather tellingly – may have resulted from other overtly racialized priorities as much as other factors, such was the grip and pernicious power of race in this period.

NAM, Chief Secretary’s Office (British Burma), Political Department, 1922, 282B, 4481, 1 (Letter from Hsipaw Sawbwa, Hsaw Ke, to Lewisohn, 21 March 1922), for this and the preceding citations in this paragraph. 70 The subject of labour discipline in the context of India’s tea garden has received considerable attention; see above, n. 62. 71 Manjapra, ‘Plantation Dispossessions’, 365. 72 For racial attitudes in expatriate business and government in British India around this time, see Maria Misra, Business, Race, and Politics in British India c. 1850–1960 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). 69

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Trade, knowledge and power Indirect rule was no obstacle to the spread of the plantation complex, therefore. Indeed, far from being a feudal lord or even the guardian of an older moral economy of custom, the Hsipaw sawbwa was a willing accomplice of the spread of capitalist modernity, so compelling and pervasive was its logic. Yet, the benefit that could be derived by the colonial state was greatest in areas under direct rule – that is, where it collected the land taxes, a pillar of the state’s fiscal might and the lodestone of the whole edifice of the Indian empire.73 Hence, it was in areas subject to direct rule that central or provincial administrations more actively encouraged the establishment of tea gardens, a means of making the land more remunerative and the people more governable – but also, as it will be shown, of addressing other, geopolitical priorities. Here, then, it is worth returning to where we started: the terrestrial trans-Eurasian tea trade. For, if tea could be grown in the ‘submontane’ tracts of the newly annexed province of Punjab, and if this tea could be carried through neighbouring Afghanistan to Afghan and Central Asian markets, then British (Indian) merchants might at once help provide a vent for a valuable surplus and keep Russia’s advance into the markets and states of the Eurasian interior at bay. Bengal and the north-east, including Assam, were transformed from the late eighteenth century into a capitalist hub of the production and trade of certain ‘global’ commodities to the extent that its experience served as a precedent to be emulated in Punjab in the decade or so after the final stage of its annexation in 1849.74 Before c. 1860, therefore, the Government of India solicited information about the extent of cultivation in Punjab of those crops that had proved so instrumental to the transformation of Bengal or the larger Bengal Presidency: ‘cotton, sugarcane, country hemp, indigo, poppy (for opium)’ and, of course, tea.75 Tea was not native to Punjab, but tea saplings had already been transferred to the Kangra valley in 1848, their growth under the care of government superintendents, first Dr Falconer and then Dr Jameson. ‘Plantations’ were established by the Punjab government at three locations in the Kangra valley: Nagrota, Holta and Bhawarna.76 Just as Punjab’s new administrators strived to

Lally, ‘Salt and Sovereignty’, 652. Jagjeet Lally, ‘Trial, Error and Economic Development in Colonial Punjab: The Agri-Horticultural Society, the State and Sericulture Experiments, c. 1840–70’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review 52, no. 1 (2015): 1–27. 75 NAI-F, Foreign, 17 September 1858, Nos. 206–9. 76 NAI-F, FC, 25 April 1856, Nos. 164–6. 73 74

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replicate the successes achieved in the Bengal Presidency, those in charge of running Punjab’s government estates also tried to mimic the strategies of their forebearers in Assam. Jayeeta Sharma has revealed the shifting association of ideas about race (and racial descent), climate and landscape in the context of Assam’s tea gardens. Of particular relevance to the present discussion is the rationale for the employment of Chinese labourers on Assam’s tea gardens in the first few decades of their history, for Chinese labourers were also ‘imported’ into the Kangra valley. One thing that Bentinck’s Tea Committee lacked were Chinese tea plants, which were preferred as the basis of a new Indian enterprise to the un-adapted ‘wild’ variety because Assam and the entire borderland towards Yunnan was deemed uncivilized, its natural productions themselves supposedly in a ruder and less desirable state than those of China’s ancient tea hills.77 This problem resolved itself following the infamous theft of tea seeds from China. The other problem was a lack of know-how of tea cultivation, for such knowledge was monopolized and guarded by the Chinese. Central to the new enterprise, therefore, were Chinese tea cultivators; not only would they bridge the knowledge gap but their employment would assuage the suspicion of consumers, so synonymous had ‘tea’ and ‘China’ become in metropolitan markets. At the same time, the consumption of opium by Assamese was perceived to have caused the deeper descent of the hill tribes into ‘savagery’, making local labour unsuitable – it was felt – for so important a task as pioneering tea production in British India. As the forests were cleared to make way for European enterprise and Chinese expertise, Assam’s wild ‘tea forests’ were replaced with orderly ‘tea gardens’, this seemingly subtle linguistic change signalling a more profound shift in the physical form of the landscape and the proprietary rights over its use. Chinese were ‘sourced’ and recruited as labourers through the networks of opium trade that connected India and China, and into which the nascent tea enterprise was thoroughly embedded. Although not entirely successful, the efforts of these Chinese pioneers enabled the production of a small amount of marketable Indian tea. With the sudden growth of demand that followed, and in light of the limited numbers – and lack of any genuine experience of tea cultivation – of the Chinese procured for the commencement of the experiment, the Assam enterprise was faced with the need for more (and more skilled)

The discussion in this and the following paragraph draw upon: Sharma, Empire’s Garden, 1–70; Stan Neal, ‘Opium and Migration: Jardine Matheson’s Imperial Connections and the Recruitment of Chinese Labour for Assam, 1834–39’, Modern Asian Studies 51, no. 5 (2017): 1626–55.

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Chinese tea cultivators. There resulted an influx of men, a number of whom were arrested for creating disturbances, with the overall cost of the recruitment drive rendering it a failure. Thus, use of Chinese labour was gradually phased out over the 1850s. An intervening factor was increased differentiation of local ethnic groups in the eyes of expatriate planters and officials, with some groups deemed less indolent or more suitable as labourers than others. Another factor was the rise of the indenture system that made use of local labour more expedient. Ultimately, in this light, the recruitment of two Chinese (as masters) and ten ‘native’ factory workers (as apprentices) at the government gardens in Punjab in the late 1850s looks strangely out of step with thinking in the north-east and the trajectory of Assam’s tea industry at the same time. It seems almost as if the entire precedent derived from Assam – trials and tribulations and all – had to be replicated and repeated in Kangra for similar results to be reached.78 Indeed, not only historical precedent but the maintenance of a connection with Chinese ‘origins’ mattered to the creation of a marketable product, as can be seen in the use of Chinese names for different types of tea produced in Punjab: ‘Souchong’, ‘Pouchong’ and ‘Bohea’. 79 By the end of the decade, 5,664 lbs of tea was produced at a value of Rs. 8,496 (or £849), yet it either lacked the marketing networks or was of insufficient quality for commercial sale, and was instead ‘made over to the Commissariat Department for the use of the European Troops’.80 Initially, the lowest-grade teas were not deemed worth payment of transportation to markets in the Punjab Plains and it was thought they might be more profitable if sold locally, an added advantage being the fostering of a taste for tea to sustain future sales. Even the better-grade teas were deemed easier to sell to the military and the cantonment population in Jullundur than on the truly open market.81 Yet, picking continued on the tea gardens of the Kangra Hills (and remains a significant local agro-industry today, in fact). Amritsar emerged as an entrepot of the Kangra tea business, but the trade needed nurturing, and those involved were on the lookout for suitable markets from the outset – long before brokers of Assam tea in Calcutta and the British expatriate planters themselves started to look for the ‘market at our door’, as noted in the introduction.82 Quality was NAI-F, FC, 15 April 1853, Nos. 186–8; NAI-F, FC, 25 April 1856, Nos. 164–6. The Kangra tea gardens were networked with the East India Company’s botanical garden at Saharanpur, and thus within the larger imperial networks of botanists and natural scientists. 79 NAI-F, FC, 16 May 1856, Nos. 189–90. 80 NAI-F, FC, 29  January 1858, Nos. 200–2; NAI-F, Foreign, 31  December 1858, Nos. 3226–8. The former notes that the tea was produced at the Holta Factory (near Palampur). 81 NAI-F, FC, 14 November 1856, Nos. 230–2. 82 NAI-F, FC, 27 May 1853, Nos. 307–210, which reveals that hopes for sales were pinned squarely on the presence of Kashmiris in Punjab, for they were observed to be tea drinkers already. 78

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a pivotal consideration, insofar as expatriate merchants and colonial officials were aware of the inferiority of their product and were searching for markets where they might offload lower-grade or surplus stock.83 Nepal was a good prospect, at least for nearby Kumaon (rather than Kangra) tea planters: not only was tea widely consumed, but it was ‘poor stuff and the price high’, suggesting good inroads could be made by merchants.84 Some reports claimed that Afghans drank ‘the ordinary China green tea imported in large quantities by Kurrachee’, others venturing that ‘China tea of the finer, light coloured kinds […] alone find favour with the Afghans, Persians, Uzbaks and Turkomans’, but it was widely opined that there was a market for coarse Indian (brick) teas wherever and among whomever could not afford to drink the fine ‘Chah-i Sabz’ (green China tea), including among the Hazara or in Turkestan and northern Iran.85 About twenty years after Lumley had advocated for the encouragement of entrepreneurial merchants to take Punjab teas to Central Asia, in spring 1882, the provincial government reported to the centre that samples of Indian brick tea prepared in Calcutta had been sent to the commissioners of the Punjab districts of Amritsar, Peshawar and Rawalpindi, but also directly to an Afghan merchant. The aim was to entice the ‘principle merchants’ into disposing of this sort of Indian tea in markets in Afghanistan, Chinese Turkestan and Tibet.86 A rapid response came from the Afghan-Baluch frontier: the Kandahari merchants were unimpressed by the samples, namely because of their preference for green tea (the sample was black), although there was a strong possibility it might find sale in Nepal and possibly Tibet.87 A gloomier tally followed in October from a number of merchants – such as Lala Sant Ram, Rai Kalian Singh and Mian Sharaf Din, who had agents in Kabul, Kashgar and Bukhara – casting ‘doubt [on] the probability of success in any attempts to introduce the brick-tea into the countries in question’. This was on the grounds of the cost of the tea from Calcutta, relative to the cheap tea of Kangra, and the strangling of the market by Russian tariffs on Indian goods.88 Another note followed from Peshawar in

See, for instance, the interest expressed by Calcutta merchants via government to this extent: NAI-F, General A, March 1882, Nos. 52–4. See: Lutgendorf, ‘Making Tea’, for the larger efforts of Calcutta merchants to this end around the fin de siècle. 84 NAI-F, General A, March 1882, Nos. 50–5, Frontmatter. For similar reasons, perhaps, Kumaon tea was less extensively traded to Central Asia – or exertions made to that effect – than Kangra tea: NAI-F, Secret F, May 1888, No. 40, 18. 85 Citations, respectively, from: NAI-F, General A, March 1882, No. 50, 1; NAI-F, Secret F, May 1888, No. 40, 21. 86 NAI-F, General A, March 1882, Nos. 50–5. 87 Ibid. 88 NAI-F, Secret E, October 1882, Nos. 186–201, 22–3. 83

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mid-1883 containing evidence supplied by a merchant indicating (overstating, perhaps?) how dire the situation had become.89 Attempts to entice merchants plying routes via Kashmir to Yarkand and Kashgar similarly met with little success.90 In other words, Kangra tea – like other merchandise making it across the Indo-Afghan frontier and onwards to the oases states around this time – only continued to find sale because of its cheapness, and the ability of merchants to turn a (slender) profit in the face of tariffs.91 Price data collected by ‘native agents’ of the British Indian government operating in Central Asia in c. 1870 suggests that Punjab teas were 53 to 100 per cent of the value of the varieties brought by Russian merchants, and as much as half the cost of the most expensive varieties and twice that of the cheapest black tea brought by Indian merchants.92 As for tariffs, the problem was twofold, insofar as goods transported by caravan were liable to pay duties in two jurisdictions between India and markets of the continental interior. This was a sore point, for Afghanistan had been transformed into a British dependency yet the British Indian government could do little but investigate the Afghan ruler’s exactions, which they did – and thoroughly.93 The more they knew, the more frustrated they became, however, for there was little scope for actual intervention towards the betterment of trade. Tea from Kiakhta was imported duty-free into this space from 1869, whereas other tea was subject to tariffs.94 Thus began suspicion, which only intensified as inquiry into the matter was deepened in the 1880s, that Russia was determined to ruin trade with British India, with the volume of goods brought from Punjab steadily dropping off in consequence.95 That tea was not a homogenous substance, and the varieties brought by Russian merchants deemed inferior to those sold

NAI-F, S.E., October 1882, No. 313, 4. C.f. the schedule of taxes on dues through Afghanistan to Bukhara found in: NAI-F, Secret F, May 1888, No. 40. 90 NAI-F, General A, April 1882, Nos. 3–4. Contrast this with the optimism for such endeavours of a decade prior, described in: Lally, Silk Roads, 169–70. That said, even then it was noted that the journey from Punjab was difficult and the logistics complex, constraining the scope of trade: NAI-F, Secret, April 1874, Nos. 52–4, 3–4. 91 Lally, Silk Roads, 217–56. The advantage of cheapness is not to suggest that drinkers in Central Asia became any less discriminating; it was noted that they continued to prefer teas of quality: NAI-F, Secret F, August 1891, Nos. 180–3, 117. 92 See: NAI-F, S.I., 1870, Nos. 90–6, 6–7, which includes the names of various varieties and which notes that the prices are subject to the vicissitudes occasioned by the upheaval accompanying the conquest. 93 A delegate of the Kangra, Kumaon and Dehra Dun (Almora) tea planters – Leslie Rogers – also pressed the Government of India to take action on this matter: NAI-F, Frontier, May 1891, Nos. 12–13, Part B. 94 NAI-F, SH, 1869, Nos. 28–9. 95 NAI-F, S.E., October 1882, No. 200, 29. 89

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through networks reaching into north India and the Indian Ocean, only seemed to underscore to British officialdom the perniciousness of Russian policy.96 That said, tea was among those goods coming from British India that were not actually prohibited (others being muslin and indigo, which were without close substitute and deemed necessities), merely subject to a duty payment, although at a rate sufficient for one Indian merchant to lament a likely ‘loss of some five or six lakhs’.97 The restrictions, moreover, only applied to areas now subject to Russian authority. Elsewhere in the Eurasian interior – in Chinese Turkestan, Tibet and Mongolia – Russians and Russian subjects seemed to be making more headway than British (Indians), the latter (unfairly) despaired as unenterprising.98 It is significant that the Quarter-Master General (or his deputy), architect of what has been called the ‘imperial security state’, was the author of numerous documents from which evidence has been drawn in this section. This fact signals the indivisibility of international trade and politics.99 Indeed, when news came of the confiscation of Indian tea from merchants in Yarkand, and reports that tea brought by Russian (Andijani) and Chinese merchants continued to find sale unimpeded, a lengthy correspondence ensued between officials working within the various levels of the state (local, provincial, central) and branches of government (finance, frontier administration, political), as well as the government’s extra-territorial officers and Indian subjects plying the trade routes to Chinese Turkestan, into the precise nature, purpose and motivation of the confiscation as well as whether and how to retaliate. The flurry generated by the back and forth of paperwork broached not only Russia’s advance into such markets and its guiding hand in this matter but also the relationship of Yarkand’s administration to the Qing Empire (which had recently defeated the Russianbacked and short-lived ruler of an autonomous khanate, thereby returning Qing rule to the region). This last pivoted to the larger question of British rights of access to the Chinese interior for trade via the long, landward Indian border visà-vis that of her Russian and French rivals in Central Asia and Southeast Asia,

NAI-F, S.I., 1870, Nos. 90–6, 6–7. NAI-F, S.E., October 1882, Nos. 186–201, 4–5 and 25. See also NAI-F, A.Pol.E., September 1883, Nos. 300–2, frontmatter, 1. 98 NAI-F, Secret F, May 1888, No. 40, 1–4. For a report by Faiz Buksh into Russian trade to these markets, including the operations of one Nimchinoff Koffs and his agents – who traded in tea and other goods in Chinese Turkestan, and who were believed to be operating under the aegis of the Russian governor of Turkestan – see NAI-F, Secret, September 1872, Nos. 193–194, especially 20–22. For details of special measures to encourage Russian trade into Chinese Turkestan, see NAI-F, Secret F, October 1894, Nos. 76–81. 99 Lally, Silk Roads, 187–95. 96 97

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respectively, in the wake of those treaties struck following China’s defeat in the Opium Wars.100 The confiscation of a consignment of Indian tea thus escalated into crucial matters of geopolitics.

Conclusion This chapter was written against the backdrop of the global Covid-19 pandemic and it would be remiss, therefore, not to mention the ricochet of news between Hong Kong, Kashgar, Kabul and Calcutta of an outbreak of plague in China in 1894. Notes made in archives in 2012 and 2014 suddenly reverberate in 2020 because of the uncanny resemblance of concerns expressed over a century apart. In 1894, contemporaries raised concern over the tea caravans serving as vectors of plague, and the use of quarantine as a contrivance to shut out British (Indian) trade. In 2020, voices within governments and publics around the globe have raised concerns over mobility and have variously ‘blacklisted’ certain countries as part of ‘travel bans’, not to mention the piquing of xenophobia and racism in public life and discourse. Indeed, for better or worse, many of us have developed a heightened sense that trade is not merely a matter of geopolitics, for we are alive to the myriad ways in which globalization is connected to the biopolitical and how debates over trade and migration are sometimes a little more than tinged by a sense of racial difference or a desire for race-based exclusion. Such connection of commodity, empire and the biopolitical certainly merits more attention from historians, therefore. Sujit Sivasundaram’s recent ‘pre-history’ of Covid-19 – of zoonotic transfer from pangolins to humans, of its location within patterns of interaction between colonization, capitalism and settlement – offers a glimpse of the power of such analysis, fundamentally linked as it is to the history and present-day reality of the climate emergency.101 A related matter concerns race or racial(ized) difference and its entanglement with empire and commodity, even such a commodity as tea, exploration of which constitutes one of three larger contributions of this chapter. The domestication of particular aspects of Chinese tea-drinking culture within Western Europe meant that Britons were stunned by very different modes of tea consumption and their NAI-F, Frontier A, December 1888, Nos. 106–33. Scope for retaliation, it was noted, was negligible and likely to be counterproductive. Smuggling, moreover, negated the extent of the problem: NAI-F, Secret F, January 1894, Nos. 337–52. 101 Sujit Sivasundaram, ‘Viewpoint: The Human, the Animal, and the Prehistory of Covid-19’, Past & Present 249, no. 1 (2020): 295–316. 100

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associated material cultures in such locales as Upper Burma, contemporaries’ descriptions thus tinged with a sense of ‘otherness’. Race was also entangled in the spread of the plantation complex around the globe. Racial capitalism and its institutions, however, found advocates not only among Europeans but also their indigenous collaborators, as we have seen. Unsettled, perhaps, by this appropriation (and subversion?) of a white technology, the British halted the advance of plantations in Upper Burma in the instance reviewed, above. A larger contribution of this chapter regards knowledge. Once the gauntlet had been laid down to study the ‘social lives of things’, scholars began teasing apart the issues attending on such an enterprise.102 One is methodological: how do we study the social lives of things? Another is epistemological-ontological: what exactly is the (immutable?) ‘thingness’ of commodities, materia, artworks and so on in circulation? – wherein does it reside? – how does it come to be (known)? Scholars have paid considerable attention to how the identity or essence – for example, the uses, meanings and significations – of things were constructed within particular contexts, and how they were altered as they moved from one context to another (not to mention in consequence of the very act of mobility itself). Tracing the circulation of an artwork represents a rather different endeavour to studying the history of a commodity and its social lives, however. The latter runs the risk of becoming part of the process of commodification itself, rather than remaining aloof from it: far from merely revealing the historical process by which a substance was rendered into a stable or uniform ‘thing’ transformed through market exchange into a ‘commodity’, scholarly knowledge production risks becoming an act of reproducing, and thereby reifying, the transformation of substance into commodity.103 This is achieved, often entirely inadvertently, by taking for granted the very thingness of a substance or because of a tendency towards backward induction – a retracing of the steps by which cocoa, tea, indigo, rubber, jute or oil became global commodities par excellence. By staring this problem in the face, we might begin to prospect forwards (instead of retracing backward), examine other trajectories (than the master narratives of particular commodity histories) and take alternative vantage points or bring into view a range of other actors (the ‘subalterns’, perhaps, to those prescribed by the itineraries and identities embedded within the master narratives). In so doing,

Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 103 That said, tracing the life of an artwork can flesh out its provenance, the result of which can be to create or alter market value. 102

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we may come to see how commodity histories are entangled with empire not only in an empirical-historical sense but in methodological and epistemologicalontological terms, too. By focusing on Sino-Russian tea trade networks and Burmese modes of tea production, consumption and material culture, this chapter has sought to make such an intervention. Tea journeyed in different directions to numerous locales and was – as it travelled and at the point of consumption – hardly a singular substance, for it was constituted into a variety of preparations (loose leaf, bricks, discs, dry, wet) and was in some places chewed and eaten rather than brewed and drunk. The analysis calls to issue the connection of substance, empire, world economy, commodity (and commodification), consumption and material culture into single, neat narratives or works of global history. It suggests a tapestry woven from the multiplicity of the material lives of commodities such as tea, with such closer focus disturbing and even deconstructing the coherence of ‘commodity’ and the ‘global’ as conceptual categories. By turning to – and traversing – the frontiers of British rule in Asia, furthermore, this chapter also interrogates the value of focusing on ‘empire’. The frontier was a place where imperial power was more fragile and fissiparous and the state and its officials relatively impoverished of information. The process of expansion towards and within the frontier necessarily improved the stock of knowledge about the Eurasian interior (including its markets and economic potential) and of Russian imperial advances. This material and epistemological advance brought matters of tea production, trade and exchange networks, and consumption to the attention of British officials. Yet, tea was also conceived as a means of advancing British power – or at least stymying the advances of rivals – within this space. Tellingly of this particular relation of commodity and empire, the data on matters relating to the trans-Eurasian tea trade and the promotion of Indian teas within Central Asia were collected at the behest of the intelligence branch of the British Indian state. Tea and British imperial ambition were in such connexion that tea could become one of the objects of trade war, as the latter parts of this chapter demonstrate, such rivalry between empires forcing us beyond the imperial domain and into a trans-imperial and global space. Thinking with a framework or terrain of analysis that is not narrowly bounded by an empire, but brings into view the spaces between and across empires, is another contribution of this chapter.

4­

Sailors as traders: Early modern seafarers in commodity chains, commercial practices and empire Richard J. Blakemore

From the medieval period through to the modern day, seafaring has been an essential component of both global trade and global empire. Commerce and empire are closely interlinked, relying upon each other, shaping each other and often operating through the same or overlapping circuits of travel, encounter and  exchange. During the early modern period, maritime travel in particular became increasingly crucial, in some cases building upon preexisting and long-standing circulations, but transforming in extent and character the commercial, material, demographic and biological exchanges which occurred between different regions of the world.1 Shipping was probably the most dynamic economic sector of the age, and the material and economic shifts wrought by maritime travel reached inland even to places distant from

This chapter is based on research I undertook during the project ‘Sailing into Modernity: Comparative Perspectives on the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century European Transition’, funded by the European Research Council (Starting Grant n. 284340), and as a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, and I would like to thank both the ERC and Merton College for their financial support. It also draws on research conducted by the MarineLives project (http://www. marinelives.org/), led by Colin Greenstreet, and I am extremely grateful to Colin for his assistance and for permission to use that material here. 1 James D. Tracy, ed., The Political Economy of Merchant Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); James D. Tracy, ed., The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ed., Merchant Networks in the Early Modern World (Aldershot: Routledge, 1996); Charles H. Parker, Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,  2010); Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, eds., The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World (London: Routledge, 2016); Anne Gerritsen, ‘From Long-Distance Trade to the Global Lives of Things: Writing the History of Early Modern Trade and Material Culture’, Journal of Early Modern History 20, no. 6 (2016): 526–44.

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the sea.2 It is no coincidence, therefore, that many of the new empires which emerged during this period, not only in Europe (as is often assumed) but also in the eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, were heavily involved in maritime activities.3 Yet if commerce and empire were closely connected during this period, they were not perfectly aligned. Despite the efforts of sovereigns and mercantile elites to monopolize the movement and sale of valuable commodities, the practical limits to their control and the fierce competition between empires created opportunities, which occurred within imperial and global networks but were open to exploitation at a local level, including by the agents of those same empires.4 This combination of and disjunction between trade and empire, constraint and opportunity, risk and reward characterized the maritime world of the early modern period: and it is this combination that I wish to explore in this chapter, by focusing on the activities of seafarers themselves. Seafaring labourers, unsurprisingly, played a pivotal role in these imperial and commercial circuits. Neither intercontinental trade nor seaborne empire could function without these workers, and it is precisely in that context of labour that seafarers have usually been interpreted, especially in studies which emphasize the international and global trajectories of their working lives.5 In this interpretation,

Jan Lucassen and Richard W. Unger, ‘Shipping, Productivity and Economic Growth’, in Richard W. Unger, ed., Shipping and Economic Growth, 1350–1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 3–44; Guillaume Daudin, ‘Le Commerce Maritime et la Croissance Européenne au XVIIIe Siècle’, in The Sea in History: The Early Modern World, eds. Christian Buchet and Gérard le Bouëdec (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2017), 9–18. 3 See, for example, Palmira Brummett, Ottoman Seapower and Levantine Diplomacy in the Age of Discovery (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994); and the chapters by Théodore Nicoué Gayibor, Sachin Pendse, and Ei Murakami in Buchet and Bouëdec, Sea in History. 4 These themes have been emphasized in Jonathan Curry-Machado, ‘Global Histories, Imperial Commodities, Local Interactions: An Introduction’, in Global Histories, Imperial Commodities, Local Interactions, ed. Jonathan Curry-Machado (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 1–14; and Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, ‘The Global Lives of Things: Material Culture in the First Global Age’, in The Global Lives of Things, eds. Gerritsen and Riello, 1–28. 5 Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso, 2000); Jaap R. Bruijn, ‘Seafarers in Early Modern and Modern Times: Change and Continuity’, International Journal of Maritime History 17, no. 1 (2005): 1–16; Marcel van der Linden, ‘Labour History beyond Borders’, in Histories of Labour: National and International Perspectives, eds. John McIlroy, Alan Campbell and Joan Allen (London: Merlin Press, 2010), 353–83; Lucassen and Unger, ‘Shipping, Productivity’; Jelle van Lottum, Jan Lucassen and Lex Heerma van Voss, ‘Sailors, National and International Labour Markets and National Identity, 1600–1850’, in Shipping and Economic Growth, ed. Unger, 309– 51; Matthias van Rossum, Lex Heerma van Voss, Jelle van Lottum, and Jan Lucassen, ‘National and International Labour Markets for Sailors in European, Atlantic and Asian Waters, 1600– 1850’, in Maritime History as Global History, eds. Maria Fusaro and Amélia Polónia (St John’s, 2

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mariners’ work, which is often perceived as unskilled, contributed to the value of commodities by moving them to suitable markets, but most seafarers interacted with these cargoes only in physically handling them. Though commanders and senior officers enjoyed the perquisite of trade for themselves, mariners lower down the pecking order could only dabble in an opportunistic and limited (and, it is often implied, illicit) fashion.6 Indeed, several scholars have concluded that the early modern period witnessed the decline of a medieval system in which sailors shared in the possession and profits of ships and their cargos, a system increasingly replaced by wage contracts, accompanied by dispossession and exploitation, with these experiences provoking a ‘nonaccumulative ethic’ among mariners.7 The commodity of most importance to low-ranking seafarers was, by this argument, their own commodified labour. As Marcel van der Linden has argued, however, the relationship between labour and commodities is not so straightforward – any one example of labour exists within larger chains of production and commodification, while labourers are also themselves consumers.8 By revisiting the activities of seafarers within commodity chains, therefore, we can consider their individual agency more fully, building upon recent work which has emphasized that early modern seafarers were not a homogenous and entirely subordinate labour force, but a

Newfoundland: International Maritime History Association, 2010), 47–72; Matthias van Rossum, Werkers van de Wereld: Gobalisering, Arbeid en Internculturele Ontmoeting tussen Aziatische en Europese Zeelieden in  Dienst  van de VOC, 1600–1800 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2014); see also Alessandro Stanziani,  Sailors,  Slaves and Immigrants: Bondage in the Indian Ocean World, 1750– 1914 (London: Palgrave, 2014). 6 Dorothy Burwash, English Merchant Shipping, 1640–1540 (Newton Abbott: David & Charles, 1969), 42–56; Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the 17th and 18th Centuries (Newton Abbott: David & Charles, 1972), 147–50; Rediker, Between the Devil, 129–33; Cheryl A. Fury, Tides in the Affairs of Men: The Social History of Elizabethan Seamen, 1580–1603 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 96; J. D. Alsop, ‘Tudor Merchant Seafarers in the Early Guinea Trade’, in The Social History of English Seamen, 1485–1649, ed. Cheryl A. Fury (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2012), 99; David Loades, ‘The Elizabethan Maritime Community, 1500–1650’, in Social History of English Seamen, 1485–1649, ed. Fury, 119. 7 Burwash, English Merchant Shipping, 47–8; Richard P. Jackson, ‘From Profit-Sailing to Wage-Sailing: Mediterranean Owner-Captains and their Crews during the Medieval Commercial Revolution’, Journal of European Economic History 18, no. 3 (1989): 605–28; Rediker, Between the Devil, 147; Rediker and Linebaugh, Many-Headed Hydra. Most historians acknowledge that shares in profits, though probably not in commodities, persisted as a common form of remuneration in sectors such as privateering, fishing, and coastal trade. For further discussion on this subject, see Richard J. Blakemore, ‘Pieces of Eight, Pieces of Eight: Seamen’s Earnings and the Venture Economy of Early Modern Seafaring’, Economic History Review 70, no. 4 (2017): 1153–84. 8 Marcel van der Linden, ‘The “Globalization” of Labour and Working-Class History and Its Consequences’, in Global Labour History: A State of the Art, ed. Jan Lucassen (Oxford: P. Lang, 2006), 13–36, at 34; see also the comments on commodity chains in Curry-Machado, ‘Global Histories’, and Gerritsen and Riello, ‘Global Lives of Things’.

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diverse group, some of whom were skilled workers who could, within certain limits, shape their circumstances to their own advantage.9 Moreover, we might reflect on their role in commerce and commodification beyond the act of transport. Beverly Lemire has shown how even mariners of the lower ranks aboard ship were discerning and knowledgeable traders and consumers, whose choices, in terms of the objects they chose to buy, possess and sell, had a broader impact on ‘plebeian’ material culture (and seafarers’ own possessions are no less significant in this regard than their transactions as intermediaries for others).10 This chapter focuses on British seafarers, mainly because it draws primarily on the records of the High Court of Admiralty, an especially rich resource for this topic whose existence reflects the growth in scale and range of British shipping and trade across this period.11 Like all legal materials, the papers of this court must be handled carefully, because lawyers, litigants and witnesses presented evidence to fit their own interests, and their claims cannot always be taken at face value. Nevertheless, the detailed nature of these documents, their sheer volume (especially from the seventeenth century, the court’s busiest period) and the active and often successful involvement in lawsuits by seafarers of all ranks make these sources among the best evidence available to evaluate the nature and extent of seafarers’ activities as traders.12 Equally importantly,

See, for e.g., the essays in Maria Fusaro, Bernard Allaire, Richard J. Blakemore and Tijl Vanneste, eds., Law, Labour, and Empire: Comparative Perspectives on Seafarers, c. 1500–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); see also Eleanor Hubbard, ‘Sailors and the Early Modern British Empire: Labor, Nation, and Identity at Sea’, History Compass 14, no. 8 (2016): 348–58. 10 Beverly Lemire, ‘“Men of the World”: British Mariners, Consumer Practice, and Material Culture in an Era of Global Trade, c. 1660–1800’, Journal of British Studies 54, no. 2 (2015): 288–319; Beverly Lemire, ‘A Question of Trousers: Seafarers, Masculinity and Empire in the Shaping of British Male Dress, c. 1600–1800’, Cultural and Social History 13, no. 1 (2016): 1–22; Beverly Lemire, Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures: The Material World Remade, c.1500–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). See also Anne E. C. McCants, ‘Exotic Goods, Popular Consumption, and the Standard of Living: Thinking about Globalization in the Early Modern World’, Journal of World History 18, no. 4 (2007): 433–62; Maria Fusaro, Richard J. Blakemore, Benedetta Crivelli et al., ‘Entrepreneurs at Sea: Trading Practices, Legal Opportunities and Early Modern Globalization’, International Journal of Maritime History 28, no. 4 (2016): 774–86; Blakemore, ‘Pieces of Eight’. 11 I use ‘British’ here as a shorthand for English, Scottish and Welsh sailors and imperial or commercial activities, rather than to imply any British identity among these seafarers. For an overview of early modern maritime developments in Britain, and some discussion of identities, see Richard J. Blakemore and James Davey, eds., The Maritime World of Early Modern Britain (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020). 12 George F. Steckley, ‘Merchants and the Admiralty Court during the English Revolution’, The American Journal of Legal History 22 (1978): 137–75; George F. Steckley, ‘Instance Cases at Admiralty in 1657: A Court “Packed up with Sutors”’, The Journal of Legal History 7 (1986): 68–83; George F. Steckley, ‘Litigious Mariners: Wage Cases in the Seventeenth-Century Admiralty Court’, Historical Journal 42 (1999): 315–45; Richard J. Blakemore, ‘The Legal World of English Sailors, c. 1575–1729’, in Fusaro, Allaire, Blakemore and Vanneste, eds. Law, Labour and Empire, 100–20; 9

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in these records, and in other evidence, it is apparent that these sailors were active in both intra-imperial and trans-imperial commerce, just as they moved between employments across local, national and imperial contexts in a highly international labour market. They took advantage of their professional mobility to gain access to commodity chains which were unavailable to many others, and by doing so redirected those chains in new directions. In relation to the themes of this volume, there are two key points I wish to raise in this chapter. The first is chronological continuity as an accompaniment to the remarkable change in global trade which characterized the early modern period. I will argue that far from declining, the supposedly ‘medieval’ activity of trade by seafarers in fact proved remarkably resilient, deliberate and strategic throughout the early modern period, and afterwards, while evolving into new forms. Those forms, the routes they sailed and the commodity chains in which they participated were determined by seafarers’ relationship to early modern empire, a relationship they could never quite escape (and nor did they always seek to) – but the practice continued nonetheless, and it was often at the interstices between empires that the most profitable prospects occurred. This relationship to empire connects with my second point: the importance of local actors in commodity chains.13 Seafarers, while trading on a small scale, were labourers in global commodity chains and ‘cross-cultural brokers’ in their own right, directly involved in the transmission of both the commodities themselves and of knowledge about them, the places they were created and the markets in which they were sold. More broadly, an analysis of seafarers’ trading prompts us to reconsider the idea of local actors within the context of maritime mobility, rather than a particular location. The relationship between empire, commodity chains and local actors cannot be restricted to the analysis of specific places and their inhabitants. As I noted earlier, much of the value of global trade came precisely through the movement of commodities, and while ‘connectivity’ or the ‘circulation’ of people, goods and ideas has proved a popular concept among historians of the early modern world, we should pay more attention to the mechanisms by which these circulations occurred and their impact on the commodity chains themselves.14 Empires sought not just to control colonial territories, populations and resources but also to control this movement, especially movement by sea, as Richard J. Blakemore, ‘Orality and Mutiny: Authority and Speech amongst the Seafarers of Early Modern London’, in Spoken Word and Social Practice: Orality in Europe (1400–1700), eds. Thomas Cohen and Lesley Twomey (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 253–79. 13 See Curry-Machado, ‘Global Histories’, 4–6, and the introduction to this volume. 14 For comments on ‘connectivity’ see Gerritsen and Riello, ‘Global Lives of Things’, 17; see also Gerritsen, ‘From Long-Distance Trade’.

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shown by the efforts of early modern rulers to control shipping routes and by the legal disputes over maritime sovereignty that rumbled throughout the seventeenth century and contributed to the emergence of international law.15 At the same time, it was precisely seafarers’ movement that created their agency in these commodity chains, and ships were sites for commerce and consumption as well as being mobile and transitory objects. Whether docked in a bustling harbour, anchored off an unfamiliar shore or rolling across the ocean many days away from land, cross-cultural deals were as likely (perhaps even more likely) to take place on the deck of a ship as they were in a merchant factory. Those deals might transfer fortunes between wealthy merchants and powerful rulers, but they might also involve a small sum swapped between sailors for just a handful of goods. The important role of ships not just as links between other places or as carriers of cargoes but as social, economic and cultural spaces themselves deserves more attention than it has yet received from historians of global trade.16 I will explore these questions through three sections. In the first, I survey the range of commodities that seafarers traded, and offer some evidence on the volume and value of such trade in specific cases, to demonstrate the continuation of this practice across the period and its economic implications for individual seafarers. I then turn to seafarers’ commercial practices in a broader sense, examining the personal and financial networks which enabled their acquisition and exploitation of those commodities. In the third section, I discuss the relationship between seafarers, imperial authorities and risk, to consider how seafarers’ travels gave them access to a wider range of commodity chains, but also rendered them vulnerable to the vagaries of imperial power.

British seafarers and global commodity chains The commodity chains in which mariners participated as small traders were as varied as the locations to which they sailed – and, unsurprisingly, were dictated by the marketable goods of those locations. As with other aspects of global See Richard J. Blakemore, ‘Law and the Sea’, in The Routledge Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds, 1400–1800, eds. Claire Jowitt, Craig Lambert, and Steve Mentz (London: Routledge, 2020), 388–425. 16 For recent discussions of ships as social and cultural sites, see Richard Gould, Archaeology and the Social History of Ships (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Anyaa Anim-Addo, William Hasty, and Kimberley Peters, eds., The Mobilities of Ships (London: Routledge, 2015); Martin Dusinberre and Roland Wenzlhuemer, ‘Editorial – Being in Transit: Ships and Global Incompatibilities’, Journal of Global History 11, no. 2 (2016): 155–62; Dagmar Freist, ‘A Global Microhistory of the Early Modern Period: Social Sites and the Interconnectedness of Human Lives’, Quaderni Storici 52, no. 2 (2017): 537–55. 15

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commerce, British sailors’ trade continued in more ‘traditional’ regions while expanding into new areas and commodities across the early modern period. For example, those sailing to northern Europe and the Baltic brought home raw materials which had been traded for centuries, including tar, flax, rye and lead.17 In the Mediterranean, where the presence of British and Dutch shipping increased from the later sixteenth century onwards, and especially in trade to the Venetian empire, British seafarers traded in currants, oil and silk; in Ottoman ports they bought grosgrains and rice.18 Several mariners testifying in the admiralty court mentioned glass, while John Casey possessed ‘a boxe of stones to make looking glasses’, as well as several casks of currants, another popular cargo.19 In the western Mediterranean, fruit and wine were the goods most often mentioned in these sources, sometimes in substantial volumes: aboard the Digbey Ketch, in 1687, two of the mariners carried respectively 500 and 1,100 oranges from Seville, while the master had 9,000.20 All of these commodities were already known in Britain, but were only now transported in British ships. Seafarers’ place in the commodity chains, and therefore their access to these trade goods, had profoundly changed. Further afield, as British trade and shipping increased continuously across these centuries, mariners purchased the popular new commodities that were the mainstays of colonial economies and intercontinental trade, and not just from British colonies. Adam Cornelisz, a Scottish sailor who died while serving on the Dutch vessel Harpoen, had two rolls of tobacco aboard, besides over 100 guilders – or so his widow, Margariet Willemsen, claimed.21 In the Caribbean and South America, mariners purchased sugar, sometimes shipping quite The National Archives (henceforth: TNA) HCA 13/70, fos 57v-9r; cf. fos 198r-v; F. W. Brooks, ed., The First Order Book of the Hull Trinity House, 1632–1665 (Hull: Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 1942), 9, 44, 121. 18 E.g., TNA HCA 13/61, fos 220v-1r, 221v-2r; HCA 24/106/98; HCA 24/109/137; cf. HCA 24/106/101. On changes to shipping networks in the Mediterranean, see Maria Fusaro, Colin Heywood, and Mohamed-Salah Omri, eds., Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Braudel’s Maritime Legacy (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010). 19 On Casey, see TNA HCA 13/118, answers of Thomas Burley, John Casey, Edward Fainte and Richard Guy, 29 March 1644; cf. HCA 3/41, fo. 413v; see also HCA 24/109/293. For another mariner carrying currants, see HCA 24/109/142; cf. HCA 23/15/199; HCA 13/62, depositions of Benjamin Cleer and Thomas Colsen, 14 August 1649; HCA 13/122, answer of John Hide, 23 August 1649; TNA PROB 11/208/717. 20 TNA HCA 23/22/199; HCA 13/79, deposition of James Cloghorne, 9 May 1688; see also TNA HCA 24/109/42; TNA HCA 24/109/82; HCA 13/121, answer of Peter Ackland, Richard Smith, John Titchill, John Friggin, 17 May 1649. See also Pauline Croft, ‘English Mariners Trading to Spain and Portugal, 1558–1625’, Mariner’s Mirror 69, no. 3 (1983): 251–66. 21 Stadsarchief Rotterdam (henceforth: SAR) 18/669, 221. ‘Cornelisz’ is the version of his name given in the Dutch records. For other examples, see TNA HCA 24/109/61; HCA 13/61, fos 417v-19v; HCA 13/62, deposition of Adrian Block, 8 December 1647; HCA 24/112/148, 182; HCA 3/56, fos 256v-7r. On the role of Dutch shipping in early English colonial trade, see Wim Klooster, ‘Anglo-Dutch Trade in the Seventeenth Century: An Atlantic Partnership?’, in Shaping the Stuart World, 1603–1714: The Atlantic Connection, eds. Allan I. Macinnes and Arthur H. Williamson (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 261–82. 17

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Across Colonial Lines

substantial quantities on their own behalf.22 On the other side of the Atlantic, seafarers bought gold and ivory on the coast of West Africa.23 In the service of the English East India Company, or its competitors, mariners sailing to the Indian Ocean also acquired dyes, textiles, spices, chinaware and other commodities that were new to British culture.24 As British ships began to trade on the east coast of Africa, particularly at Madagascar, mariners participated in commerce there, too.25 The novelty of these goods lessened over time, but their cumulative impact on European society persisted.26 Some of this trading may well have been an opportunistic side-line for sailors, but the variety and volume of commodities already suggests something more than that, and there is plentiful evidence that seafarers went on their voyages prepared and looking for trade, especially as they often took commodities with them on their outwards voyage. Alexander Cox, a master’s mate (or navigating officer), carried 500 ‘Coniskins’ to Alexandria, where he purchased cloves; shipmaster Henry Wallis carried out clothing, pewter and seventeen ‘suffolke Cheeses’, which he traded for ‘two tun of fruit’; and Thomas Davis, a shipmaster’s servant, had aboard ‘kerseyes, callicos, French wynes Brandiwynes waxe & paper and swords’ when their ship was seized off the coast of West Africa.27 Nor was this practice restricted to ships’ officers and their personal attendants. A lengthy admiralty court case regarding the Dutch ship Lookinge glasse, which was seized by an English vessel off the coast of Maryland in 1645, and which

TNA HCA 13/71, fos 657v-8r, 662r; HCA 13/101, fos 62v-5v, 93v-7r; cf. HCA 24/57/217. For further examples, see below, 93–5, 99. 23 For gold, see TNA HCA 24/108/357; HCA 24/109/181, 275, 344; HCA 13/121, answer of Alice Langram, 13 December 1648; HCA 23/15/115, 211; HCA 13/78, depositions of John Fowles and Leonard Woodfine, 3 June 1675, and Henry Oakes, 4 June 1675. For ivory, see HCA 24/109/283; HCA 13/122, answers of William Paine, Nicholas Smith, Christopher Collesse, John Constantine, 12 February 1649[/50], and John Constantine, 14 February 1649[/50]. 24 For examples, see Edward Barlow, Barlow’s Journal of His Life at Sea in King’s Ships, East & West Indiamen & Other Merchantmen from 1659 to 1703, ed. Basil Lubbock (London: Hurst & Blackett, 2 vols, 1934), I: 189, 194, 218, 226–7, II: 517, 527–8. See also below, 107–8. 25 TNA HCA 24/121/201, 191; HCA 3/56, fos 504v, 510r, 533v; HCA 13/132, answer of William Derow, 3 January 1684[/5]; HCA 13/79, depositions of James Callant, 23 February 1684[/5], John Absolon, 5 March 1684[/5], Antony Couch, 23 March 1684[/5], James Neale, 15 April 1685, Joseph Pickerill, 14 May 1685, and Roger Smith, 13 June 1685. 26 See McCants, ‘Exotic Goods’; Sara Pennell, ‘Material Culture in Seventeenth-Century “Britain”: The Matter of Domestic Consumption’, in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, ed. Frank Trentmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 64–84; Michelle Craig McDonald, ‘Transatlantic Consumption’, in History of Consumption, ed. Trentmann, 112–26; Lemire, Global Trade. 27 For Cox: TNA HCA 13/30, fo. 68v; HCA 13/101, fos 228v-9r; cf. HCA 13/30, fos 69r-70v. For Wallis: HCA 13/79, deposition of Henry Boucher, 1  June 1688; HCA 13/132, answer of Henry Wallis, 11 July 1688 (and for another ship’s crew carrying cheeses, see HCA 13/30, fos 77v-8r, 233v-4r). For Davis: HCA 13/71, fo. 677r; HCA 23/18/68. 22

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89

also had several English mariners serving aboard, preserves particularly detailed information about the sailors’ ventures.28 The master and company transported ‘Linnen cloth, stuffe, silke, hatts, shooes, stockinges stronge waters and such like trade goodes’, in total worth 2,243 guilders, and one witness reported that all the sailors ‘carried out with them […] an adventure in goodes little more or less accordinge as they were able which was to trucke and trade’ for tobacco. One mariner carried ‘soape Bibles & pepper’, while another had ‘stuffes buttons stockings & other odd Comodities’ for sale.29 Not only does this case demonstrate a deliberate intention to ‘trucke and trade’ as part of mariners’ economic strategies, but the choice of outward-bound commodities is revealing: books, clothes and other manufactured items were all in high demand in the fledgling colonies, suggesting a shrewd sense of what was likely to sell well.30 Both tobacco and sugar were transformative for European consumer habits and for the colonial societies that produced them, which came to depend extensively on the destruction or expropriation of indigenous communities and the labour of millions of enslaved people.31 As well as purchasing the products, seafarers were involved in the earlier stages of these commodity chains too, through their participation in the transatlantic slave trade, which for British sailors began to expand rapidly from the mid-seventeenth century onwards.32 In focusing on seafarers as labourers, some scholars have drawn comparisons between maritime work and slavery, highlighting how both were brutally coercive and positing the existence of transnational

The ship was named in the English documents as ‘Speagle’ (i.e. spiegel, ‘mirror’) and translated as ‘Lookinge glasse’ in the English sources. See Timothy B. O’Riordan, The Plundering Time: Maryland and the English Civil War, 1645–1646 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Richard J. Blakemore, ‘The Politics of Piracy in the British Atlantic, c. 1640–1649’, International Journal of Maritime History 25, no. 2 (2013): 159–72. For a similar case of a Dutch ship, listing the sailors’ goods in detail (but not in value), see TNA HCA 13/70, fos 645r-49v. 29 TNA HCA 13/60, fos 110r-17v. 30 Michael Kwass, ‘Production and Export of Tobacco: The Development of Atlantic Maritime Commerce’, in Sea in History, ed. Buchet and Bouëdec, 302. 31 Thomas Benjamin, The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians and their Shared History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), chapter  8; McDonald, ‘Transatlantic Consumption’; Kwass, ‘Production and Export’; David Eltis, ‘Sugar and the Slave Trade in the Development of Atlantic Maritime Trade’, in Sea in History, eds. Buchet and Bouëdec, 275–85. 32 John C. Appleby, ‘A Guinea Venture, c.1657: A Note on the Early English Slave Trade’, Mariner’s Mirror 79, no. 1 (1993): 84–7; John C. Appleby, ‘“A Business of Much Difficulty”: A London Slaving Venture 1651–1654’, Mariner’s Mirror 81, no. 1 (1995): 3–14; Larry Gragg, ‘“To Procure Negroes”: The English Slave Trade to Barbados, 1627–60’, Slavery & Abolition 16, no. 1 (1995): 65–84; Alison Games, ‘“The Sanctuarye of our Rebell Negroes”: The Atlantic Context of Local Resistance on Providence Island, 1630–41’, Slavery & Abolition 19, no. 3 (1998): 1–21; Richard J. Blakemore, ‘West Africa in the British Atlantic: Trade, Violence, and Empire in the 1640s’, Itinerario 39, no. 2 (2015): 299–327. 28

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class solidarities.33 However, without denying the existence of coercion and the potential for class identity among seafaring labourers, it is important to highlight how mariners of all ranks not only laboured for but invested in the transportation of captive human cargoes. As in other shipping sectors, shipmasters and senior officers were granted particular privileges and often worked together.34 In the Hopewell, which transported 249 enslaved people to the Caribbean, of whom 74 died during the voyage, the master Robert Lumley (who also died at sea) purchased 22 enslaved people for himself, one of whom he gave to the boatswain (one of the ship’s officers) and carpenter, and another to his mate Robert Chasely. Chasely recorded that he, the surgeon and the master’s mate of another ship purchased a further seventeen enslaved people for their own account.35 Just as with other maritime sectors, however, mariners of lower rank participated in this trade too. Aboard the Mary & John, which sailed from Angola to Bahia in 1651–2, the master and shipowners transported 133 enslaved people on their account, while the pilot carried 24 enslaved people (of whom two died aboard), the master’s mate, boatswain and carpenter transported one each, and two mariners together also transported one.36 In 1729, Robertson Mumford, a sailor from New York, bought the young Guinean Broteer Furro, whom Mumford renamed Venture because he was purchased ‘with [Mumford’s] own private venture’.37 While the concept of ‘agency’ has often been construed in a positive light in social and cultural history, and especially in relation to local actors resisting imperial authorities, this evidence reminds us that the economic opportunities and agency of seafarers often came at the expense of others’ freedom and others’ lives. The evidence from some of these transatlantic slave-trading voyages throws further light on the balance between wages and trade within that economic agency. When the Rappanahoacke and Sarah were seized by two Dutch ships during the 1650s, for example, the mariners of each ship claimed that they had

Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra; Emma Christopher, Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargos, 1730–1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Stanziani, Sailors, Slaves, and Immigrants. 34 Charterparties, the contract between shipowner, shipmaster, and freighting merchant(s), often specified these privileges, e.g., TNA C 6/36/21, fo. 3r. 35 TNA HCA 24/121/179, 180, 189; HCA 23/22/44; HCA 3/56, fo. 465r. It is possible that Lumley transferred the enslaved person to another mate, not Chasely, but this is not clear in the sources. 36 TNA HCA 13/71, fos 644r-55r; see Table 4.2. 37 Quoted in Bryan Sinche, ‘Constituting Value in A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa’, in Atlantic Biographies: Individuals and Peoples in the Atlantic World, eds. Jeffrey A. Fortin and Mark Meuwese (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 130. 33

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lost in total (including wages and goods) between £800 and £1,500.38 The master of the Rappanahoacke, Thomas Clarke, reported that they had loaded just over 200 enslaved people and were sailing for Cartagena in the Caribbean, and he estimated the loss of wages for the crew at £900, and the loss of ‘private adventure of himselfe and [his] Company’ at £300.39 In the Hopewell lawsuit mentioned above, Chaseley’s testimony reveals that the profits from selling enslaved people could have been worth almost five years’ salary for the deceased Lumley, and perhaps around three years’ salary for Chasely himself.40 While the figures in these cases are only estimates, they indicate that the economic value of the commodities acquired by seafarers could be substantial relative to their wages, and the same pattern emerges from similar estimates relating to other areas of the shipping industry. Alexander Cornwell, a shipmaster based in Rotterdam, reported that his mariners lost goods worth 400 guilders when his ship was seized by a frigate from Ostend in October 1658.41 In other cases there are more details about individual investments: Richard Shone, a carpenter, claimed that when his ship was captured during the 1640s he had tobacco aboard worth twelve months’ pay, while two mariners of the Looking glasse, discussed earlier, both stated that their goods had cost 220 guilders when purchased in Rotterdam, worth about two years’ pay on a mariner’s median salary at the time.42 There is particularly detailed evidence in a series of cases arising from English ships seized by the Portuguese empire during 1649–51.43 In Tables 4.1 and 4.2, individual seafarers’ possessions from various ships are listed, demonstrating

TNA HCA 24/112/262. TNA HCA 13/71, fos 628r-40r. 40 TNA HCA 24/121/179, 180, 189; HCA 23/22/44; HCA 3/56, fo. 465r. The ship’s owners accused Chasely of selling some enslaved people illegally, while Chasely claimed that he and Lumley sold those enslaved people which they had transported on their own account. The calculations regarding salary use the lowest estimated price given by Chasely, and assume that he and his two partners each received one-third of the total. 41 SAR 18, inv.nr. 675, 24. 42 For Shone: TNA HCA 13/62, deposition of Richard Shone, 9 September 1647; Shone’s pay was 38s per month, so this would amount to £22 16s. (For a 1676 voyage also involving considerable amounts of tobacco, see HCA 13/78, deposition of Nicholas Oliver, 28 June 1678). For Corbyn and Williams: TNA HCA 13/60, fos 110r-7v. For mariners’ median pay in the 1640s, see Blakemore, ‘Pieces of Eight’, 1163; for contemporary exchange rates between guilders and sterling, see Stadsarchief Amsterdam (henceforth: SAA) 5075, inv.nr. 685/17; Richard J. Blakemore, ‘The HCA Wage Dataset: A Descriptive Report’, 12, available at http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/ collegeofhumanities/history/researchcentres/centreformaritimehistoricalstudies/documents/ HCA_Wage_Dataset_descriptive_report.docx. For discussion of some other examples besides those offered here, see Blakemore, ‘Pieces of Eight’, 1174–8. 43 On the background to these cases, see Richard J. Blakemore and Elaine Murphy, The British Civil Wars at Sea, 1638–1653 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2018), 160–3, 166–8, 170–2. For another case of an English ship seized in Portugal, in which mariners’ possessions were valued at between a quarter or half of the total wages owed to them, see TNA HCA 13/71, fos 664r-5r. 38 39

Table 4.1  Seafarers’ Ventures and Value of Wages, 1649–51.44 Name

Rank

Venture

Value of venture

Personal possessions

Value of personal possessions

Monthly wage

Total wages claimed

Thomas Walker Master’s mate Harry Lane Carpenter

100 lbs of beads, ‘false pearles’ 5 quintels of fish

£15 10s

£12

£4

£20

–

Clothes, books and instruments Tools and clothes

£1 12s

£32 6s

Peter Philmer

7 quintels of fish, 1 quintel of ‘refuse’ fish Not specified

£16

Clothes

£14 14s (incl. fish) £2

£1

£8

£25

Clothes and instruments

£15

Not specified

£15

–

–

Clothes, instruments, plate, ammunition, cash Clothes, books, globes and instruments

£183 15s

–

–

£15

–

–

£200 £51

Clothes and instruments Tools and clothes

£15 £20

– £2 2s

– £33 12s

£88

–

–

Not specified

£20

John Coomes

Master’s mate James Bowman Master Thomas Jones

John Blake Jacob Bowry

Ralph Hiscock

Master’s mate and pilot

A ‘parcell of pictures’, stuffs and stockings, ‘Gummalack (a drug)’, oil, tobacco Master 20 cwt of ivory, wax Master 30 quintels of fish, carpenter 20 bushells of pease, 0.5 cwt tobacco Boatswain’s Bacon, tobacco, mate iron and ‘ready money’

£63

Source: TNA HCA 13/71, fos 659r, 664r-6r, 668r-v, 670r-3r, 677r-8r, 680r-1v.

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Table 4.2  Ventures and Wages Aboard the Mary & John, 1650–2.45 Name

Rank

Venture

William Marshall

Pilot

Thomas Wise John Cobb John Haynes Richard Rawl Robert Pearce and James Large

Purser Master’s mate Boatswain Carpenter Mariners

22 enslaved people, 7 ivory tusks 7 ivory tusks 1 enslaved person 1 enslaved person 1 enslaved person 1 enslaved person

Value of venture £432.4 £12 £21.5 £21.5 £20.6 £20.6

Monthly wages £4 £2* £3 £2* £2* £1.5*

again that the monetary value of ventures could extend to several months’ and even sometimes years’ worth of wages. While most of these cases deal with officers, they also include some lower-ranking seafarers (such as Peter Philmer and Ralph Hiscock in Table 4.1, or Robert Pearce and James Large in Table 4.2). With some of these cases, where the ships carried sugar from Brazil, we see a broad distribution of ventures among the ship’s companies. Aboard three such ships, the master and officers each possessed somewhere between half a chest and three chests of sugar. Practically all of the mariners also carried sugar aboard, usually in smaller quantities ranging from just one rove to one ‘feach’ and several roves, but many of them had a whole chest or more. Aboard the St Nicholas one mariner (presumably belonging to a different ship, as they were not named as part of the St Nicholas’s company) shipped eight chests of white sugar and two of muscovado.46 Nor was this restricted to the sugar trade, or to British vessels: evidence relating to the Propheet Samuel, a Dutch ship trading in tobacco, recorded the volume of the crews’ personal ventures in tobacco and shows a similarly broad distribution (see Table 4.3). The charterparty had Source; TNA HCA 13/71, fos 644r-55r. The venture values have been converted from milréis, as they are recorded in the sources, to sterling at a rate of 1 milréis = 103d., the rate at Lisbon in 1645: see John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–1775 (London: MacMillan, 1978), 107–15, 300–1. Where wages were not recorded, I have included the median rate for that rank from the 1650s, indicated by ‘*’ in the table: see Blakemore, ‘Pieces of Eight’, 1163. 46 TNA HCA 13/71, fos 658r-8*v (the pagination of fo. 658 has been accidentally duplicated onto a second folio here), 661r-2r. A ‘chest’ may have carried approximately 10–15 cwt of sugar: see Nancy Cox and Karin Dannehl. ‘Suave Water – Sugar Chest’. In Dictionary of Traded Goods and Commodities 1550–1820 (Wolverhampton: University of Wolverhampton, 2007), British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/traded-goods-dictionary/1550-1820/suavewater-sugar-chest, accessed 8 February 2021. A ‘rove’ (from arroba) was 25–36lb: see Oxford English Dictionary, OED Online, December 2020, www.oed.com, accessed 9  February 2021. A ‘feach’ may derive from ‘fecho’, approximately 12 arrobas or roughly 3 cwt; I am grateful to Thiago Krause for this information. 45

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Table 4.3  Tobacco Ventures Aboard the Propheet Samuel, 1644.47 Name

Position

Jacob Andersz Jan Jansz van Ossener Pieter Cornelisz Jan Willemsz Cornelis Jansz Padt Hujbert Jansz Pieter Aertsz Jan Arentsz Pieter Jacobs de Zeen Hendrick Luijckasz Jan Hendricksz Glas Willem Garbrants Jan Hendricksz Tames Claesz Cornelis Pietersz Jan Pieters

Trumpeter (trompetter) Shipmaster (schipper) Master’s mate (stuurman) Boatswain (bootsman)

Constable (constapel)

Boatswain’s mate (schieman) Barber (barbier) Steward (bottelier)

Tobacco (lbs) 2,512 1,070 939 920 826 615 390 380 345 261 155 145 115 65 50 15

permitted the shipmaster 3,000 lbs and each mariner 300 lbs freight-free, while the freighters carried 10,000 lbs. However, just over half of the crew exceeded this allowance, with four of them carrying twice as much or an even higher volume  – remarkably, Jacob Andersz, the ship’s trumpeter, carried more than double the master’s own venture. The value and volume of this trading reveals that it was more than a side-line for these seafarers. In some cases, as we have seen, it exceeded their wages in the same voyage. A similar point might be made about the value of mariners’ other possessions such as clothes, tools and navigational instruments, which deponents in the admiralty court also often listed, as shown in Table  4.1.48 Though rarely worth as much in monetary value as trade goods, these objects represented a significant investment for the mariners themselves, perhaps imbued with personal meaning – though that is difficult to recover from legal documents like these – as well as visibly representing their professional,

Source: SAR 5075, inv.nr. 848, 936–7. For other examples, listing the total value of lost possessions for the crew, see TNA HCA 13/71, fos 658r–v, 661r–2r, 664r–v. On the social value of navigational instruments, see Richard J. Blakemore, ‘Navigating Culture: Navigational Instruments as Cultural Artefacts, c. 1550–1650’, Journal for Maritime Research 14, no. 1 (2012): 31–44.

47 48

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economic and social status.49 The presence of these personal possessions again reminds of the multifaceted participation of seafarers in commodity chains, as labourers, traders and consumers themselves. This evidence, together with their selection of specific outward goods, confirms that at least some mariners had a strategic approach to trade and a sense of which commodity chains would lead to favourable market opportunities. The merchant of the Lookinge glasse claimed that the mariners’ investments, purchased in Holland, would have been worth ‘five for one accordinge as the prices of tobaccoes then were at Rotterdam’, if they had gone ahead with their trading and completed the trip home.50 William Marshall, pilot of the Mary & John, thought the profit of his sales in Bahia ‘invested in sugars would have yielded four for one profit att Lisbone’; his witnesses claimed he could have purchased around 36 chests of ‘the best white sugars’.51 Nicholas Spurman, a surgeon, likewise stated that £100 invested in gold in West Africa, carried to India and ‘invested in goods of that place’, would yield double or treble on sale of those goods in London and he estimated his own loss of goods and wages at £750 after his ship was taken by a Dutch vessel.52 Nor were these the only seafarers with a clear sense of the expected market value for certain commodities.53 Given the legal context of these sources, these estimates of value may have been exaggerated, or at least reckoned generously, but even so it is evident that seafarers planned for profit, and their access to information about commodities and market values, as well as the commodities themselves, represents another dimension of their economic agency. Spurman’s testimony raises a particularly significant point: within a single voyage seafarers might participate in multiple commodity chains, such as the exchange of West African gold for Indian produce. Similar practices were especially common in the Mediterranean, where northern European ships could spend several years criss-crossing from port to port before returning home. Aboard the Lewes, which sailed to Portugal and then to Venice and Zante, the surgeon Josia Tewe carried out 3 cwt of unspecified ‘goods’ to Lisbon; in partnership with Robert Mudd, the carpenter, he then took 4.5 cwt of sugar from Lisbon to Genoa and Venice; from Venice to Messina he carried On material possessions, wealth, and social status, see Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, & the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 50 TNA HCA 13/60, fos 92r-93r; cf. fos 93r-v. 51 TNA HCA 13/71, fos 646r-9v. Marshall also paid freight charges to the master; for discussion on these charges, see below, 105–7. 52 TNA HCA 13/71, fos 613r-v. 53 For other examples, see TNA HCA 3/56, fos 44v-5v; HCA 13/71, fos 614v, 624v; Blakemore, ‘Pieces of Eight’, 1153–5. 49

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‘certaine drinckinge and lookeinge glasses’; finally, he purchased half a tonne of currants in Zante, bringing these to Amsterdam.54 Similarly, the master and carpenter of the Hopegood carried several quintals of both ‘driefish’ and ‘cod fish’ from Newfoundland to Oporto on their own account, as part of a regular voyage pattern which linked the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean.55 Seafarers’ employment thus offered them significant opportunities for participating in interregional and inter-imperial exchanges. Their involvement in trade did not decline after the medieval period – in fact, the expanding volume and complexity of global trade created new opportunities for seafarers, especially as lengthier voyages and more destinations enabled them to string together different commodity chains in this manner. The significance of these practices to individual seafarers varied considerably by their circumstances, and undoubtedly these opportunities were greater for the higher professional ranks. Nevertheless, the involvement in trade of seafarers at all social levels should not be underestimated, not least because, as Beverly Lemire argues, ‘the cultural force of [mariners’] actions, within their distinct networks, carried weight that far exceeded the volume of their trade’.56 It is to those networks that I will now turn.

Commodities and costs in personal networks Seafarers who purchased commodities during their voyages were rarely investing by, or for, themselves alone. As Lemire has explored in her work, the commodities they transported went on to circulate among their social networks ashore, and mariners played multiple roles within those networks as suppliers, negotiators, consumers and even trend-setters.57 Here, I will focus on a different aspect of seafarers’ commercial practice, but one which is no less revealing about their role within these networks, and the dual themes of opportunity and risk

TNA HCA 13/118, answers of Josia Tewe, undated, and Robert Mudd, 29 March 1644. TNA HCA 13/71, fos 664r-5r; see Colin Heywood, ‘Beyond Braudel’s “Northern Invasion”? Aspects of the North Atlantic and Mediterranean Fish Trade in the Early Seventeenth Century’, International Journal of Maritime History 26, no. 2 (2014): 193–209; Blakemore, ‘Pieces of Eight’, 1168–9, 1178. 56 Lemire, ‘Men of the World’, 294. 57 Lemire, ‘Men of the World’; Lemire, ‘A Question of Trousers’. For a useful, brief introduction to the theory of commercial networks, see Mark Casson, ‘Networks in Economic and Business History: A Theoretical Perspective’, in Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society, 1660–1914, eds. Andreas Gestrich and Margrit Schulte Beerbühl (London: German Historical Institute, 2011), 17–49. 54 55

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with which I am concerned in this chapter: the various collaborations through which seafarers financed their trading. Some mariners may well have been sole traders; for example, when Alexander Cox sold his ‘Coniskins’ and bought cloves at Alexandria – all ‘without any privatey’ of the shipmaster, James Lyle, though Lyle went on to sue Cox for a share in the profits on their return to England. Yet even here Cox cooperated with his shipmate Roger Crosse, a mariner who purchased the cloves on Cox’s behalf.58 In other cases, references to goods carried for the shipmaster ‘and for the rest of the mariners’ might indicate either a series of individual investments or perhaps some sort of syndicate, and in some cases early modern seafarers might even be co-investors in the whole cargo, though this was rare in British shipping.59 Most often, however, mariners worked on temporary contracts and their income arrived at irregular intervals. Wages were usually paid as an advance before departure and the remainder at the end of the voyage, though sometimes with instalments during the voyage as well.60 It is not surprising, then, that seafarers were heavily dependent on credit networks and cooperation to fund their purchases, and in this, and in the importance of material possessions to reputation and social status within such credit networks, they resembled the rest of early modern society.61 Sometimes these debts were simply a matter of the money that mariners spent while ashore between voyages. For example, James Cooke and Maynard Johnson, a master’s mate and boatswain, were both indebted to David Hayes, a mariner and victualler, ‘for diet and lodging, and for moneys lent out of his purse to them, and goods as sack, tobaccoes and strong waters’.62 When his ship was impounded by the Portuguese authorities in Bahia, William Marshall ‘was forced to take upp sixty millres [milréis] there for his owne and his freinds necessary livelyhood having noe allowance’, a sum worth £20, borrowed at an interest of 30 per cent, all of which he later repaid in Lisbon.63 The system of

TNA HCA 13/30, fos 67r-70v; HCA 13/101, fos 228v-9r. Quoting TNA HCA 13/101, fos 62v-5v, 93v-7r; cf. HCA 24/57/217. Shares in the whole cargo of the ship remained common in Malta: see Joan Abela, ‘Sailors’ Legal Rights in a Mediterranean Hub: The Case of Malta’, in Law, Labour, and Empire, eds. Fusaro, Allaire, Blakemore, and Vanneste, 69–73. 60 Davis, English Shipping Industry, 133–5; Rediker, Between the Devil, 118–19; Maria Fusaro, ‘The Invasion of Northern Litigants: English and Dutch Seamen in Mediterranean Courts of Law’, in Law, Labour, and Empire, eds. Fusaro, Allaire, Blakemore, and Vanneste, 21–42. 61 Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998); Shepard, Accounting for Oneself. 62 TNA HCA 13/71, fos 152r-v. 63 TNA HCA 13/71, fo. 649v; cf. 652v. 58 59

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paying an advance to seafarers may have arisen, at least in part, as a way to pay off such debts, and large maritime employers such as the Dutch and English East India Companies, and the navies of both empires, also allowed mariners to assign part of their wages by letter of attorney, to be collected on their behalf at regular intervals during the term of the voyage.64 While intended to support mariners’ families, this system too was often used to settle debts, and as the creditors might then sell the letter of attorney to a third party in return for quick (but usually discounted) cash, a market developed in speculating upon the documents themselves, while letters of attorney could be forged.65 Other kinds of exploitation flourished too, such as hostellers and other suppliers inflating their prices. The governors of the East India Company complained in 1640 that ‘many tradesmen furnish the Company’s servants with money or goods to be repaid on their return at the rate of two or three for one, which not only increases private trade but impoverishes all who do so’.66 Moreover, hostellers sometimes arranged contracts for their lodgers, not always with the lodger’s consent (known in England as ‘crimping’). Matthias van Rossum has shown how, during the early eighteenth century, intermediary recruiters such as hostellers were exercising more control over sailors hired by the Dutch East India Company, with these arrangements generally becoming ‘more deceitful and violent’.67 Yet the English East India Company’s complaint about ‘private trade’ also shows that such transactions were not always deceitful or harmful to seafarers, Pamela Sharpe, ‘Gender at Sea: Women and the East India Company in Seventeenth-Century London’, in Women, Work and Wages in England, 1600–1850, eds. Neil Raven, Penelope Lane and Keith D. M. Snell (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2004), 53–6; Marc van Alphen, ‘The Female Side of Dutch Shipping: Financial Bonds of Seamen Ashore in the 17th and 18th Century’, in AngloDutch Mercantile Marine Relations 1700–1850, eds. Jaap R. Bruijn and Willem F. J. Mörzer Bruyns (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum and Nederlands Scheepvaartmuseum, 1991), 125–32. 65 For examples of lawsuits relating to forgeries, see SAA 5061, inv.nr. 304, fo. 113r-v; inv.nr. 75v; Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.2, accessed 14 June 2016), July 1696, trial of Richard Eltham Susan Smith Alice Body (t16960708-22). For other examples, see April 1691, trial of Christian Gray (t16910422-33); May 1694, trial of George Cobham (t1694052432); December 1695, trial of Christian Brothers (t16951203-48); July 1696, trial of John Fogam (t16960708-31); July 1696, trial of Richard Parford (t16960708-53); September 1697, trial of Christopher Dickenson (t16970901-67); December 1697, trial of Sibel Bursman, alias Thomson (t16971208-41); December 1714, trial of John Jones Mary Hopgood (t17141209-17); January 1723, trial of Elizabeth Bates, alias Chipp, alias Middleton (t17230116-42); April 1727, trial of Mary Jones (t17270412-51). 66 Ethel Bruce Sainsbury, ed., A Calendar of Court Minutes etc. of the East India Company, 1640–1643 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909), 108. 67 Matthias van Rossum, ‘“Working for the Devil”: Desertion in the Eurasian Empire of the VOC’, in Desertion in the Early Modern World: A Comparative History, eds. Matthias van Rossum and Jeannette Kamp (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 137–9; see also Rediker, Between the Devil, 27, 43–4, 81–2; Karel Davids, ‘Seamen’s Organizations and Social Protest in Europe, c. 1300–1825’, International Review of Social History 39, no. S2 (1994): 161–3. 64

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and that credit arrangements ashore could provide them with much-needed financial liquidity, both to purchase ‘necessaries’ for their voyages and to invest in ventures (to the horror of the Company’s governors). For example, several English and Scottish mariners residing, or at least sojourning, in Rotterdam acknowledged debts to their hosts and hostesses for goods such as woollen clothes, tobacco and foodstuffs like butter, cheese, oil and beef.68 Whether these were for personal consumption or for trade is not always clear, but this evidence indicates how much seafarers relied upon their contacts ashore (and as noted, we should not overlook the importance of mariners as consumers themselves). Similar credit networks existed among ship’s crews as well.69 Before the Talbot was seized in Brazil in August 1650, for example, the master lent money to most of his crew so that they could buy sugar, while James Flawes, master of the William & Ralphe, ‘at the Westerne Islands borrowed money of all or moste of his Company’, implying that his mariners’ finances were in a better state than his own.70 Occasionally there is evidence of more formal arrangements, explicitly intended for private trade. In Amsterdam, on 7 March 1651, Stoffel [Christopher?] Geswaert of Bristol, boatswain of the Dutch ship Hoff van Cleef, received 839 guilders 14 stuivers from Jan Jansz of Gottenburg, resident in Amsterdam, with which Geswaert was to purchase goods for trade during the ship’s journey to Manhattan. Geswaert was to receive half of the profit and the whole risk was borne by Jansz alone.71 Even without such a written contract, it was fairly common for seafarers to trade for others, as when Timothy Craven, a master’s mate, carried ‘gold, goods, merchandizes, clothes and necessaries’ worth £500, ‘for account of himselfe and John Morgan and other friends’.72 It is likely that some of the commodities discussed previously, such as the trumpeter Jacob Andersz’s substantial amount of tobacco aboard the Propheet Samuel, resulted from partnerships of this kind.73 Whether they were agents for others or simply borrowing for themselves, these networks of credit clearly facilitated seafarers’ careers and their role within international and inter-imperial commodity chains, and far from SAR 18, inv.nr. 187, 144–5, 155, 185; inv.nr. 189, 142–4, 206–7, 253–4, 342–3; inv.nr. 206, 327. On sailors and debt, see Paul E. H. Hair and J. D. Alsop, English Seamen and Traders to Guinea, 1553–1565: The New Evidence of Their Wills (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 119, 129; Fury, Tides in the Affairs of Men, 97–9. 70 TNA HCA 13/71, fos 661v-2r; HCA 13/56, deposition of Richard Spencer, 12 June 1640. 71 SAA 5075, inv.nr. 2278, protocol 5, 31–2. 72 TNA HCA 13/71, fo. 611v. For further examples, see Barlow, Barlow’s Journal, I: 189, 194. 73 See above, 93–4. 68 69

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being penniless or perpetually in debt, some sailors, at all professional ranks, also acted as creditors. David Davidtsz, a Scottish mariner, gave 100 guilders to his hostess in Rotterdam, Griettge Willems, who purchased various clothes from the Rotterdam loan bank, without Davidtsz’s knowledge. Davidtsz then authorized Griettge de Pieters, in whose house the clothes lay, to reclaim them from Griettge Willems’s son-in-law and heir.74 Similarly, before setting off on a voyage to Greenland, sailor Jan Carr authorized Jennittgen Linth, the daughter of a Scottish merchant in Rotterdam, to recover a debt of 200 guilders – plus 20 guilders for five years’ worth of annual interest – which Carr had loaned to one Lysbeth Jans.75 One aspect which emerges clearly from these instances, and which has received increasing attention in recent scholarship, is the important and multifaceted role that women played within these networks, as creditors, debtors, hostesses, suppliers, sellers (or fences) and consumers.76 When John Merricke, a mariner aboard the Paragon, carried an adventure to the Canary Islands intending to purchase wine, it was his wife Elizabeth Merricke who took out a ‘policye of assurance’ in his name.77 Similarly, after Edward Coxere brought back some cloth from one voyage, it was Mary Coxere who ‘soon turned [… it] into money […] my wife having good friends with her own industry kept me out of debt’.78 The testimony of Jane Hendell before the admiralty court showed that she was evidently well-versed in maritime affairs. The wife of a distiller in London, Hendell not only sent an adventure of her own with William Hyatt, master of the Sara Bonadventure, but also hosted Hyatt and a shipwright at her husband’s house and went with them to the King’s Head in Southwark to be a witness to their business dealings. Later, she was explicitly asked by Hyatt to ‘sea the worcke’ on the ship once it was completed (either because she lived near the shipyard or because she had formerly been married

SAR 18, inv.nr. 671, 103. SAR 18, inv.nr. 672, 93. 76 Sharpe, ‘Gender at Sea’; Van Alphen, ‘Female Side’; Fury, Tides in the Affairs of Men, 214–15; Cheryl A. Fury, ‘Seamen’s Wives and Widows’, in Social History of English Seamen, 1485–1649, ed. Fury, 254–75; Douglas Catterall and Jodi Campbell, eds., Women in Port: Gendering Communities, Economies, and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500–1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Eleanor Hubbard, City Women: Money, Sex, & the Social Order in Early Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 207–11, 212, 216, 223. See also Amélia Polónia, ‘Women’s Contributions to Family, Economy and Social Range of Maritime Communities in Sixteenth-Century Portugal’, Portuguese Studies Review 13, nos. 1–2 (2005): 269–85; Annette de Wit, Leven, Werken, en Geloven in Zeevarende Gemeenschappen: Schiedam, Maasluis en Ter Heide (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2008). 77 TNA HCA 13/51, fo. 425r. 78 Edward Coxere, Adventures by Sea of Edward Coxere, ed. Edward H. W. Meyerstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), 76. 74 75

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to a ship carpenter; perhaps both), and then mediated between the two parties again when payment was delayed.79 Though examples as detailed as Hendell’s are rarely documented, women’s participation in these activities seems to have been commonplace. Seafarers not only brought new commodities into these networks but the networks themselves enabled seafarers’ activities within the international and inter-imperial commodity chains I have surveyed. Women and other contacts in maritime communities were more than passive recipients of the trade goods brought home by seafarers, as they too had agency in these commodity chains. Their tastes and decisions influenced the choice of commodities, as when Elisabeth Philipse Amelingh wrote from Amsterdam to her husband, a shipmaster in the Mediterranean, requesting him to bring back specific merchandise.80 This evidence again complicates the picture of seafarers as exploited wage-labourers, even while showing that this was indeed sometimes the case, for seafarers of all ranks and their connections ashore were involved in these transactions. At the same time, the role played in these networks by state governments and trading companies points us towards the third and final topic of this chapter: the risks that were inherent within international commerce, and the way in which these imperial agencies simultaneously created the opportunities for and sought to control and even suppress seafarers’ trading.

Seafarers, commerce and empire Seafarers’ employment by empires and merchants – their mobility between different jurisdictions and regions, and the access this granted to an extremely wide range of commodity chains – was the foundation of their commercial practice. Indeed, besides the opportunities we have already explored for small trade, seafarers’ position within empire, as international travellers, traders and often also combatants, created other possibilities as well. For example, during the Gift of God’s voyage to Alexandria, the crew saved an Egyptian ship from sinking, for which they were rewarded with part of that ship’s cargo, but when they came to Crete, the Venetian imperial authorities there seized some of these goods, though there were enough left to sell for 600 ducats on the ship’s subsequent TNA HCA 13/51, fo. 217v. See Tijl Vanneste, ‘Sailing through the Strait: Seamen’s Professional Trajectories from a Segmented Labour Market in Holland to a Fragmented Mediterranean’, in Law, Labour, and Empire, eds. Fusaro, Allaire, Blakemore, and Vanneste, 135.

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arrival in Venice.81 The actions of the Venetian officers in Crete throws into doubt just how legal this particular transaction was, and the evidence in the admiralty court regarding this voyage may well have been framed to avoid accusations of piracy.82 Illicit trade and maritime violence were not only widespread but even essential for many local economies, especially for commodities that were heavily taxed (like tobacco), and in regions such as the British colonies in Ireland and the Americas where imperial control was weak.83 Nor was all maritime violence illegal, because most early modern empires granted commissions to private maritime raiders (known as privateers from the mid-seventeenth century) to supplement the limited naval resources at their disposal.84 These commissions opened up another angle of potential economic gain for seafarers, not only through the shares they received instead of wages on such voyages, but also through the custom of ‘pillage’ by which captors claimed for themselves the possessions of the captured crew.85 Privateering and piracy were other ways in which commodity chains might be disrupted or rerouted, and even authorized privateers did not always stay within the legal boundaries set by states; as with smuggling, these activities placed seafarers on the margins of imperial authority, sometimes enforcing it, sometimes transgressing it and exploiting this marginal position where possible. Edward Coxere, who like many seafarers moved easily between trading and raiding, often during the same voyage, summed up the situation neatly when he wrote ‘though we run great risk yet it was best fishing in troubled waters.’86 TNA HCA 13/30, fos 26r-v. The Gift’s company kept ‘some smale quantity of sope to washe their clothes’. 82 Ibid: the deposition admits that the Gift had no legal commission to seize prizes, but maintains that the Egyptian cargo was transferred willingly. 83 Hugh V. Bowen, ‘“So Alarming an Evil:” Smuggling, Pilfering and the English East India Company, 1750–1810’, International Journal of Maritime History 14, no. 1 (2002): 1–31; Geoffrey V. Scammell, ‘“A Very Profitable and Advantageous Trade”: British Smuggling in the Iberian Americas circa 1500–1750’, in Seafaring, Sailors, and Trade, 1450–1750: Studies in British and European Maritime and Imperial History, ed. Geoffrey V. Scammell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 135–72; Keith Pluymers, ‘“Pirates” and the Problems of Plantation in Seventeenth-Century Ireland’, in Governing the Sea in the Early Modern Era, eds. Peter C. Mancall and Carole Shammas (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2015), 79–107; Jan Lucassen and Matthias van Rossum, ‘Smokkelloon en Zilverstromen: Illegale Export van Edelmetaal via de VOC’, Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis 13, no. 1 (2016): 99–113; Lemire, Global Trade, chapter 4; Kwass, ‘Production and Export’, 305–6. 84 Janice E. Thompson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), especially chapter 3; Nicholas Rodger, ‘The Law and Language of Private Naval Warfare’, Mariner’s Mirror 100, no. 1 (2014): 5–16; Stefan Amirell and Leos Müller, eds., Persistent Piracy: Maritime Violence and State Formation in Global Historical Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 85 On privateering and pillage see Fury, Tides in the Affairs of Men, 102–8. 86 Coxere, Adventures by Sea, 128. 81

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Coxere’s comment on risk here reveals the other side of the equation: that this marginal position was frequently a dangerous one, precisely because the sea was a space between imperial jurisdictions where violence and inter-imperial conflict were frequent, as well as being naturally perilous.87 The very existence of the evidence on which I have drawn throughout this chapter testifies to these conditions, as seafarers only started lawsuits regarding their trade goods when they had lost those goods, either through shipwreck, warfare or some other seizure or embargo.88 For example, after the Gift of God left Venice with their (possibly ill-gotten) gains, they themselves ran into a maritime raider who, despite their protests, took away ‘oyles & currants’.89 The mariners aboard those ships seized by the Portuguese empire in 1649–51 faced imprisonment for several months or even longer, and their estimates of lost wages and goods during that time, as well as extra charges during imprisonment, reached substantial sums.90 John Haynes, boatswain of the Mary & John, was imprisoned for eighteen months and took a further eight months to get home after that. Nor were their losses only financial: Haynes also complained of ‘infirmityes of his body gotten by his long imprisonment, which he fears will stick to him soe long as he lives, and he beleeves it will shorten his dayes’.91 Edward Barlow, like Coxere a sailor and autobiographer, wrote that ‘that seaman which goeth to the seas most part of his lifetime, and suffereth neither shipwreck, nor falleth into the hands of one enemy or another […] may count himself among the happy and [most] fortunate of seamen’.92 Natural and imperial perils were not the only reasons a seafarer’s venture might fail. John Bryan, a carpenter, sent his apprentice Laurence Hobby to Africa in the Arana Merchant as carpenter’s mate, and Hobby took a venture worth £13. Though Hobby met with success trading at Kormantin, he fell ill and died after he was transferred to another ship, and his purchases were then embezzled by the Arana Merchant’s carpenter, or so Bryan claimed.93 Even completing a voyage brought no certainty of profit. David Salter, a surgeon from Benton, Search for Sovereignty; see also Blakemore, ‘Law and the Sea’. There are also numerous examples during the seventeenth century of European sailors losing goods when their ships were seized by English vessels, e.g., TNA HCA 13/62, depositions of Robert Dull and Gilbert van Walker, 30 August 1650; HCA 13/70, fos 49r-50v, 438v-9r; HCA 24/144/59. 89 TNA HCA 13/30, fo. 40v. 90 TNA HCA 13/71, fos 644r-58v, 6601r-6v, 667v-8v; see above, 91–3. 91 TNA HCA 13/71, fo. 655r. The Mary & John had also been detained and forced to serve the Portuguese Empire as a privateer earlier in the voyage at Angola. 92 Barlow, Barlow’s Journal, I, 226. Both Barlow and Coxere were captured, Coxere on several occasions, and both experienced shipwreck. 93 TNA HCA 13/65, deposition of Robert Chapman, 30 September 1651, fos 95v-6r. 87 88

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St Christopher’s who sailed aboard the Dutch ship Bontekoe, purchased a barrel of indigo from his fellow islander and ‘Freeplanter’ John Allen. Unfortunately for Salter, he had bought it ‘unsight and unseene, onlie upon the word of the said John Allen, warranting the same to be good and merchantable’.94 After arriving in Amsterdam, in April 1645 he negotiated a sale at 36 stuivers per pound with the dyer Abraham Seafers, but when they then opened the barrel, they found ‘in the middest greate quantity thereof […] bad & naughty Indigo accounting to a third part of the parcell or more’.95 Through the mediation of the Bontekoe’s captain, Salter and Seafers agreed on the lower price of 26 stuivers per pound, while Salter planned to ‘recover the dammage & losse’ from Allen, although even at this lower price the sale would have brought Salter approximately £23, about eight months’ wages for a surgeon.96 Although it is not clear whether this indigo was always ‘bad & naughty’ or had been damaged during the voyage, the possibility of damage shows how the physical experience of travel by sea could affect both commodities and traders alike. Such misfortune, whether incurred by loss through violence or storm, a poor choice of commodity or trading partner or simply bad luck, could prove disastrous, and although charitable organizations for mariners existed, the activities of those organizations were relatively limited.97 These circumstances perhaps increased the importance of trading opportunities and especially of the credit networks which facilitated them, but also meant that mariners’ trading careers were frequently thwarted. Edward Barlow wrote that he ‘always had a desire to take such care to get and save money in my younger years out of my employment and labours, that I might maintain myself and keep out of debt [… but] my hopes were frustrate’.98 A similar picture emerges from depositions in the admiralty court in which witnesses assessed their material estate, usually in response to interrogatories designed to test their social status and therefore their integrity.99 Thirty-five-year-old mariner John Hall said that ‘hee cannot tell how much hee is worth most of his estate being at sea’, implying that while he SAA 5075, inv.nr. 849, fo. 125r-v, akte 61. Ibid. 96 Ibid. This was one of four barrels that John Allen loaded into the ship, but it is not clear if the other three also belonged to Salter. On surgeon’s wages, see Blakemore, ‘Pieces of Eight’, 1160–2. 97 Blakemore, ‘Legal world’, 113; Davids, ‘Seamen’s Organizations’. 98 Barlow, Barlow’s Journal, I, 263. 99 For a broader discussion of these statements and their implications for contemporary assessment of social status, see Alexandra Shepard, ‘Poverty, Labour and the Language of Social Description in Early Modern England’, Past & Present 201, no. 1 (2008): 51–95; Alexandra Shepard and Juditch Spicksley, ‘Worth, Age and Social Status in Early Modern England’, Economic History Review 64, no. 2 (2011): 493–530; Shepard, Accounting for Oneself. 94 95

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may have had investments, he had not yet made substantial returns on them.100 Phillip Jefferies, a 36-year-old mariner, was evidently unfortunate: he admitted to being ‘worth little, having made three broken voyages’.101 Even more significant is the example of John Bennet, still going to sea at sixty, who was ‘worth little in his owne estate’.102 Further complicating the inherent risks faced by seafarers was the position taken by their employers and imperial authorities regarding mariners’ customary right to carry cargo without paying freight charges to the shipowners. As noted earlier, historians have tended to assume that this practice had no formal legal status, but in fact customs such as this one were recognized in early modern maritime law, and shipowners, merchants and judges usually respected them; not all seafarers’ ventures were smuggled aboard.103 In a dispute at the end of the sixteenth century, Thomas Corbett, one of the owners of the George Bonaventure, stated that the whole ship was hired out to merchants, ‘unlesse it might be some tonne or two usually lefte in all shipps for the master & maryners to use if they list’.104 The company of the Anne, in a voyage to the Mediterranean, carried twenty-nine barrels of pilchardes ‘amongst them all’, and maintained that ‘yt is a usuall custome for marriners to carry soe small an adventure fraight free’.105 Similarly, throughout the early decades of the seventeenth century, the Trinity House of Hull – a guild of shippers and shipmasters of that port – routinely judged in favour of seafarers’ right to carry a ‘furthing’ (a word probably related to the Dutch voering), which might be a hogshead or tonne of cargo.106 Even sailors and officers on British naval ships claimed the right to carry private goods and if the admiralty did not always agree, they rarely had the means to prevent it in practice.107 However, while the principle was accepted, its contours and extent were not fixed, but were subject to continuous and ongoing negotiation between

TNA HCA 13/73, fo. 586v. Ibid, fo. 587v. 102 TNA HCA 13/71, fo. 98v. 103 For further discussion, see Blakemore, ‘Legal World’; Blakemore, ‘Pieces of Eight’. 104 TNA HCA 13/101, answer of Thomas Corbett, 1  November 1590; cf. answers of John Hayes, 21 November 1590, and Henry Porder, November 1590. In this period, ‘tonne’ referred to a measure of volume, not weight. 105 TNA HCA 13/118, answer of William Spenser, 25 January 1643[/4]. 106 Brooks, ed., First Order Book, 14, 23, 81; F.W. Brooks, ed., ‘A Calendar of the Early Judgments of Trinity House’, Miscellanea V (Hull: Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 1951), 20, 23, 26, 40; on ‘voering’, see Vanneste, ‘Sailing through the Strait’, 135–6. 107 Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy: The Fleet and the English Revolution, 1648–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 233. 100 101

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seafarers and their employers.108 These negotiations are most evident in lawsuits where mariners disputed whether freight charges were payable on their ventures, an issue which appeared quite regularly before the court of the Hull Trinity House.109 For example, Robert Baker claimed that William Rakes owed him a tonne of wine as furthing; Rakes contended that Baker had already ‘had his full furthinge in nuts, and prunes and other things’, and had also hired out half a tonne to another mariner.110 Similarly, when Gervas Webster and Thomas Jenkinson demanded their wages from a voyage to the Netherlands, it was noted that ‘each of them brought a Holland calf over in the ship’, and 6s. 8d. freight was accordingly deducted from their wages.111 In another dispute that came before this court the mariners had brought so many of their own goods aboard that the deeply laden ship was damaged leaving port, while in yet another there was not enough space left for the ship’s actual intended cargo and so the merchant lost his freight contract.112 Similar issues were judged in the High Court of Admiralty throughout the seventeenth century, where merchants often contended that the crew had exceeded their usual allowance and ought therefore to pay freight, while the mariners disagreed.113 During one lawsuit in 1650, the admiralty judge ordered Samuel Stanton, master of the Elizabeth, to pay his mariners’ wages but to deduct freight for any goods that ‘doe exceed the usuall and ordinary allowance to marriners in the like voyages’, once again invoking customary and perhaps quite vague limits, but limits nonetheless.114 These cases are further evidence of the volume of seafarers’ trading, and the very fact that some seafarers exceeded their customary (and legally recognized) privileges and incurred freight charges suggests, in line with the evidence discussed above, that seafarers of lower professional rank were acting deliberately and strategically, just as senior officers did. At the same time, they show that this trading could also become a site of contest between seafarers, their employers and the imperial authorities who sought to control and profit from the trade of their subjects. It is worth stressing that these legal sources

On the question of negotiation between seafarers and employers, see Rediker, Between the Devil, 130–52; Blakemore, ‘Legal World’; Blakemore, ‘Pieces of Eight’. 109 Brooks, ed., First Order Book, 50, 54, 55, 57, 81, 82, 106, 111–12, 132. 110 Ibid., 14. 111 Ibid., 33; for another example, see 119. 112 Ibid., 135, 148–9. 113 E.g., TNA HCA 3/46, fo. 593r; HCA 3/56, fos 44v-5v, 214v, 256v-7r; HCA 13/71, fo. 623v; HCA 24/109/42 (and on this case see also HCA 3/43, fo. 106r); 114 TNA HCA 3/43, fo. 397r; for similar judgments, see HCA 24/121/14; HCA 3/56, fos 57v, 60r. 108

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by their very nature reflect the breakdown of relationships. Conflict between seafarers and employers may not have been continual, and it is possible that the boundaries of these customary rights were vague precisely because they did not need to be delimited, except in situations where something had gone wrong and somebody had to bear the loss. Nevertheless, these tensions evidently characterized seafarers’ commercial practices, and in some cases, imperial authorities intervened more directly to restrict seafarers’ trading. That kind of intervention is most apparent in the actions of the major trading companies, such as the East India Company.115 Initially, the Company was quite permissive: in their first voyage, they not only paid an advance in wages but also decreed ‘for the better advauncement of his sallarie, that everie of the said mariners shall have two monthes wages in adventure as his stocke’.116 Thereafter they attempted to restrict private trading and to prohibit certain commodities, as a way of controlling the market for their monopolized goods in England.117 In 1660, for example, the Company allowed 1 cwt of goods each for the mariners employed aboard the London and the Discovery, so long as these were not prohibited commodities.118 Similarly, the crew of the Loyall Merchant, sailing to Surat two years later, were allowed twenty-five tonnes of freight amongst them, but were forbidden from carrying out an extensive list of goods including woollens, lead, alum, brimstone, mercury, vermillion, coral, amber or ivory, or from returning with calicoes and other Indian textiles, Indian woods, saltpetre, indigo and a variety of spices including cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, mace, nutmeg and pepper.119

On the East India Company see Kirti N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company, 1600–1640 (London: Frank Cass, 1965); Kirti N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Philip Lawson, The East India Company: A History (London: Longmans, 1987); Geoffrey V. Scammell, ‘The English Chartered Trading Companies and the Sea’, in Seafaring, Sailors, and Trade, ed. Scammell, 1–26; Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundation of the British Empire in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 116 Henry Stevens, ed., The Dawn of British Trade to the East Indies as Recorded in the Court Minutes of the East India Company, 1599–1603 (London: Henry Stevens & Son, 1886), 70. I am grateful to Edmond Smith for this reference. See also Cheryl A. Fury, ‘The First English East India Company Voyage, 1601–1603: The Human Dimension’, International Journal of Maritime History 24, no. 2 (2012): 69–96. 117 E.g. the Company’s lawsuit against Edward Thompson and William Trevechan in 1648: TNA HCA 24/108/262, 265; HCA 23/15/97; HCA 13/61, fos 131v-2r, 139r-40r; HCA 13/121, answer of Edward Tompson and William Trevine, 21  July 1648. Officers still retained some established privileges: Rediker, Between the Devil, 131–2; Earle, Sailors, 61–2; Scammell, ‘Chartered Trading Companies’, 23; see also Lemire, Global Trade, 168–70. 118 Sainsbury, ed., Court Minutes etc., 1640–1643, 42. 119 TNA C10/488/141. 115

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Nor were these empty threats. When, in July 1643, the Crispiana and Aleppo Merchant returned from Surat and the Company’s governors were informed that the mariners had brought back large quantities of indigo as private ventures, they immediately intervened. A warehouse was arranged to store the indigo and the governors decided to call the mariners together ‘to agree to the goods being sold; those that will not sell can either be kept in “bancke” or divided’. They also prepared an admiralty lawsuit against the mariners, ‘so that the truth will appear’.120 Forty years later, Edward Barlow, in a voyage to India, bought ‘two pieces of calico’ for 5s 9d, and complained that on his return the Company ‘put me to four shillings open charges before I could have [the goods] in my own possession’.121 The extensive list of prohibited goods and these measures taken against private trade show just how concerned the Company governors were with maintaining their monopoly on specific commodity chains, though interloping merchants, such as those led by William Courteene during the 1630s–40s, were apparently more willing to let mariners participate; when Courteene’s ship the Bona Esperanza was seized by the Dutch in 1643, mariners’ goods were listed amongst those lost.122 Yet even aboard Company ships, both officers and lowerranking seafarers continued to engage in trade despite the restrictions laid upon them.123 Barlow repeatedly grumbled about how the Company mistreated its crews and officers by restricting their trading, forcing them to pay charges and to sell goods through the Company’s own warehouses – but he also kept on trading throughout his many years in their service.124 Paradoxically, it was their employment by the Company that brought these sailors into contact with highly lucrative commodity chains and yet  also subjected them to the prohibitive attentions of these imperial authorities. As seafarers’ working conditions and wages came under increasing regulation from the British government in the eighteenth century, it may be significant that this legislation, and especially the Act for the Better Regulation and Government of Seamen in the Merchants Service passed in 1729, made no mention of the right to Sainsbury, ed., Court Minutes etc., 1640–1643, 334–5, 338–9, 351–2, 357. Barlow, Barlow’s Journal, II: 365. 122 TNA HCA 23/14/297, 389. On Courteene’s interloping syndicate see Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 170–81; Edmond J. Smith, ‘“Canaanising Madagascar”: Africa in English Imperial Imagination, 1635–1650’, Itinerario 39, no. 2 (2015): 277–98. 123 E.g. TNA HCA 13/79, depositions of Roger Paxton, 20 October 1686, and Samuel Gilman and Giles Katchpoole, 24 January 1689[/90]. 124 Barlow, Barlow’s Journal, I: 218, II: 352, 365, 406–7, 455, 515, 517. 120 121

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carry some goods freight-free.125 The relationship between seafarers, employers and imperial authorities may have shifted, eventually diminishing the legal opportunities that seafarers could exploit from their travels and trading. Yet it is clear from the work of Hugh Bowen, Meike von Brescius and Beverly Lemire that seafarers continued their commercial practices well into the eighteenth century and beyond, confirming that the resilience of these practices long outlasted the early modern period, and that those opportunities never disappeared entirely.126

Conclusion Seafarers’ commercial practices formed undercurrents to the larger, and often much more visible, circuits of global trade and empire which defined the early modern world. Those practices persisted and in some cases thrived among seafarers of all social ranks, many of whom took advantage of the new markets and commodity chains that were created through those larger circuits during this period and long afterwards. These maritime labourers invested in a remarkable range of commodities, including the purchase of enslaved African people; such investments represented, at least for some, a substantial portion of their income; and this trading brought new material possessions and forms of consumption, including some exotic and luxury goods to seafarers’ communities and no less significantly, to seafarers themselves. Social and economic networks ashore, especially involving mariners’ wives and other female relatives or acquaintances, not only facilitated but actively directed these transactions and the further spread of commodities which resulted from them. If these practices were resilient, they were not static. Studying them has highlighted the volatile and contingent nature of seafarers’ participation in commodity chains. Many of these commercial practices depended on seafarers’ mobility, not only in a geographical sense, but in crossing imperial boundaries or operating on their margins to acquire new commodities, both by trade and by violence. These same circumstances also created significant threats which might deprive seafarers of their livelihoods and indeed their lives, whether through On this Act see Blakemore, ‘Legal World’, 117–20. Bowen, ‘“So Alarming an Evil”’; Hugh V. Bowen, ‘Privilege and Profit: Commanders of East Indiamen as Private Traders, Entrepreneurs and Smugglers, 1760–1813’, International Journal of Maritime History 19, no. 2 (2007): 43–88; Meike von Brescius, ‘Worlds Apart? Merchants, Mariners, and the Organization of the Private Trade in Chinese Export Wares in Eighteenth-Century Europe’, in Goods from the East, 1600–1800: Trading Eurasia, ed. Maxine Berg (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 168–82; Lemire, ‘Men of the World’.

125 126

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combat with and imprisonment by the forces of other empires, or the efforts of their own employers and imperial government to restrict and control trade, as well as the perils of storm, shipwreck or fraudulent dealings. Not every voyage was a success, with the consequences for individual seafarers including penury and death, and if the existence of these threats evidently did not discourage seafarers from trading, they did shape and sometimes interdict the seafarers’ access to specific commodity chains. The undercurrents of seafarers’ trading indicate a local or individual form of agency within or across imperial and commercial systems, but not necessarily outside them, one which highlights the fragmented and fraught relationship between commodities and empire.

5­

The social locations of colonial knowledge: Indigo in Bengal, Java and Senegal Willem van Schendel

Colonialism has been central to the formation of the modern world and remains a topic of huge scholarly significance. Here we look at a single aspect: ‘colonial knowledge’ in relation to commodities of empire. ‘Colonial knowledge’ has been a hotly debated concept since the 1980s, when theorists posited it as the information that colonial rulers (overwhelmingly Europeans) amassed about non-European populations. According to these theorists, it was an all-powerful, essentializing and utilitarian form of knowledge. It was knowledge in the service of political and economic supremacy.1 Since then, debates on knowledge formation have become more complex and nuanced, partly as a result of challenges to the direct link between knowledge and power. Rather than emphasizing a ‘knowledge dichotomy’ between colonizers and colonized, an alternative view suggests that colonial knowledge was based on shifting alliances between powerful local informants and Europeans struggling to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings.2 The resultant knowledge was the outcome of ‘exercises in negotiation, mediation and contestation’.3 Colonial states might exercise ‘considerable power as they imposed new political boundaries,

In this chapter, translations from French, German and Dutch are the author’s. 1 For overviews, see Tony Ballantyne, ‘Colonial Knowledge’, in The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives, ed. Sarah Stockwell (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 177–97; and David Arnold, ‘Knowledge Formation’, in Key Concepts in Modern Indian Studies, ed. Gita Dharampal-Frick, Monika Kirolskar Steinbach, Rachel Dwyer and Jahnavi Phalkey (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 145–50. 2 Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 3 Matthew H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 25.

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reoriented local economies, promoted new forms of knowledge, and constructed new regimes of surveillance and censorship, [but] this control was never total’.4 How did colonial rulers deal with the fact that, in their overseas possessions, they had to negotiate ‘a radically different cognitive universe, one which [they] grasped only imperfectly, and which [they were] never to wholly comprehend or subdue’?5 This question has been explored by investigating indigenous elites as sources of knowledge for the new rulers. This sharing – under duress, or voluntarily – led to an amalgamation of precolonial and colonial forms of knowledge. It also privileged indigenous elite interpretations of cultural forms, histories, social relations and the environment. These interacted with the forms of knowledge that Europeans brought to their colonies. In recent studies of ‘colonial knowledge’, scholars have privileged these elite contributions. This chapter explores another aspect of ‘colonial knowledge’, one that requires us to step back from the colonial-ruler/indigenous-elite dyad. Europeans were also in direct contact with non-elite groups in their colonies, leading to struggles over different kinds of local knowledge and to other patterns of sharing, concealment and contestation. Moreover, ‘colonial knowledge’ was neither confined to individual colonial empires nor did it circulate freely and uniformly across the world. Distinct social groups shared specific types of knowledge across colonial and imperial borders. Mapping these flows is important for understanding how colonies and empires formed, functioned and survived; how they differed from each other in their mixes of ‘colonial knowledge’; and how they were linked to each other in both material and immaterial ways. Debates on colonial knowledge production can be lopsided. It has even been suggested that ‘[s]o much study has focused on Britain and France that

Ballantyne, ‘Colonial Knowledge’, 188. The demise of colonial states and empires (still incomplete in the twenty-first century) did not mean the end of ‘colonial knowledge’ – as lively discussions on ‘decoloniality’ (a concept with roots in Latin American studies), ‘the geopolitics of knowledge’ and ‘colonial unknowing’ demonstrate. See, for example, Carlos Rafael Rea Rodríguez, ‘Repensando la relación entre decolonialidad y hegemonía’, Nóesis: Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades 24 (2015): 39–53; Sergio Wanderley and Amon Barros, ‘Decoloniality, Geopolitics of Knowledge and Historic Turn: Towards a Latin American Agenda’, Management & Organizational History 14, no. 1 (2018): 79–97; Capucine Boldin, ‘Études décoloniales et postcoloniales dans les débats français’, Cahiers des Amériques Latines (Paris: IHEAL/Université Paris, 2010), 129–41; Manu Vimalassery, Juliana Hu Pegues and Alyosha Goldstein, ‘Introduction: On Colonial Unknowing’, Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (2017): 1042–54; Indrani Chatterjee, ‘Connected Histories and the Dream of Decolonial History’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 41, no. 1 (2018): 69–86. 5 Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 12–13. See also G. Roger Knight, ‘The Blind Eye and the Strong Arm: The Colonial Archive and the Imbrication of Knowledge and Power in Mid-Nineteenth Century Java’, Asian Journal of Social Sciences 33, no. 3 (2005): 544–67. 4

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the history of their empires has become prototypical’.6 The concept of ‘colonial knowledge’ has been applied especially widely in Indian historiography. It has been helpful in flagging the local particularities of how British knowledge of India took shape in fields such as demographics, ethnology, cartography and economics. However, the notion has also been applied to other colonial empires, sometimes without explicitly engaging with the theoretical debate on ‘colonial knowledge’. In other words, there is scope for comparisons across colonial empires. This chapter is an attempt to do this for a quintessential ‘commodity of empire’. It compares knowledge formation about indigo in three colonies in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. British India, the Netherlands East Indies and French Senegal belonged to different European empires but their histories were connected. Each developed an indigo export industry to meet the demand for this blue dyestuff among European consumers. Indigo was a key object of imperial rivalry – and at the same time it triggered trans-imperial movements of people, ideas, resources and plants. It touched myriad individuals, created far-reaching contexts and buttressed imperial ideologies. In each colony, knowledge about this prized commodity was shared out differently.

Indigo knowledge Indigo, a colourfast blue dye that can be extracted from many plant species, has been used and traded around the world since prehistoric times.7 Knowledge of its complicated production process developed in various parts of the world. Europeans were not very knowledgeable until they began to expand their power beyond their own continent. The word ‘indigo’ derives from indikon (Greek for ‘Indian’) because the most highly prized blue dye in ancient Europe came from western India. Many Europeans actually thought that indigo was a mineral because it arrived in the form of solid blue cubes or balls. Named lapis indicus (Indian stone) by the Romans, it was long thought to be a semiprecious stone,

Matthew G. Stanard, ‘Post-1945 Colonial Historiography and the New Imperial History’, in The Colonial Past in History Textbooks: Historical and Social Psychological Perspectives, ed. Karel Van Nieuwenhuyse and Joaquim Pires Valentim (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing Inc., 2018), 25. See also Arnold, ‘Knowledge Formation’; Ballantyne, ‘Colonial Knowledge’; John Slight, ‘British Colonial Knowledge and the Hajj in the Age of Empire’, in The Hajj and Europe in the Age of Empire, ed. Umar Ryad (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 81–111. 7 Jenny Balfour-Paul, Indigo (London: British Museum Press, 1998). 6

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a confusion that persisted until the sixteenth century when Europeans learned about indigo plants in the Americas.8 Before European expansion, imported indigo was rare and expensive, so much of the European demand for blue dye was satisfied by a local industry based on the woad plant. How ‘indigenous’ woad itself is to Europe is an open question; some suggest it originated in Asia and was used in Europe since the Iron Age.9 As Europeans learned more about the world, they understood that tropical indigo plants produced a more concentrated dye than the European woad plant and that indigo could be produced more profitably in their new colonies. Soon the Spanish, French and British in the Americas were planting and processing indigo for European markets. The most successful indigo production systems sprang up in El Salvador/Guatemala, Haiti and South Carolina, and these wiped out the European woad industry.10 In the late-eighteenth century, however, these colonial systems began to unravel and European consumers had to find new ways to still their rapidly growing hunger for the fine blue dye.11 Just at this time Europeans were able to expand their colonial control over parts of tropical Asia and Africa, and they sought to create indigo production systems in their new possessions. These endeavours were good examples of the ‘exercises in negotiation, mediation and contestation’ involved in establishing colonial power on the ground.12 Colonial indigo knowledge was forged in a period of disruption, with the new rulers seeking to appropriate resources, land and labour, and curtail the power of local leaders. Establishing colonial rule was a violent encounter marked by persistent brinkmanship and insecurity – and indigo production exemplified this rockiness.13 Producing the dyestuff that European consumers desired was complicated. The lifecycle of this commodity passed through several stages: agricultural,

Auguste de Saint-Hilaire, ‘Histoire de l’indigo depuis l’origine des temps historiques jusqu’à l’année 1833’, Nouvelles Annales des Voyages et des Sciences Géographiques … 19, no. 1 (1837): 329–31; Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The History of a Color (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), 17–18. 9 Carmine Guarino, Paolo Casoria and Bruno Menale, ‘Cultivation and Use of Isatis tinctoria L. (Brassicacaea) in Southern Italy’, Economic Botany 54, no. 3 (2000): 396. 10 Fritz Lauterbach, Der Kampf des Waides mit dem Indigo (Leipzig: Veit & Comp. 1905); Balfour-Paul, Indigo. 11 Willem van Schendel, ‘The Asianization of Indigo: Rapid Change in a Global Trade around 1800’, in Linking Destinies: Trade, Towns and Kin in Asian History, ed. Peter Boomgaard, Dick Kooiman and Henk Schulte Nordholt (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2008), 29–49. 12 Edney, Mapping an Empire, 25. 13 Willem van Schendel, ‘Staying Embedded: The Rocky Existence of an Indigo Maker in Bengal’, in Embedding Agricultural Commodities: Using Historical Evidence, 1840s–1940s, ed. Willem van Schendel (London and New York: Routledge, 2017), 11–29. 8

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industrial and marketing. The agricultural stage saw cultivators collecting indigo seeds, ploughing and levelling the ground, planting seeds, weeding frequently and finally harvesting mature indigo plants. The harvest was then delivered to a nearby indigo factory where it was subjected to various stages of industrial processing: steeping the plants in water reservoirs to extract the dye particles; beating the solution to force oxidation (at this stage the blue colour first became visible); draining, boiling and straining the blue slush; pressing it and cutting it into cakes; and finally drying the cakes and packing them in crates. The next stage was marketing: the crates were transported to a colonial port city, shipped to Europe, sorted by quality, distributed and sold. The primary consumers were European dyers who ground the cakes to dust and dissolved them, primarily to colour cotton, silk or wool. In this form indigo became part of another industrial stage, the production of textiles, followed by tailoring and the marketing of finished clothes to consumers. After indigo-blue textiles had been worn they would be discarded and might pass through a final stage of re-use as second-hand clothes and, ultimately, rags. Thus, the indigo commodity chain involved multiple groups of producers, multiple groups of traders and multiple groups of consumers. Despite not being in direct contact, they had to attune their behaviour in order for the chain not to break. Over time, these groups of producers, traders and consumers changed continually as local commodity chains would snap, but the global supply itself remained unbroken for centuries.

Indigo historiography There is a rich historiography on colonial production systems, often conceptualizing them as emerging commodity chains. Historians have insisted on the importance of treating commodity chains not as smooth supply channels orchestrated by corporations but as concrete social relations in which different actors struggle over power and take local decisions that affect the chain’s embedding, functioning and survival.14 There are so many individuals, links, localities, scales, phases and relationships involved in a single chain (let alone its frequent intersections with other chains) that gaining intimate knowledge of all Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal and Zephyr Frank, ‘Commodity Chains in Theory and in Latin American History’, in From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000, ed. Steven Topik, Zephyr Frank and Carlos Marichal (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 2.

14

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of these is a daunting task, even for teams of researchers. And yet, it is essential to piece together the very different social worlds through which a commodity travels. Colonial indigo production systems forged new connections between plants and people, and between the lives of cultivators in Asia, Africa and the Americas and consumers in Europe – groups that were largely unaware of each other’s existence but connected by webs of indigo knowledge.15 In the wide-ranging scholarly literature on colonial indigo production, the most successful case, Bengal, has received far more attention than Java and Senegal: in Bengal, indigo became a more dominant commodity than in Java or Senegal, and its heyday lasted much longer, resulting in more plentiful historical sources.16 Four trends stand out in the literature. First, writings have shifted between two poles: portraying indigo factory owners as heroic pioneers of modern enterprise, or as ruthless exploiters of indigenous or enslaved labour. Second, most studies on indigo production have been framed as national stories, focusing on the relationship between a colony and its metropole, with occasional references to transnational knowledge flows and material exchanges. Third, most historical work has focused on the agricultural phase of production (cultivators growing indigo plants) and on trade in the finished product (cakes of indigo dye), touching lightly, if at all, on the industrial phase in between (the transformation of plants into cakes). And fourth, the linguistic fragmentation of indigo historiography – with archival sources and classic studies in Spanish, French, English, Dutch and other languages – has hampered comparative research. In the Anglophone scholarly literature, Bengal came to dominate, often with remarkably little cognizance of (near-)contemporary indigo developments in other colonial empires. It has been suggested that the late eighteenth century saw a crucial shift in world history. There was such a spurt in global connectedness and uniformity across different societies that we can speak of the beginning of a new phase of globalization that is continuing today.17 Rapid change in the world production

As Prakash Kumar points out, ‘the study of indigo knowledge requires a simultaneous consideration of textual knowledge, natural history, modern scientific practice, institutional dynamics, colonial relations, and the political economy of colonialism’. Prakash Kumar, Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 9. 16 Even though we still lack a truly global history of indigo, an excellent springboard is provided by Ghulam A. Nadri, The Political Economy of Indigo in India, 1580–1930: A Global Perspective (The Hague: Brill, 2016). 17 Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004).

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of indigo was a distinctive element of this shift. We start with how this worked out for Bengal (a new British acquisition in South Asia) from the 1770s onwards. We then turn to how indigo knowledge was employed in Java in the early 1820s, followed by the third case, Senegal, from the mid-1820s. Our focus will be on comparing the social locations of indigo knowledge in these three cases, and how these determined each indigo commodity chain’s success.

Case 1: Bengal After the American Revolution (1776), the British lost their advantageous access to American indigo for European markets and they started thinking about supplying indigo from other parts of their empire. They were not the only ones trying to set up new indigo commodity chains at the time. In the 1760s, 1770s and 1780s experiments were made to acclimatize tropical indigo (Indigofera tinctoria), and manufacture dye from it, in Italy, France and Germany, but these experiments failed.18 The British turned to Bengal, which had a long tradition of making indigo for local consumption but not in a form suitable for long-distance export.19 It exported indigo to nearby areas, notably Bhutan and Tibet.20 The emergence of a new export-oriented indigo industry aiming for the European market did not wipe out these older systems; they remained separate, smaller commodity chains.21 In 1757 the British East India Company had become the de-facto ruler of Bengal, acting as the colonial government.22 Its control remained uncertain for

Charles P. de Lasteyrie, Du pastel, de l’indigotier, et des autres végétaux dont on peut extraire une couleur bleue (Paris: Deterville, 1811), 156–61. 19 Indigo from India had long been exported to Europe, but the production regions were far from Bengal, in western and northern India. These areas remained well beyond the control of the British until much later. Nadri, Political Economy of Indigo. 20 William W. Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal, Volume VII: Districts of Maldah, Rangpur, and Dinájpur (London: Trübner & Co., 1876), 246. 21 A survey of dyers in the town of Malda noted that they used indigo ‘made in the form of balls by the natives of Rongpur and … generally much adulterated with clay. The good indigo, prepared by Europeans, is never employed by the tradesmen of Maldeh’. Francis Buchanan (Hamilton), A Geographical, Statistical and Historical Description of the District, or Zila, of Dinajpur, in the Province, or Soubah, of Bengal (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1833), 290–1. See also François Balthazar Solvyns’ sketch of indigo manufacture for local consumption in Les Hindoûs (Paris: Chez l’auteur, 1808–1812), vol. 4, 156; Prakash Kumar, ‘Planters and Naturalists: Transnational Knowledge on Colonial Indigo Plantations in South Asia’, Modern Asian Studies 48, no. 3 (2014): 741. 22 During this period, ‘Bengal’ referred to an expanding unit under British control. Starting from ‘Bengal proper’ (today roughly Bangladesh and West Bengal (India)) in the mid-eighteenth century, it spread to include regions we now know as Bihar, Odisha (Orissa) and Assam (all in India). Indigo production took place mainly in Bengal proper and Bihar up to 1860, and mainly in Bihar for the remainder of the period. 18

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two decades, however, and only in the late 1770s did it become more effective. This was the cue for European entrepreneurs to take new risks – and many of them saw indigo factories, silk filatures and sugar mills as the most promising ventures. They benefited from a change in policy as well. Previously the East India Company had brought crucial resources – notably saltpetre (1758) and opium (1773) – under its direct control. When indigo emerged as a very profitable resource, the Company considered directly controlling the trade in indigo as well – but ultimately decided against it.23

The failure of the plantation model Export-oriented indigo production in Bengal was made possible by new knowledge from the Americas.24 The first indigo factory was constructed just north of Calcutta (now: Kolkata) in 1777. This was an initiative of Louis Bonnaud, a Frenchman who had learned indigo manufacturing in the Caribbean and later settled as a merchant in Île de Bourbon (now: Réunion), before trying his luck in the small French settlement of Chandannagar (Chandernagore) in Bengal. He built his indigo works ‘after the West Indian or American manner’.25 His example was soon followed by others, notably Carel Blume26 and John

Extract Letter from the Court of Directors to the Governor-General in Council, Bengal, dated 6 May 1791, reprinted in East India Company, Reports and Documents Connected with the Proceedings of the East-India Company in Regard to the Culture and Manufacture of Cotton-Wool, Raw Silk, and Indigo in India (London: East India Company, 1836), 22. See also Blair B. Kling, The Blue Mutiny: The Indigo Disturbances in Bengal, 1859–1862 (Calcutta: Firma KLM Private Ltd., 1966), 18. 24 As Kumar points out, this knowledge itself had roots in ‘the sixteenth-century system of production by peasants on the Indian subcontinent and in the Spanish “greater Caribbean”’, and had been adapted to the Caribbean plantation model. Thus, ‘multiple logics rather than the single colonial logic’, ‘multilateral knowledge flows’ and ‘ecumenical borrowings’ enabled indigo commodity production in Bengal. Kumar, ‘Planters and Naturalists’, 720, 722, 725, 751. See also Kathryn E. Sampeck, ‘An Archaeology of Indigo: Changes in Labor and Technology in the Izalcos Region of Western El Salvador’, in Technology and Tradition in Mesoamerica after the Spanish Invasion: Archaeological Perspectives, ed. Rani T. Alexander (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019), 167–88. 25 According to Carel Blume, writing in 1790, Bonnaud’s factory was in Ghiretti (‘Gheyretty’) but Bonnaud’s son mentioned Taldanga and Gondolpara. John Phipps, who wrote in 1832, links Ghiretti to ‘two French medical gentlemen, Messieurs Ferrier and Michelet, supported by an entreprizing English gentleman, [who] erected a factory at Sampooker, near Ghiretty; which factory is still in existence’ (Proceedings (Commercial), Board of Trade (9  November 1790), West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata, India [hereafter WBSA]). See the short biographical sketch of Louis Bonnaud in Minden Wilson, History of Behar Indigo Factories; Reminiscences of Behar; Tirhoot and Its Inhabitants of the Past; History of Behar Light Horse Volunteers (Calcutta: Calcutta General Printing Co., 1908), 70–2; John Phipps, A Series of Treatises on the Principal Products of Bengal. No.1: Indigo (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1832), 8. 26 In 1778 Blume began constructing buildings ‘of substantial masonry solely for the purpose of manufacturing indigo’, which he named Nill (= Indigo) Castle, in the district of Hooghly. He stepped into indigo production because he had been ‘credibly informed that the Hon’ble Company 23

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Prinsep.27 These early factories were on the banks of the Ganges in western Bengal but soon others were established. Some considered eastern Bengal to be unsuited for indigo because it was too forested28 – but indigo production established itself there as well: in 1781 John Gray obtained land for cultivating indigo in the south-eastern district of Chittagong.29 What did indigo production ‘after the West Indian or American manner’ mean in Bengal? The Caribbean plantation model – with full land ownership and a captive labour force of enslaved workers – was then very much the dominant business model for tropical commodities: it had amply proven its profitability. It was hardly surprising that the earliest attempts in Bengal did start from this model: Bonnaud set out to cultivate indigo in his own ‘garden’; Prinsep persuaded the authorities to make him a grant for life of 675 ha (5,000 bigha) in 1779, on condition that the land be used solely for indigo; and Gray in Chittagong also acquired his large land holding for indigo cultivation.30 Initially, even the French-Haitian term for indigo plantation, indigoterie, was occasionally employed in Bengal.31 But it soon transpired that indigo knowledge from the Americas was inadequate – the plantation model did not fit the realities of colonial Bengal,

had ordered that every possible assistance should be given to the promoters of this commerce within their Territories’ (Proceedings (Commercial), Board of Trade (9 November 1790), WBSA). The term ‘Honourable Company’ refers to the (British) East India Company. Blume also styled his establishment ‘Anil Castle near Houghly’. C. Blume, ‘Short Sketch of the Measures adopted for the introduction of Indigo and the promotion of Agriculture in Bengal between the Year 1779 & 1790’ (30 December 1790) (Home Department, Miscellaneous/434, 599–617, WBSA). 27 John Prinsep, originally a textile printer from London, took up indigo production in 1779 and had three plantations under cultivation in 1780. ‘Copy letter to Lord North from John Prinsep, relating to the introduction of indigo, sugar and tobacco into Great Britain from the East Indies, 25 January 1780’. Mss Eur D624, vol. 1, 1, British Library, London, UK (hereafter BL). Prinsep named his first factory Nilganj (Indigo Market). C. E. Buckland, Dictionary of Indian Biography (London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1906), 345. 28 ‘It may be said that there are vast parts of land applicable for Indigo cultivation in the most eastern districts of Bengal, but these districts are at present overrun with forests and jungle, and are so scantily supplied with inhabitants, that it would require ages to bring them under general cultivation.’ N.  Alexander, ‘Cultivation of Indigo (1829)’, Transactions of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India, vol. 2 (Calcutta: Hurkaru Press and Serampore Press, 1836), 35n. 29 The government granted Gray 25 dones of land for indigo lying between the Angarkhali canal and the Chambal spring in the Banskhali chakla. Alamgir Muhammad Serajuddin, The Revenue Administration of the East India Company in Chittagong 1761–1785 (Chittagong: University of Chittagong, 1971), 201–2. 30 Peter J. Marshall, ‘Private British Investment in Eighteenth-Century Bengal’, Bengal Past and Present 86 (1967): 60. Wilson, History of Behar Indigo Factories, 72; Serajuddin, Revenue Administration, 202. 31 ‘Partnership agreement between Henry Creighton, William Grant and Francis Dingley Hasted, all of Malda, Bengal, for the cultivation and manufacture of indigo at Miniacy and Serasing for a period of two years, 1793’ (Mss Eur G 105, BL).

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and a new organizational form had to be invented. Although the terms ‘West Indian manner’ and ‘plantation’ continued to be used, they referred to the technology employed, the work process and the end product: cakes of dark-blue dye readily acceptable to dyers in Europe. They did not refer to land control or labour relations. The Caribbean/North American indigo plantation system was premised on large tracts of private cultivable land and, crucially, enslaved labour for both field cultivation and manufacture. Neither could be replicated in Bengal. British rule rested squarely on an inherited precolonial system of land taxation based on smallholder (raiyat) productivity and landlord (zamindar) compliance. It was to protect this ‘zamindari’ system – and the precolonial knowledge of taxation and rural control that it embodied – that European entrepreneurs were barred from owning land (or, indeed, residing) in rural areas, unless the Company expressly authorized them. The social order should not be disrupted by capitalist dynamism.32 Dispossessing or enslaving smallholders being out of the question, the labour costs of plantation agriculture were high.33 As a result of these restrictions on land and labour, indigo in Bengal never became a real plantation crop, and neither did other crops, such as sugar. Sugar plantations on Caribbean lines were tried in Bengal in the 1770s, but they required large investments, suffered heavy losses, and were soon abandoned.34 Ever since, sugar manufacturers in Bengal have followed the ‘indigo model’, paying advances to smallholders for delivery of freshly harvested cane to sugar-refining and distillery mills.

Willem van Schendel, ‘What Is Agrarian Labour? Contrasting Indigo Production in Colonial India and Indonesia’, International Review of Social History 60, no. 1 (2015): 1–23. After 1835 it became possible for indigo entrepreneurs to buy the rights to collect revenue, and thus to become landlords/tax collectors, but this did not mean they owned the land because cultivators’ rights to the land continued to exist. See The Experiences of a Landholder and Indigo Planter in Eastern Bengal (Aberdeen: John Smith, 1859). 33 G. Ballard, ‘On the Cultivation of Indigo in Bengal’ (1829), Transactions of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India 2 (1836): 15. 34 Marshall, ‘Private British Investment’, 61–2. For an impression of the investments required for sugar and indigo, consider this statement from 1829: ‘Indigo works, capable of producing yearly £10,000 worth of the dye, may be constructed for about the sum of £700; sugar works, capable of yielding a produce of equal value, would require an investment of capital to the amount of £24,000’ ([J. Crawfurd,] A View of the Present State and Future Prospects of the Free Trade and Colonization of India, 2nd edn. (London: James Ridgway/Liverpool: Egerton and John Smith, 1829), 31). See also David Arnold, ‘Plant Capitalism and Company Science: The Indian Career of Nathaniel Wallich’, Modern Asian Studies 42, no. 5 (2008): 914. 32

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Embedding indigo production in Bengal In commercial terms, the experiments of the 1770s paid off. Even though individual indigo enterprises frequently went bust, the industry as a whole was on a steep learning curve and grew vigorously. The promise of high profits was, however, offset by the fickleness of the indigo plant. Its yields were never assured, and a seasonal suspense permeated the industry – would the harvest be good? A popular ditty captured this: The indigo planter is filled with good cheer When crowned with success at the end of the year With his boxes of blue and his lakhs of rupees.35

In 1785 there were fourteen indigo factories, and by 1793 the directors of the East India Company in London felt that ‘the cultivation and manufacture of indigo must be considered as an object of national importance’.36 Government support to the fledgling industry came in several forms, including free seeds from the new botanic garden in Calcutta. Indigo seeds (and knowledge about them) crisscrossed the world. For example, seeds from Guatemala could be sent to Bengal via the Philippines.37 Colonial botanic gardens were crucial in the global diffusion of plants and botanic knowledge.38 By 1829 there were hundreds of indigo concerns (often with several subsidiary factories) spread over more than forty districts.39 Indigo entrepreneurs – sometimes known as the Blue Fraternity40 – became a powerful interest group.

A lakh = 100,000. From ‘Journals of Thomas Machell’ (1840–1856) (India Office Private Papers, Mss Eur B369, BL), vol. 1, 72/168. 36 See Extract Letter from the Court of Directors to the Governor-General in Council, Bengal, dated 11 April 1785, reprinted in East India Company, Reports and Documents, 36. 37 Tim Robinson, ‘William Roxburgh (1751–1815): The Founding Father of Indian Botany’ (PhD diss., Edinburgh University, 2003), 204; Adrian P. Thomas, ‘The Establishment of Calcutta Botanic Garden: Plant Transfer, Science and the East India Company, 1786–1806’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Series 3 16, no. 2 (2006): 165–77. See also Kling, Blue Mutiny, 18. 38 Roger Spencer and Rob Cross, ‘The Origins of Botanic Gardens and Their Relation to Plant Science, with Special Reference to Horticultural Botany and Cultivated Plant Taxonomy’, Muelleria 35 (2017): 43–93. 39 ‘Indigo Planters’ (Board’s Collections [F/4/1277/51242], March 1829–March 1830 [Judicial B (LP), 1832, BL]). See also Willem van Schendel, ‘Green Plants into Blue Cakes: Working for Wages in Colonial Bengal’s Indigo Industry’, in Working on Labor: Essays in Honor of Jan Lucassen, ed. Marcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), 50–1. 40 One of the Blue Fraternity, ‘Indigo Plants’, Calcutta Journal (1819): 424. 35

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If lucky, these men, who came from many different countries,41 could make enormous profits on which they retired to their home countries, or settled in booming urban centres in Bengal.42 What had made this possible? There was clearly a multitude of contingencies that worked together. Historical studies of plant transfers have tended to highlight the role of colonial institutions and prominent naturalists in the initial transfer of plants. A fuller picture also takes into account the role of less conspicuous participants in these transfers, the subsequent spread of plants, and the causes of success, or failure, of plants in their new environments.43 Among these causes are plant attributes, soil and climate conditions, the social arrangements that the plants encountered and the bundles of human knowledge accompanying the plants. Success also depended on which groups of people held which kind of knowledge. We can explore the social location of different types of indigo knowledge by distinguishing plant knowledge, dye knowledge, site knowledge and chain knowledge.

Plant knowledge The early entrepreneurs knew little about the local ecology or the requirements of indigo cultivation in Bengal. Their experiments with growing indigo plants themselves proved unprofitable and were soon abandoned. Indigo plantations could not develop and therefore the agroecological expertise of Bengali smallholders became absolutely indispensable for the indigo industry, although it was rarely acknowledged as a major input.44 Indigo entrepreneurs outsourced cultivation and were largely oblivious to the practical knowledge and skills required to grow a good crop. Peasants provided the knowledge of plant The first official survey of the indigo industry (1829) found that factory managers active at that time came from England and Wales (46  per cent), Scotland (21  per cent), India (13  per cent), Ireland (9  per cent), France (5  per cent), elsewhere in Europe (3  per cent – Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Switzerland, Poland, Portugal and Greece), elsewhere in Asia (2 per cent – Macao, Mauritius, Armenia), and America (0.3 per cent). Calculated from ‘Indigo Planters’ (1832). 42 Alexander, ‘Cultivation of Indigo’, 32. On the link between indigo production and the growth of towns, see Christopher A. Bayly, ‘Town Building in North India, 1790–1830’, Modern Asian Studies 9, no. 4 (1975): 483–504. For the experience of Henry Masik, an indigo entrepreneur who retired around 1800 with a fortune of Rs. 2,500,000, see John H. Tull Walsh, A History of Murshidabad (Bengal) with Biographies of Some of Its Noted Families (London: Jarrold & Sons, 1902), 117. 43 William Beinart and Karen Middleton, ‘Plant Transfers in Historical Perspective: A Review Article’, Environment and History 10, no. 1 (2004): 3–29. 44 The essential role of prior peasant knowledge is revealed if we compare the repeated attempts to establish an Indian tea industry. These failed because Indian peasants had no knowledge of tea cultivation and Indian tea only took off with the help of imported Chinese labourers. Jayeeta Sharma, ‘British Science, Chinese Skill and Assam Tea: Making Empire’s Garden’, Indian Economic Social History Review 43, no. 4 (2006): 429–55. 41

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varieties; seed selection and storage; types of land most suitable for indigo; the timing of sowing, weeding and harvesting; pests and plant diseases; and coping with the vagaries of Bengal’s turbulent climate. The prominence of indigenous plant knowledge manifested itself in how local terms pervaded documents on indigo in European languages.45 For example, Pierre-Paul Darrac coined the verb ‘chytaniser’ (‘to chitanize’), and Walter Reid used ‘chitanee sowing’, to refer to the broadcasting of seeds (derived from the Bengali word chitani). And both authors used ‘moy’ and ‘mooie’, respectively, to indicate the harrow (Bengali: moi) that was used to flatten indigo fields before cultivation.46 Plant knowledge certainly was not static; countless cultivators, voyagers and traders must have been involved in various transfers over time. Information is scarce but a French expert who visited Bengal in the 1780s provided an example: he noticed the success of an indigo variety recently imported from Sumatra.47 There were a number of reasons why indigo succeeded where other new cash crops failed. First, the variety that best suited the indigo entrepreneurs was an indigenous plant (Indigofera tinctoria48), adapted to the local climate and easy to grow, if the monsoon rains were on time. Second, the flat alluvial soils of the Bengal delta and the Ganges valley were excellent for indigo; the plant could be grown almost anywhere in this huge swathe of fertile land, allowing the industry to spread out rapidly from its origins in the vicinity of Calcutta. Third, there was abundant water in deltaic Bengal, critical for both dye manufacture and rapid transport. Indigo is a highly perishable crop – leaves and stems must be processed within hours of being cut – so speed was of the essence. The bulk of the harvest arrived See also Allison Bigelow, ‘Incorporating Indigenous Knowledge into Extractive Economies: The Science of Colonial Silver’, The Extractive Industries and Society 3 (2016): 117–23. 46 Pierre-Paul Darrac, ‘De la Culture de l’Anil et de la fabriquation de l’Indigo au Bengale (1823)’ (Mss Eur F193/87, BL); W. M. Reid, The Culture and Manufacture of Indigo; with a Description of a Planter’s Life … (Calcutta: Thacker & Co., 1887), 74–80. Darrac’s text is peppered with his versions of Bengali terms such as metiel (clayey soil), doubla (couch grass) and nérény (weeding tool). An English translation of this report can be found in Pierre-Paul Darrac and Willem van Schendel, Global Blue: Indigo and Espionage in Colonial Bengal (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 2006). 47 Joseph-François Charpentier de Cossigny, Voyage au Bengale, suivi de notes critiques et politiques … (Paris: Émery, An VII, 1799), vol. 1, 112; vol. 2, 265–6. 48 ‘There are more than 40 species of Indigofera indigenous to India, largely localized. Originally, in each locality, the dye was obtained from the species indigenous to that locality. With the arrival of the European and the development of an export trade, the same confusion [as to the specific Linnean title and even origin of the various forms grown in different regions] arose, not only from transference of the indigenous species from one area to another, but from the importation of alien species.’ Hugh Martin-Leake, ‘An Historical Memoir of the Indigo Industry of Bihar’, Economic Botany 29 (1975): 362. Many sources concur in portraying Indigofera tinctoria as a ‘local’ plant in Bengal, but we know too little about the early history of indigo transfers in Asia to be sure. Today, in an age in which states struggle with corporations over ownership of biological resources, and in which there is much concern about environmental integrity, it is essential to realize that genetic property claims and terms like ‘biological invasion’ and ‘ecological imperialism’ suggest a static image of former pristine purity, unsullied by ‘foreign’ species, that is historically untenable. 45

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at the factory by boat (often at night when temperatures were lower) and the rest by bullock cart. The typical indigo factory lay on the bank of a river, downstream from nearby fields. Indigo manufacture was a quintessentially rural industry. One issue needed a solution, however. Unlike other indigo-producing regions around the world, Bengal was prone to deep annual flooding, which killed indigo plants and stopped factory work during the rainy season.49 But even this was no deterrent: cultivators knew how to deal with annual floods. Indigo, a fastgrowing plant, was re-sown annually and the industry adapted its schedules to the monsoon rhythm of the cultivators.

Dye knowledge ­ uropean entrepreneurs in Bengal had to learn quickly how to manufacture dye. E Some had personal familiarity with indigo production elsewhere, for example Frenchmen (such as Bonnaud) who had grown indigo in the Caribbean and Réunion, and Englishmen who came over from post-revolution North America or the Caribbean. One of these was Robert Heaven, who had produced indigo, cotton and sugar in the West Indies for thirteen years. The East India Company granted him permission to go ahead in 1787.50 Not all newcomers appear to have been committed to applying their dye knowledge to boost the industry, however. According to one source of the 1780s, ‘most English indigo establishments in Bengal are run by French vagabonds who are much less concerned with producing indigo than with stealing from the owners’.51 Those who entered the field inexperienced could make use of a shortcut: printed manuals about the Caribbean way of manufacturing, written by Frenchmen, then the leading experts.52 Between 1769 and 1794 works by Beauvais Raseau (1761), Monnereau (1765) and Charpentier de Cossigny (1779) were all translated into English and published from Calcutta and London, expressly to serve indigo manufacturers in Bengal (Figures 5.1 and 5.2).53 See Willem van Schendel, A History of Bangladesh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 1–10. 50 Extract Letter from the Court of Directors to the Governor-General in Council, Bengal, dated 27 March 1787, reprinted in East India Company. Reports and Documents, 6. 51 Charpentier de Cossigny, Voyage au Bengale, vol. 1, 111–12. 52 Kumar, ‘Planters and Naturalists’, 729–44; Kumar, Indigo Plantations, 25–76. 53 M. de Beauvais Raseau, L’Art de l’Indigotier (Paris: Saillant et Nyon, 1761). Part of this manual, together with other writings on indigo production, was published in Calcutta as M. de Beauvais Raseau, Treatise on Indigo, trans. Richard Nowland (Calcutta: James White, 1794). Élie Monnereau, Le Parfait Indigotier: ou Description de l’Indigo. Nouvelle Édition … augmentée par l’auteur (Amsterdam/Marseille: J. Mossy, 1765). English translation: Elias Monnereau, The Complete Indigo49

Figure 5.1  Title page of the English translation of Monnereau’s indigo manual (1769).

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Figure 5.2  Dedication in the English translation of M. de Beauvais Raseau’s manual, 1761/1794.

These manuals were useful because basic technical requirements of the Caribbean system could be implemented in Bengal without much difficulty. Most components of an indigo factory could be made from local materials; there was no need for complicated or expensive machinery to be imported from abroad. Coal for the factory furnaces was also procured from nearby. Indigo factories in western Bengal bought their coal from north-eastern Bengal; in 1795 a French indigo entrepreneur in the neighbourhood of Calcutta informed a colleague that ‘our coal from Sylhet will be delivered at noon today’.54

Maker, Containing an Accurate Account of the Indigo Plant … (London: P. Elmsly, 1769). JosephFrançois Charpentier de Cossigny, Essai sur la fabrique de l’indigo (Isle de France: Imprimerie Royale, 1779) was published in abridged translation, combined with writings by other authors on processes observed in different parts of India, as Joseph François Charpentier-Cossigny de Palma, Memoir Containing an Abridged Treatise on the Cultivation and Manufacture of Indigo … (Calcutta: Manuel Cantopher, 1789). 54 Letter from Robert Desmarchais at Chialdinga indigo factory to his business partner J. X. Verlée in Chandannagar, 12 October 1795. Verlée Papers (Mss.Eur. F 193/65, BL).

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Indigo entrepreneurs used the dye-making techniques advocated by their colleagues halfway around the world, making adaptations and noting these down. One adaptation was the boiling of indigo pulp.55 Another was the drying of indigo cakes. Charpentier de Cossigny, visiting in the 1780s, noticed that Bengal’s humid climate made it difficult to dry indigo cakes. Therefore, sturdy wooden presses were used to squeeze water out of indigo paste, which was then cut into cakes. These were regularly turned during several weeks in airing houses before being dry enough to be packed and shipped (Figure 5.3).56

Figure 5.3  An indigo drying house.57

William Fitzmaurice, A Treatise, on the Cultivation of Sugarcane, and Manufacture of Sugar … Some Useful Information on the Cultivation of Coffee, Ginger, Guinea … (Calcutta: J. Leary at the World Press, 1793), 61–2; Darrac, ‘De la Culture de l’Anil’; David R. Williams and A. Campbell Dunlop, ‘On the Cultivation and Preparation for Market of the Bengal Indigo’, Southern Agriculturist and Register of Rural Affairs (May 1829), 206–9; H. Piddington, ‘On the Manufacture of Indigo’ (1829), Transactions of the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India 2 (1836): 24–9; R., ‘Hints Respecting the Manufacture of Indigo in the Manner Practised in Bengal’, Journal of the Franklin Institute, of the State of Pennsylvania, … (February 1830): 120–1; Phipps, A Series of Treatises; George Richardson Porter, The Tropical Agriculturist: A Practical Treatise on the Cultivation and Management of Various Productions Suited to Tropical Climates (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1833), 334–68. 56 Charpentier de Cossigny, Voyage au Bengale, I, 172–4. 57 Reid, The Culture and Manufacture of Indigo, facing 63. As Reid explains (63): ‘Each cake is […] carefully stamped with the name of the factory and the number of the boiling, to check off afterwards the quality and date of the colour. They are then taken into the godown or drying house, and placed on mat or bamboo trellis-work on shelves in tiers, one above another; each day’s manufacture having its ticket attached to the tier on which its cakes lay, so that by reading the number and remarks on the wooden ticket any specimen or cake of any date can in a moment be at once got down. When the cakes are thoroughly dry they are carefully taken down and cleaned with soft brushes.’ 55

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Factory managers usually discounted the knowledge of their labourers (even referring to them as the factory’s ‘living machinery’58) but dye knowledge was not the domain of managers alone. They shared it with hundreds of labourers in their factories, who often had skills that the managers lacked.59 For example, the rang mistri (colour master) had expert knowledge of exactly when the fermentation of the steeped indigo plants should be stopped to get the best result.60 The significance for managers of indigenous knowledge in dye-making is reflected in local terms pervading English-language texts, for example, ceetee (indigo plants discarded after steeping), gomosta (factory supervisor) and amla (office clerk).61 Labourers also brought indigenous belief systems into the factory, connecting dye-making skills with knowledge of the supernatural – a form of ‘colonial knowledge’ well beyond the understanding of their European bosses.62

Site knowledge The marriage of plant and dye knowledge formed the foundation of a viable production system, but it was not sufficient to ensure indigo a future. A third type of knowledge was essential for the system to flourish in its social and political context. Many indigo entrepreneurs were Europeans and for them getting to grips with local social arrangements was challenging. According to the Board of Trade (the East India Company’s trade branch in Bengal) in 1791, this understanding of local social realities was far more difficult to acquire than technical knowledge: ‘A Knowledge of the new manufacture is probably attainable without much difficulty, a person of competent skill in this respect

[Colesworthey Grant], Rural Life in Bengal; Illustrative of Anglo-Indian Suburban Life … Letters from An Artist in India to His Sisters in England (London: W. Thacker & Co., 1860), 137. See also Van Schendel, ‘Green Plants’, 47–73. 59 Thus, Kumar asserts that in Bengal ‘peasant traditions of manufacture were neither rejected out of hand nor rapidly rendered irrelevant’. Kumar, ‘Planters and Naturalists’, 745. 60 Machell, ‘Journals’, vol. 2, 181/114. 61 [Grant], Rural Life in Bengal, 126, 129, 137–40; Papers Relating to the Cultivation of Indigo in the Presidency of Bengal; Selections from the Records of the Government of Bengal (Calcutta: Bengal Military Orphan Press, 1860), vol. 2, 405. See also Van Schendel, ‘Green Plants’. 62 ‘July 18th. On arriving at the factory [Rooderpore], I found they had just slain the goat in honour of Kalli and sprinkled its blood on the vats preparatory to opening them for the season. The Pundit still mouthed his mantras. The incense still smoked and victim’s limbs still quivered whilst the sacrificial sword was covered with blood. The pundit had done his office well: one blow had taken the head off and doubtless that knife would have taken off a man’s head just as expertly to the honour and glory of the horrid toothed goddess.’ Machell, ‘Journals’, vol. 4, 0127. On sacrificial offerings in Java sugar mills, see John Pemberton, ‘The Ghost in the Machine’, in Photographies East: The Camera and Its Histories in East and Southeast Asia, ed. Rosalind C. Morris (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), 29–56. 58

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may be hired and it is easy for an industrious proprietor sufficiently to watch their conduct.’ But this did not take care of the interior detail of the business specially of the intercourse with the Husbandman [cultivator] in making advances to him, in appraising the plant he delivers and in adjusting accounts and recovering balances and also in knowledge of the soil. These are probably the most intricate and difficult parts of the management since they require a competent knowledge of the language, dispositions, habits and connections of the lower order of the natives; in short a familiarity of intercourse which few Europeans ever attain; and an observation of the country which few make and without which they are very liable to be duped by the Husbandmen themselves and by their own sircars [accountants] and immediate servants.63

S­ uch ‘site knowledge’ was particularly important because, as we have seen, the plantation model had to be abandoned and indigo production could not retreat into a capitalist enclave. The colonial government had blocked indigo entrepreneurs’ direct access to land and field labour and forced them to resort to outsourcing to independent smallholders against cash advances paid back in freshly harvested indigo plants. They operated in rural areas where the state was very thin on the ground and cultivators often were unwilling to grow indigo because it earned them little money, was risky and interfered with a more useful rice crop. Landlords were often ill-disposed to having their tenants grow indigo. Landlord-and-cultivator opposition and weak government support meant that European indigo entrepreneurs never mastered the site knowledge that would have allowed them to insert indigo production into rural society by means of persuasion and cooptation. Even the economic coercion of cash advances was rarely sufficient to secure good indigo plants on their doorsteps at the right time. In Bengal, indigo enterprises could survive only by violent means. Indigo factories had their own posses of hired armed men (barkandaz or lathial 64) and their own dungeons for defaulting cultivators. Soon indigo production was associated with what officials routinely described as oppressive conduct, illegal detention and murder of debtors. As indigo factories proliferated, they also began to compete for indigo plants, leading to ‘violent affrays’ between ‘Indigo’ (Board of Trade (Commercial) Proceedings (20 December 1791), WBSA). These were described as ‘sometimes proclaimed offenders, escaped Convicts, or persons discharged from the Jails … Organised gangs of Brigands, denominated “Lateals”, consisting of from 1 to 200 men under regular Sirdars [leaders], live by hiring themselves to fight the battles of Indigo Planters’. ‘Indigo Planters’ (1832), 816.

63 64

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neighbouring indigo entrepreneurs over fields of indigo plants and control of cultivators.65 In other words, site knowledge was largely martial and considerably indigenous in nature. Right from the beginning, and throughout its existence, the system of indigo production in Bengal was associated with high levels of violence.66 This, more than anything, has dominated the historiography of indigo production in Bengal, which has focused squarely on the discordant character of site knowledge.67 A Bengal ‘planter’ was actually a factory manager who manufactured indigo cakes out of purchased indigo plants.68 His violence was directed outwards – to cultivators, landlords and other indigo factories. Inside the factory, arrangements were less overtly brutal – they rested on wage relations, but labour discipline was harsh.69 Indigo factories were seasonal, requiring ‘site knowledge’ about how to attract large numbers of wage labourers for processing during relatively short periods. Most labourers were seasonal migrants (known as bonwallah or Buno – forest people) or permanent staff. Some members of local smallholder households may also have found employment as day labourers. A fragment of a farming journal (undated, 1820s?), probably kept by Chéri Verlée or Alexandre Darrac, mentions different types of labourers: 5th of September … Now that all land is flooded, productive work has come to a stop. The only remaining work is cleaning out the ditches around the factory, repairing the stables, etc. The carpenters are making indigo chests. We have paid and sent away the ‘bonwallahs’ who are going home. The peasants are very busy harvesting rice. After harvesting and ploughing the land once, they will sow

For example, a survey of the industry stated: ‘The Chief evil complained of by Indigo Planters, and the fertile source indeed, of serious breaches of the peace, is the interference of rival factories with each other, and the injury to which Planters are constantly exposed from new Factories being erected within the bounds of the old established concerns in their possession, either native Proprietors or Lease holders, or some European Planter.’ ‘Indigo Planters’ (1832), 798. See also ‘Blue Devil’, in The Bangladesh Reader: History, Culture, Politics, ed. Meghna Guhathakurta and Willem van Schendel (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), 91–6. 66 Roy suggests that the system was ‘mildly extortionate’ before 1860: ‘The received view of the indigo crisis of 1860 suggests that the business was ordinarily performed by coercive means … this view overstates coercion and understates institutional complexity.’ Tirthankar Roy, ‘Indigo and Law in Colonial India’, Economic History Review 64, no. S1 (2011): 73; Kumar, ‘Planters and Naturalists’, 721. 67 See Kling, Blue Mutiny; Chittabrata Palit, Tensions in Bengal Rural Society: Landlords, Planters and Colonial Rule, 1830–1860 (Calcutta: Progressive Publishers, 1975); Amiya Rao and B. G. Rao, The Blue Devil: Indigo and Colonial Bengal, with an English Translation of Neel Darpan by Dinabandhu Mitra (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992). 68 In Bengal, indigo entrepreneurs and factory managers rarely grew indigo themselves and, if they did, they grew very little. It would be more accurate to call them ‘factors’, as Porter does. In parts of north-west India it was more common for them to have fields under their direct supervision (nij abad), cultivated by agricultural labourers. Porter, The Tropical Agriculturist, 353. 69 Van Schendel, ‘Green Plants’, 71. 65

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sesame. As this is the time of year when there is the least work, especially in the fields, we have allowed some of the foremen and clerks to visit their homes, on condition that they return by the end of the month.70

The site knowledge required for successful indigo production was shared by factory managers and their local enforcers. The latter’s indigenous designations crept into English-language texts on site knowledge: amin (land surveyor), lathial (man armed with a club), naib (rent collector), piada (bailiff), choukidar (watchman), barkandaz (mercenary) and so on.

Chain knowledge Plant, dye and site knowledge allowed entrepreneurs to manage networks of labour and production processes that resulted in a finished commodity: indigo cakes. But getting these from a rural factory to consumers in Europe required a very different type of ‘colonial knowledge’. Getting the cakes to Calcutta required the local boatmen’s detailed knowledge of Bengal’s complicated waterways. The cakes were intended almost entirely for the London market.71 From London, Bengal indigo was re-exported to other European countries. Getting the indigo to its faraway consumers involved specialized skills. We can describe these as ‘chain knowledge’: an understanding of shipping, warehousing, insurance, tariffs, sales, capital flows, quality standards and consumer preferences.72 Indigo could never have become an ‘object of national importance’ without these inputs. Bengal indigo also benefited from unforeseen events around the globe. The American Revolution came as a boon to European private traders in Bengal because the East India Company forbade its servants and other merchants to invest their savings in foreign companies (notably French and Dutch, supporters of the Americans), or use these as channels for remittances. Instead, they had to invest in legal private trade and send their remittances through the East

Verlée Papers (Mss.Eur. F 193/95, BL). Around 1820 French ships were still involved in taking about three quarters of France’s indigo requirement from Bengal. ‘In fact, some other commodities are also transported in French ships returning from Bengal – sugar, saltpetre, rubber, elephants’ tusks, and so on – but these are mere by-products. French trade can still get these more advantageously from America or Africa, so it is for indigo that French ships go to Bengal.’ P. P. Darrac, ‘Mémoire historique sur les établissemens français en Asie et principalement de ceux du Bengale’ (Chandernagore, 1822) (Mémoires et documents, Compagnie des Indes, Premier Empire Coloniale, Fonds Ministériels, FM C/2/115, 498–9, Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, France (hereafter ANOM). 72 Michael Aldous, ‘Rehabilitating the Intermediary: Brokers and Auctioneers in the NineteenthCentury Anglo-Indian Trade’, Business History 59, no. 4 (2017): 525–53. 70 71

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India Company. The preferred form that these took was shipments of indigo to Britain.73 The dye was so valuable that it functioned as an ‘alternative currency’.74 The loss of the North American colonies resulted in increased British private trade interest in India, including merchants migrating from America to Bengal. As more disposable capital flowed into Bengal, new mercantile organizations came up. Composed of (ex-)Company servants and traders with little capital of their own, these ‘agency houses’ attracted deposits from wealthy Company servants and others, including Indians, and they began investing in new ventures such as indigo factories. The East India Company quickly became involved. Wishing to encourage export trade ‘by the side of the Government monopoly and under its wing’, it supported the agency houses with advances, sometimes in cash but often in the form of (indigo) contracts.75 Soon a dozen agency houses were operating in Calcutta. Energetic promoters of commodity production, they became the main repositories of indigo ‘chain knowledge’ and formed a vital link between indigo enterprises and their capital and product markets. Indigo entrepreneurs relied increasingly on the chain knowledge of agency houses.76 This paid off, not least in product quality. By the 1780s efforts were under way to standardize the product so that it could compete in the European markets with the best indigo from Haiti and Guatemala. This implied fashioning indigo cakes of 1½ to 2 inches square, making sure they contained no sand or dirt, aiming for a quality product (lowgrade indigo from the Americas was still plentiful in Europe) and stacking only one grade of indigo in each chest sent to London.77 In 1792 the Board of Directors of the East India Company in London wrote to Calcutta: ‘It affords us much pleasure to remark, that the article, as to quality, is still increasing

Unlike most other tropical commodities, which left the colonial shores in bulky form and required further processing in European factories, indigo was processed locally, and it left its rural factories as small, lightweight, valuable cakes. It was a commodity that became storable and transportable within kilometres from the fields that had produced the raw material. This – combined with its high valueto-bulk quality – marked indigo as the commodity of choice for remitting capital. A commodity with similar characteristics is tea; it played no role as a competitor to indigo for remitting capital from India to the metropolis because India would not produce tea until much later. John M. Talbot, ‘Tropical Commodity Chains, Forward Integration Strategies and International Inequality: Coffee, Cocoa and Tea’, Review of International Political Economy 9, no. 4 (2002): 701–34. 74 Sampeck, ‘An Archaeology of Indigo’, 167. 75 S. B. Singh, European Agency Houses in Bengal (1783–1833) (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1966), 1–16; William Huggins, Sketches in India … (London: John Letts, 1824), 71–5. 76 Carel Blume’s letter in Proceedings (Commercial), Board of Trade (9 November 1790), WBSA. 77 Extract Letter from the Court of Directors to the Governor-General in Council, Bengal, dated 11 April 1785, reprinted in East India Company, Reports and Documents, 4; also 12–21. See also ‘Indigo’ (Board of Trade (Commercial) Proceedings (20 December 1791), WBSA). 73

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in quality. It has already surpassed the American and French, and there is no doubt but by perseverance and attention on the part of the planters, it will effectively rival the Spanish.’78

Bengal indigo knowledge Bengal’s indigo boom of the 1780s and 1790s was based on a particular way of sharing vital knowledge about this commodity. Smallholding peasants possessed most of the plant knowledge; factory managers, labourers and mercenaries most of the dye and site knowledge; and Bengali boatmen, agency houses, Company officials, transporters and retailers in Britain most of the chain knowledge. None of these sets of knowledge was fool proof. The indigo system remained volatile because it was plagued by occasional poor harvests, spoiled batches of dye, excessive use of violence and unexpected market gluts and shortages. Nor was indigo production easy on individual participants: indigo cultivators were severely exploited and resisted in various ways, factory managers frequently lost their jobs over poor results and factory owners went bankrupt, taking investors down with them. And yet, from shaky beginnings, a viable if conflict-ridden system developed that would survive until the early 1900s, when the world demand for natural indigo collapsed as a result of the discovery of synthetic dyes. At least one secret of this success was the indigo entrepreneurs’ early acknowledgement that they could not control all forms of knowledge required for the system to work.79 They outsourced plant knowledge to cultivators (abandoning their initial ambition to grow indigo themselves) and chain knowledge to agency houses and the Company (abandoning early attempts to organize shipping and marketing themselves). By not following the Caribbean model that the existing manuals recommended, they created the circumstances for Bengal indigo to be turned into a highly successful global commodity, which would dominate the European markets for over a century.80

‘State of the Indigo Manufacture, &c’ (March 1792–May 1799), 121. (Extract Court’s Commercial Letter dated 30  May 1792, Records of the Board of Commissioners for the Affairs of India, Board’s Collections, F/4/60/1369, BL). See ‘Indigo’ (Board of Trade (Commercial) Proceedings (20 December 1791), WBSA). 79 Kumar, ‘Planters and Naturalists’, 750–1. 80 One way of demonstrating the rapid emergence of Bengal indigo, and its importance to the British economy, is to compare the import and export figures. In 1783, Britain imported 0.54 million kg of indigo, only 7 per cent of which came from Bengal. Fifteen years later, indigo imports from Bengal had increased forty-fold: in 1798 Britain imported 1.8 million kg of indigo, 96 per cent of which came from Bengal. In 1783 Britain consumed 78 per cent of the indigo it imported and re-exported 78

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Case 2: Java British success in Bengal was carefully watched. Soon other European colonial powers mounted challenges to British indigo hegemony, and European states without colonial empires also attempted to produce indigo for themselves.81 The Dutch possessed tropical colonies and hoped to position themselves as major players in the shifting global indigo trade. They focused on Java, which, unlike Bengal, had long exported indigo. From the 1630s the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) had tried to stimulate export production from Asia, but the quality of indigo from Java, Ambon, Taiwan, Mauritius and Thailand had been disappointing. Java indigo began to improve after 1700 and it became a regular commodity on the Amsterdam market from 1734.82 By the end of the eighteenth century, however, Java indigo had declined: ‘we are now completely at the mercy of French merchants, even though we have both land and hands to supply this profitable product ourselves’.83 Even more galling was the emergence of a new indigo industry in Bengal. As a Dutch newspaper, discussing the period around 1800, put it: ‘it was lamentable that this source

22  per cent, mainly to continental Europe. In 1798, Britain consumed 45  per cent of the indigo it imported and re-exported 55  per cent. Britain’s re-export trade thus grew from 0.4  million kg in 1783 to 1.0  million kg in 1798. Phipps, A Series of Treatises, 49. By 1831–2 Bengal exported 4.2 million kg of indigo, of which 70 per cent went to Britain, 15 per cent to France and 7 per cent each to the United States and the Persian Gulf. Of the indigo exported to Britain, 70 per cent was private trade and 30 per cent trade on account of the East India Company, ‘Note sur le commerce de Calcutta; tableau de l’importation et de l’exportation de la récolte d’indigo de 1831’ (1832) (Inde, Séries Géographiques, Séries Documentaires; Ministère des Colonies (hereafter INDE), Carton 537, ANOM). See also tables of indigo imports to, and exports from, Great Britain between 1782 and 1799 in Robert Wissett, ‘A View of the Trade in Indigo’, in A Compendium of East Indian Affairs, Political and Commercial, Collected and Arranged for the Use of the Court of Directors (London: E. Cox, 1802), vol. 2, 210–22. 81 As we have seen, Germany and Italy had tried this in vain in the late eighteenth century. In the 1830s, Belgium, newly separated from the Netherlands and still without colonies, experimented unsuccessfully with the production of blue dye from Chinese indigo (Polygonum tinctorium) in its southern hill country. A French report of 1843 expressed hopes that Chinese indigo, grown in France, would be ‘destined to play a role in France almost as beautiful as that of the sugar beet’. Lasteyrie, Du pastel, de l’indigotier, 156–61; Charles Morren, ‘Mémoire sur la formation de l’indigo dans les feuilles du Polygonum tinctorium ou renouée tinctoriale’ (1838), Nouveaux Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Sciences et Belles-Lettres de Bruxelles 12 (1839): 1–33; ‘Rapport du comité de chimie sur le mémoire No. 6’, Bulletin de la Société Industrielle de Mulhouse 17 (1843): 280–3. 82 Hans van Santen, ‘De Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie in Gujarat en Hindustan, 1620–1660’ (PhD diss., Leiden University, 1982), 135. For an overview of Dutch East India Company dealings with indigo production in Java, see Robert Van Niel, Java’s Northeast Coast: A Study in Colonial Encroachment and Dominance (Leiden: CNWS Publications, 2005), 153–62. 83 F. van Boeckholtz, ‘Generale calculatie vertooning …’ (1797), Collectie Nederburgh, 1.10.59, inv.nr. 712, Nationaal Archief, The Hague, The Netherlands (hereafter NA).

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of wealth had completely withered while in Bengal it veritably generated fortunes.’84 And a British observer pointed out: The indigo of Java was formerly considered to be the best that came from the East; but since the great improvement adopted in the mode of preparing this dye in the [British] East India Company’s possessions, and the consequent large importations thence, that of Java has fallen into comparative insignificance.85

Actually, the cultivation of indigo plants probably had not declined but processing was now restricted to ‘wet’ indigo, produced in the ‘Chinese manner’.86 For local consumers, indigo in the form of a watery solution sufficed. This perishable variety was unsuitable for export to Europe (but appears to have been traded to other Indonesian islands, Singapore and southern China) because European shippers and consumers demanded durable, lightweight, hard cubes (Dutch: koekjes).87 In the 1820s observers were struck by a resurgence of export-quality ‘dry’ indigo in Java. Both European and Chinese entrepreneurs were now experimenting with large-scale indigo enterprises.88 The government became ‘Algemeen Verslag wegens den staat van Landbouw op Java over het Jaar 1828; ingediend aan Zijne Excellentie den Minister van Staat, Kommissaris-Generaal, over Nederlandsch-Indië, enz. enz. enz., door de Hoofdkommissie van Landbouw, uitgegeven te Batavia, 29 Augustus 1829’, Algemeen Handelsblad (31 March 1830), 4. 85 Porter, The Tropical Agriculturist, 336–9. Porter describes how the situation was changing: ‘The export of indigo from Java amounted, in 1828, only to 24,000 pounds weight; the production of the island in 1829 was 152,000 pound weight, and it is rapidly increasing.’ See also W. L. de Sturler, Handboek voor den Landbouw in Nederlandsch Oost-Indië – Overzigt van de Kweeking en Behandeling der Voornaamste Voortbrengselen uit het Plantenrijk in de Keerkringslanden (Leiden: A. W. Sythoff, 1863), 836–7. 86 ‘Indigo’, Javasche Courant (16 September 1830), 1; ‘Algemeen Verslag wegens den staat van Landbouw op Java’ (1830), 4. 87 Petel also mentioned that the use of lime in indigo for the local market ruined its usefulness for export. ‘Stukken betreffende de fabricage van indigo’ (1824) (Collectie 057 G. J. C. Schneither, no. 31, NA); Johannes Loman, Jz., Het eiland Java, in verband beschouwd, met Neêrlands handel, zeevaart en fabrijken … (Amsterdam: M. Schooneveld en zoon, 1828), 43–4; P[etel de Vaugarny, Louis Jean August], ‘Mémoire sur les facilités et les avantages de cultiver l’indigo pour les marchés de la métropole dans plusieurs residences et particulièrement dans celle de Pekalongang’, Indisch Magazijn, 2e twaalftal, nrs. 7–8 [11 March 1828] (1845), 115. 88 For example, Robert Scott Douglas, Charles Dupont, Pierre François Riquet, Harvey Thomson, William Emburg Edwards and Ong Sioekoe. Letter by C. Vos, Resident of Pekalongan, 22 December 1823 (Collectie Schneither, 31, NA), also cited in Ulbe Bosma, ‘The Cultivation System (1830–1870) and Its Private Entrepreneurs on Colonial Java’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 38, no. 2 (2007): 278; ‘Indigofabriek op Tjiledoek’, Indisch Magazijn, 2e twaalftal, nrs. 9–10 [28 August 1828] (1845), 103–15. When the Cultivation System was introduced, there were, in the Priangan area alone, no less than 122 indigo gardens. P.A. van der Lith, Encyclopædie van Nederlandsch-Indië (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff/Leiden: E.J. Brill, c.1900), 82. See also Van Schendel, ‘What is Agrarian Labour?’There were connections with indigo production in India – for example, Robert Scott Douglas was previously sentenced to 12 months imprisonment as ‘a riotous indigo planter’. House of Commons, Papers &c (East India Company), Second Part, Session 24 November 1812 to 22 July 1813, vol. 8, no. 5: Extract of the Bengal Judicial Consultations … 20th of July 1810 … Persons Accused or Tried for Serious Offences, Committed in the Interior of the Country (London, 1812–13), 11–40. 84

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interested and in 1824 decided to grant a large interest-free loan to a French entrepreneur, Louis Petel, who proposed to set up an export-oriented indigo factory in the district of Pekalongan.89 Java’s indigo production was bouncing back: ‘This dyestuff, which, almost out of nothing, has suddenly re-emerged, is being propagated so vigorously by just a few landowners and their investments, that they are able to produce 16,000 to 20,000 pounds annually.’90 Some Javanese aristocrats also saw opportunities and set up ‘factories equipped in the European manner’ that produced export-quality indigo.91 The Dutch were hopeful of a further increase because Java appeared well placed to manufacture a first-rate dye: ‘The experience of the last few years has shown that the well-processed indigo that Java can produce is not only of the same quality as that from elsewhere, in particular from Bengal, but also that it deserves, in many respects, to be preferred.’92 Java indigo could, indeed, be excellent. Seventy years later Von Georgievics considered Java indigo to be top quality (allerfeinst) and explained that it was very easy to distinguish it from Bengal indigo ‘because it has a smooth surface, whereas Bengal indigo has a net-like pattern on its surface from the cloth on which it is dried’.93 The Dutch detected another advantage of Java. Indigo crops hardly ever failed here, unlike in Bengal, where ‘the general rule of thumb is that one in three fail’.94 The way ahead, they felt, was ‘an improved imitation’ of the Bengal method.95 Clearly, Java offered a very different starting point from Bengal, where export-quality indigo production had been introduced ex novo. And yet, there were also striking similarities between Bengal in the 1780s and Java in the 1820s, partly because of a short but administratively dynamic period of British rule

For the conditions of this loan, see Resolutie no. 8 (Collectie Schneither, 31, NA). For Petel’s proposal, see his ‘Projet pour l’Établissement d’une indigoterie composé de deux jeux de Cuves …’ (26 January 1824) (Collectie Schneither, 31, NA). Louis Jean August Petel de Vaugarny was born in St. Malo (France) in 1777 and died in Batavia in 1856. 90 Loman, Het eiland Java, 42. According to this author (46), Java’s indigo production for export had been 30,000 pounds in 1795. After a severe dip in the period 1800–25, exports recovered: by 1828 Governor-General Van den Bosch reported that Java exported over 17,000 pounds of indigo, and that in 1830 exports had risen to 46,000 pounds (Staatsblad, no. 22 (1834), no. 60). In 1825 there were only three factories producing export-quality indigo, and by 1828 there were twenty-one. ‘Algemeen Verslag wegens den staat van Landbouw op Java’ (1830), 4; cf. ‘Landbouw’, NederlandschIndisch Handelsblad (15 augustus 1829), 2. 91 ‘Algemeen Verslag wegens den staat van Landbouw op Java’ (1830), 4. 92 G.F. Meylan’s letter of 9 February 1824 (Collectie Schneither, 31, NA). 93 Georg von Georgievics, Der Indigo vom praktischen und theoretischen Standpunkt dargestellt (Leipzig and Vienna: Franz Deuticke, 1892), 43. 94 Loman. Het eiland Java, 15. 95 Ibid., 45. 89

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in Java between 1811 and 1816. Here, as in Bengal, indigo entrepreneurs were barred from owning land and from residing in rural areas without government permission. They also lacked a captive labour force and therefore could not replicate the slave-based Caribbean plantation model. But indigo production in Java was based on a different parcelling out of plant knowledge, dye knowledge, site knowledge and chain knowledge. Whereas the Bengal production system continued under broadly stable state policies throughout the nineteenth century, Java’s system found itself on a rollercoaster of policy change. The export industry that came up in the 1820s was soon overtaken by a ‘System of State Cultivations’ (‘Cultivation System’, Kultuurstelsel). Introduced in many parts of Java in 1830, this new policy of colonial exploitation aimed at ‘transforming Java into a large-scale exporter of tropical agricultural products, with the profits from the sale of those products flowing mostly into the Dutch treasury’.96 It did so by commandeering peasant labour and land for the cultivation of export crops, the most important of which were indigo, sugar and coffee. Indigo was the crop chosen to set the new system in operation because it was already grown extensively and had a short growing season. The Cultivation System lasted until the 1860s, after which indigo production in Java entered a new phase that endured into the early twentieth century. Here we focus primarily on the pre-1830s phase in which the Javanese indigo commodity chain was established. Historical source material for this period is scanty compared to the post-1830 period.

Plant knowledge In the 1820s, indigo factory managers in Java employed a mix of strategies to get fresh indigo plants. Some required more plant knowledge than others. They could have indigo grown by villagers, against advances in cash and rice, or by wage labourers. Most indigo entrepreneurs were Chinese; many Europeans wished them removed because they were effective and could produce indigo ‘more cheaply than any European could’.97 A Chinese-owned factory, surveyed

Cornelis Fasseur, The Politics of Colonial Exploitation: Java, the Dutch, and the Cultivation System (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1992), 239. See also Robert E. Elson, Village Java under the Cultivation System 1830–1870 (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994), 45. For the changing relationship between state and private entrepreneurs, see Bosma, ‘The Cultivation System’. 97 ‘Indigofabriek op Tjiledoek’, 108. 96

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in the 1820s, produced indigo far more profitably than the European-owned factories of the day because its owner lived frugally: Ong Sioekoe’s activities should convince those who contemplate taking up this branch of agriculture that they have nothing to fear if they persist in the same rigorous thrift; we find that his accounts contain no expenses except those that were absolutely necessary, and he is content with a bamboo dwelling, which, I found, is not devoid of comfort.98

­ uropean entrepreneurs such as Louis Petel, who rose to prominence by means E of government subsidies, outsourced cultivation of indigo to smallholders under a contract system.99 The agroecological expertise of Javanese villagers was crucial to the success of the indigo industry but – as in Bengal – it was rarely acknowledged as a major input. Indigo entrepreneurs were not directly concerned with this expertise and often knew little about the details of cultivation. They followed local knowledge, for example in their choice to propagate indigo by means of cuttings rather than growing plants from seed. Similarly, it was local knowledge that guided the industry in preferring a local variety of indigo; choosing the most suitable land; allocating labour to field tasks; fighting pests and plant diseases; and deciding when the indigo was ready to be harvested. Naturally, the agroecological knowledge of Javanese cultivators differed from that of their counterparts in Bengal. In Java, unlike Bengal, indigo was widely seen as a crop that exhausted the soil.100 Its deleterious effects could, however, be mitigated by not growing indigo from seeds, which were thought to degenerate in Java’s environment. Instead, growers used indigo cuttings because they believed that these exhausted the soil less than seeds did and led to more stable yields with a higher dye  content.101 They ‘Indigofabriek op Tjiledoek’, 109 and 114–15. A similar argument was made for Bengal indigo: ‘The personal expense of Europeans even of the lower class comparatively speaking on a large scale in furnishing articles that in their own country would be deemed superfluities, but in this climate must be regarded as necessaries of life for the preservation of health but which the natives of India do not require and are unaccustomed to is alone an insurmountable obstacle to their executing the detail of manufacture on any footing of economy equal to a native.’ ‘Indigo’ (Letter of 20 December 1791, Board of Trade (Commercial) Proceedings, WBSA). 99 Resolutie no. 8 (Collectie Schneither, 31, NA). See also ‘Rapport van de Hoofdkommissie van Landbouw aan Zijne Excellentie den Kommissaris-Generaal’, Algemeen Handelsblad (27 September 1828), 2. 100 J. J. Rochussen, Toelichting en verdediging van eenige daden van mijn bestuur in Indië … (’s-Gravenhage: Gebroeders Van Cleef, 1853), 126; F. D. J. van der Pant, ‘Over den invloed van de indigokultuur op die der padi’, Natuurkundig Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch-Indië 8 (1855): 347–90. 101 J. C. Baud, ‘Rapport van den Gouverneur-Generaal ad interim, aan den Minister van Koloniën, omtrent eene inspektie-reis over Java’ (1834), in Bijdragen tot de Kennis van het Landelijk Stelsel op Java, op Last van Zijne Excellentie den Minister van Koloniën, J.D. Fransen van de Putte …, ed. S. van Deventer (Zalt-Bommel: Joh. Noman en Zoon, 1865), vol. 2, 631; ‘Algemeen Verslag wegens den staat van Landbouw op Java’ (1830), 4. 98

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also preferred a local variety of Indigofera tinctoria (taroem kembang, or stekindigo) over imported varieties. These considerations created certain complications in Javanese indigo cultivation that did not exist in Bengal. To expand cultivation to new areas in Bengal, a network of seed exchanges was easily established. In Java, such expansion was more cumbersome because transfers of the bulkier and very perishable cuttings were risky and often failed. It was difficult to keep cuttings alive during transport over long distances because they were susceptible to damage resulting from shaking and desiccation.102 Thus in Java, as in Bengal, most plant knowledge regarding indigo was the domain of smallholding villagers, and their understandings had a huge bearing on the development of the export industry. Their language crept into Dutch writings on indigo: patjoel (hoe, pacul), pedattievragt (cartload of indigo, from pedati, buffalo cart), bamboezen kranjangs (bamboo baskets to transport cuttings, from keranjang, basket), siekap (indigo corvée labourer, sikap), pikoelan (carrying pole for harvested indigo, pikulan) and so on.

Dye knowledge By the 1820s the old factories that had previously produced indigo for export lay in ruins, but dye knowledge endured.103 The new enterprises employed experienced indigo labourers and foremen – a major difference with Bengal, where local knowledge of dye manufacture in the form of cakes had initially been lacking. The use of the Javanese term for foreman (mandor) in Dutch texts about indigo and the fact that foremen were in charge of sorting the cakes suggest that new entrepreneurs could tap into this pre-existing local expertise.104 They also learned from manuals, as their counterparts in Bengal had done. Certain manuals were available in Dutch translation.105 But European

‘Verbaal van de Directeur der Cultures, Producten voor de Europese Markt Bestemd, C. Indigo’ (Februari 1832), Archieven Cultures 1816–1920 (Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia, Jakarta, Indonesia [hereafter AN]). I am grateful to Roger Knight for sharing his microfilm collection with me. 103 For example, those of Charles Dupont and Mr Douglas in the district of Pekalongan. Letter by C. Vos, Resident of Pekalongan, 22 December 1823 (Collectie Schneither, 31, NA). For activities of early-nineteenth-century indigo entrepreneurs (e.g. Petel importing seeds of an indigo cultivar from Réunion in 1808, Douglas doing the same from Manila a few years later, and Van den Berg from India in the 1820s), see F. D. J. van der Pant, ‘Indigo. Geschiedenis, Kultuur en Fabrikaat’, Natuurkundig Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch-Indië 9 (1855): 37–48; ‘Rapport van de Hoofdkommissie van Landbouw’ (1828), 2. Cf. ‘Algemeen Verslag wegens den staat van Landbouw op Java’ (1830), 4. 104 C. M. Baumhauer, ‘Indigo’, Nederlandsch-Indisch Handelsblad (15 December 1829), 6. 105 For example, Jean-Baptiste Labat, Nieuwe reizen naar de Franse eilanden van America … (Amsterdam: Balthasar Lakeman, 1725). 102

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entrepreneurs in Java were often French or British, and many Dutch in Java read French and English, so they had access to the same manuals that the Bengal entrepreneurs had used. Meanwhile new ones had also been published.106 Soon the first detailed accounts in Dutch appeared (Figure 5.4).107 The influence of the French language, rather than English, in transferring indigo knowledge to Java is clear from the frequent use of French terms next to Dutch ones in treatises on indigo production, for example, indigoterie/indigofabrijk (indigo factory), batterie/klopbak (beating vat), réservoir/vergaarbak (tank) and fécule/ verfstof (dye). The dye knowledge contained in manuals was critically assessed and selectively used. Writings on indigo in Java emphasized the need to take local conditions into account: dye knowledge was not just disembodied technical knowledge that could be applied anywhere; it had local specificity, even within Java.108 One idea that was prominent throughout Java was that indigo manufacture was harmful to human health, mainly as a result of presumably noxious vapours released during processing. Such ideas had been very prevalent in the Americas but were surprisingly missing in Bengal.109 In Java the syndrome was described as follows: ‘Whoever participates [in indigo processing] for some considerable time remains apparently healthy but his appetite declines and he does not care if he does not eat all day; by contrast, he craves rest.’110 There were, however, ways to avoid the ‘illnesses caused by indigo manufacture’: ‘Do not expose yourself to indigo vapours, sniff vinegar and drink acidic water.’111 In Java there was also a fear that wading around in indigo vats could damage men’s sex organs.112 This idea, too, was absent in Bengal.

M. Plagne, Mémoire sur la culture des indigofères et la fabrication de l’indigo (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1825) and his Instruction sur la culture, la récolte, la dessiccation des Indigofères et la fabrication de l’indigo (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1826). 107 ‘Indigo- en rijstcultuur. Regten van den Javaan’ [1828], Indisch Magazijn 2, nos. 7–8 (1845): 133–48; J. E. de Sturler, ‘Indigo-cultuur en vervaardiging’, Javasche Courant (4 augustus 1829), 1; and Ament, ‘Bereiding en Kultuur der Indigo op Java’ (1834), in De Cultuur en Behandeling der Westindische Koffij en Indigo, Beschreven en Vergeleken met die der Zelfde Producten in Oost-Indië, uitgegeven door de Redactie van den Oosterling (Kampen: K. van Hulst, 1836), 17–42. 108 For a description of the manufacturing process in privately owned factories in Java, see G. van Beest Holle, ‘Verslag van een gehouden plaatselijk onderzoek omtrent de kultuur en bereiding van indigo door partikulieren in de Residentie Djokjokarta’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde van Nederlandsch Indië 3 (1859): 106–12. 109 Sampeck, ‘An Archaeology of Indigo’, 176–7. 110 Loman, Het eiland Java, 45. 111 Joseph-François Charpentier de Cossigny, Moyens d’amélioration et de restauration; proposés au gouvernement et aux habitants des colonies … (Paris: l’Auteur, Delalain, C. Pougens, Merlin, An XI/1803), 196. 112 Elson, Village Java, 357. 106

Figure 5.4  Cultivation and Manufacture of Indigo in Java: First page of an influential treatise in Dutch by Ament (1834).

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Figure 5.5  Wooden wheels in action in an indigo factory in Klaten, Java, c. 1910. Courtesy of Tropenmuseum, part of the National Museum of World Cultures, The Netherlands.

Another specificity of dye knowledge in Java was the use of water-propelled wooden wheels in indigo processing. This technology had been rejected in Bengal in favour of manual labour to oxidize the fluid obtained from steeping indigo plants.113 In Bengal, men with paddles would ‘beat’ the fluid, making blue indigo particles precipitate, and attempts to mechanize this process had been unsuccessful. In Java wheels were introduced in the 1820s and soon appeared in factories across the island. An official pointed to ‘Mr Petel’s new invention to process indigo by means of water-propelled wheels, which I have observed in Bellerive, and which has convinced me that – apart from indigo planting, cutting and transporting – few hands will be needed in the indigo factory itself ’.114 The wheels were simple and relatively cheap contraptions that were made locally (Figure  5.5). This element illustrates how, in different Asian locations, local components – including labour supply – produced variations in dye production. ‘Formerly a complex machinery, called beaters, was used for agitating the infusion, and thus mixing it with air; but a much simpler method is now followed. A number of naked men or boys go into the vat, and run backwards and forwards, beating the infusion with a wooden implement called phauri.’ Buchanan (Hamilton), A Geographical … Dinajpur, 309. 114 Resolutie no. 8, 14 February 1824 (Collectie Schneither, 31, NA). 113

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Site knowledge Java’s revenue system differed considerably from that of Bengal, which was based on peasant cultivators (raiyat) paying land-rents to the state via landlords/ tax collectors (zamindar). Although the British had tried to introduce cash land-rents in Java when they briefly ruled the island (1811–16), rural taxation remained largely based on levies of labour and crops. The administrative framework of indigo cultivation in Java differed enormously from that in Bengal. In Bengal land surveys – pre-dating colonial rule – were crucially important and indigo entrepreneurs clashed with smallholders, landlords and state officials over land control. In Java struggles focused on headcounts and corvée labour. What was similar, however, was that the colonial state in Bengal in the 1780s–1790s, and in Java in the 1820s, had at its disposal only rudimentary and often inaccurate information about rural people and resources. For indigo entrepreneurs in Java in need of generating both indigo plants and labour for their factories, the main bottlenecks were a scarcity of labour and the impossibility of dislodging cultivators from the soil. In comparison with Bengal, Java was quite sparsely settled and most people were involved in the cultivation of field crops that provided a fairly solid basis for subsistence.115 The only strategy for indigo entrepreneurs was to hook up to the taxation system through village powerholders who were in charge of regulating labour obligations. This reflected the Javanese political reality that peasant landholding was not a right but ‘a privilege upon which rested a concomitant obligation to perform services for the community and for higher authority’.116 In Bengal, village institutions played no role in relations between state and cultivator, and cultivators had well-entrenched individual rights in land. In Java, village institutions were pivotal and cultivators’ access to land was a matter of favours. In 1820s Java, the dynamic of indigo production was one of negotiations between village chiefs (kepala, hoofden) and factory managers over the allocation of peasant labour. Indigo entrepreneurs often found these negotiations cumbersome and tried to get the government to do away

Elson, Village Java, 3–22; ‘Indigo Aanbouw’, Javasche Courant (20 March 1828), 1–2 and (27 March 1828), 1–2. 116 Elson, Village Java, 18. 115

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with them.117 Their site knowledge grew out of these negotiations. Whereas in Bengal indigo entrepreneurs relied on coarse site knowledge and coercion by well-armed men, in Java indigo entrepreneurs relied on comprehensive site knowledge and the persuasive capacity of recurrent negotiation with village chiefs. These chiefs colluded with them: they got cultivators to grow indigo and deliver it to the factory – in return for a share in the indigo profits. Unhappy indigo cultivators found no allies among the rural elite – as in Bengal’s indigo conflicts – because this elite profited from indigo production. Disgruntled indigo growers could not risk confrontation: their only defence was to leave their village and settle beyond the reach of their chief. Indigo entrepreneurs and village chiefs controlled the domain of site knowledge and usually worked in tandem for their common interest.

Chain knowledge In 1820s Java, chain knowledge – an understanding of indigo transportation, warehousing, insurance, tariffs, sales, capital flows, quality standards and consumer preferences – was not the domain of ‘agency houses’, as in 1780s Bengal. The sources at my disposal do not provide a very clear picture of how chain knowledge was distributed in Java before 1830. It is important to realize that the historiography of nineteenth-century rural Java is heavily slanted in favour of the period of the Cultivation System (1830–1860s) when the colonial state became directly involved in a large variety of cash crops and produced much more documentation than for the earlier period. The indigo commodity chain emerged in the 1820s, and for this period sources are much scarcer, particularly regarding chain knowledge. Transporting indigo locally was difficult because Java lacked Bengal’s omnipresent waterways, and its roads were so poor that most goods were carried by men or horses rather than in carts. It was their knowledge of roads and halting places that delivered indigo cakes to warehouses (even in the 1820s mostly government-owned, it seems) in port cities such as Surabaya. From there traders took charge. Compared to the situation in Bengal, chain

Thus in 1828 indigo entrepreneur Petel argued for full control, free from interference from local chiefs and government officials, as the only way to encourage advantageous cash cropping. P[etel de Vaugarny, Louis Jean August], ‘Mémoire sur les facilités’, 122–3.

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knowledge in Java was far less concentrated and coordinated. It was shared between a variety of dispersed social groups: indigo entrepreneurs, porters, warehouse managers, government officials and a string of shippers, traders and retailers.118

Case 3: Senegal Not only the British and the Dutch were experimenting with indigo. Other European powers also sought to establish export-oriented indigo industries in their tropical possessions. The Spanish and Portuguese took initiatives in several colonies. Venezuela and Brazil were among the more successful, but they never became even a remote threat to the British position on the world market.119 The French focused on Senegal. France had been a very prominent indigo supplier to European markets until the late 1700s, mainly from its colony of Haiti (then known as Saint-Domingue). After the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), France lost this position and around 1820 France imported three quarters of its indigo requirement (or 900,000 pounds) in French vessels straight from Bengal.120 Although indigo was grown in and around the French possession of Pondicherry in south India, the quality of the product was not considered equal to Bengal indigo.121

For an indication of indigo entrepreneurs’ chain knowledge at the end of the century, see Gecombineerde algemeene vergadering der Solosche en Jogjasche Landhuurders Vereenigingen op Zaterdag, 30 April 1892, in het Logegebouw te Soerakarta (Solo: Vogel, van der Heijde, 1892). 119 José Gemán Pacheco Troconís, ‘El Añil: Historia de un cultivo olvidado en Venezuela, 1767–1870’ (PhD diss., 2 vols, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2000); José-Miguel Lana-Berasain, ‘Añil, cacao y reses: los negocios del indiano Esteban González de Linares en tiempos de mudanza, 1784–1796’, Memorias: Revista digital de historia y arqueología desde el Caribe Colombiano 2, no. 22 (2014): 52–80; Dauril Alden, ‘The Growth and Decline of Indigo Production in Colonial Brazil: A Study in Comparative Economic History’, The Journal of Economic History 25, no. 1 (1965): 35–60; Fábio Pesavento, ‘O azul fluminense: O anil no Rio de Janeiro colonial, 1749–1818’ (PhD diss., Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2005); and Alexander Lima Reis, ‘Ciência e técnica na produção do corante do anil e da cochonilha no Rio de Janeiro colonial (1772–1789)’, Meridional: Revista Chilena de Estudios Latinoamericanos 3 (2014): 37–59. 120 Darrac, ‘Mémoire historique sur les établissemens français en Asie’ (1822), 498–500; Marguerite Martin, ‘Teindre en bleu après 1789: La reconfiguration des circuits d’approvisionnement en indigo en France, 1789–1820’, Hypothèses 17, no. 1 (2014): 101–14. 121 In 1824 there were 19 indigo factories (and 9 under construction) in Pondicherry, and 317 (and 26 under construction) in the British-ruled areas surrounding it. ‘État des indigoteries qui existent sur le territoire dépendant de Pondichéry à l’époque du 1ier Janvier 1824’, and ‘État des indigoteries établies sur le territoire anglois limitrophes des districts dépendant de Pondichéry et comprises dans un littoral de trois limes des limites françoises’ (INDE, Carton 537, ANOM). 118

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Plant knowledge Like the Dutch in Java, the French temporarily lost control of their colonies to Britain during the Napoleonic war, but regained them in 1817. They now planned to re-establish indigo and launched an ambitious policy of plant exchanges between French colonies. A ‘botanic garden’ and a ‘naturalization garden’, established in the island of Réunion in the southern Indian Ocean in 1817, became the conduit for Indian indigo to be dispatched to various French colonies.122 Soon the French authorities came to the conclusion that Senegal offered the best opportunity for a new indigo export industry.123 Local plant knowledge was studied, tried and dismissed.124 The Senegal authorities imported plant knowledge from botanic gardens across the French tropical empire, started a botanic garden at Richard Toll on the banks of the Senegal river125 and published two manuals specifically geared towards local conditions.126

­Dye knowledge The Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies in Paris took the lead in transferring dye knowledge from India to Senegal. Its first effort appears to have been made in 1816. A few years later Pierre-Paul Darrac – head of the French establishment in Dhaka (Bengal) and an indigo entrepreneur himself – was ordered to write a report about the Bengal indigo industry.127 He also dispatched wooden ‘Rapport sur l’améliorisation de l’agriculture coloniale, 23 Octobre 1817’ (Généralités, Affaires Économiques, Produits et Exploitations Industriels’, Séries Documentaires, Ministère des Colonies [hereafter GEN/52], Dossier 422, ANOM). See also ‘Rapport à l’administration [du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle au Jardin du Roi] sur une communication du Ministre de la Marine (1823)’ (Réunion, Série Géographique, 467/5335, ANOM); and N. Bréon, Catalogue des plantes cultivées au jardins botanique et de naturalisation de l’Ile Bourbon (Saint Denis, Île Bourbon: Imprimerie du Gouvernement, 1825), 5–7. 123 Samuel Perrottet, Mémoire sur la culture des indigofères tinctoriaux et sur la fabrication de l’indigo (Paris: E. Duverger, 1832), 7; Georges Hardy, La mise en valeur du Sénégal de 1817 à 1854 (Paris: Émile Larose, 1921); Darrac and Van Schendel, Global Blue. 124 ‘Notice sur la préparation que les nègres font subir à l’Indigo’ (Agriculture, Commerce, Industrie; Sénégal et ses dépendances, Séries Géographiques, Séries Documentaires, Ministère des Colonies (hereafter SEN) XIII/39a, n.d., ANOM). 125 Roger’s letter (22 April 1822); and his report (5 September 1822) (SEN I/8b) (ANOM). 126 Plagne, Instruction sur la culture (1826); Perrottet, Mémoire (1832). Perrottet was a Swiss naturalist who embodied the itinerant character of ‘colonial knowledge’. He first served the French colonial enterprise by collecting plants in Réunion, Java and the Philippines (for replanting in French Guyana), then became Director of Agriculture in Senegal, and ended his career managing the (French) botanic garden in Pondicherry, India, where Plagne had previously been the chemist. Anantanarayanan Raman, ‘Georges Guerrard-Samuel Perrottet, A Forgotten Swiss−French Plant Collector, Experimental Botanist and Biologist in India’, Current Science 107, no. 9 (2014): 1607–12; Hardy, La mise en valeur, 136, 164. 127 Darrac, ‘De la Culture de l’Anil’; Darrac and Van Schendel, Global Blue. 122

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models of Bengal indigo factories and bags of seed to Senegal, via Bordeaux.128 Indigo makers from Bengal were offered employment in Senegal but appear to have been very reluctant. In 1824 a French official with knowledge of indigo production was ordered to transfer from Chandannagar, the small French colony in Bengal, to Senegal.129 At the same time Alphonse Millon de Verneuil, an indigo manager with seventeen years’ experience in India, was asked to compare the indigo factories in Bengal and Coromandel (south-east India). He suggested that the Bengal system was more suited to the tropical, river-fed circumstances of Senegal.130 Another experienced indigo maker from Bengal, M. Verploegh, explained that setting up indigo factories like those in Bengal was cheap: only some copper sheets, screws and lead needed to be imported from Europe. He added that a factory could run a profit within three years – and that Senegal had a huge advantage over Bengal because ‘the source of our prosperity will be much closer to the metropolis’.131 Dye knowledge was flowing between Java and Senegal as well, notably the experimental indigo-beating wheel.132

Site knowledge The French enterprise in Senegal was part hard-nosed business, part utopia: an attempt to create a more humane alternative to the now defunct slave-based Haitian system. The governor had a grand vision of a ‘new Africa – with its “gardens” and its “Negro workers flocking willingly from all the surrounding countries”’:133 There would be no ‘plantations’ in [Governor Roger’s] Senegal, only ‘gardens’; no one was to use the words ‘slave’ or ‘captive’ in reference to his engagés à temps, Auguste Bergeron’s letter of 31  July 1824. See also letter about sending indigo seeds from Chandernagor to Senegal (22 May 1823) (SEN XIII/39a, ANOM). 129 Agreement signed by Jacques Maurice Dégoutin, Chandernagore, 16  September 1824. See also P. Roquet’s letter of 17 August 1822 (SEN/XIII/39a, ANOM); J. Jubelin, ‘Rapport’ (25 July 1828) (SEN/XIII/21, ANOM); and Hardy, La mise en valeur, 180. 130 ‘Mémoire sur les végétaux indigofères pourrant être naturalisés dans nos colonies …’ (1816) (INDE, Carton 537, ANOM). See also Correspondence 1822–9 (SEN/I/8-13, ANOM); A. Millon de Verneuil, ‘Mémoire sur la Culture et la Fabrique de l’Indigo au Bengale et à la Côte Coromandel’ (1824) and ‘Affaires Générales – Indigo 1820–1863’ (both in GEN/55, Dossier 527, ANOM); and ‘Catalogue des plantes du Jardin Royal du Sénégal, année 1820’ (SEN XIII/22a, ANOM). 131 J. G. Verploegh’s letter of 1  September 1829 (SEN XIII/39a, ANOM). Comparisons with Bengal were constantly made. For a detailed breakdown of the costs and profits of indigo factories in Bengal and Senegal, see E. Brunet, ‘Le récensement annuel des cultures …’ (12 April 1829). 132 For a drawing, see B. Plagne, ‘Mémoire sur la culture et les produits du Sénégal, et particulièrement sur l’Indigo, remise à Son Excellence le Ministre de la Marine et des Colonies (le 15 Mars 1826)’ (GEN/55, Dossier 527, ANOM). 133 Christopher L. Miller, ‘Forget Haiti: Baron Roger and the New Africa’, Yale French Studies 107 (2005): 51. The quotes are from Roger’s novel Kelédor: Histoire africaine (Paris: A. Nepveu, 1828), 201. 128

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indentured laborers. How much difference the politically correct vocabulary made to those workers is questionable. Roger recruited his workers from four principal sources: ‘men of color’ deported from Martinique; captives redeemed from the slave trade in Africa and subsequently indentured for fourteen years; former slaves from Saint Louis du Sénégal; and free laborers ‘on loan’. The system of indenture soon resulted in a new trade not unlike the slave trade; engagés were bought and sold.134

An enthusiastic governor, French indigo entrepreneurs, agronomists in the new botanic garden and Senegalese indigo cultivators worked in tandem during the 1820s to create a commodity chain to challenge British dominance. It was very much a government-propelled undertaking and, as in Bengal and Java, it was to serve the European market, not the local one, for which a separate commodity chain continued to exist. Unlike in Bengal and Java, however, access to land was made easy for newcomers – there was no land tax system to restrict it. Even so, the colonial authorities found it hard to acquire effective site knowledge. The initial idea was to copy the system that ‘the Dutch practise successfully in Java’, by having indigenous chiefs supply labourers.135 When this turned out to be difficult, indigo enterprises followed two strategies. The first was to buy indigo from indigenous producers in the form of dried leaves. The second was to develop true plantations and produce fresh leaves themselves. The government mounted expeditions to engage seasonal labourers from different parts of the colony – local cultivators were unwilling to provide labour.136 Migrant labourers were hard to discipline and could run away or revolt, in which case they were brought to the botanic garden at Richard Toll, put in fetters, and given punishment.137 As wages were high, the system continued to fluctuate between the outsourcing of indigo cultivation and self-cropping.138 On the whole, the labourers’ indigo Miller, ‘Forget Haiti’, 48. Cf. Klas Rönnbäck and Dimitrios Theodoridis, ‘African Agricultural Productivity and the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Evidence from Senegambia in the Nineteenth Century’, Economic History Review 72, no. 1 (2019): 221–6. For example, in 1829, one enterprise, the Société de Galam, ‘rather than employing free labourers, bought 84 captives for the sum of 21,500 francs’. Letter from M. Leblanc to the Governor, 26 May 1830 (SEN XIII/39a, ANOM). For a source that describes labourers as ‘slaves’ anyway, see ‘Notes remises à Monsieur Jubelin, Gouverneur du Sénégal et Dépendances, par M. Dégoutin, Indigotier’ (28 March 1828) (SEN XIII/21, ANOM). 135 Hardy, La mise en valeur, 48, 99. 136 ‘Notes remises’ sees them as difficult (‘tracassier’), lethargic and indolent (‘doux et parresseux’), and hostile to immigrant labourers – and speaks of immigrant labourers as ignorant blacks (‘nègres bruts’). ‘Notes remises à Monsieur Jubelin, Gouverneur du Sénégal et Dépendances, par M.  Dégoutin, Indigotier’ (28  March 1828) (SEN XIII/21, ANOM). See also E. Brunet’s report (12 July 1826) (SEN XIII/21, ANOM). 137 Hardy, La mise en valeur, 149. 138 Early attempts to produce dye from dried indigo leaves in the indigenous way (as recommended by Plagne, Instruction sur la culture [1826]) were abandoned in 1827, since when fresh leaves were used. But in 1830, on account of the costliness of labour, the governor ordered a partial 134

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knowledge was discounted: they were seen as untrained novices who needed to be instructed.139 In view of the fact that ‘the costliness of labour is the main defect’ of the system,140 it is remarkable that – compared with Bengal and Java – labourers rarely figure in the archival sources.141 However, one document explains: The blacks employed in the enterprises are slaves or free people from the interior. We will soon give up on the slaves because they are in their own country, among their free countrymen, who encourage them to run away … Free labourers generally come from far away, their ambition is restricted to getting a gun, a bit of naughtiness, a few cheap trinkets, and a return home. They rarely stay for more than eight or nine months. We make great efforts to train them but soon have to start all over again with others. This requires double the number of overseers and harms production.142

The deficiency of site knowledge was summarized in the following assessment: ­ an we produce indigo in Senegal that can compete with Bengal? No. The C main obstacles are: poor soil quality, intense and untimely heat during the growing season, excessive drought combined with lack of irrigation, the short rainy season, transport problems, the dearness and poor quality of materials to construct indigo factories, and the high labour wages.143

Chain knowledge The governor was crucial in coordinating the new commodity chain. Soon he was sending indigo cakes for testing to France. A national committee and a prominent indigo merchant in Bordeaux both judged the finest to be ‘approaching the best qualities of Bengal’. The governor also managed to have specimens of Senegal indigo presented to the French king and thereby inform the home public about

return to dry leaves, to be bought at a government-set rate from ‘indigenous chiefs’. J. Jubelin’s memoir (1 January 1828) (SEN I/13); ‘Nous Gouverneur du Sénégal et dépendances …’, P. E. Brou’s ‘Declaration’ (16 April 1830) (SEN XIII/21, ANOM); Hardy, La mise en valeur, 180. See also G.-S. Perrottet, Art de l’indigotier, ou Traité des indigofères tinctoriaux et de la fabrication de l’indigo, suivi d’une notice sur le wrightia tinctoria … (Paris: Librairie Mme Ve Bouchard-Huzard, 1842), 120–91. 139 ‘Notes remises à Monsieur Jubelin, Gouverneur du Sénégal et Dépendances, par M. Dégoutin, Indigotier’ (28 March 1828) (SEN XIII/21, ANOM). See also Hardy, La mise en valeur, 155, 202. 140 ‘Nous Gouverneur du Sénégal et dépendances …’ (SEN XIII/21, ANOM). 141 But see the account of labour costs of an indigo enterprise in ‘Apperçu appuyé de quelques faits …’ (25 July 1828) (SEN XIII/20 and XIII/21, ANOM). 142 ‘Notes remises à Monsieur Jubelin, Gouverneur du Sénégal et Dépendances, par M. Dégoutin, Indigotier’ (28 March 1828) (SEN XIII/21, ANOM). This source also lists wage rates. 143 Ibid.

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indigo so as to ‘attract the attention of capitalists to Senegal’.144 Indigo cakes were transported in French ships to Bordeaux, the centre of the French indigo trade, and distributed to dyers throughout the country.

The failure of the indigo system in Senegal Indigo production for the European market was very much a state effort involving both the government in Paris and the colonial government in Senegal. It was they who set up a network of plant knowledge based on botanic gardens and seed exchanges across the French-governed tropics. It was they who acquired dye knowledge by means of industrial espionage in Bengal, assigning trained indigo makers to Senegal, and publishing manuals on indigo production in Senegal. Archival records show the state’s determination to acquire site knowledge, notably about the ecological and social contexts of indigo production. And the state vigilantly guarded the chain knowledge necessary to enable the dye cakes to be transported and marketed in France. But this top-down system showed much less vibrancy than its counterparts in Bengal and Java, largely an effect of the state’s failure to master the necessary site knowledge and its side-tracking of indigenous knowledge. Tellingly, colonial documents on Senegalese indigo do not employ local terms. The state acted as initiator and coordinator of the indigo commodity chain, but it was also hands-on in ways that were not required in Bengal or Java. Senegal indigo was manufactured ‘for the account of local government, and because of its care’; the authorities issued ‘encouragement bonuses’ for quality indigo; and they co-funded infrastructural works to protect indigo factories from inundation.145 After a devastating river flood in 1827 the government even distributed rations of millet and meat to ‘feed the labourers of various enterprises’.146 By the late 1820s some twenty-five factories were in operation and there were great hopes for the future.147

‘Note’ (20  June 1826). ‘Note pour le Moniteur (partie non-officielle) (28  July 1826); Governor Roger’s letter (30 September 1825); ‘Copie de l’Avis du Comité consultatif des arts et Manufactures’ (20 March 1830); M. Doris’ letter (5 September 1829) (all in SEN XIII/39a, ANOM). 145 ‘Rapport’ (1  April 1831) (SEN XIII/39a, ANOM); J. Jubelin’s memoir (1  January 1828) (SEN I/13, ANOM). For operational details of some factories, see ‘Tableau synoptique de la culture des indigofères pendant l’année 1829’ (SEN XIII/39a, ANOM). 146 ‘État des Rations délivrées des magasins du Roi …’ (SEN XIII/21, ANOM). 147 Eleven factories were listed in 1826 and twenty-five in 1827. ‘État indiquant l’étendue … 1826’, and ‘Tableau … Année 1827’ (SEN XIII/39a, ANOM); ‘État indiquant l’étendue … 1826’ (SEN XIII/21, ANOM); H.B. Gerbidon’s memoir (25 August 1827) (SEN I/12, ANOM); ‘Culture de l’Indigo au Sénégal’, Le Constitutionnel (5 March 1829), 2. 144

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But soon indigo was in trouble. As one indigo entrepreneur put it, ‘with the outspokenness of a good Frenchman’: ‘Not only does the ill-fated colonist fail to make a fortune, but he will ruin himself as soon as government leaves him to his own devices.’148 The authorities were beginning to accept that ‘the climate of Senegal and the physical conditions repel colonial commodities’.149 Indigo enterprises closed down and when, in 1837, the Paris authorities asked the governor to send specimens of indigo plants from Bengal that were acclimatized in Senegal, none could be found.150 But this did not mean that all hopes were dashed. For example, by mid-century a study stated: If there is one branch of agriculture, industry and business that only needs our good will to flourish, it is indigo … the two species that grow most widely and are the best can produce indigo as good as the top qualities from Bengal. Repeated  experiments, most recently in 1848 by Mr Fontaine, head pharmacist  at  the hospital in Saint Louis, a distinguished chemist, leave no doubt about this.151

Another observer added that indigo in Senegal was a ‘starting industry, which, well-managed, will give formidable competition to the English establishments in India and the Dutch ones in the islands of Indonesia’.152 Such ‘colonial disinformation’ continued: as late as the 1890s, an ‘old Senegal hand’ still thought the industry could be revived by ‘bringing over some families from Bengal to take up indigo cultivation and manufacture’.153 Nothing came of such proposals  – when Senegalese indigo was sent to the Universal Exposition in Paris (1889), it was not in the form of neat factory-made cakes, but as worthless tangles (Figure 5.6). ‘Notes remises’. ‘Extrait d’une dépêche ministérielle du 28 Décembre 1830’ (SEN XIII/39a, ANOM). For an assessment of low land productivity, see Rönnbäck and Theodoridis, ‘African Agricultural Productivity’, 209–32. 150 Hardy, La mise en valeur, 283, 288. Meanwhile, information on indigo manufacture was still eagerly sought after in other French colonies. Perrottet, Art de l’indigotier, vi. 151 S. Auxcousteaux, Le Sénégal est une colonie française (Paris: Imprimerie Administrative de Paul Dupont, 1851), 16–17, 37. 152 A. Decaux, ‘Indigos du Sénégal’, Revue Algérienne et Coloniale (octobre 1859), 92–3. See also A. Decaux, ‘Sur les indigos du Sénégal’, Revue Coloniale, 2e série 17 (1857): 158–60. Although Senegal continued to export some indigo to France, most of it was of poor quality. Apparently, Senegal displayed only ‘indigenously manufactured’ indigo at the Paris Exhibition (1855), which was deemed to be ‘very coarse and nothing more than a mass of fermented indigo-plant debris’. C.-A. Decaux, ‘Notice sur les matières colorants et textiles envoyées par les colonies françaises à l’Exposition Universelle de 1855’, Revue Coloniale, 2e série 17 (1857): 115. 153 Marc Maurel, ‘Lettre à Monsieur le vicomte A. de Fontenay …’, Bulletin. Société de Géographie Commerciale de Bordeaux 17, no. 2 (1894): 349n. See also entries in SEN XIII/39b, ANOM. After the collapse of export indigo in Senegal, attempts to start indigo production in other parts of the French empire continued until the 1880s, when the French consul in Batavia (Netherlands East 148 149

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Figure 5.6  A sample of low-grade indigo from Senegal.154

Conclusion These three cases suggest that colonial commodity chains are best narrated as fragile configurations that emerged from incessant negotiations between a range of European and non-European partners of unequal capabilities. The success of indigo chains depended on how they combined distinct bundles of knowledge – about plants, land, climate, labour, coercion, dye-making, advances, investments, subsidies, remittances, tariffs, transportation, marketing, dyeing and consumption. This pooling of plant/dye/site/chain knowledge was always a precarious affair. The disparate fate of this commodity across colonial empires demonstrates that top-down, single-colony or intra-imperial histories can be misleading. Local forces shaped, and were shaped by, trans-imperial flows of trade and information, policy initiatives and industrial espionage. The agency of peasants, Indies) sent a questionnaire, a report on indigo production in Java, seeds and drawings of a factory to the French authorities in Cochin-China. It was a setback when the indigo produced in CochinChina turned out to have a much lower dye (indigotin) content than the Bengal product. ‘Mémoire sur la naturalisation dans nos colonies de végétaux indigofères qui croissent dans l’Inde et de l’arbre tuteur du poivrier’ (GEN/52, Dossier 422, ANOM). See also Compte rendue des travaux de la Commission de Surveillance de l’Exposition Permanente des Colonies pendant le 2e trimestre de 1882 (Nancy: Imprimerie Berger-Levrault et Cie, 1882), 7; and F. Ozoux, ‘Notes et essai sur la fabrication de l’indigo’, Bulletin de la Société des Études Indochinoises de Saigon (1884): 58–106. 154 Enclosure in ‘Président, Chambre de Commerce d’Exportation, à M. Etienne, Sous-Secrétaire d’Etat des Colonies’ (28 March 1890) (GEN/55, Dossier 530, ANOM).

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factory labourers, hired enforcers and indigenous landlords was abundantly clear: it varied from avoidance to armed resistance, and from cooperation to sabotage. Trans-imperial developments – revolts in Haiti and the United States, seeds from Guatemala, circulating manuals – meshed with dynamics in Senegal, Java and Bengal to produce distinctly local outcomes. It is easy to overstate the determinative nature of ‘colonial projects’. The case of Senegal shows that such projects, even if enthusiastically promoted at the very highest levels, were doomed to fail without the right pooling of knowledge and the right partnerships. Moreover, in each case commodity production for European markets fed off older systems of indigo production for regional markets in which imperial elites and enterprises played no role. Bundles of colonial indigo knowledge were never controlled by a single category of people. First, it was an amalgam of insights and practices gathered by generations of peasants and dye makers from all over the world – a phase in the ‘multisited development of indigo knowledge’.155 Second, it was parcelled out in ways that qualify the concept of the ‘colonial archive’ as a comprehensive project of European knowledge appropriation in the service of power. And third, it refuted the idea that ‘colonial knowledge’ was primarily the outcome of a dialogue between European rulers and indigenous elites. Much indigo knowledge remained beyond the reach of European entrepreneurs – let alone the colonial state156 – but also beyond that of indigenous elites who are often taken to stand for ‘colonized society’. It was the domain of cultivators and labourers; it remained largely unnoticed in the colonial records; and its fruits were extracted by means of cash, food advances and brute force. Indigo is a commodity that qualifies debates about ‘colonial knowledge’ in three further ways. To begin with, it challenges the colonial dogma of a sharp distinction between Europeans and indigenous persons – a notion that today resonates in academic constructs of ‘the colonial archive’ and ‘colonial knowledge’.157 True, many managers of indigo factories were relatively new – and

Kumar, Indigo Plantations, 14. In Bengal, the Board of Trade of the East India Company, referring to themselves in the third person plural, put it like this: ‘they have never any of them been concerned in indigo works or plantations, nor in indigo traffic, except on account of the Company; they therefore are very superficially informed of the interior detail of the business specially of the intercourse with the Husbandman in making advances to him, in appraising the plant he delivers and in adjusting accounts and recovering balances and also in knowledge of the soil’. ‘Indigo’ (Letter of 20 December 1791, Board of Trade (Commercial) Proceedings, WBSA). 157 For an example of why this distinction is untenable, see Javed Majeed, Colonialism and Knowledge in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (London: Routledge India, 2018). 155 156

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sometimes transient – arrivals from Europe. But others embodied the blurry zone connecting colonial racial categories.158 ‘Country-born’, Chinese, Eurasian, Armenian and métis indigo managers may actually have been best placed to negotiate the ‘radically different cognitive universes’ of cultivators, labourers, local chiefs and colonial rulers to make indigo a success.159 Second, the emergence of three new indigo systems underlines the need to map ‘colonial knowledge’ across colonial and imperial borders. We can frame these systems as separate cases, to be used in an exercise in comparative history, but it is more productive to understand them primarily as intersections in the connected history of global commodities. Much expert knowledge was embodied in the ‘blue fraternity’ of indigo managers and experts who thought nothing of empire hopping and borrowing ideas from other colonies. Frenchmen moved easily from the Caribbean to Asia, and from India to Senegal; Scots left Bengal for Java; and Swiss, Polish, Dutch and Portuguese men took up indigo in Bengal. Peasants in French colonies such as Pondicherry and Chandannagar traded indigo seeds with their counterparts in British India. In addition, scale models, documents, printed manuals and seeds travelled around the globe. Everywhere, however, empire-hopping indigo knowledge met specific local indigo knowledge, jointly becoming positioned in a distinct social fix. Finally, the three cases show that ‘colonial knowledge’ is a time-bound construct. New commodity chains could not have emerged without the simultaneous demise of imperial rule in the New World. As decolonization created the United States (1776), Haiti (1804) and the Mexican Empire (1821), the idea of ‘colonial knowledge’ lost its old meaning there. But in many parts of Africa and Asia, colonial rule was only just taking off in earnest, and these parts attracted displaced entrepreneurs from the American ex-colonies. Transfusions of knowledge kick-started commercial indigo in colonial Bengal, Java and Senegal. In an even longer time perspective, indigo highlights the sequential nature of commodity chains. Imperial export indigo was merely an episode in a story

See Machell’s reflections after meeting Armenian indigo managers: ‘Next in rank to those who came from abroad are those who are born in the country of pure blood, then come the half-blood who rank with the native and then the black blood who are the lowest of all and it is singular that all the black bloods, especially those who claim Portuguese descent, are darker by many shades than the low caste native’ (‘Journals’, vol. 4, 141). 159 Mani, Contentious Traditions, 12–13. 158

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spanning many centuries. In European markets it had been preceded by blue dye production based on the woad plant. The rise of European empires in the Americas had caused woad’s demise. Around 1800, indigo imports from the Americas collapsed and new production systems emerged in Asia and Africa. After 1900 these in turn crumpled when synthetic dyes wiped natural indigo off the map and the craft of pooling plant/dye/site/chain knowledge met its waterloo.

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What Angolans got for their coffee: Connecting histories of labour and consumption in colonial Africa, c. 1860–1960 Jelmer Vos

Africa is the birthplace of the world’s two main commoditized coffee species – Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora, alias robusta – but coffee only became an important cash crop in the continent in the first half of the twentieth century, when most Africans lived under European rule. This was four centuries after commercial production of arabica had started in Yemen and two centuries after European empires had diffused cultivation to Asia and the Americas. Mainly based on smallholder effort, Africa’s contribution to world coffee production increased from 2 per cent in 1914 to roughly 20 per cent in 1960.1 Informed by experiences in East Africa, scholars analysing the history of coffee in Africa often assume that coffee cultivation in the continent was a colonial imposition. Histories of coffee production in Tanganyika and Rwanda, for instance, tell of how colonial administrations promoted the cultivation of newly introduced arabica plants in the 1920s, compelling reluctant farmers to grow this foreign cash-crop through propagation schemes and fiscal imperatives.2 These narratives suggest Research for this chapter has been supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (RF-2019–194). The ideas presented in this chapter developed over several years at different conferences and seminars at European universities: University of Lisbon (May 2017), European Conference on African Studies (July 2017), University of Glasgow (February 2019), Humboldt University Berlin (June 2019), University of Leeds (September  2019), University of Pavia (February 2020) and the University of Lancaster (March 2020). I am grateful to the participants for their feedback and to Lynn Abrams, Keith Allen, the volume editors and the anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts. The chapter title paraphrases Stanley B. Alpern, ‘What Africans Got for Their Slaves: A Master List of European Trade Goods’, History in Africa 22 (1995): 5–43. 1 Jonathan Morris, Coffee: A Global History (London: Reaktion Books, 2018). 2 Kenneth Curtis, ‘Smaller Is Better: A Consensus of Peasants and Bureaucrats in Colonial Tanganyika’, in The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 1500–1989, ed. William Gervase Clarence-Smith and Steven Topik (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 314; Andreas

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that local farming populations were pulled into the global coffee economy more by colonial force than by their own initiative. Using the case of Angola, this chapter places African engagement with the global coffee economy in a longer timeframe and broader context to propose an alternative scenario. After the closing of the export slave trade to Brazil, in 1850, small farmers in this region began exploiting indigenous robusta stands, responding to a growing demand for ‘legitimate’ products and rising world prices for coffee. The early history of coffee cultivation in Angola therefore seems to follow the pattern of African initiative observed in the better-studied agrarian transitions that happened in West Africa around this time, which were generally based on oleaginous products.3 This chapter therefore offers a correction to the view that the coffee crop in Africa was a colonial imposition that smallholders only embraced when prices spiralled upwards briefly in the 1920s and again after the Second World War. At the same time, the Angolan case provides ground for a more general reflection on smallholder decision-making. African farmers based their judgements about what to grow and for whom on more than external stimuli like world-market prices or colonial dictates. As Mario Samper has suggested, to understand how farmers respond to outside stimuli, historians must pay ‘attention to how, and to what extent, changing external conditions are “internalized” by local economies, where endogenous processes and past history play a decisive role’.4 This chapter argues that to explain why Angolan farmers turned to coffee cultivation in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, we must see them not merely as producers responding to market opportunities but also as consumers, whose economic behaviour was influenced by local histories

Eckert, ‘Comparing Coffee Production in Cameroon and Tanganyika, c. 1900–1960s: Land, Labor, and Politics’, in ibid., 286–311; Sven Van Melkebeke, ‘“Changing Grounds”: The Development of Coffee Production in the Lake Kivu Region (1918–1960/62)’ (PhD diss., Universiteit Gent, 2017). 3 For discussions and case studies, see Robin Law, ed., From Slave Trade to ‘Legitimate’ Commerce: The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Robin Law, Suzanne Schwarz and Silke Strickrodt, eds., Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade and Slavery in Atlantic Africa (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2013). 4 Mario Samper K., ‘The Historical Construction of Quality and Competitiveness: A Preliminary Discussion of Coffee Commodity Chains’, in Global Coffee Economy, ed. Clarence-Smith and Topik, 121. Samper’s observation resonates with the distinction between opportunities and motives, or ‘external’ and ‘internal’ approaches to innovation in African agriculture, in Antony G. Hopkins,  ‘Innovation in a Colonial Context: African Origins of the Nigerian Cocoa-Farming Industry, 1880–1920’, in The Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of Africa and India, ed. Clive Dewey and Antony G. Hopkins (London: The Athlone Press, 1978). Note that Samper refers to William Roseberry, ‘Introduction’, in Coffee, Society, and Power in Latin America, ed. William Roseberry, Lowell Gudmunson and Mario Samper Kutschbach (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 7, who sees the ‘internalization of the external’ mainly in terms of sociopolitical context.

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and cultures of consumption and associated political economies. To understand why this was so, it helps to embed Angola’s insertion in the global coffee economy in a longer history of African interaction with the ‘outside world’.5 By placing cash-crop farmers in a longer history of African engagement in European trade, the role of consumption in smallholder behaviour comes into focus. Scholars of the transatlantic slave trade have long made the case that African consumer cultures played an important part in shaping Atlantic commerce.6 The demand for imported goods, some of them exotic luxuries, others more essential wares, motivated coastal elites to trade away human capital in the form of enslaved people. African consumption patterns were placespecific and time-dependent and, importantly, they were part of local political economies: slaving elites used imported goods to build social and political power, investing material wealth in the accumulation of dependents, including wives, clients and slaves.7 Historians working in circumscribed timeframes often ignore, however, that culturally determined preferences for specific goods, like textiles or liquor, that were shaped in the era of the slave trade often lasted into the colonial era and beyond.8 Contemporary observers seemed to be aware of the importance of local consumer habits to economic change after abolition. According to Edmund Gabriel, the British representative on the Court of Mixed Commission that from 1844 adjudicated intercepted slave ships in Luanda, the transition from slaving to ‘legitimate’ commerce in Angola was partly a question of changing the nature of the currency Africans used to obtain imported goods. The desire for foreign luxuries, which the chiefs of Africa have already acquired by intercourse with Europeans, is the great inducement for making slaves of their subjects and selling them to slave-dealers; and so long as the Slave Trade exists, every effort to substitute legitimate commerce for one so deeply implanted in their minds by the habits of ages, must prove unavailing; but if that source was no longer available, and the markets for the sale of their fellow creatures effectually closed for a time, they would be compelled to turn their attention to

Jean-François Bayart, ‘Africa in the World: A History of Extraversion’, African Affairs 99, no. 395 (2000): 217–67. 6 See David Northrup, Africa’s Discovery of Europe, 1450–1850, 3rd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), ch. 3 and the literature there cited. 7 Ty M. Reese, ‘“Eating” Luxury: Fante Middlemen, British Goods, and Changing Dependencies on the Gold Coast, 1750–1821’, William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2009): 851–72. 8 An exception is Phyllis M. Martin, ‘Contesting Clothes in Colonial Brazzaville’, The Journal of African History 35, no. 3 (1994): 401–26. 5

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more honest and profitable pursuits … procuring the produce of the country to barter for those luxuries which have become essential to their comforts.9

Linking industriousness to a need for imported consumer goods was partly an expression of British imperial ideology, but Gabriel was not mistaken about the economic significance of African consumer habits.10 As this chapter will demonstrate, the burgeoning coffee trade in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Angola, like the African ‘cash-crop revolution’ generally, built on older patterns of exchanging locally procured commodities for imported manufactures.11 The first part of the chapter highlights what global historian Sebastian Conrad has called ‘synchronous structures’ or ‘simultaneous events’ in the Atlantic world that influenced the initial growth of Angolan coffee production. The events that structured developments in Angola were the nineteenth-century expansion of the global coffee trade and the concurrently unfolding international campaign to abolish the transatlantic slave trade.12 In this section, I argue that smallholder initiative, rather than the policies of the Portuguese colonial government or the pioneering enterprise of a handful of colonial settlers, brought Angola in the orbit of the global coffee trade after 1850. The next section describes how, in response to favourable world prices for robusta coffee after the First World War, European settlers, backed by government supplies of land and labour, aggressively expanded their estates on African lands considered vacant. But while these planters threatened to drown out smaller farmers, the latter were able to compete by expanding cultivation into unexploited coffee forests, effectively keeping the dual economy that had characterized the Angolan coffee sector from the beginning in place. The third part examines the consumer habits of African smallholders in order to understand their motives and strategies. This section highlights continuity, rather than synchronicity, in that it points to culturally and historically embedded practices of conspicuous consumption. Engaging with the work of Sara Berry, it suggests that the spending habits of African smallholders were part of entrepreneurial strategies designed to gain social influence.13 The The National Archives (TNA), FO 420/4, Edmund Gabriel to Earl of Aberdeen, Luanda 31 December 1845. 10 Frank Trentmann, Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-first (London: Penguin, 2016), 121; David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 22–3. 11 John Tosh, ‘The Cash-Crop Revolution in Tropical Africa: An Agricultural Reappraisal’, African Affairs 79, no. 314 (1980): 79–94. 12 Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 150–6. 13 Sara S. Berry, ‘Entrepreneurial Labour’, in General Labour History of Africa: Workers, Employers and Governments, 20th–21st Centuries, ed. Stefano Bellucci and Andreas Eckert (Woodbridge: James Currey, 2019), 457–74. 9

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chapter closes with some preliminary observations relating demonstrations of wealth in the African coffee sector to larger questions about rural poverty and economic development.

G ­ lobal setting In the twentieth century, the Portuguese colony of Angola was one of the world’s leading producers of robusta coffee. Robusta is a low-quality coffee, generally priced a bit lower than the lowest-graded arabica, and is mainly used as a basis for soluble coffee and as a filler in ordinary coffee blends. It owed much of its arrival on the global coffee scene to the leaf rust (Hemileia vastatrix) epidemic that struck arabica plantations in Asia in the late nineteenth century. Around 1900, as this epidemic ravaged the Indonesian coffee economy, botanists in Java initiated breeding experiments with robusta stocks of Congolese origin. As robusta proved to be immune to the disease, most coffee farmers in Indonesia and other parts of Asia adopted the new cultivars created in Dutch colonial nurseries. In the 1920s, colonial governments also began to stimulate smallholder cultivation of imported and local robusta strains in Africa. Responding to favourable prices, African coffee production doubled in the 1930s and surpassed Asian outputs. Western demand for robusta spiked after the Second World War, as high coffee prices stimulated the consumption of instant coffee and cheaper coffee blends. The arrival of the vending machine in many workplaces further promoted the drinking of poor-quality coffee and thus, by extension, robusta.14 Robusta was Africa’s chief contribution to the world coffee trade in the twentieth century. Compared to other producing regions in the continent, Angola was distinctive for at least three reasons. First, the commercialization of indigenous coffee developed in the 1800s and this happened largely independently from colonial dictate. In addition, a dual economy, opposing settlers to local smallholders, characterized the Angolan coffee sector from its beginning until the war of independence in 1961–74. Finally, Angola found its strongest export markets in the Netherlands and the United States, rather than the William Gervase Clarence-Smith, ‘The Coffee Crisis in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, 1870–1914’, in Global Coffee Economy, ed. Clarence-Smith and Topik, 100–19; Stuart McCook, Coffee Is Not Forever: A Global History of the Coffee Leaf Rust (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019); Mark Pendergrast, Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World (New York: Basic Books, 2010), ch. 14.

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colonial metropole, Portugal. The history of coffee production in Angola is also remarkable because it has been largely untold.15 Two important global developments formed the background to the rise of coffee production in Angola in the nineteenth century. One was the dramatic expansion of the world coffee trade; the other the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. Between 1850 and 1900, the period when coffee became a staple of the Angolan export economy, world coffee production increased from roughly 300,000 tonnes per year to almost a million metric tonnes.16 This was mainly the doing of Brazil, a relatively new player in the world coffee market, whose influence on the Angolan coffee economy was twofold. On the one hand, the Angolan slave trade on which Brazilian coffee planters relied for their labour inputs stifled local entrepreneurship in alternative forms of commerce until its effective suppression in 1850.17 On the other hand, Brazil’s massive outputs of relatively cheap arabicas helped create a mass demand for coffee in North America and Europe, encouraging coffee merchants to explore new supply zones in Latin America and Africa. Coffee was, in fact, part of a worldwide expansion of commodity production and trade in the nineteenth century, driven by Western industrialization and the relentless spread of global capitalism.18 In Africa, this expansion coincided with the suppression of the transatlantic slave trade and the subsequent rise of ‘legitimate’ commerce, which in Angola after 1850 increasingly meant coffee. Africans were not all new to commodity trading, but what changed in the nineteenth century was the scale of African participation in export production. During the historical slave trade, the exchange of products like ivory and gold for European and Asian imports was, like the slave trade, done on terms dictated

See David Birmingham, ‘The Coffee Barons of Cazengo’, The Journal of African History 19, no. 4 (1978): 523–38; David Birmingham, ‘A Question of Coffee: Black Enterprise in Angola’, Canadian Journal of African Studies 16, no. 2 (1982): 343–6; Yonah Ngalaba Seleti, ‘Portuguese Colonialism, Capitalism and the Angolan Coffee Industry: 1850–1950’ (PhD diss., Dalhousie University, 1987); Fausto Martins Lourenço, ‘História do Café Robusta em Angola’, Revista de Ciências Agrárias 15, no. 3 (1992): 59–117; idem 15, no. 4 (1992): 85–119; idem 16, no. 4 (1993): 35–80; Maria do Mar de Mello Gago da Silva, ‘Robusta Empire: Coffee, Scientists and the Making of Colonial Angola (1998–1961)’ (PhD diss., Universidade de Lisboa, 2018). 16 Mario Samper and Radin Fernando, ‘Appendix: Historical Statistics of Coffee Production and Trade from 1700 to 1960’, in Global Coffee Economy, ed. Clarence-Smith and Topik, 411–62. 17 Gabriel Paquette, Imperial Portugal in the Age of Revolutions: The Luso-Brazilian World, c. 1770–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 323. 18 Steven C. Topik and Allen Wells, ‘Commodity Chains in a Global Economy’, in A World Connecting, ed. Emily S. Rosenberg (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 593–812. 15

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by African brokers and generally did not require major adjustments in African social and economic structures.19 Unlike in the Americas, where plantation agriculture and mining of silver and gold involved the violent and radical transformation of landscapes and societies, in Africa, as one scholar puts it, ‘flexible local communities absorbed European commercial capital’.20 In the late 1700s, a handful of ambitious European imperialists proposed to grow coffee and other plantation crops in the Gold Coast by employing enslaved Africans locally, instead of shipping them overseas, but, as David Eltis has argued, such dreams ‘came to nothing in the face of African resistance to European occupation’.21 When Europeans changed their business from slaving to commodity trading in the first half of the nineteenth century, however, the response in coastal western Africa was a structural transformation of the economic and social organization of agriculture. The initiative generally came from small-scale farmers, previously excluded from the export economy, who used their access to land and labour to expand the production of palm oil, peanuts and other products, including, in some places, coffee. Coffee is thus part of a larger story about changes in African production following the abolition of the slave trade.22 Two Portuguese colonies still deeply involved in the slave trade, São Tomé e Príncipe and Angola, became the frontier of coffee cultivation in western Africa (in eastern Africa, two islands with a French settler presence, Réunion and Madagascar, were the main export centres).23 Around 1800, Portuguese landowners in São Tomé, a provisioning station for slave ships off the coast of Gabon, began experimenting with arabica plants introduced from Brazil. Growth was initially slow because of infrastructural limitations, but from 1850 colonial planters exploited fresh capital injections, reduced tariffs and enslaved workers illegally imported from Angola and Gabon to expand production, resulting in exports of around 2,000 metric tonnes per year from the 1870s to the end of

Ralph Austen, African Economic History: Internal Development and External Dependency (London: James Currey, 1987). 20 Sven Beckert, ‘Commodities’, in Princeton Companion to Atlantic History, ed. Joseph C. Miller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 117. 21 David Eltis, ‘The Slave Trade and Commercial Agriculture in an African Context’, in Commercial Agriculture, ed. Law, Schwarz and Strickrodt, 36; Per Hernæs, ‘A Danish Experiment in Commercial Agriculture on the Gold Coast’, in Commercial Agriculture, ed. Law, Schwarz and Strickrodt, 158–79. 22 Antony G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (London: Longmans, 1973), 124–6. See Eltis, ‘Slave Trade and Commercial Agriculture’, 46, and Gareth Austin, ‘Commercial Agriculture and the Ending of Slave-Trading and Slavery in West Africa’, in Commercial Agriculture, ed. Law, Schwarz, and Strickrodt, 258–61, for recent takes on the ‘transition’ theme. 23 Gwyn Campbell, ‘The Origins and Development of Coffee Production in Réunion and Madagascar, 1711–1972’, in Global Coffee Economy, ed. Clarence-Smith and Topik, 67–99. 19

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the century.24 In the 1820s, while arabica was being planted in Brazil and São Tomé, Portuguese colonial officials also learned about the existence of coffee trees in the montane forests of northern Angola. Some African and Portuguese farmers recognized the plant’s commercial potential and began to cultivate the wild stands they found in abundance near the colonial settlements of Encoge and Cazengo.25 Botanists later concluded that these Angolan coffees belonged to a distinct species, indigenous to central Africa, which they labelled Coffea canephora, alias robusta.26 In the early nineteenth century, Portuguese imperialists started to imagine new futures for commercial agriculture in Angola. Anticipating the end of the transatlantic slave trade, some optimistically depicted Portugal’s crown colony in Africa as a ‘new Brazil’, a land rich in soils and natural resources, whose trade would compensate the loss of Portugal’s only American colony in 1822 and be a worthy substitute for the export trade in human beings.27 Of several existing cash crops projected to replace the lucrative slave trade in Angola, such as tobacco, cotton and sugar, only coffee became a significant export earner in the nineteenth century. This was mainly because coffee was a crop requiring little capital investment, which African farmers could easily integrate in mixedcropping systems. Initially coffee exports grew only slowly as the interests of local merchants were almost exclusively vested in the illegal slave trade to Brazil and Cuba. When human trafficking ended in the 1860s, however, opportunities for alternative trade opened and more farmers began to invest in coffee planting. By the early 1870s, trees planted five years earlier had started to bear fruit, coffee had become Angola’s most valuable colonial product, and Angola surpassed São Tomé as the largest coffee supplier in Africa.28 The Angolan historiography has mainly focused on a small group of Portuguese entrepreneurs, some of whom migrants from Brazil, who from the

Tony Hodges and Malyn Newitt, São Tomé and Príncipe: From Plantation Colony to Microstate (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988), 26–32; Hélder Lains E Silva, São Tomé e Príncipe e a cultura do café (Lisboa: Ministério do Ultramar, 1958), 91. 25 Birmingham, ‘Coffee Barons’. 26 Auguste Chevalier, ‘Sur quelques caféiers et faux caféiers de l’Angola et du Mayombe portugais’, Revue de botanique appliquée et d’agriculture coloniale 19, no. 214 (1939): 396–407. 27 João Pedro Marques, Os sons do silêncio: o Portugal de Oitocentos e a abolição do tráfico de escravos (Lisboa: Instituto de Ciências Sociais, 1999), ch. 5; Valentim Alexandre, Velho Brasil, novas Áfricas: Portugal e o Império (1808–1975) (Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 2000); Gabriel Paquette, ‘After Brazil: Portuguese Debates on Empire, c. 1820–1850’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 11, no. 2 (2010); Roquinaldo Ferreira, ‘Agricultural Enterprise and Unfree Labour in NineteenthCentury Angola’, in Commercial Agriculture, ed. Law, Schwarz, and Strickrodt, 225–42. 28 Aida Freudenthal, Arimos e fazendas: a transição agrária em Angola (Luanda: Chá de Caxinde, 2005), 178. 24

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1830s onwards carved plantations out of existing coffee forests using the labour of enslaved Africans.29 But these foreign planters accounted for only a small part of Angola’s total coffee output in the nineteenth century, probably not more than 10 per cent. The early expansion of cash-crop production in Angola was mainly based on African initiative. European traders on the coast seemed to be aware of this. One was quoted as saying, ­ lmost the only part of Africa that I know of wherein Coffee planting is carried A on by the natives of the soil, and not aliens of European or Arabian descent, is Northern Angola … in many districts lying between the Lower Congo and Angola, wherein no white man has yet penetrated, Coffee planting and gathering is carried on by the natives, who bring their harvests down to the coast … to sell to the white … traders.30

But also the Portuguese government realized that coffee cultivation had, especially from the 1860s, spread far beyond the centres of colonial control. As the administrator of Encoge, the oldest coffee nucleus in the country, noted in 1901, ‘Encoge … produces a lot of coffee, indeed, but it is important to know that most production happens inland at places far away from here’, among what he called ‘non-allied peoples’.31 Angolan coffee exports peaked at 11,000 tonnes in 1895. While in subsequent years declining world prices caused the collapse of several European plantations, mixed cropping buffered local smallholders from market volatility. Although harvests declined in response to lower prices, coffee still provided farmers a small basis for cash purchases. In this initial phase, most Angolan coffee was exported to northern Europe.32 In global terms Angolan outputs were minimal, contributing at best 1 per cent to the world coffee trade, but, as will be shown, this early development of the Angolan coffee sector involved a widening engagement of local farmers with the global economy, both as producers and as consumers.33 In this period, African smallholders also laid the foundation for the rapid expansion of the coffee sector after the First World War, when Angola, like several other African regions, benefited from a growing global demand for robusta coffee.

Birmingham, ‘Coffee Barons’; Freudenthal, Arimos; Ferreira, ‘Agricultural Enterprise’. Edwin Lester Arnold, Coffee: Its Cultivation and Profit (London: W. B. Whittingham & Co., 1886), 265–6. 31 Arquivo Nacional de Angola (ANA), caixa 4997, Chefe do concelho, no. 127, Encoge 22 July 1901. 32 João Mesquita, Dados estatísticos para o estudo das pautas de Angola: exportação pelas alfândegas do Círculo e do Congo nos anos de 1888 a 1913 (Luanda: Imprensa Nacional, 1918). 33 C. F. Van Delden Laerne, Brazil and Java: Report on Coffee-Culture in America, Asia and Africa (London: W. H. Allen & Company, 1885). 29 30

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Settler economy In the interwar years, Angolan coffee exports doubled from roughly 10,000 tonnes in 1922 to 20,000 in 1939. The main acceleration of coffee production happened after the Second World War: by 1960, Angolan exports had risen to 80,000 tonnes, which was about 4 per cent of all coffee traded worldwide. Angola sold relatively little coffee to the colonial metropole, Portugal, a small country with low per capita consumption levels. Instead, Angola found major outlets for its robusta production in the Netherlands and the United States, both of which lacked colonial possessions in Africa. The link with the Netherlands had been established in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Dutch merchants played a pivotal role in developing Angola’s new commodity trade. When Indonesian coffee outputs collapsed in the wake of Japanese occupation during the Second World War, Dutch roasters turned increasingly to Angola for their robusta supplies. The United States began to source more coffee in Africa after the New York Coffee Exchange lifted its ban on robusta imports in the 1920s. The country developed an especially strong relationship with Angola, which in the 1950s supplied nearly half of all American robusta imports from Africa.34 The Angolan coffee sector’s response to the global robusta boom was paradoxical. Given the economic initiative indigenous farmers demonstrated in the nineteenth century, both in Angola and beyond, there were strong economic reasons for the colonial government to support smallholder farming. As it happened, however, the government endorsed the expansion of settler agriculture by supporting European – mainly Portuguese – immigrants with land concessions and cheap supplies of contract labour. This policy was a particular manifestation of what Corey Ross has called the ‘plantation paradigm’: a widespread belief among European colonial rulers that plantation-oriented agriculture, based on intensive production techniques under centralized European management, was superior to African forms of smallholder agriculture, despite evidence to the contrary.35 In the case of Portugal, the paradigm also legitimized a policy of white settler expansion dating back to the nineteenth century.36

René Coste, Les caféiers et les cafés dans le monde, vol. 1 (Paris: Larose, 1955). Corey Ross, ‘The Plantation Paradigm: Colonial Agronomy, African Farmers, and the Global Cocoa Boom, 1870s–1940s’, Journal of Global History 9, no. 1 (2014): 49–71. 36 Cláudia Castelo, ‘Developing “Portuguese Africa” in Late Colonialism: Confronting Discourses’, in Developing Africa: Concepts and Practices in Twentieth-Century Colonialism, ed. Joseph M. Hodge, Gerald Hödl, and Martina Kopf (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 63–86. 34 35

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It is important to emphasize that the Angolan settler economy was as much created from the bottom-up as it was facilitated and promoted by the colonial government. The government neither prohibited African farmers to grow coffee nor reserved large swaths of fertile coffee land for settler agriculture, as happened in Kenya and Belgian Congo for instance. Rather, it allowed white settlers to apply for concessions, with the legality of demarcations depending on proof of vacancy of the land. Many of the new coffee plantations were established by Portuguese shopkeepers already living in Angola, who learnt about the crop’s potential as they were buying it from African smallholders. When coffee prices picked up in the 1920s, many invested their money in small and medium-sized plantations, though quite a few went bust during the Great Depression of the 1930s. After the Second World War, a new generation of immigrants arriving directly from Portugal followed these shop-keeping coffee planters into the Angolan coffee forests.37 As Angolan exports increased, the percentage produced by African smallholders steadily diminished. In every district of the country where coffee could be grown, African farmers faced increasing competition from European settlers. The Dembos district in northern Angola is a good example. In 1925, only a single European farmer was found there; in 1934, the district counted thirty-eight foreign plantations; in 1949 the number had increased to eighty; and by 1957 white settlers owned more than three-hundred plantations, most of which were small or medium-sized. While concessions were officially granted upon verification of the vacancy of land, illegal land grabbing was an established settler practice, dating back to the first coffee boom in the mid-nineteenth century.38 The land rush in the 1950s was especially notorious. According to one source, the number of European plantations in Angola jumped from 763 in 1955 to 1,638 the following year.39 By that point, African farmers produced a quarter of Angola’s total output. Labour shortages were a persistent problem for Angola’s settler population, as they were for white planters elsewhere in colonial Africa. While the first coffee plantations in Angola kept a permanent labour force of enslaved workers, early in the twentieth century planters came to adopt a system of contract labour,

Birmingham, ‘Question of Coffee’. Birmingham, ‘Coffee Barons’; Mariana Dias Paes, ‘Registro e colonialismo em Angola’, in Historical Perspectives on Property and Land Law: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue on Methods and Research Approaches, ed. Elisabetta Fiocchi Malaspina and Simona Tarozzi (Madrid: Dykinson, 2019). 39 Coste, Caféiers; Irene S. Van Dongen, ‘Coffee Trade, Coffee Regions, and Coffee Ports in Angola’, Economic Geography 37, no. 4 (1961): 320–46. 37 38

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with most contracts lasting between six and eighteen months. Because workers were generally in short supply, the colonial government assisted planters in the recruitment of labour, forcing Africans into contracts by means of taxation, conscription and trickery. There is a long tradition of observers and historians, mainly from outside Portugal, commenting on this infamous system of forced labour, which has often been interpreted as a new form of slavery, different from the old in that it did not involve the burdens of ownership.40 But a detailed historical analysis of labour recruitment for the coffee plantations, in the way Jeremy Ball and Todd Cleveland have done for sugar and diamonds, does not yet exist.41 In the space given here, I can only give a brief account of what large segments of the Angolan population had to suffer during the country’s second coffee boom. These observations are mainly informed by the labour inspections  the Portuguese Colonial Ministry carried out in Angola after the Second World War.42 In all coffee-producing districts, planters struggled to recruit free labour. Shortages were especially acute during the harvest season, from June to September, when, depending on the size of the plantation, planters needed dozens, sometimes hundreds of workers to pick and sort coffee. Low wages and poor working conditions were the main deterrents to plantation labour. As one observer explained, the wages planters offered in Angola did not compensate peasants for the loss of income from subsistence and cash-crop farming.43 Colonial administrators helped to cover the deficit by requisitioning workers from village chiefs and by orchestrating the movement of workers from what colonial censuses identified as labour-abundant areas to regions with labour shortages. As the number of foreign plantations in Angola exploded after the war, workers were increasingly recruited outside the coffee districts, most notably in impoverished regions near Huambo, Bié and Bailundo on the central plateau, which had been a source of unfree labour migration in and out of Angola since

Henry W. Nevinson, A Modern Slavery (Essex: Daimon Press, 1906; 1963) commented on gang labour in the coffee plantations. For critical opinions on the system of contract labour, see Edward Alsworth Ross, Report on Employment of Native Labor in Portuguese Africa (New York: Abbott Press, 1925); Henrique Galvão, Santa Maria: My Crusade for Portugal (Cleveland, OH: World Publishing Company, 1961); Basil Davidson, The African Awakening (London: Cape, 1955), ch. 19. 41 Jeremy Ball, Angola’s Colossal Lie: Forced Labor on a Sugar Plantation, 1913–1977 (Leiden: Brill, 2015); Todd Cleveland, Diamonds in the Rough: Corporate Paternalism and African Professionalism on the Mines of Colonial Angola, 1917–1975 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2015). 42 Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (AHU), Ministério do Ultramar (MU), Inspecção Superior de Adminstração Ultramarina (ISAU). 43 Armando Castro, O sistema colonial português em África (meados do seculo XX), 2ª edição (Lisboa: Editorial Caminho, 1980), 110, 131, 196. 40

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the eighteenth century. Thus, by 1960, probably half of all contract workers at the coffee plantations in the northern districts of Uíge and Cuanza Norte came from central Angola.44 Colonial inspectors examined recruitment at the district level and took complaints from African chiefs and occasionally from workers. Their reports laid bare the widespread exploitation and abuses perpetrated or condoned by the colonial administration. In the Dembos and Uíge districts in northern Angola, chiefs often complained about the encroachment of European settlers on African lands.45 The settlers’ incessant demand for workers drained labour from African households. This not only caused stagnation in African coffee production but also threatened African subsistence farming, especially since the government increasingly requisitioned male workers all year round. Although some international observers called Portuguese labour practices in Africa a ‘modern slavery’, it would be more accurate to describe the labour system underpinning the settler economy as coerced low-wage labour.46 For many of the Africans caught up in this system, coffee did not end the poverty that was pushing them into contract labour. Importantly, however, the expansionist settler economy that squeezed land and labour from African household economies did not kill off indigenous entrepreneurship.47 On the contrary, it seems that African smallholders held their own in the face of European competition. While the share of Angolan coffee exports produced by African farmers declined from the 1920s onwards, African production expanded in absolute terms. In 1928, African farmers brought 2,700 tonnes of coffee onto the market; by 1958 this contribution had risen to 22,200 tonnes.48 These figures point to the existence of a dual economy, in which some African smallholders clearly flourished in competition with European settlers.

Fernando Diogo da Silva, O Huambo: mão-de-obra rural no mercado de trabalho de Angola (Luanda: Fundo de Acção Social no Trabalho em Angola, 1968), 186. For a longer time frame, see Linda Marinda Heywood, Contested Power in Angola, 1840s to the Present (New York: University of Rochester Press, 2000). 45 AHU, MU, ISAU, A2.050.02/016.00094, Colónia de Angola, Inspecção dos Serviços Administrativos e dos Negócios Indígenas, Inspecção feita ao concelho dos Dembos pelo Inspector Administrativo, Américo Baptista de Sousa, 1949; A2.49.002/39.00251, Relatório da Inspecção Administrativa ao Concelho do Uíge, pelo Inspector Administrativo António do Nascimento Rodrigues, 1959. 46 Basil Davidson, ‘A Modern Slavery (Angola, February 1954)’, Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines’ Friend, Series VI, 9, no. 5 (1954): 85–92. 47 Malyn Dudley Dunn Newitt, Portugal in Africa: The Last Hundred Years (London: C. Hurst & Co., 1981), 135. 48 Boletim da direcção dos serviços de agricultura e comércio 2, no. 7 (1929): 341; Angola, Anuário Estatístico de Angola, ano de 1958 (Luanda: Imprensa Nacional, 1959). 44

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As one Portuguese observer noted in 1956: ‘It so happens that the native Congo, taken by the increase in value of coffee, has amplified his plantations, making use of every bush available, just like the European.’49

E ­ ntrepreneurship There were an estimated 30,000 Angolan coffee farmers north of the Cuanza River in 1956 (south of the river there were very few), of whom about 5 per cent had registered their lands. Some farms measured only a few hectares, others might have reached the size of small European plantations. According to the French coffee researcher René Coste, who visited Angola in 1957, African smallholders achieved the same output per hectare as European planters, only they did so more efficiently.50 African farmers had a competitive advantage as their small farms required fewer labour inputs per hectare than the larger European plantations, making production more cost effective.51 In addition, African smallholders were not burdened by the costs of coercion and could offer more attractive wages and working conditions than European settlers.52 Theoretically, all farmers in Angola had access to contract labour, as the government made supplies conditional upon output, not on any racial or legal distinction between Africans and Europeans; but few Africans could afford the costs of recruitment. Small farmers relied on the labour of kin and other dependents; larger farmers, including chiefs, could tap into village supplies. Free wage labour was rare in the Angolan coffee sector, even on European farms. Among Africans, recruitment occurred informally, with family and village heads invoking the power of dependency, authority and material rewards.53 The literature on cash-crop production often points to colonial taxation as the main external stimulant driving African peasants to commercial farming. Scholars

Jorge Trancoso Vaz, ‘Problemas da cafeicultura no Congo e a mão de obra’, Revista do Café Português 3, no. 11 (1956): 26–32. 50 René Coste, ‘Impressões de uma viagem às regiões cafeeiras de Angola’, Revista do Café Português 5, no. 19 (1958): 5–11. 51 Gareth Austin, ‘Mode of Production or Mode of Cultivation: Explaining the Failure of European Cocoa Planters in Competition with African Farmers in Colonial Ghana’, in Cocoa Pioneer Fronts since 1800: The Role of Smallholders, Planters and Merchants, ed. William Gervase Clarence-Smith (London: Macmillan, 1996), 154–75. 52 Sara S. Berry, No Condition Is Permanent: The Social Dynamics of Agrarian Change in Sub-Saharan Africa (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993). 53 Castro, Sistema colonial, 129–30, 178–9, 202; René Coste, Les caféiers et les cafés dans le monde, vol. 2 (Paris: Larose, 1961), 452. 49

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working on coffee are no exception. For example, Andreas Eckert, Kenneth Curtis and Sven Van Melkebeke all mention the need for tax cash as a key motive for cash cropping. At the same time, they point out that coffee farmers used their coffee revenue to pay for school fees and bride-wealth, to invest in cattle and to buy imported textiles – which increasingly replaced traditional garments – while after the Second World War, farmers started buying novel items like bicycles and sewing machines. Rising coffee prices in the 1920s and 1930s unleashed a ‘coffee euphoria’ among the Bamileke of Cameroon, as they saw their purchasing power suddenly increasing, while a Haya farmer in Tanzania remembered about that time: ‘There was so much money we started to go crazy.’54 Catherine Baroin has shown that successful Haya farmers spent their coffee income on things like home improvement, cars, clothing, meat and British tea. Some also invested in livestock and land as well as in the education of their children.55 Clearly, coffee gave farmers sometimes more than a means to pay taxes. Baroin argues that the consumption habits afforded by coffee income were an expression of a colonial ‘modernity’.56 In Angola, where coffee farmers showed similar consumer preferences, the distinction between supposedly ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ lifestyles was not so clear-cut, as many of these habits built on earlier adaptations of an imported material culture. As Frank Trentmann has aptly put it, ‘Africans did not need imperial masters to teach them how to become consumers.’57 In the case of Angola, it is important to remember that coffee cultivation expanded in the nineteenth century largely without the colonial dictates of taxation or compulsory production. Evidence suggests that even after the Portuguese government imposed fiscal imperatives on Angolan populations in the twentieth century, the same consumer demands continued to drive smallholder production. Before discussing the reasons for these consumption patterns, it is useful to see what Angolans got for their coffee. The first item that should be mentioned is textiles. Throughout the colonial period, coloured cottons were consistently the most important Angolan import, their value constituting between 10 and 20 per cent of total imports.58 Customs information from Ambriz, a port north

Curtis, ‘Smaller Is Better’, 316, 319; Eckert, ‘Comparing Coffee Production’, 306; Van Melkebeke, ‘Changing Grounds’, 191, 208. 55 Catherine Baroin, ‘L’impact social de la caféiculture en Tanzanie du Nord’, Études rurales 180 (2007): 93–5. 56 Baroin, ‘L’impact Social’. 57 Trentmann, Empire of Things, 125. 58 Angola, Anuário Estatístico de Angola (Luanda: Imprensa Nacional, 1934–1961). 54

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of Luanda, which in the late nineteenth century almost exclusively focused on exporting coffee, shows that in that specific period coffee was exchanged mainly for cotton textiles, including blankets. According to one colonial officer, in 1889, consumers in the northern coffee zones had an especially strong preference for striped and printed cottons.59 Imported textiles were sometimes used as garments. As one observer noted in 1902, however, buyers often acquired textiles as a form of capital, a currency they could later invest in other things.60 Some of these other investments were in people. It is not surprising to find that successful farmers transferred their money into human capital, and in colonial Africa this usually meant women. A British Baptist missionary in northern Angola observed in 1954 that ‘coffee-growing is a very remunerative job in this area, so that those who have a large number of trees can become quite wealthy in a comparatively short time provided they have enough “hands” to pick the berries for them! This economic factor is making men keener than ever to have several wives with the hope of correspondingly large families’.61 When reading evidence like this, it is important to be aware of missionary bias against polygyny and that successful men had other means to extend their households. A colonial census in Encoge in 1910 shows that most men in this coffee district at the time had only one wife and that incorporating nephews and wards was the easiest way to enlarge the nuclear family.62 Money was also spent on new manufactures like bicycles, motorcycles and even cars. One Portuguese visitor to Angola in the 1950s considered N’dalatando, one of the old centres of the Angolan coffee economy, ‘the land of black millionaires’. He said: ‘Wealth has no limits here and is glorified, here and there, in some comic scenes – empty American beer cans piled up in villages; blacks traveling on motorbikes with side-car and chauffeur, because while rich, being illiterate they cannot drive; big brand cars – Plymouths and Dodges – parked under thatched roofs.’63 Through conspicuous consumption, successful farmers demonstrated their wealth and status, but they could also redistribute

AHU, SEMU-DGU, Angola, no. 641, Mapa estatístico das mercadorias importadas e reexportadas na Alfandega do Ambriz, durante 1869; António José Valente, Novo projecto da pauta aduaneira da Alfândega do Ambriz (Lisboa: Typografia Franco-Portugueza, 1889), 26; Portugal, Relatório do Ministro e secretário d’estado dos negócios da marinha e ultramar (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1898). 60 Fernando Pimentel, Investigação commercial na província de Angola (Porto: Typographia a Vapor da Empreza Guedes, 1903), 149. 61 Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, BMS A/94, Bembe, Women’s Report, 1954. 62 ANA, caixas 375 and 4999, Listas de família, freguesia S José de Encoge, 31 December 1910. 63 Almerindo Lessa, ‘Angola e Moçambique: Panorama da terra e dos homens’, Boletim Geral do Ultramar 28, no. 326–7 (1952): 120–1. 59

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part of their riches to buy patronage. Seemingly wild consumption habits were, in other words, a kind of ‘politics of the belly’.64 Beyond conspicuous consumption, spending on imported food and household items also increased, especially as some coffee farmers were giving up on subsistence farming. In Ambaca, ‘Africans live reasonably well, feeding themselves not just with the products of the land, but also buying, in the shops, flour, spaghetti, olive oil, lard, chorizo, etc.’65 Ambaca residents, building on a longer tradition of cultural borrowing from the West, began to decorate their wattle-and-daub homes with European-style tables, chairs, plates, pots and cutlery. The high coffee prices of the 1950s gave many African coffee growers in the Ambaca district a chance to accumulate wealth, resulting in a growing trade in goods imported from other parts of the country and from abroad: The district exports large amounts of coffee … importing almost all products which it needs, like manioc flour, maize, rice, potato, groundnuts, beans, fish, meat, fruit, cement, etc. The local people produce hardly anything, because coffee gives enough to satisfy their limited needs … . Commerce now is the main supplier of consumer goods to the local populations who are getting used to easy, but onerous credit to acquire everything, in return for the awaited coffee harvest.66

British reports from the Uíge district, the heart of the post-war coffee boom, indicate that coffee money was invested in ‘traditional’ goods like textiles and livestock, but was also used to buy meat and pay for children’s education.67 One way to explain the consumption patterns described above is to see them as part of entrepreneurial strategies aimed to display social status and extend relations of patronage. Based on this kind of ‘social work’, as Sara Berry has coined these strategies, smallholders managed to compete for labour, generally providing more attractive forms of remuneration and working conditions than those in the European plantation sector.68 Writing on African agrarian entrepreneurship, Berry has explained why successful farmers invest a lot of their income in social relationships: ‘Partly because of the continued importance of social networks as channels of access to the means of production, many farmers

Jean-François Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly (London: Longman, 1993). AHU, MU, ISAU, A2.050.02/016.00106, Inspecção dos Serviços Administrativos e dos Negócios Indígenas, Relatório da Inspecção ao Conselho de Ambaca, 1950. 66 AHU, MU, ISAU, A2.49.005/59.00457, Relatório da Inspecção ao Concelho de Ambaca, 1957. 67 North Angola Mission, Uíge, 31 December 1942; TNA, CO 371/97249, House to FO, Luanda 12 February 1952. 68 Berry, ‘Entrepreneurial Labour’. 64 65

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have invested part of their income in maintaining or advancing their position within established networks and/or gaining entry into new ones.’69 In relation to cocoa farming, she adds, ‘To keep a new farm going until it paid for itself, seven to ten years after planting, a farmer had to persuade his dependants that years of unpaid labour would be remunerated, if not directly, then with future gifts, extra household consumption, and future assistance in starting farms or businesses of their own.’70 For those farmers with access to land and labour, coffee required little investment as mechanization played no role in cultivation. Transforming wild coffee bush into a healthy farm and extending production by adding new trees mainly depended on structural labour inputs. Because controlling people was crucial to success, the ‘social work’ of smallholder entrepreneurs was an important part of their lives. Some farmers unquestionably failed, but their stories are very hard to recover. The evidence above is of those who succeeded.

Conclusion This chapter has argued that from the 1850s throughout the colonial period, farmers in Angola were to a large degree attracted to coffee growing because it created opportunities for conspicuous and inconspicuous consumption. Fundamentally, evidence from Angola and other colonial economies in Africa suggests that, when prices were high, small coffee farmers fared relatively well, using the riches made in coffee to pay for different consumer goods, including education for their children. But there are several larger points about commodity history and African agricultural history to draw from this basic observation. First, it challenges African historians to study in greater detail what farmers did with income earned from selling agricultural products. Scholars like Phyllis Martin, Timothy Burke, Laura Fair and Andrew Ivaska have begun to examine urban consumer cultures in colonial Africa.71 However, this new literature has so

Berry, No Condition, 159. Berry, ‘Entrepreneurial Labour’, 463–4. 71 Phyllis Martin, Leisure and Society in Colonial Brazzaville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Laura Fair, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2001); Andrew Ivaska, Cultured States: Youth, Gender, and Modern Style in 1960s Dar es Salaam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 69 70

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far paid little attention to consumer cultures outside the urban centres, and few historians have yet related the subject of consumption to work.72 People living in rural areas are still too often seen mainly as producers of export crops, rather than consumers of imported commodities. For instance, some commodity historians tend to view the ‘global countryside’ primarily as sites of resource extraction for the capitalist world economy, but such a unidirectional model of core-periphery relationships, reminiscent of worldsystems theory, limits the agency of local people involved in commodity production.73 By examining the goods Angolan farmers received in exchange for their coffee, this chapter has related their motivations to invest in cashcrop production to material culture, as shaped by local political economies and precolonial cultures of consumption. Second, a longue durée perspective on agrarian entrepreneurship in Africa allows for global comparisons and, therefore, a better understanding of how material culture factored into smallholder strategies. One could indeed argue that the economic behaviour of African households during the continent’s ‘agricultural revolution’ was driven by a demand for consumer goods in ways that paralleled the ‘industrious revolution’ in early modern Europe and North America.74 Focusing on the historically and culturally embedded motives of entrepreneurial smallholders also forces historians to rethink the primacy of colonial coercion in explaining the development of cash-crop farming in Africa.75 The experience of African coffee farmers furthermore provides an interesting contrast to Steven Topik’s sweeping observation about the relation between coffee production and rural poverty in Latin America: ‘Coffee required rich land, ample rain, and poor workers. Poverty was much more associated with it than was prosperity.’76 However, as Topik has elsewhere pointed out, coffee has

Patrick Harries, Work, Culture, and Identity: Migrant Laborers in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860–1910 (London: James Currey, 1994) is an exception. For an example from the Bengal basin, see Tariq Omar Ali, A Local History of Global Capital: Jute and Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). 73 Sven Beckert, Ulbe Bosma, Mindi Schneider and Eric Vanhaute, ‘Commodity Frontiers and the Transformation of the Global Countryside: A Research Agenda’, Journal of Global History 16, no. 3 (2021): 435–50. 74 Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 75 Robert Ross, Marja Hinfelaar and Iva Peša, ‘Introduction: Material Culture and Consumption Patterns: A Southern African Revolution’, in The Objects of Life in Central Africa: The History of Consumption and Social Change, 1840–1980, ed. Robert Ross, Marja Hinfelaar and Iva Peša (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 1–13. 76 Steven Topik, ‘Coffee’, in The Second Conquest: Coffee, Henequen and Oil during the Latin American Export Boom, ed. Steven C. Topik and Alan Wells (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998), 38. 72

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never been a homogeneous commodity; coffee production systems have always adapted to the societies in which they nested.77 The colonial configuration of Angola meant that coffee developed in a dual economy, in which European settler plantations thriving on a perverse mixture of coerced and low-waged labour competed with independent African smallholders. While the Angolan coffee economy was to a large extent built on the backs of poorly paid contract workers, coffee also brought significant material benefits to areas where African smallholders thrived. For many small farmers coffee was an opportunity crop, rather than a poverty crop. These conclusions also intersect with an ongoing debate about the Cultivation System in colonial Indonesia, in which some historians emphasize exploitation and impoverishment, while others argue that there were positive spin-offs in the form of independent production and commercial activity.78 At the same time, caution is required when assessing the evidence of material wealth in colonial Angola found in government and missionary archives, especially since it is still fragmentary and circumstantial. Obviously not all coffee farmers in Angola lived a life of luxury; perhaps only one in ten smallholders was well-off.79 Better estimates are therefore needed of the number of rich versus poor farmers. Any welfare assessment also requires information about familial and extra-familial labour on smallholder farms, how small farmers remunerated labour, the number of workers respectively employed in the African and European sectors, and the real wages and benefits received by contract workers in the plantation sector. Finally, while coffee has brought economic benefits to individual peasant households in Africa, it has not yet been the basis of sustainable economic development. The brief outline of smallholder spending habits offered here raises questions about the long-term implications of capital accumulation by independent African entrepreneurs. Ayodeji Olukoju has argued that in colonial Nigeria there were both political and cultural constraints to sustainable capital accumulation. Because of powerful societal notions of wealth, honour and

Steven Topik, ‘The Integration of the World Coffee Market’, in Global Coffee Economy, ed. ClarenceSmith and Topik, 21–49. 78 Jan Breman, Mobilizing Labour for the Global Coffee Market: Profits from an Unfree Work Regime in Colonial Java (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015); Robert E. Elson, Village Java under the Cultivation System, 1830–1870 (Sydney: ASAA Southeast Asia Publication Series, 1994). 79 William Gervase Clarence-Smith, ‘Capital Accumulation and Class Formation in Angola’, in History of Central Africa, vol. 2, ed. David Birmingham and Phyllis M. Martin (London: Longman, 1983), 195. 77

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social status, accumulated capital has historically been diverted to conspicuous consumption, impeding what he calls ‘developmental entrepreneurship’.80 As Steven Topik and William Gervase Clarence-Smith point out, countries focusing their export economies on coffee ‘have tended to remain poor’.81 While the reasons for this are complex and varied, in the African case, deep-rooted cultures and political economies of consumption may have had something to do with it.

Ayodeji Olukoju, ‘Accumulation and Conspicuous Consumption: The Poverty of Entrepreneurship in Western Nigeria, ca. 1850–1930’, in Africa’s Development in Historical Perspective, ed. Emmanuel Akyeampong, Robert H. Bates, Nathan Nunn and James A. Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 208–30. 81 Steven Topik and William Gervase Clarence-Smith, ‘Conclusion: New Propositions and a Research Agenda’, in Global Coffee Economy, ed. Clarence-Smith and Topik, 404. 80

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‘Docile, quiet, orderly’: Indian indenture trade and the ideal labourer Purba Hossain

The singular purpose of bringing sugar to the metropolitan plate had led colonial sugar plantations to engage slave labour from a cross-imperial network of migration. When slavery was abolished in the British Empire by an act of parliament in 1833, the British Empire spanned several plantation colonies involved in the production of commodities such as sugar, coffee, cotton, indigo and tobacco. Sugar production was a labour-intensive process heavily dependent on labourers who sowed, reaped and processed sugarcane. Moreover, British planters had large investments tied up to their plantation estates. As abolition deprived sugar planters of their labour base, they suddenly found themselves in need of alternative sources of labour. Thus, the slave-labour system was quickly replaced by the Indian indenture system, whereby Indian labourers migrated to Caribbean and Indian Ocean colonies to work in the production of sugar.1 As a labour system that required Indian migrants to contractually bind themselves to plantations, the indenture trade allowed labour to function as a commodity – a mobile commodity that was offered by migrants in exchange for wages, and that circulated throughout the British Empire to facilitate the production of yet another commodity: sugar. By focusing on nineteenth-century discussions around Indian indenture, this chapter explores how the nexus of labour deficit,

The terms ‘indenture’ and ‘indentured migration’ have been historically used to refer to different forms of contractual and bonded labour, including white contractual labour in Spanish America, English, French and German indentured servants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European and Chinese workers employed in plantation colonies, as well as Indian labourers contractually bound to plantations other than sugar (such as rubber or tea). For the purposes of this chapter, however, we restrict our analysis to Indian indentured labour in nineteenth-century sugar plantations.

1

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sugar trade and imperialism facilitated the commodification of labour, while also creating a rubric for the ideal post-slavery plantation worker. A key player at this juncture was British planter John Gladstone (father of four-time prime minister William Gladstone).2 A Liverpool-based planter with financial interests in sugar plantations in Demerara (West Indies) and Jamaica, John Gladstone was keen to find an alternative source of plantation labour. In January 1836, he started negotiating with a merchant company in Calcutta (India) to arrange for the emigration of Indian labourers to work in his West Indian sugar plantations.3 He wrote: You will probably be aware that we are very particularly situated with our negro apprentices in the West Indies, and that is [a] matter of doubt and uncertainty how far they may be induced to continue their services on the plantations after their apprenticeship expires in 1840. We are, therefore, most desirous to obtain and introduce labourers from other quarters, and particularly from climates similar in their nature […] [I]t has occurred to us that a moderate number of Bengalees, such as you were sending to the Isle of France [Mauritius], might be very suitable for our purpose.4

Gladstone assured that labourers in his estates ‘pass[ed] their time agreeably and happily’, and promised to offer them wages according to contract, food, comfortable housing, medical assistance and a free passage to British Guiana.5 The merchant company Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co. readily agreed and set up a contract with Gladstone to procure labourers, stating: ‘within the last two years, upwards of 2000 natives have been sent from [Calcutta] to the Mauritius. [W]e are not aware that any great difficulty would present itself in sending men to the West Indies.’6 Several planters followed suit and with the passing of the

For a fuller biography, see Sydney Checkland, The Gladstones: A Family Biography 1764–1851 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971). 3 At the time, Calcutta was the administrative capital of British India and a key port involved in international trade. A large group of British and Indian merchants lived and worked in Calcutta in the nineteenth century. 4 Letter from John Gladstone to Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co., dated 4 January 1836. Enclosure No. 1 to Gladstone’s letters to Lord Glenelg dated 28 February 1838, in Copies of All Orders in Council, or Colonial Ordinances, for the Better Regulations and Enforcement of the Relative Duties of Masters and Employers, and Articled Servants, Tradesmen and Labourers, in the Colonies of British Guiana and Mauritius and of Correspondence Relating Thereof (Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed, 2 March 1838). Henceforth, ‘Masters and Employers’. 5 Letter from John Gladstone to Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co., dated 4 January 1836. In Masters and Employers. 6 Letter from Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co. to John Gladstone, dated 6 June 1836. In Masters and Employers. 2

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Act V of 1837, this became a standardized, government-sanctioned system of labour migration based on five-year contracts (known as ‘indentures’). Between 1837 and 1920, 1.3 million indentured Indians migrated to plantation colonies, including the British colonies of Mauritius, British Guiana, Jamaica, Trinidad, Fiji, St Lucia, Grenada, St Vincent, St Kitts, Malaya, Seychelles and South Africa, the French colonies of Guadeloupe, Guiana, Réunion and Martinique, as well as Danish St Croix and Dutch Surinam. The migration of Indians overseas was not a novel phenomenon. Indian labourers and convicts had long been employed across the globe in domestic work, agricultural labour or public works.7 However, with Gladstone’s intervention, this private and unregulated migration was converted into an organized, centralized system of contractual migration. As part of the process of emigration, indentured migrants came to be photographed for official purposes in 1865. However, the image of the ideal and most suitable labourer had already been created in the 1830s – long before they were photographed, and before colonial ethnographic projects in India came to define Indian communities according to physical and racial features. This was partly informed by planters’ demands, partly by the post-abolition understanding of labour, and partly by an essentialized understanding of enslaved labourers and the Indian labouring force. Planters demanded labour that was used to the tropical climate and ‘young, active and able-bodied’;8 the colonial state required that the indentured labourers be mobile communities used to migrating for employment; and the post-abolition society in Britain and India insisted on labour that was ‘free’ and as far removed from slave conditions as possible. Indenture debates and changing emigration policies reflected and perpetuated the image of a migrant labourer who was ‘free’, male, compatible with the tropical climate and outside the restrictions of traditional caste society. The cross-imperial debate on Indian indenture thus not only turned plantation labour into an imperial commodity but also solidified the image of the ideal post-abolition plantation worker.

Key works on domestic, convict and maritime labour include: Nitin Sinha, Nitin Varma and Pankaj Jha, eds., Servants’ Pasts: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century South Asia, Vol I (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2019); Nitin Sinha and Nitin Varma, eds., Servants’ Pasts: Late-Eighteenth to Twentieth Century South Asia, Vol II (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2019); Clare Anderson, Convicts in the Indian Ocean: Transportation from South Asia to Mauritius, 1815–53 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000); Michael Fisher, ‘Working Across the Seas: Indian Maritime Labourers in India, Britain, and in Between, 1600–1857’, International Review of Social History 51, no. S14 (2006): 21–45. 8 Letter from John Gladstone to Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co., dated 4 January 1836. In Masters and Employers. 7

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Labour: Defining a commodity The relationship between labour and commodities is well established. Adam Smith argued that labour was ‘the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities’.9 For Marx, commodities functioned both as objects of utility (‘use-value’) and repositories of value (‘exchange-value’), and thus commodities could also be seen as repositories of labour.10 This relationship was further expanded as scholars studied how slavery and other forms of unfree labour were crucial in the production of global and imperial commodities. As Sidney Mintz demonstrated in Sweetness and Power, the sugar revolution – which fuelled industrial development in Britain, aided the growth of Britain into a global and colonial power, and changed consumption patterns in Europe – was contingent upon plantation slavery.11 Histories of sugar production and trade were also intricately linked to the commodification of labour. In his 1986 essay, Igor Kopytoff wrote that slavery begins when an individual is captured or sold, and thus becomes stripped of his previous social identity and emerges instead as an actual or potential commodity. As the enslaved person is sold to a planter or merchant, he acquires a new social identity, but remains a ‘potential commodity […] [and] continues to have a potential exchange value that may be realized by resale’.12 He critiqued the conceptual polarization where physical objects represented the natural universe of commodities and people represented individuation, thus bringing people (particularly enslaved people) within the purview of commodity histories.13 In a more recent work, Jonathan Curry-Machado has argued that not only were commodities like sugar the reason behind the Atlantic slave trade but in fact commodity trade made slave trade a practical possibility.14

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Edinburgh: Arch. Constable and Company, 1806 [1776]), 39. 10 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1 (London: Penguin Classics, [1867] 1990). 11 Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1986). 12 Igor Kopytoff, ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 65. He went on to argue: ‘Effectively, the slave was unambiguously a commodity only during the relatively short period between capture or first sale and the acquisition of the new social identity; and the slave becomes less of a commodity and more of a singular individual in the process of gradual incorporation into the host society.’ 13 Ibid. 14 Jonathan Curry-Machado, ‘Global Histories, Imperial Commodities, Local Interactions: An Introduction’, in Global Histories, Imperial Commodities, Local Interactions, ed. Curry-Machado (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 7. 9

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The commodification of slave labour is a well-trodden field of scholarship, but is this analysis transferable to Indian indentured labour? The discussion of slaves as possessions or commodities undoubtedly facilitated the idea of indentured labour as a commodity, even as the passing of acts abolishing slave labour meant that this commodification had to be nuanced rather than explicit. A crucial difference, however, is that in the case of slavery, it was the person of the enslaved labourer that was viewed as the commodity. Mintz, for instance, argued: ‘Slaves and forced laborers, unlike free workers, have nothing to sell, not even their labor; instead, they have themselves been bought and sold and traded.’15 By contrast, in the case of indentured labour, it was the intangible concept of labour that emerged as a commodity. In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi called labour a ‘fictitious commodity’.16 In a market, labour power can be exchanged for wages, is subject to the forces of demand and supply, and is offered ‘for sale’ on the market. Thus, even as it does not fit the empirical definition of a commodity, it acts similarly to one. Polanyi wrote that the commodity description of labour, land and money is entirely fictitious: ‘None of them is produced for sale. […] Nevertheless, it is with the help of this fiction that the actual markets for labor, land, and money are organized.’17 By focusing on the early indenture debates, this chapter builds upon this idea of commodification of labour, extending it to understandings of commodification within an imperial context. Imperial networks of exchange made it possible for something as intangible as the labouring power of migrants from South Asia to emerge as a commodity. The employment of indentured Indians in colonial sugar plantations and the discussions over the viability of this system not only commodified the labouring power of Indian migrants, but also framed it within categories of race, gender and ‘free labour’. In writing about colonial Fiji, John Kelly argued in favour of indentured labour as a commodity. For Kelly, the capitalist form of labour ownership in Fiji (where ‘labour units’ arrived by ship and were contracted at a specified price) was ‘suspended uneasily between slavery and wage-labour’.18 In fact, indentured labourers were seen not as people working for wages, but instead as workers by nature. He based this on several pieces of evidence – including the use of penal

Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 57. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001 [1944]). 17 Ibid., 76. 18 John D. Kelly, ‘“Coolie” as a Labour Commodity: Race, Sex, and European Dignity in Colonial Fiji’, The Journal of Peasant Studies 19, no. 3–4 (1992): 250. 15 16

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sanctions like fine and jail sentence against indentured labourers who violated labour law, the provision for wages paid according to tasks completed rather than per hour, and the terming of migrants whose indentured contracts had expired as ‘free’.19 Kelly argued: The ‘coolie’ in the colonial imagination was different from a ‘labourer’ in politicaleconomic theory. […] The ‘coolie’ was suited to a particular type of labour and life by race: by physical, mental and emotional characteristics, characteristics determined (some thought) by the action of the tropical environment over vast time. […] his suitability for tropical labour was determined by his racial nature.20

This chapter argues that the idea of indentured labour as a racially defined commodity, which made the colonial plantation production system possible, was consolidated long before indentured Indians set foot in Fiji. The discussions that created and perpetuated the racialized image of Indian migrant labour began in the 1830s, and owed as much to European understandings of race and labouring power, as to Indian understandings of the interplay between caste, labour and social identity. This chapter also demonstrates the consequences of such commodification. Treating labour as a commodity led to the creation of an image of the ideal, undifferentiated labouring force, and such stereotypes in turn impacted emigration regulations (including provisions for food and lodging of indentured migrants). The continuation of the Indian indenture trade for eighty-odd years was contingent upon such commodification.

Freedom and unfreedom of labour Indian indenture emerged at a time when debates over the abolition of slavery were still fresh in the minds of activists, planters and policy-makers. The act of abolition in 1833 not only outlawed the sale and employment of slave labour across the British Empire, but also implied that future labour systems had to be purposefully dissimilar from slavery. In fact, abolition had created a dichotomy between acceptable and unacceptable forms of labour. Provisions that were seen as central to the slave labour regime and thus unacceptable – such as the use of coercion or deception when procuring labourers, mistreatment of labourers on plantations, and their detention and punishment – also had to be discarded in the labour systems that followed. Thus, for both planters and government officials, Ibid. Ibid., 253.

19 20

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the ideal indentured labourer had to be ‘free’ – free to migrate, free to sell their own productive labour and free from modes of exploitation that defined the slave regime. The commodification of indentured labour was contingent upon first recognizing the labourers as ‘free’. The establishment of the indenture trade had led to debates about how far removed it was from the recently abolished slavery. On the one hand were merchants and planters with direct stake in continued labour trade, who argued that indenture offered a legal and lucrative employment opportunity for labourers. Since it began after slavery was abolished in the British Empire, and was defined by adherence to contracts of employment signed by labourers (often with a thumbprint), the indenture trade was seen as an exercise in free labour. For instance, a merchant petition from Calcutta in 1838 argued that Indian labourers preferred the indenture trade since it offered superior labour conditions: ‘a most liberal rate of money payment, an abundant supply of wholesome food, a degree of daily labour far within the physical powers of any race of men, kind personal treatment, and a free passage back to their own country’.21 It stated that allowing the indenture trade to continue was actually ‘a question involving the rights of British subjects […] to carry their manual labour to the most productive market’.22 When the indenture trade was briefly suspended between 1839 and 1842, the British periodical Quarterly Review argued that the prohibitive order ‘imprison[ed] eighty or ninety millions of human beings as if they were no better than rats in an iron cage – to debar the Hindoo from exporting himself as well as the fruit of his labour’.23 Calls for suspension of the indenture trade based on its similarity to the slave trade were thus considered restrictive to commodity trade, and to the livelihood of merchants, planters and labourers. On the other hand, there was a rising tide of people in Britain and India who saw indenture as an exploitative system reminiscent of slavery. They argued that the indenture trade depended heavily on misinformation to recruit labourers, and did not take enough precautions to ensure against exploitation. In a public meeting at Calcutta in 1838, for instance, a participant pointed out the irony of declaring the indenture trade as a trade in free labourers when they were

‘Petition of Messers Henley, Dowson & Bestel and others, or the respectful representation of the merchants of Calcutta, who are connected with the trade of the Mauritius, in a memorial addressed to the President in Council of India in Council’, dated 23 July 1838, Calcutta. General Department (General) Proceedings, 1 August 1838, No. 2, West Bengal State Archives, Kolkata. 22 Ibid. 23 ‘State and Prospects of Asia’, Quarterly Review, March 1839, quoted in Bengal Hurkaru, 18 September 1839. 21

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destined for old slave colonies. He asked, ‘Where were the laws to protect them in an old slave colony and from the tyranny of task-masters who had spent a whole life in driving slaves.’24 In fact, many believed that owing to the supposed ignorance of the labourers, the deception by recruiters and the prevalence of kidnapping, labourers who migrated were rarely free. This dichotomy of freedom and unfreedom, so to speak, was central to this debate. Comparison to slavery was the central and most forceful argument against indenture. The term ‘slavery’ held political weightage and thus, post-slavery labour regimes came to be defined by a complete and immediate revocation of the Atlantic slave trade. On the one hand, concerned citizens argued that in its deceptive recruitment processes and exploitative plantation practices, indenture trade was an unfree system that went against post-slavery restrictions on labour. On the other, merchants and planters posited that the very act of prohibiting the free flow of indentured migrants imposed restrictions on the freedom of labourers. Their argument in favour of continued migration was thus contingent on both dissociating indenture from slavery and underlining its ‘free’ nature. With a constant comparison to slavery, and consistent reference to rubrics set by the abolition of slavery, the ideal post-slavery labourer was imagined by both parties as unequivocally free. Differentiating between free and unfree labour practices was also crucial for the British Parliament, as it discussed whether the indenture trade was indeed a ‘new species of slavery’. In 1837, the parliament gave nod to the Indian indenture scheme with caveats meant to protect it from becoming an unfree labour system. This included restricting indentured emigration to the ports of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras, making it compulsory for contracts to be written in English and in the mother tongue of the labourer, appointing officers to verify contracts and ensure against abuses during embarkation and disembarkation, and restricting the duration of contracts to five years.25 Although contracts were at the core of the 1837 regulations, the issue remained contentious even after the act was passed. In a parliamentary session in 1838, Lord Brougham declared: ‘these poor and ignorant creatures, the hill coolies, were smuggled away under the idea that Mauritius […] was a village belonging to the East India Company.’26 A leading abolitionist, Brougham opposed the indenture trade and argued that it replicated slave conditions. Others, like the Duke of Wellington, ‘Meeting for Preventing the Exportation of Coolies’, Calcutta Review, Vol. XLIV, 1838, 311. Emigration Act V of 1837, passed by the Governor-General in Council on 1  May 1837. Home Department, Public Branch, National Library (Kolkata). 26 Quoted in John Geoghegan, Note on Emigration from India (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1873), 9. 24 25

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asked for increased government supervision to protect against exploitation and deception.27 This idea of ‘free’ indentured labourers was not just derived from the logic that every labour system post-abolition had to be free by definition. Indian indenture depended on the very premise that the labourer was, in some way, in charge of their own productive power and in a position to sell their own productive labour. Thus, even as anti-indenture proponents argued that early indentured migrants were coerced or deceived into migrating to Mauritius or the West Indies, it was generally understood that most were willing to provide their labour in exchange for wages – just not necessarily outside the country. This is evident in testimonies of migrants interviewed for the Calcutta investigative committee, which was established in 1838 to investigate the accusations of abuse and deception in indentured emigration. For instance, a migrant named Karoo stated that he was promised a road-repairing job in Calcutta, but then deceived into joining the overseas indenture trade.28 Court-pleader Roger Dias also testified to the prevalence of migration to Calcutta in search of labour. He argued that labourers expected it to be ‘a service near Calcutta, and of a short duration, to enable them to return to their homes, as I believed servants are in the habit of doing biennially and triennially, and that they would be able to make their usual remittance to their families’.29 Thus, the lack of interest in being employed overseas did not necessarily mean that the labourers were not in charge of their own labour.

­Race and labour: The ‘coolie’ in public view30 The commodification of indentured labour also depended upon racialization. One of the key contributions of the global indenture debates was the creation and perpetuation of a racialized image of the Indian migrant. Just as Indian migrants came to be valorized as the solution to the post-slavery labour shortage, the ideal Ibid. Testimony of Karoo, 16 November 1838. In ‘Proceedings of the [Calcutta Investigative] Committee, from 22  August 1838 to 14  January 1839’, in Letter from Secretary to Government of India, to Committee on Exportation of Hill Coolies: Report of Committee and Evidence (East India House: Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed, 12 February 1841). Henceforth, ‘Proceedings of the Calcutta Committee’. 29 Testimony of Roger Dias, 25  October and 29  October 1838. In ‘Proceedings of the Calcutta Committee’. 30 The term ‘coolie’ appears frequently in sources on Indian indenture, where it was removed from its original connotation of physical labourer or worker, and was deployed as an umbrella term for Indian indentured migrants. This is a contested term. Referring to its use as a derogatory term in the Caribbean region, some scholars have repudiated its use. Lomarsh Roopnarine, for instance, called it 27 28

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indentured labourer came to be imagined as primitive, docile and outside the restrictions of traditional caste society. Although in actual practice indentured migrants came from diverse geographical and social backgrounds, they were essentialized within the image of ignorant and docile ‘hill coolies’ who were easy to induce to travel. This racialization was central to the continuation of Indian indenture for eighty-odd years since it was intricately tied to ideas of labouring capability. The choice of Indian labourers for colonial plantations was in many ways based on contemporaneous understandings of race and racial behaviour. Drawing upon nineteenth-century assumptions of a direct link between race, climate and behaviour, planters demanded labourers from tropical climates, and especially from communities traditionally considered to be docile and controllable. Merchants, colonial officials and anti-indenture proponents from India, on the other hand, saw labourers through the lens of caste. This derived both from traditional understandings of the Indian caste system in terms of inclusion-exclusion and historical precedence of losing one’s caste, and the colonial state’s understanding of caste identity as intrinsically related to physical and behavioural characteristics. Thus, the racialized image of indentured Indians emerged through an interplay of Indian and European ideas of race and social division. As a result, indenture debates and changing emigration policies essentialized the identity of Indian labourers under stereotypical images of the ‘hill coolie’, who was suitable to the tropical climate, outside traditional caste society and without any ties to land or country. The relationship between race, colonialism and capitalism has been discussed in the context of slavery.31 This chapter extends it to the study of indentured labour as it untangles this complex process of racialization. The letters between John Gladstone and Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co. include one of the earliest mentions of Indian indentured labourers in racialized terms. As the Calcutta-based merchant firm confirmed their interest in procuring Indian labourers for the West Indies, they suggested labourers from ‘the c-word of indenture’. Others have reclaimed the term. Most prominently, Khal Torabully coined the term ‘coolitude’ to refer to the cultural interactions of the Indian diaspora. The term has been used throughout this chapter within quotes to refer to indentured migrants, and in particular, to reflect the tendency in official discourse to essentialize and stereotype the identity of indentured migrants. See Lomarsh Roopnarine, ‘Review of Coolies of the Empire: Indentured Indians in the Sugar Colonies, 1830–1920 by Ashutosh Kumar’, Labor History 60, no. 5 (2019): 590–91; Marina Carter and Khal Torabully, Coolitude: An Anthology of the Indian Labour Diaspora (London: Anthem Press, 2002). 31 A key work on this is Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).

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eastern India as ideal for Gladstone’s plantations. Referencing their previous experience of sending Indian labourers to Mauritius, Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co. wrote: the tribe that is found to suit best in the Mauritius is from the hills to the north of Calcutta, and the men of which are all well-limbed and active, without prejudices of any kind, and hardly any ideas beyond those of supplying the wants of nature […] They are also very docile and easily managed, and appear to have no local ties, nor any objection to leave their country. […] [They] are always spoken of as more akin to the monkey than the man. They have no religion, no education, and in their present state no wants beyond eating, drinking and sleeping; and to procure […] labour.32

Thus, the choice of men from ‘hills to the north of Calcutta’ was based on a combination of assumptions about their docility, lack of ties to the land, physical fitness and climatic compatibility. Having ‘no religion’ and no objection to leaving the country, and in particular their perceived position outside caste society, added to their ability to be ideal migrant labourers. For Hindu men and women of the time, crossing the seas (colloquially known as kala pani, or the dark waters) equalled losing their position within caste society. Roger Dias testified to the Calcutta investigative committee that ‘natives of the northwestern provinces would lose caste by a sea voyage; and […] to the natives of the lower provinces a sea voyage would be more dreadful than incarceration for life’.33 Bibee Zuhoorun testified that since returning from Mauritius, she had faced social ostracization, stating, ‘even my mother will not drink water from my hand or eat with me’.34 Moreover, caste status was seen as intricately linked to propensity for physical labour, as labourers from upper castes were considered ineligible for plantation labour by recruiters.35 As Gladstone started negotiating with British parliamentarians to allow for a legal system of indentured migration, he perpetuated such assumptions. In a letter to the parliamentarian Sir Hobhouse, Gladstone repeated the assertions from Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co. about the labourers from the hills, calling them ‘docile, quiet, orderly, and able-bodied People, of whom a great Number are constantly employed as Letter from Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co. to John Gladstone, dated 6 June 1836. In Masters and Employers. 33 Testimony of Roger Dias, 25 October 1838. In ‘Proceedings of the Calcutta Committee’. 34 Testimony of Bibee Zuhoorun, 20  September 1838. In ‘Proceedings of the Calcutta Committee’. Since traditionally caste determined who one could dine with, and whose touch was considered ‘polluting’, losing one’s caste often resulted in complete social ostracization. 35 See Thomas Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), chapter 5. 32

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Labourers in Calcutta’.36 Through such discourses, a racialized understanding of Indian migrants made their way into official reports and government regulations. Fitness for work was another major concern, as planters insisted upon young and able-bodied migrants who were ‘in good health and not incapacitated by old age, bodily infirmity or disease’.37 This insistence continued well into the later days of indenture – instructions from an indenture inquiry committee in 1883 required that surgeons should examine indentured emigrants and choose only those who were physically fit, free from contagious diseases, with experience in agricultural labour and with ‘horns on the palmar base of the finger, showing that the emigrants were accustomed to hard work’.38 Emphasizing the link between labour, productivity and medical ideologies, Yoshina Hurgobin has argued that the colonial state saw the worker’s body as ‘a crucial link to the regime of production processes since workers’ health directly determined his or her productivity’.39 Indian labourers, particularly men from ‘hills to the north of Calcutta’, were considered physically fit and thus ideal for plantation work. Climatic and geographical compatibility was another key concern because of the assumed relationship between climate and race. West India planters maintained that Indians were perfect for the warm tropical climate of plantations, which was otherwise considered a hindrance for European and Chinese labourers. As Gladstone stated in a letter to Hobhouse, ‘labourers have been sent from Germany, Madeira, Ireland, and elsewhere, but these experiments have not succeeded, from the influence of the climate generally producing reluctance to labour, and increasing the desire for the spirituous liquors’.40 Gladstone argued elsewhere that ‘the extreme heat and relaxing influence of the climate produce  […] a disposition of indolence and an aversion to labour’ for the African slave population.41 By contrast, Indian labourers were not only used to working in the tropical climate but were also

Letter from John Gladstone to John Hobhouse, dated 23 February 1837. In Enclosure 1 in No. 5, in Masters and Employers. 37 Quoted in Yoshina Hurgobin, ‘Making Medical Ideologies: Indentured Labor in Mauritius’, in Histories of Medicine and Healing in the Indian Ocean World, Volume Two: The Modern Period, ed. Anna Winterbottom and Facil Tesfaye (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 15. 38 Report of Major Grierson and Pitcher, 1883. Quoted in Madhwi, ‘Recruiting Indentured Labour for Overseas Colonies, circa 1834–1910’, Social Scientist 43, no. 9–10 (2015): 57. 39 Hurgobin, ‘Making Medical Ideologies’, 4. 40 Letter from John Gladstone to John Hobhouse, dated 23 February 1837. Enclosure 1 in No. 5, in Masters and Employers. 41 John Gladstone, A Statement of Facts on the Present State of Slavery in the British Sugar and Coffee Colonies, and in the United States of America (London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1839). Manuscript contained in a letter from John Gladstone to Sir Robert Peel, GG/1171, Glynne-Gladstone MSS Collection, Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden (Wales). 36

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familiar with seasonal migrations necessitated by the largely agrarian nature of precolonial and early colonial economy. The interplay of race and labour in indenture debates has parallels in other labour systems. Jonathan Connolly has shown that race was key to explaining the perceived economic failure of the emancipation system, since ‘“Indolence” [of emancipated slaves] was linked to savagery; resistance to labour discipline attributed to racial incapacity’.42 Similar racialized rhetoric pervaded the discourse on ‘coolie’ migration to the Andamans, as evident in the works of Philipp Zehmisch.43 Known as ‘Ranchis’, labourers were contracted from the Chhotanagpur region of India to clear forests and erect infrastructure in the Andaman Islands, and are even today referred to as ‘simple’, ‘hard-working’ and ‘submissive’.44 Zehmisch argues that contemporary stereotypes of the Ranchi Adivasis derived from colonial classifications that constructed ‘the primitive as both exotic tribal and everyday manual labourer’.45 Their suitability for labour was ascribed to collective racial characteristics such as docility, submissiveness and physical strength.46 The Ranchis were thus affected by the same racial stereotype of the ‘hill coolie’ from Chhotanagpur region as the indentured Indians. Outside the Indian subcontinent, Stan Neal has shown that the colonial desire to experiment with Chinese migrant labour in Assam, Ceylon, Hong Kong and Australia derived from ideas of a ‘distinctly Chinese racial character’, which was constructed in the AngloChinese contact zone of Singapore.47 Much like stereotypes about indentured Indians, stereotypes of Chinese deceitfulness, entrepreneurship and commercialmindedness were based on the assumption of an unchanging racial character. What about in India? The dual notions of race and primitivism in the context of colonial South Asia were central to the racialized characterization of indentured Indians. As Uday Chandra has shown, primitivism as an ideology of state-making emerged as the colonial state in India encountered landscapes that clashed with its vision of ‘a civilized, well-ordered agrarian society’.48 This

Jonathan Connolly, ‘Indentured Labour Migration and the Meaning of Emancipation: Free Trade, Race, and Labour in British Public Debate, 1838–1860’, Past & Present 238, no. 1 (2018): 109. 43 Philipp Zehmisch, ‘The Invisible Architects of Andaman: Manifestations of Aboriginal Migration from Ranchi’, in Manifestations of History: Time, Space, and Community in the Andaman Islands, ed. Frank Heidemann and Philipp Zehmisch (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2016), 122–38. 44 Quoted in ibid., 123. 45 Ibid., 124. 46 Ibid., 133. 47 Stan Neal, Singapore, Chinese Migration and the Making of the British Empire, 1819–67 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2019). 48 Uday Chandra, ‘Liberalism and Its Other: The Politics of Primitivism in Colonial and Postcolonial Indian Law’, Law & Society Review 47, no. 1 (2013): 142. 42

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imperial ideology of rule ‘infantilized so-called savage or tribal peoples and subjected them to a protectionist yet developmentalist regime’.49 This ideology was central to discussions of indenture in mid-nineteenth-century Calcutta, manifesting in meetings, petitions and reports in the form of essentialized ideas of the labourer, assumptions of characteristics such as physical fitness and ignorance, and a persistent trope of speaking on their behalf. Consider for instance the meeting held at the Calcutta Town Hall in July 1838, where public concerns about the indenture trade were brought to light. Spokesmen at the meeting stated that ‘hill coolies and other natives of India’ who were induced to emigrate, were not capable of understanding the terms of the contract into which they entered.50 Testimonies from Calcuttans in the report of the Calcutta investigative committee also referred to indentured migrants as ‘illiterate and extremely ignorant’ people who were ‘not capable of understanding the nature of the [indentured] contract’.51 In fact, many who vocalized their concern in the Town Hall meeting or wrote a petition to the British government in 1838 asking for an end to the indenture trade, rested their entire argument on this understanding that the labourers were capable neither of understanding the contract nor of defending their rights in terms of that contract. Although indentured migrants drew from different caste and geographical backgrounds, the term ‘hill coolie’ emerged as a common epithet for migrant labourers. This essentialized view of the primitive and ignorant migrant from the hinterland (primarily hill communities from eastern India) derived from racial stereotyping of the workforce, and colonial essentialist understandings of the relationship between profession and caste in India. In fact, it was perpetuated by the understanding that characteristics such as ignorance, lack of intelligence, docility and eagerness to travel abroad were racial features – common to the entire community and determined by race. This also promoted the image of indentured labourers as ignorant, helpless and almost child-like, thus providing space for the Calcutta elite to speak for and make decisions on their behalf.52 Ideal labouring characteristics were thus manifest in the ‘hill coolie’, fetishizing him as the solution to the post-abolition labour problem. Ibid., 161. ‘Meeting for Preventing the Exportation of Coolies’, Calcutta Review, 1838, 311. 51 Testimony of Roger Dias, 25 October 1838. In ‘Proceedings of the Calcutta Committee’. 52 Andrea Major has shown how racial discourses impacted the portrayal of the ‘hill coolie’ in the Australian indenture scheme, arguing: ‘In order to render the inhabitants of India appropriate subjects of colonial philanthropy, they first had to be configured as helpless victims, rather than active agents who had complex and diverse experiences of and encounters with colonialism.’ Andrea Major, ‘“Hill Coolies”: Indian Indentured Labour and the Colonial Imagination, 1836–38’, South Asian Studies 33, no. 1 (2017): 27. 49 50

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Female migrants and the gendered image of indenture Since women’s labour was considered a form of domestic labour as opposed to plantation labour, the ideal indentured labourer was also imagined primarily as male. Most letters from planters specified the number of men and women they wanted for their plantations – women generally being offered menial, non-heavy work or domestic work in the houses of plantation owners. Although there was an increasing number of women participating in indentured migration, their presence was seen as secondary to the men, and their particular problems such as sexual assault and violence at the hands of planters were ignored in early legislation. Gladstone’s correspondence with merchants in Calcutta and parliamentarians in London included some of the earliest discussions on the inclusion of women in indentured migration. In a letter to the colonial secretary Lord Glenelg in 1838, Gladstone mentioned his difficulty in procuring female migrants, stating, ‘It is the practice of the Hill Coolies to leave their families at home when they come down to Bengal to seek employment.’53 Thus, only a small number of women could be persuaded to migrate to the West Indies ‘to be employed in washing and cooking for the men’.54 They were also paid lower wages than the men.55 As Madhavi Kale has shown, Gladstone had originally considered hiring an equal number of men and women (provided that women also entered into indentures and worked in the fields), but Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co. had explained that cultural conservatism would make the recruitment of women difficult and expensive.56 The gender ratio was also a cause for debate in Britain since the relatively small proportion of women in plantations caused issues such as bigamy and adultery. Opinion was divided – while some argued that the temporary nature

Letter from John Gladstone to Lord Glenelg, dated 26 May 1838, GG/358, Glynne-Gladstone MSS Collection, Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden (Wales). 54 Ibid. 55 Gladstone wrote: ‘If women embark in the larger proportion, and engage to work in the field, they will then have to receive wages, though at a lower rate than the men, and other allowances in the same manner.’ Letter from John Gladstone to Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co., dated 10 March 1837, in Masters and Employers. 56 Madhavi Kale, ‘Projecting Identities: Empire and Indentured Labor Migration from India to Trinidad and British Guiana, 1836–1885’, in Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora, ed. Peter van der Veer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 81. Kale argued that Gladstone’s argument for female migration was primarily an attempt to protect against anti-slavery arguments that accused planters and merchants of separating the family and augmenting ‘depraved sexual practices’. 53

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of indentured migration undercut the need for family migrations, others countered that an increased migration of women would favour family life on the plantations. The Land and Emigration Commissioners wrote in 1843 that since indentured migrations were more temporary than European settlements, compulsory measures to migrate women would only result in the migration of ‘worth-less women’.57 A member of the Calcutta investigative committee, J. P. Grant justified the separation of families, arguing that ‘for adult labouring men to leave their homes and families for years together, to seek service at a distance, is a very common and a very beneficial custom’.58 For some, the idea of female labourers itself was alarming and thus discouraged. As Kale points out, for many ‘the prospect of women detached from male authority, working for wages and the reproduction of their own labor […] was alarming, indeed threatening to their bourgeois notions of order, virtue, and civility’.59 On the other hand, there were people who discouraged the skewed proportion of men and women on plantations. Prominent anti-indenture voice John Scoble wrote in 1840: ‘It is easy to conceive, that, from this frightful disparity of sexes, the most horrible and revolting depravity and demoralization must necessarily ensue; and that such large masses of ignorant and degraded beings must carry with them a most corrupting influence on others.’60 Since women were regarded as accompaniments to men, and as domestic rather than plantation labourers, they were precluded from the imagination of the ideal indentured labourer. In fact, many newspaper reports from the time claimed that women who migrated were not even labourers. An 1838 news report from Calcutta argued (without much evidence), ‘The women, who are sent, with trifling exceptions, have been the dregs of the Calcutta brothels.’61 Another questioned, ‘Is the proportion of women that accompany the male emigrants composed chiefly of their wives, or of free-trading ladies going out on their own private account […] from the lanes and byways of Calcutta, Chandernagore and other large towns [?]’62 Cited in Marina Carter, Servants, Sirdars and Settlers: Indians in Mauritius, 1834–1874 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 89. 58 Copy of Mr. J. P. Grant’s Minute on the Abuses Alleged to Exist in the Export of Coolies, dated 1 March 1841, in Hill Coolies: Copy of Papers Respecting the Exportation of Hill Coolies (Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed, 21 June 1841), 27. 59 Madhavi Kale, Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor Migration in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 164. 60 John Scoble, Hill Coolies: A Brief Exposure of the Deplorable Condition of the Hill Coolies in British Guiana and Mauritius, and of the Nefarious Means by Which They Were Induced to Resort to these Colonies (London: Johnston and Barrett, 1840), 27. 61 Friend of India, 7 June 1838. 62 Calcutta Star, 28 August 1843, 1637. 57

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Consequently, women were also underrepresented in the early indenture debates. It is hard to find evidence of many women migrating in the early decades of indenture, and even harder to locate their voices. Reminiscent of Spivak’s argument in ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’, female indentured migrants suffered ‘double displacement’ from a position where they could voice their opinion – first as indentured migrants and then as women.63 In fact, the only prominent voice of a female migrant in the first decade of indenture was the testimony of Bibee Zuhoorun for the Calcutta investigative committee of 1838. Her testimony offers a rare insight into early migrations and into the problems faced by female migrants (such as sexual harassment or expectations of sexual favour on plantations). In the 1830s, Zuhoorun was persuaded by a labour-recruiter in Calcutta to travel to Mauritius and work as a servant in the home of a plantation-owner. After her departure, however, she realized that she had been deceived: ‘I got no clothes given to me, nor blankets, nor brass pots.’64 She also did not receive the right quantity of wages, or the six-month wage advance that the recruiter had promised. Her testimony spoke to the gendered experience on plantations. While men worked to clear forests, cultivate sugarcane and process sugar, women were often confined to the households of plantation owners. She herself was employed in ‘making salt, climbing tamarind trees to pick them, sweeping the house, and cutting grass for cattle’.65 She also faced sexual harassment at the hands of the plantation owner, Dr Boileau. Boileau had asked her to be his mistress, and when she refused, she was beaten up and refused help from the police. Eventually, she returned to India before the end of her five-year contract, even though it meant not receiving wages for her 2.5 years of service. While testifying to the Calcutta investigative committee, she stated, ‘I would not return to Mauritius on any account; it is a country of slaves; […] I would rather beg my bread here.’66 In spite of her damning evidence, however, when the investigative committee submitted its report, there was no mention of female labourers or allegations of sexual harassment. This was in keeping with the imagination of the ideal post-slavery labourer as male. This omission of women from the early indenture debates and indeed from the imagination of the ideal labourer is significant because it stands in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–314. 64 Testimony of Bibee Zuhoorun, 20 September 1838. In ‘Proceedings of the Calcutta Committee’. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 63

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stark contrast to indenture debates later in the century. As Kale points out, the category of the labourer was portable and malleable.67 During the eighty years of indenture, female indentured labourers went from being cast as ‘inferior’, less productive labourers in the field, to corrupting figures with ‘loose morals’, to marriageable labourers who brought stability, morality and culture to the indenture experience, to helpless victims of the indenture trade, and finally, to vessels of national honour who were at the centre of the anti-indenture argument. By the 1880s, the women’s question had become central to the criticism of the indenture trade, especially in the context of emigration to tea plantations in Assam (in north-eastern India). As anti-indenture views underwent a resurgence in Bengal under the Brahmo Samaj towards the end of the century, news reports, novels and pamphlets frequently pointed to the plight of female migrants in tea plantations and to attacks on their ‘chastity and modesty’ to instigate public opinion against the trade.68 A prominent Brahmo Samaj activist Dwarkanath Ganguli highlighted such instances in a series of articles for the English periodical Bengalee in 1886–7. He stated: ‘it was very difficult for the young coolie women to escape the lustful attention of the planters. Chastity and modesty could not be maintained, and most of them had to fall easy prey to the caprice of the planters.’69 Another Brahmo Samajist Ramkumar Vidyaratna was responsible for publicizing the case of the planter Charles Webb, who was arrested for raping and killing a female labourer on his plantation, but was acquitted with the help of a falsified post-mortem report.70 In the early-twentieth century, the plight of female indentured labourers like Kunti and Bachi had become an important instrument for proving the evils and immorality of the overseas indenture trade. Female labourers became subjects and symbols of collective protest in the hands of twentieth-century anti-indenture activists in India, which was disseminated through reports, novels and plays.71 Kale, Fragments of Empire, chapter 7 (especially p. 156). The Brahmo Samaj was an organization that spearheaded the monotheistic reformist movement in Hinduism known as Brahmoism. It was strongly associated with social and religious reform in Bengal, including reforms for the betterment of indentured migrants. 69 Kanailal Chattopadhyay, ed., Dwarkanath Ganguli’s Slavery in British Dominion (Calcutta: Jijnasa, 1959). 70 Justice Murdered in India: The Papers of the Webb Case (Calcutta, 1884), reprinted in ibid. Novels and travel narratives also highlighted such experiences. See, for instance, anon, Coolie Kahini: Sketches from Cooly Life (Calcutta: Victoria Press, 1888); Ramkumar Vidyaratna, Udasin Satyasrabar Assam Bhraman [The Indifferent Truth-Seeker’s Travels in Assam], 1st edn, 1885, reprinted as Assam Cha Kuli Andolon [The Tea-Coolie Movement in Assam] (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1989). 71 See Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Anatomy of a Politics of the People’, in Political Imaginaries in TwentiethCentury India, ed. Mrinalini Sinha and Manu Goswami (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 31–50; Karen A. Ray, ‘Kunti, Lakshmibhai and the “Ladies”: Women’s Labour and the Abolition of Indentured Emigration from India’, Labour, Capital and Society 29, nos. 1, 2 (1996): 126–52. 67 68

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As Karen Ray has shown, ‘the “nationalist” literature of the [Indian] abolition movement presented a consistent image of indentured women as victims, as ignorant dupes of colonial recruiters.’72 The discussion of sexual violence was also common in anti-slavery debates. As Henrice Altink points out, abolitionists and anti-slavery activists often referred to the treatment of slave women to expose the horrors of slavery.73 Outside the sugar industry, Arunima Datta has shown that in British Malaya, which employed indentured Indians in its rubber plantations, indentured women’s intimate lives emerged as ‘ideological battlegrounds’.74 Datta argues that ‘the image of “coolie” women as passive victims allowed colonial administrators to present themselves as protectors of social order, and nationalist leaders to accuse colonial administrations of failing to preserve the social and moral welfare of their subjects’.75 In reality, however, this victimhood narrative was turned on its head as ‘coolie’ women manipulated colonial perceptions of Indian women and the emerging Indian independence movement to ensure their survival, escape from unfavourable situations and improve their lives.76 The women’s question was thus a potent point of criticism against the indenture trade, and potentially an important addition to the anti-indenture argument. However, it was excluded from the Calcutta committee report, and indeed from discussions in the mid-nineteenth century, because the ideal plantation labourer was imagined unequivocally as male.

Conclusion Ultimately, Indian indenture engaged with imperial commodity networks in two distinct ways. On the one hand, the production of sugar in Indian Ocean and Caribbean plantations facilitated the commodification of labour. As Indian labourers contractually bound themselves to plantations and offered their

Ray, ‘Kunti, Lakshmibhai and the “Ladies”’, 148. Henrice Altink, Representations of Slave Women in Discourses on Slavery and Abolition, 1780–1838 (New York: Routledge, 2007). 74 Arunima Datta, ‘“Immorality”, Nationalism and the Colonial State in British Malaya: Indian “Coolie” Women’s Intimate Lives as Ideological Battleground’, Women’s History Review 25, no. 4 (2016): 584–601. 75 Ibid., 584. 76 Arunima Datta, Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 72 73

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productive labour in exchange for wages, indentured labour came to function as an imperial commodity. The image of the ideal plantation labourer was forged in the crucible of global indenture debates – shaped by the demands of planters, British parliamentarians, and post-slavery societies in Britain and India. This racially determined, essentialized image drew upon European and Indian understandings of race, caste and labour, and in turn shaped official indenture policies. As such racialized images were presented to members of the British Parliament to gain legal sanction for the indenture regime, it was perpetuated in committee reports and government regulations. For instance, the idea that indentured migrants were mostly ‘hill coolies’ who had very little wants in terms of food and housing led to an official remarking: ‘The Hill Coolies […] subsist upon the products of the chase, reptiles, and insects; in short […] all sorts of disgusting food.’77 Such ideas had a very real impact upon the indentured contract, as food provisions were kept to a bare minimum of rice, lentils, ghee and salt. Similarly, the idea that ‘hill coolies’ were excellent physical labourers who did not need much leisure influenced their allotted leisure hours in the indentured contract. On the other hand, discussions over the indenture trade were key for the continuing recognition of sugar as a global and imperial commodity (an importance that had already been established in the seventeenth century). As merchants and planters advocated for the need for labour forces to replace enslaved labourers in plantations, and succeeded in persuading the British parliament to continue the indenture trade for eighty-odd years even in the face of calls for abolition, the indenture debates strengthened the sugar lobby in Britain and continued to legitimize the position of sugar planters and merchants within the British Empire. With indentured Indians inheriting the plantation culture, indenture networks remained intimately connected with sugar commodity networks and continued to legitimize the position of sugar as a key imperial commodity.

Correspondence Relative to the Introduction of Indian Labourers into the Mauritius (London, 1842), 9. Quoted in Tirthankar Roy, ‘Sardars, Jobbers, Kanganies: The Labour Contractor and Indian Economic History’, Modern Asian Studies 42, no. 5 (2008): 979.

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Globalization gothic: Unpacking the commodity fetish in Caribbean tourism Lowell Woodcock

I was seated in the offices of the Tobago Tourism Division. An official was lamenting to me about the state of the island and the struggle to attain development. This monologue of woe gave me cause to reflect upon the ethereal nature of that concept and the longing for it which was expressed. It occurred to me that the authors of Tobago’s then development plan, as well as the central government in Trinidad’s tourism master plan, spoke about tourism in much the same way as they described development. Given the dominant role of tourism in the Caribbean, the two things were hard to disentangle.1 Tourism emerged as an entity to be desired, implemented and expanded. Instead of being visible as the sum total of many commodities, imported luxuries or service sector experiences, the plan spoke of tourism as a product in its own right.2 Reading through the plans and listening to officials I was left with the sense that the belief in the intangible tourism product belied a wider web of meanings and relationships. A part of unpacking these meanings lay in understanding that the practices that gave rise to the tourism product were not to be assumed. A history of a tourist product is an account of a global web of practices and meanings which, while not at first seemingly connected, interact through the intent and agency of individuals to create something which a consumer can desire. Exploring small facets of the early emergence of tourism in the Caribbean becomes a way to

The major account of this remains Polly Pattulo, Last Resorts: The Cost of Tourism in the Caribbean, 2nd edn. (London: Latin America Bureau, 2005). 2 One of the documents whose production I studied speaks of both the creation of the island’s tourism product in the singular and the offer of area-specific tourism products in the plural, although earlier documents use simply the singular form. Tobago House of Assembly, A Comprehensive Development Plan for Tobago (2006–2010). Tobago, Capital of Paradise: Clean, Green, Safe and Serene (Scarborough: Tobago House of Assembly, 2005), 99. 1

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make sense of bureaucratic and corporate accounts of a tourism product. Each story emphasizes the complexities of meaning and desire that converged to render the invisible into a visible subject of the desires of others. Development is a concept closely associated with tourism. The two concepts figure as topics in an account of British rule in Jamaica by its former governor, the influential Fabian, Sydney Olivier. Olivier had some disdain for tourist treatment of local workers, but when it came to development, he saw its potential to enchant and beguile, dubbing it, ‘the ingratiating word’.3 Later studies of development share this conceptual emphasis on practice and language, albeit from a slightly less optimistic perspective than Olivier’s.4 Rather than an attainable state, it is instead reframed as a site of power relations and the competing ends of diverse actors who benefit from its umbrella. While tourism literature has generally asked if tourism brings development, or degrades its intended beneficiaries, the literature on development has progressed rather differently.5 Since the 1990s critical accounts of development have explored the emergence of the concept and its effects.6 Analyses have shifted from discursive critiques of language and power to more detailed accounts of the micro-politics that exist behind the deployment of development and its associated conceptual architecture.7 Instead of questioning if development works, or policy succeeds, inquiry has shifted to revealing what development is by asking what concepts of development do and the global webs of social practices masked behind visible effects. This can be instructive. Rather than asking what tourism, or any other

Lord Sydney Haldane Olivier, Jamaica: The Blessed Isle (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), 399. Olivier’s account of the conceptual history of development offers information quite distinct from later histories: e.g. John Harris, ‘Great Promise, Hubris and Recovery: A Participant’s History of Development Studies’ in A Radical History of Development Studies: Individuals, Institution and Ideologies, ed. Uma Kothari (London: Zed Books, 2005), 17–46. It is especially noteworthy that footnote 2 of Harris’s chapter details a personal anecdote from the late Hans Singer about his and Arthur Lewis’s early work in the 1940s. Olivier’s account of the concept is a generation before them. 4 The principal sceptical accounts of development in this vein emerged in the 1990s. They are James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development,’ Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1994); Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 5 The formulaic approach of much tourism literature is remarked upon in Donald V. L. Macleod and James G. Carrier, ‘Tourism, Power and Culture: Insights from Anthropology’, in Tourism, Power and Culture: Anthropological Insights, ed. Donald V. L. Macleod and James G. Carrier (Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2010), xi. 6 A project sketched in Tania Murray Li, ‘Beyond “The State” and Failed Schemes’, American Anthropologist 107, no. 3 (2005): 383–94. 7 E.g. David Mosse, ‘Social Analysis as Corporate Product: Non-Economists/Anthropologists at Work at the World Bank in Washington, DC’, in Adventures in Aidland: The Anthropology of Professionals in International Development, ed. David Mosse (New York: Berghahn, 2011), 81–102. 3

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product, does through bearing witness to its effects, the question occurs to ask what it is in its practice. This concealment of relations between the meaning and form of human relations with both objects and concepts is commonly expressed as fetishism. In its original Marxist conception, the commodity fetish emerges as a mystical oppressive force that masks social relations. In essence there is much in common between the spiritual emphasis of Marx’s critique of capitalism and the earlier deconstructions of development’s linguistic forms. The Victorian gothic looms throughout Das Kapital with allusions to supernatural monsters, necromancy, mystical processes and quotes from Dante and Goethe. Marx explicitly speaks of his subject as being within the realm of religion more than the material.8 What makes a commodity a fetish is the moment when the production of a thing, the value of the labour and the context of that labour, vanishes from sight. This value is then replaced by a value that is relational to another object, one that is equally possessed of this mystical property, yet this exchange value is derived from the values rendered invisible. To treat tourism as a commodity in this Marxist sense raises some challenges. Marx makes contradictory allusions to the commodity. It is at once an external thing, yet he refers to physical commodities implying other kinds, uses obviously material goods in his examples and then proceeds to tell the reader that the things themselves are not commodities at all except in the moment when two parties enter into an exchange.9 These multiple aspects amplify the intangibility of the commodity’s spiritual character. In this sense an older concept of fetishism becomes more useful than Marx’s exposition of the alienation of labour in nineteenth-century Europe. Fetish in this sense does not merely imply the ignorance of prior social relations in market exchange. In its original sense, the word refers to an entanglement with ambiguity and encounter, and the capacity for self-awareness this opens up.10 Seeing something peculiar can allow the observer to perform an intellectual pivot and see similar oddities in things they once regarded as uncomplicated. Fetishism is here an encounter with perspective per se rather than with the simple act of concealment that Marx asserts.

Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One (London: Penguin, [1867] 1990), 165. 9 Contrast ibid., 125 with remarks on ibid., 156, 164–5. 10 For the origins of the conceptual use of fetishism before Marx, see David Graeber, ‘Radical Alterity is just Another Way of Saying “Reality”. A Reply to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5, no. 2 (2015): 7. 8

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Tourism is nothing if not a process of encounter. As a product it is a site where desires meet and individuals interact in complex ways. These interactions come with the Marxist inspired caveat that inequalities between consumers and producers can be masked by seeing desire as a purely autonomous phenomenon.11 Exploring tourism as a product poses a slightly different proposition to exposing simply this one form of fetish. Desire is not just on the part of the consumer. What makes the product visible to the consumer is as vital to the moment of exchange as the consumer’s desire to possess what is on offer.12 A product with no physical properties is exclusively a web of desires and meanings. Even physical products themselves come with this caveat. Consumers of fair trade, charities brokering sponsorship of impoverished children, companies offering staff medicines are all providing goods to consumers.13 The desires and ethical meanings that make those products visible through social practice are as likely to be concealed as the desires of consumers and yet are no less vital to comprehending the intangible portions of the commodity. To see inside a commodity is not to see an object but instead the meanings of the desires that gave rise to it and which shape people and the world in which they exist. Desire is here invested in the moral performances of those who produce as well as those who consume. It is in this sense that we can begin to see around us that which is otherwise not there at all. Narratives of Caribbean modernity are innately explanations of commodities.14 In academic, artistic and bureaucratic representations there is a need to explain how the Caribbean present resulted from the regime of plantation agriculture, colonization, slavery, indentureship and imperial power struggles. Half a century before two well-received ethnographies of Trinidad explored the making of local

James G. Carrier, ‘Protecting the Environment the Natural Way: Ethical Consumption and Commodity Fetishism’, Antipode 42, no. 3 (2010): 682. 12 Global commodity supply chains are more complex than the Marxian commodity fetish would indicate from focusing purely on the invisibility of the labour of the producer. The moral commitments that inspire producers generate both the fetishized image before the consumer and the preceding social relations in the supply chain. See Peter Luetchford, ‘Brokering Fair Trade: Relations between Coffee Cooperatives and Alternative Trade Organisations – A View from Costa Rica’, in Development Brokers and Translators: The Ethnography of Aid and Agencies, ed. David Lewis and David Mosse (Bloomfield: Kumarian Press, 2006). 13 These examples are Peter Luetchford, ‘The Hands That Pick Fairtrade Coffee: Beyond the Charms of the Family Farm’, in Hidden Hands in the Market: Ethnographies of Fair Trade, Ethical Consumption and Corporate Social Responsibility. Research in Economic Anthropology 28, ed. Geert de Neve, Peter Luetchford, Jeffrey Pratt and Donald Wood (Bingley: Emerald Publishing, 2008), 143–70; Erica Bornstein, The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality and Economics in Zimbabwe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Dinah Rajak, ‘‘HIV/AIDS Is Our Business’: The Moral Economy of Treatment in a Transnational Mining Company’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16, no. 3 (2010): 551–71. 14 This fusion is most developed in Sydney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York and London: Penguin, 1986), 52–73. 11

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capitalism and its modernity, the same topic was the focus of Edgar Mittelholzer’s A Morning at the Office.15 The novel portrays the uneasy and oppressive social world of a quiet office in 1940s Port of Spain. A past and present of global mobilities shape the desires and interactions of the staff of Essential Products. The name carries ironic emphasis. Essential Products is a business that makes nothing in any physical sense. The staff transfer accounts data between suppliers and agricultural estates and connect to a wider global corporate world through the intermittent buzz of the phone. Although the office, or more exactly a table leg in the office, is haunted by a ghost, it is not primarily this supernatural being that shapes and moulds them. It is the wider histories of the objects around them that link them to the intangible elements of the material, that frustrate and form their desires and which ultimately press in on them. Understanding Caribbean modernity requires a recognition then of how the past itself becomes visible and invisible. The past inspires our desires, yet, like a commodity fetish, the business of Essential Products and Mittelholzer’s ghosts, it is simply not there at all in any physical sense. Capitalism in the Caribbean lends itself to ghost stories. The Atlantic slave trade and the agro-industrial plantations it served have left a vibrant folklore that explicitly references the production of commodities in goods and people. All-seeing cowries, nocturnal myths of an eternal overseer supervising the unsleeping dead to work beneath the cemetery; sinister metaphors are not hard to find.16 Memories of past commodity production are embedded in practices The ethnographies are Daniel Miller, Modernity: An Ethnographic Approach. Dualism and Mass Consumption in Trinidad (New York: Berg, 1994); Daniel Miller, Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach (New York: Berg, 1997). The novel is Edgar Mittelholzer, A Morning at the Office (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, [1950] 2010). Mittelholzer, born in Guyana in 1909, was the first full-time professional novelist from the Caribbean. Mittelholzer is largely forgotten outside of Guyana but was a high-profile figure in the 1950s, even presenting the BBC’s Caribbean Voices programme for a period. Mittelholzer suffered a lifelong battle with mental illness and often appalling ill luck. (The first edition print run of his first UK published novel was destroyed during the blitz; see Frances Williams, ‘East Indian Life in Pre-War British Guiana. Edgar Mittelholzer: Corentyne Thunder (1941)’, Caribbean Quarterly 41, no. 1 (1995): 40–9). His distance from the themes of nation and postcolony that populate the novels of his peers, combined with erratic public comments and increasingly disturbing imagery, no doubt contributed to his marginalization. His horrific suicide, in which, three months after the publication of his last novel he emulated its protagonist and burned himself to death in a Sussex field, has only added to the apparent distance between his life and work and the nationalist literary canon of the region. There is little recent critical writing on his work, but, for a discussion of his themes and also insights from unpublished manuscripts, see Juanita Anne Westmaas, Edgar Mittelholzer (1909–1965) and the Shaping of His Novels (PhD diss., University of Birmingham, 2013). 16 For commodities, modernity and ritual memory of slavery in West Africa, see Rosalind Shaw, Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002). See also the largely unused Jamaican fieldwork of the pioneering folklorist Martha Warren Beckwith. Martha Warren Beckwith, Black Roadways: A Study of Jamaican Folk Life (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1929). 15

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across society, from customary land tenure to religious rites and police violence.17 Attempts to even establish the limits of what can and cannot be considered a commodity are immediately complicated by the ethical debates around personhood and language that slavery itself engenders amongst historians.18 An encounter with the commodity in Caribbean history is a contemplation not just of material things but of the ethics that comprise our perception of them. The tourism product that the Tobago planners wrote about was a fetish in the sense that the words and the concept they referred to obscured historical webs of desire. This happened even as the authors sought to express desires related to the concept of development. The trajectory of some of the earliest regional planning documents is similar. These also sought to create bureaucratic divinatory accounts of the relations between past, present and intended future. The first comprehensive planning initiatives were inspired by the Moyne Commission and the Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1940. These were consequences of a dramatic wave of regional unrest in 1938 that observers had long warned of.19 Long-standing poverty, squalor, racism, unstable commodity prices and competing imperial agendas all came to a rapid boiling point. The stagnant system of government in British colonies came under pressure from nationalist movements, trade unions, metropolitan elite ideological change and the rising power of the United States. Between 1930 and 1945 the majority of Britain’s Caribbean colonies moved from almost unflinching loyalty to seemingly inevitable independence.20 This complex layering of regional crises stemmed from the fluctuating fortunes of plantation agriculture. It is onto this stage that tourism emerges from the background to be the dominant economic player in the Caribbean. The Moyne Commission report was cautious about

For land tenure and the memory of slavery, see Jean Besson, Martha Brae’s Two Histories: European Expansion and Caribbean Culture-Building in Jamaica (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002). For police violence and obeah, see J. Brent Crosson, Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), but also see Deborah A. Thomas, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2019). 18 E.g. Nicholas T. Rinehart, ‘The Man that Was a Thing: Reconsidering Human Commodification in Slavery’, Journal of Social History 50, no. 1 (2016): 28–50. 19 Notably, William M. Macmillan, Warning from the West Indies, 2nd edn. (London: Penguin Special, 1938). For the story behind the production of the book, see Thomas, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, 71–6. 20 The most comprehensive recent introduction to the period is a trilogy of works by Colin A. Palmer. These are Colin A. Palmer, Eric Williams & the Making of the Modern Caribbean (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Colin A. Palmer, Cheddi Jagan and the Politics of Power: British Guiana’s Struggle for Independence (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Colin A. Palmer, Freedom’s Children: The 1938 Labor Rebellion and the Birth of Modern Jamaica (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 17

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the potential of tourism, noting that tourism operates by, ‘being in effect an “invisible” export industry’.21 Even here there is intangibility and unease. When governments begin to plan for invisible industries, then other unseen things are at play.

The people on the rum bottle The story of tourism in the Caribbean is bound up with the ethnographic conception of historicity. The present is defined not simply in relation to an immediate past but to a complex of beliefs that reference the milestones of genocide, ecological cataclysm and slavery as well as the plantations that were the focus of a global commodity trade. Slavery, plantations and tourism come to operate as powerful metonyms amongst local elite and academic accounts alike. From oil, to obeah, to tourism – all these products can become metaphors for the past and in turn the past is deployed as a metaphor to characterize contemporary commodities.22 Anything can be called the new servitude. In order to see the complexity of desire that constitutes a tourism product requires a salutary warning about the perils of looking at invisible things. Like the objects and staff at Essential Products, almost everyone and everything in the Caribbean can be linked to somewhere else. Such has been the influence and mobility of accounts of the West Indian past that one is very often confronted with studying the very lens one is trying to look through.23 The It is worth mentioning that the text actually attributes agency to the tourist trade. The trade is able to expand but can easily be frightened away and vanish altogether. Report of the West India Royal Commission 1938–39 Recommendations (London: HMSO, 1940), 16. 22 For slavery as a metaphor for oil, see David McDermott Hughes, Energy without Conscience: Oil, Climate Change and Complicity (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2017); for modern obeah practitioners’ work against corrupt police as a metaphor for slave resistance, see Crosson, Experiments with Power; for an example of a historian using slavery as a metaphor for the  relations of power underpinning academic tourism, see Christer Petley, ‘Flying Away and Grounds for Concern: Mobility, Location and Ethical Discomfort in Researching Caribbean History from the UK’, in Beyond the Blood, the Beach and the Banana, ed. Sandra Courtman (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2004). 23 I am here thinking of the influence of works like Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Kingston: Ian Randle, [1944] 2005); CLR James, The Black Jacobins (London: Penguin, [1938] 2001). These works are both rooted in the cosmology of the 1930s Trinidadian middle class. The later feud between Williams and James made this entanglement more obvious: see CLR James, Party Politics in the West Indies, Formerly PNM Go Forward (San Juan: Vedic Enterprises Ltd, 1962). There is also the Nobel Prize–winning works of W. Arthur Lewis. See W. Arthur Lewis, The Theory of Economic Growth (London: Routledge, [1955] 2003). The work of Lewis was key in shaping the era of postcolonial development. Lewis’s work on growth grew from his work on Caribbean economic issues. Lewis and Eric Williams both worked for the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission that managed the rival empire’s West Indian goals. See Sabine Clarke, Science at the End of Empire: Experts and the 21

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whole problem was summed up by the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot as one that fused the ethnographic conception of historicity with the region’s historical global heterogeneity, ‘No discursive field is fully “ours”, or “theirs”’.24 To understand the significance of this requires a recognition of the contentious nature of fetishism itself. Attempting to distinguish between the authentically social and the inauthentic commercial comprises a moral projection of perspective and an exercise of power.25 Standing in judgement, the academic observer becomes transcendent arbiter of the relations between consumer and product, and in turn, arbiter and interpreter of meaning and desire.26 Stating what form the tourist encounter has taken, creating typologies of tourists, imputing character and motive are all ethical projections that can obscure as much as any other form of fetishism. Unpacking the fetish can simply amplify its effects. Not doing so can amount to an abdication of analysis or a retreat into an equally fetishistic relativism.27 Few of the powerful metonyms that shape the appraisal of the Caribbean tourist product have an appeal equal to paradise. The very imaginary of the advertised tourist experience is instantly linked to the Edenic metaphors of colonization.28 The tourist paradise functions like its Edenic precursor and erases the inequalities of its production just as Edenic imaginaries

Development of the British Caribbean 1940–62 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 147–9. In the postcolonial era, influential critiques of development and underdevelopment employed both data and resonant concepts from Caribbean history; see George Beckford, Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of the Third World (Mona: University of the West Indies Press, [1972] 1999), but also Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Verso, [1973] 2018). 24 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, ‘The Caribbean Region: An Open Frontier in Anthropological Theory’, Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 25. 25 Macleod and Carrier, ‘Tourism, Power and Culture’, 15. 26 This is a risk inherent in attempts to unpack tourism through the long-standing metaphor of a tourist bubble that serves as a form of commodity fetish, separating the tourist from their surroundings. The earliest use of the bubble metaphor is in Erik Cohen, ‘Toward a Sociology of International Tourism’, Social Research 39, no. 1 (1972): 167. See also Amanda Stronza, ‘Anthropology of Tourism:  Forging  New Ground for Ecotourism and Other Alternatives’, Annual Review of Anthropology 30, no. 1 (2001): 261–83; James G. Carrier, and Donald V. L. Macleod, ‘Bursting the Bubble: The Socio-Cultural Context of Ecotourism’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11, no. 2 (2005): 315–34. 27 The first of these points is made in Eduardo Viveiros De Castro, ‘Who Is Afraid of the Ontological Wolf?: Some Comments on an Ongoing Anthropological Debate’, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2015): 13. The second derives from the response in Graeber, ‘Radical Alterity’. 28 For the rise of the Garden of Eden as a metaphor, see Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and The Origins of Environmentalism 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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erased the violence of imperial expansion. This perspective has its origins in approaches to travel which focus on a concept of gaze. Here the most extreme form has the act of seeing invent what is encountered.29 The modern academic literature on the region, its titles often explicitly referencing paradise and plantations, takes its inspiration from the fusion of accounts of gaze with older regional nationalist accounts of the developmental failures of the colonial state and its successors.30 A more cautious view would be aware that the tourist is a participant in an exchange rather than merely the subject of an academic work. It applies whether they are on a beach speaking to you or whether you are picking through their old scrap books. Tourists do not arbitrarily consume and the concept of gaze risks turning them into marionettes to suit moralizing projects. The intention of a consumer seeking to engage with a product is not to be presumed any more than the motives of producers. To illustrate this let us join the British journalist James Pope-Hennessy on the rail of a ship nearing Castries, St Lucia, in early 1953. When he wrote to describe the scene of Castries harbour, he picked as his metaphor a rum bottle. More accurately, he picked the picture of the smiling people that adorned the rum bottle. He purposefully chose a commodity that his domestic audience would recognize. He exploits the very associations of image, marketing and desire that later studies of consumption would explore.31 He then peels back the marketing veneer of that commodity. First, he lures the reader in, setting the dockside scene, ‘as authentic and typical as the West India people on the label of a rum bottle’.32 Then, as the ship docks, it isn’t day but night, illumination comes from stepping into the darkness: Examined in detail it revealed itself as composed of a human swarm of prostitutes, beggars, pimps and scallywag children, with several lunatics

David Arnold, The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science 1800–1856 (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2006), 5, but for a focus on travel images and the depiction of the Caribbean as a destination, see Krista A. Thompson, An Eye for The Tropics: Tourism, Photography and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 30 A few examples are Frank Fonda Taylor, To Hell with Paradise: A History of the Jamaican Tourist Industry (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), or Ian Gregory Strachan, Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2002), or more recently, Angelique V. Nixon, Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2015). 31 This is an attempt at destabilizing the assumptions supported by commodity fetishism. For a more contemporary take, see Carrier, ‘Protecting the Environment the Natural Way’, 686–7. 32 James Pope-Hennessy, The Baths of Absalom: A Footnote to Froude (London: Alan Wingate, 1954), 20. 29

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and one or two lepers – the whole unutterably mournful paraphernalia of life in a British Caribbean port. It seethed and whimpered and pullulated in the hot night air beneath the sickly greenish arc-lamps. All of these eagerly stretching hands, these faces straining upwards, these imploring eyes seemed the expression of one collective personality: from the deck-rail on which I was leaning it was like looking down into the very face of the British West Indies.33

I­t was not a ringing endorsement of colonial rule. Pope-Hennessy had spent a tour as an aide-de-camp to the Governor of Trinidad, despatched amidst the chaos that followed the 1938 riots. He had nothing kind to say about the experience. He reiterated the oft reviled James Anthony Froude’s view that something was rotten in the British Caribbean, even if Froude’s overt racism was quietly set aside. His travelogue sardonically reveals the often abject failure of Colonial Development and Welfare and stands in sharp contrast to the upbeat advocates of the post-war welfare state. In 2003 a sociological account of the Caribbean appeared. Entitled Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies, its author, Mimi Sheller, sought to reveal the ways in which the gaze of visitors constructed the region, nourishing them at the expense of those who lived there. Sheller set a clear moral mission for the work, ‘the overall thrust of my work is to support the claim for reparations’, a self-conscious act of collective imagination, historicity and apology.34 Sheller refers several times to PopeHennessy’s travelogue.35 His remark about the rum bottle and his description of the dockside scene are selectively quoted from, shorn of their context. The author sombrely intones, ‘these dehumanised workers present a stark contrast to the image of exotic, fun tropical femininity projected by a banana bedecked Carmen Miranda in Hollywood in the 1940s’.36 Pope-Hennessy becomes just a tourist; Sheller dishonestly claims that the encounter is his first sight of the Caribbean, no mention of his colonial service, his multiple books on the region and its history, or that his grandfather had been a liberal reformist colonial official who had an especially turbulent stint as governor of Barbados.37 Pope-Hennessy vanishes and so does the history that links the

35 36 37 33 34

Ibid., 20. Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (London: Routledge, 2003), 4. Ibid., 100, 141, 160. Ibid., 100. Ibid., 141. All this information is in Pope-Henessey’s book, which is very short. If Sheller even read the whole page, then she would have known her comments were untrue.

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emerging geopolitics of development to tourism.38 A moral contemplation of slavery, empire and history silences earlier attempts to do much the same. All the more troubling is that the potent image of a paradise soiled by the greed and squalor of colonization is not entirely absent from early-twentiethcentury Caribbean travelogues.39 One of the oldest and most explicit uses of the metaphor is actually a pro-American treatise, My Paradise Is Hell, where tourism, modernity and the expansionist United States emerge as the saviours of paradise from European empire, squalor and decay.40 The point I make is that the moral meanings through which travel and its study are perceived are constitutive of the very fetishism that one must unpack if one wants to see beyond the picture on the rum bottle or the evocative associations of paradise. The perspectives we assume are as much shaped by our desires as the products we seek. Our desire, rather than the mystic properties of the commodity, is what makes us see the world in ways that suit our ends. What then were the webs of desire that gave rise to some of the facets that hid behind the phrase tourism product? The following three vignettes are examples of the hidden things which Trinidad and Tobago’s early tourists and their successors found themselves purchasing without ever catching sight of. As with the moralizing projects of sociologists, caveat emptor.

Sir Algernon Aspinall’s valentine ‘It seems extraordinary that a transaction such as this, involving as it does the transfer of an entire island to the Colonial Government should not have been reported at the time to the Secretary of State.’41 It was February 1930 and the British Empire in the Caribbean had just grown unexpectedly. The news was not only unexpected, it had arrived two years late and then only because the Royal

Pope-Hennessy makes multiple attacks on colonial development projects; for a more upbeat contemporary view of the challenges emerging from the Moyne Report, see T. S. Simey, Welfare and Planning in the West Indies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946). 39 The journalist Owen Rutter’s scurrilous travelogue contains many examples of elite arrogance on his part. It also contains a great deal of ironic reflection on the origins of the present. Rutter saw a bitter irony in the gift-bearing Arawaks on Jamaica’s coat of arms, an image of the island’s former inhabitants that concealed the reasons for their absence. Owen Rutter, A Traveller in the West Indies (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1936), 150. 40 Albert Balink, My Paradise Is Hell: The Story of the Caribbean (New York: Vista Publishing, 1948). 41 Thompson to Campbell, 7 February (1930), CO295/568/6, The National Archives, Kew (TNA). 38

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Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) had informed the Colonial Office. Navigating a death in the elite of a far-flung colony was to link the bureaucratic rituals of the Colonial Office to the making of a tourism product. The practices of government and producers alike are intended to render things visible, albeit for different ends. Rather than simply being monolithic acts from omnipresent oppressors, these can be multi-sited and complex webs of individual desire. The effects of visibility should never be axiomatically conflated with its cause. The story of how the British Empire gained an island and laid the foundations for a tourist experience is illustrative of this aspect of the making of both states and commodities. The island in question was Little Tobago. The owner, Sir William Ingram, had willed it to the Crown. It was the location of Ingram’s private conservation project. In 1909 Ingram had come to believe that the Bird of Paradise (Paradisea apoda) was on the verge of extinction. This led him to import some twenty-six breeding pairs from the Aru Islands in the Dutch East Indies. The birds were shipped to Little Tobago and joined its only residents, a self-marooned hermit named Mitchell and his chickens.42 The island was an unsuitable habitat and the birds needed to be supplied with food and water. Planters in the hey-day of sugar had invested in elaborate tombs and monuments to dominate their estates. Even in death they displayed the fusion of power and property that underpinned the slave economy.43 Ingram’s project fulfilled a similar purpose. Here, a globally connected vision of conservation and moral worth was enacted through a gift in death. Rather than an ostentatious tomb, Ingram had made a whole island into his monument and sought to make an offering of it to the empire. The decade which followed the gift of Little Tobago saw it developed as a tourist attraction. Wrapped inside the island’s tourism product was a complex story of bureaucratic confusion amidst the politics of death. This sequence of events mirrors later ethnographic views of the ways in which bureaucrats manage disjuncture by operating ‘a representation manufacturing machine’ that conceals the relationships through which such management is brokered.44

Algernon Aspinall, The Pocket Guide to the West Indies, British Guiana, British Honduras, Bermuda, The Spanish Main and the Panama Canal (London: Methuen, 1939), 151. 43 Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 238–44. 44 David Mosse, Cultivating Development: An Ethnography of Aid and Practice (London: Pluto Press, 2005), 197. 42

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A tourism product can be just such a ritual of coherence and its consumers and observers might never know. The initial problem facing the Colonial Office became evident in the scramble for information as they responded to the RSPB request for information on the Birds of Paradise. A reliable view of events only emerged ‘after considerable trouble from a number of unofficial (and not necessarily accurate) sources’.45 The problem was that the principal reference text that the Colonial Office West India section used was Sir Algernon Aspinall’s Pocket Guide to the West Indies, the long-running guide book for tourists. The news about Little Tobago had revealed that the guide book was now wrong. The office staff swung into action to patch reality back together with the guide book. Here public and private projects of visibility blurred. Civil Servants contacted guide-book author and industry lobbyist Sir Algernon Aspinall. The request was sent on the 14th of February and upon its receipt Aspinall thanked the Colonial Office for their Valentine.46 Aspinall informed the Colonial Office that the actual deed of gift that Ingram had made was not being honoured. First, the island’s name had not been changed to Ingram Island (the Admiralty refused to correct every chart of the area), then there were the birds themselves. As an introduced species the birds had no legal protection, and the Governor of Trinidad was instructed to amend the regulations with a proclamation.47 This was complicated further by the fact that with Mitchell, the only resident, having been dead for some years, nobody could remember seeing a Bird of Paradise. Two expeditions were made to Little Tobago without success in seeing the birds. The authorities erected a sign declaring the island Crown territory and prohibiting trespassers. Despite such an inauspicious beginning, the island gradually turned into a fixture of the local tourist product. It acquired a separate entry in the short annual report of Tobago’s Warden. Fruit trees were planted, work parties visited twice a week, and troughs were installed and native birds of prey were exterminated.48 Ingram’s gift to the empire saw his tribute in death elaborately reciprocated. In 1938 the Warden’s report first listed visitor figures and budget details for maintaining Little Tobago. There were seventy-eight visitors and $35.04 entry fees

47 48 45 46

Thompson to Campbell, 7 February (1930), CO295/568/6, TNA. Aspinall to Campbell, 17 February (1930), CO 295/568/6, TNA. Acting Governor to Lord Passfield, 13 January (1930), CO 295/568/6, TNA. C. E. R. Alford, The Island of Tobago in the British West Indies (Dorchester: Longman’s, 1953), 61.

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raised against the upkeep cost of $234.91. Placed in perspective, in the year after the vast upheaval of the Trinidad oil riots and the militarized panic that followed, an amount equivalent to about 7 per cent of the Tobago poor relief budget was being spent on the elusive Birds of Paradise.49 A tourism product can have diverse origins. In Little Tobago, the practises of bureaucratic coherence worked to assemble a commodity out of a landscape and animals. Here was the creation of a landscape for tourists, yet whose primary function was to honour the imperial fealty of a dead man. The unpacking of this part of a tourist product reveals that the commodity itself has a multi-sited origin. The tourist in this case is not simply a customer but a participant in a ritual that entwines the politics of official memory and elite death. Only when viewed through the lens of a bureaucratic imperial funerary rite does the bizarre investment in Little Tobago, out of all proportion to any financial benefit, make sense. Here the commodity is not simply an experience, object or locality. This commodity was an obligation to a ghost and bound to the textual coherence of the maps and guides on which colonial bureaucracy depended. The politics of death in the Caribbean has been a form of institutionalized magic since slavery turned humans into commodities who in turn laboured to produce commodities. The story of Little Tobago shows that this was not a linear chain from slave plantation to tourist paradise; rather it shows a wider gothic realm of globalization, where bureaucratic ritual and magic collide. This is why elite virtue can make a landscape into a funerary urn honoured by touristic pilgrims seeking a sight of transplanted birds. There is one final twist to this tale though, post-Ozymandias, as it were. In 1963 Hurricane Flora scoured the hills of Tobago. Amidst the trail of death and catastrophe, it was some time before anyone noticed that the Birds of Paradise were gone, vanished, as if they had never been.

Spectacular and visible results Metrics of assessment are a core part of the bureaucratic rituals of policy. Reports and the presentation of data form part of a broader aesthetic of modernity.50 The origins of the relationship between the state and the tourist industry in Figure arrived at from the statistics in Council Paper 82 of 1938, Warden’s Reports, Tobago. The National Archives, Port of Spain. 50 In its most cynical form this can appear self-sustaining; see Roderick L. Stirrat, ‘Cultures of Consultancy’, Critique of Anthropology 20, no. 1 (2000): 31–46. 49

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the Caribbean are no exception to this aesthetic expression. Just as with the relationship between bird sanctuary visitors and income, the collection of other statistics can contain complex relationships that interpret events dispersed by time and space, seeking to render these bureaucratically visible and coherent as well as making them appear neutral and natural.51 At the same time, as a metric can render things visible in one sense, it can, such as in the accounting of debts and obligations, render things invisible. Landscapes, livelihoods and even deities can change before your eyes but the secret of their volition lies behind metrics of value.52 Metrics of assessment are vital to making tourism visible to businesses, governments and consumers. A brief account of early tourism reports in Trinidad and Tobago serves to illustrate how a tourist product emerged from a specific ethical vision of what should be offered to potential consumers. The most established tourist industries in the 1930s Caribbean lay in the north of the region and the more distant colony of Bermuda. Visitors from Britain were few and rich. By way of example, one guide book begins with a consideration of the reasons for travel and casually remarks that ‘with one’s own cook one does at least know what one is eating’.53 The American tourists in the northern islands faced a cheaper journey and prohibition had made the British colonies attractive destinations. Here the tourist product was more crafted, and landscapes and resorts were formally racially segregated to appeal to American visitors. Organized marketing was emerging when travel writer Owen Rutter toured the Caribbean.54 He chatted with several marketing officials about their plans and ambitions. Marketing followed commercial intentions and the publicity aimed at visitors was part of complex lobbying and competition between islands to woo American business.

Tania Murray Li, ‘Rendering Society Technical: Government through Community and the Ethnographic Turn at the World Bank in Indonesia’, in Adventures in Aidland: The Anthropology of Professionals in International Development, ed. David Mosse (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013), 57–79. 52 For just such a transformation rooted in the accounting of public debts, see Laura Bear, Navigating Austerity: Currents of Debt along a South Asian River (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). 53 Rutter, A Traveller in the West Indies, 13. 54 Owen Rutter was a travel writer, poet and journalist. He had ties to the West India Committee and the Empire Marketing Board. Rutter had produced the novelization for the Board’s unsuccessful children’s film, One Family. This tells the origins of the Christmas pudding by displaying the imperial fealty of personified territories and the ingredients they furnish. Owen Rutter, One Family: A Dream of Real Things (London: Mathews & Marrot Ltd, 1930). At the time of writing, a substantial archive of letters that detail Rutter’s Caribbean trip appeared for sale along with the original manuscript and the scrap book of the trip. The bookseller did not provide a response to inquiries about the archive’s content. 51

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Trinidad and Tobago did not have the professional marketing operation of northern islands. Bermuda’s tourist board had an annual budget of £50,000, the Bahamas £5,000 and Jamaica £1,000.55 By contrast, Trinidad and Tobago was a volunteer-managed operation with few staff and operated at cost. A cursory glance at the names of the staff and volunteers reveals that these were mostly the female family members of government officials and leading businessmen. The vice-president, who wrote and signed all the Tourist Enquiry Bureau reports, was Florence Nankivell, wife of the colonial secretary. Florence Nankivell and her husband had a central role in the public life of 1930s Trinidad. While Florence developed a high profile as a social worker, her husband became known for his public support of labour reforms. The 1938 oil riots saw Howard Nankivell at the centre of both formal and informal negotiations with trade unions and activists. The Nankivell’s commitment to a conception of the imperial government having obligations to those it governed led them to an increasingly public clash with leading business interests. A flurry of back channel lobbying by oil industry figures as well as stories planted in the British press saw Howard Nankivell and his superior, Governor Murchison Fletcher, hounded out of office and recalled. Fletcher never received another posting, and Nankivell was demoted, humiliated and ostracized. Three months after a transfer to Cyprus he fell from a train in France, believed to have committed suicide on his way home for Christmas.56 On her return to Britain, Florence Nankivell spoke out publicly about events in Trinidad and furnished further written evidence to the Moyne Commission about the toxic social milieu of the local elite. The tourist bureau was established in 1932, shortly after the Nankivells arrived in the colony. Preparing the annual reports would be an early part of Florence Nankivell’s commitment to public volunteerism. The first report set aims which gave bureau staff a surprisingly wide mandate. Although the first two stated aims focused on answering visitor queries and providing assistance, the third sought ‘to record the impressions of tourists and to make proposals to the proper authorities for remedying any shortcomings which may be brought to notice’.57 What the bureau reports reveal are the ideological entanglements Ibid., 275. Brinsley Samaroo, The Price of Conscience: Howard Noel Nankivell and the Labour Unrest in the British Caribbean in 1937 and 1938 (Hertford: Hansib, 2015). Edmund Nankivell, Howard and Florence’s son, maintains a family website with additional information on their time in Trinidad and links to calypsos about his parents’ work. https://www.jowettjupiter.co.uk/nankivell.html, accessed 7 December 2021. 57 Council Paper 60 of 1933, Tourism Inquiry Bureau, 4. 55 56

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of a tourist product. Here we see the ways in which a world of global travel across borders can be expressed as a product, a product that embodies the vision of how that world might be, rather than what it is. In this sense there is a radical difference from the reports of boards in the established destinations of the 1930s Caribbean. The bureau’s volunteers implemented their project in ways that call to mind later ethnographies of development. Things were rendered into technical form in order to be seen; maps, pamphlets and lists of businesses, not to mention a formidable card index of useful topics and contacts.58 These are the technologies for making a place into a product. These are the items that let a visitor encounter the substance of a thing that is not there. The members of the Bureau Committee lobbied government on multiple issues. The reports make clear that the focus of creating a tourist product is in part the transformation of the public realm. Police were lobbied to enforce vagrancy laws, public authorities urged to better fund litter collection and dustbins needed to be placed along the dockside to facilitate public compliance with new aesthetics.59 These were not simply impersonal technologies of governance. The risk of such a portrayal obscures the reforming visions that motivated activists like Florence Nankivell. What the reports reveal is the emergence of a tourist product that is a vision of public good: ‘There is always a danger that countries which are blessed with beautiful scenery and natural advantages will stay content with these features and make little effort to develop them.’60 Tourism is here conceived as part of a broader social mission. This mission was generative of obligations on visitor as well as host. A complex bond formed through commodity exchange. The treatment of cruise ship passengers is indicative of this. Cruise tourists were the wrong kind of visitors. They ‘were not much interested in the island itself. The object of their voyage was to have as much “fun” as possible and to visit the maximum number of places in the minimum time’.61 The Bureau’s recommendation was that government should focus the tourist industry away from cruise tourists towards long-term visitors. This is a transcendent moral act that distinguishes between legitimate and illegitimate forms of global mobility. Here the traveller in search of authenticity is a figure of virtue and the mass

Council Paper 89 of 1934, Tourist Inquiry Bureau, 2. Ibid. 60 Council Paper 60 of 1933, Tourist Inquiry Bureau, 6. 61 Ibid., 5. 58 59

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tourist in search of the frivolous is viewed as parasitic and undesirable. Economic and moral improvement are described as being inseparable; the traveller on a reflective journey of discovery is a worthy pilgrim; these are, as the Bureau’s report states, ‘the real Tourist Trade’.62 It is worth noting that the Tourist Trade is capitalized. This is an abstract noun, a thing, something named but intangible; it shapes, conceals and yet embodies social relations. The bureau’s few reports set out a moral mission. Tourism had to be made from authentic experiences and this meant brokering a relationship between the mobile visitor and those they encountered on arrival. This was a political project which presented a tension for the fledgling industry. As the committee witnessed, ‘With the advance of civilisation “Local colour”, always a great attraction to tourists, is disappearing.’63 The very mission of economic and social improvement removed the unique character of the colony. It was the preservation of this character and the imagination of a local place in a global empire, rather than commerce, that was the primary function of the Tourism Enquiry Bureau’s actions: ‘We should not allow Trinidad and Tobago to remain mere specks on the map, obscure islands of the West Indies, but should aim at making the Colony one of the best known in the British Empire.’64 Amidst the quest for visibility were hidden geopolitical entanglements. Even as the bureau promoted imperial identity, it also forged other links. Visible objects displayed new connections, marketing support came from the West India Committee in London, but the neon signs on the bureau service desk were from Pan American Airways.65 The company was the corporate vanguard of American foreign policy in the region; one British MP, James de Rothschild, even saw Pan Am as a sign of an American threat that could be compared to fascism in Europe.66 Making commodities possible blurs the boundaries between the private and the public realm and displays objects that symbolize the relationships which the Tourism Product renders unseen.67

Council Paper 60 of 1933, Tourism Inquiry Bureau, 6. Council Paper 89 of 1934, Tourist Inquiry Bureau, 3. 64 Ibid., 3. 65 Ibid. 66 Jason C. Parker, Brother’s Keeper: The United States, Race and Empire in the British Caribbean, 1937– 1962 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 59. 67 The relationship between autonomous companies, state policy and commodity production has a long history. Airline routes that link tourists to destinations also emphasize that commodity regimes subvert some state forms even as they advance other kinds of government. See James Ferguson, ‘Seeing Like an Oil Company: Space, Security and Global Capital in Neoliberal Africa’, American Anthropologist 107, no. 3 (2005): 377–82. 62 63

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The ad hoc nature of the bureau reflected the chaotic organization of both the region’s colonial governments and the official response to the nascent tourist industry. The documents crafted by Florence Nankivell hide a great deal of her broader public activism, but not entirely; there are moments of strategic ambiguity. This is best captured by the sense of wider mission that marked efforts at marketing by the public sector in relation to the concept of empire. It mirrors the confession before a parliamentary committee by the short-lived Empire Marketing Board that their campaigns had no metric of effectiveness.68 The Trinidad Tourism bureau collected data on visitor numbers and the sales of stamps and postcards, but these did not provide proof of efficacy. In describing the provision of public museums, clean streets, improved morals and thoughtful guests, one report concludes, ‘the value of such work cannot be gauged by the number of enquiries made and answered. Spectacular and visible results must not be immediately expected’.69 The absence of a metric of success roots the production of tourism in an act that is as much spiritual as materially economic. The results of a desire for virtue are to be felt rather than seen.

How the last man to have been a slave was buried in a guide book By 1953 Tobago had six hotels, four were purpose built and two were developed from former sugar estates. Three more estates were raising revenues by charging for beach access. Plantations were beginning to transform into resorts. Tobago’s primary local guide book, authored by Speyside hotelier and retired naval officer C. E. R. Alford, was in its fourth edition. The Introduction conjures an image of tropical authenticity: ‘You will not find a Taj Mahal Hotel or a Peliti’s or a Shepherd’s, nor will you find a Theatre or a Music Hall. Tobago is for those who love Peace and Beauty, and they can obtain it without having to run a barrage of gentlemen who wish to sell them carpets, knives, beads or elephants made in Birmingham.’70 The global mobility of objects is a challenge to the creation of an authentic tourist product which is predicated on legitimating local virtues.

For a review of the statistical failings of the Empire Marketing Board, see David M. Higgins and Brian D. Varian, ‘Britain’s Empire Marketing Board and the Failure of Soft Trade Policy, 1926–33’, European Review of Economic History 25, no. 4 (November 2021): 780–805. 69 Council Paper 60 of 1933, Tourist Inquiry Bureau, 5. 70 Alford, The Island of Tobago in the British West Indies, 73. 68

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This practice conceals, as a true commodity must, the global connections and movements that tourism necessarily depends upon. Alford’s faded guide book is filled with the adverts for hotels and tales of pirates. The history of slavery in Tobago and the pre-war regional upheavals are out of sight in the section on local history; even if one resort encouraged its guests to engage in amateur archaeology in the ruins of the old slave barracks, the reader will not find it listed in the attractions.71 If the riots in neighbouring Trinidad are rendered historically invisible, then one event from 1938 gets a two-page spread and a photograph. The photograph is of Panchoo Campbell. The text is his obituary. Campbell was not simply a well-known local character but also the last man in Tobago to have been a slave. This obituary has a lot to say about the historical positioning of early tourism entrepreneurs like Alford. The text of Campbell’s obituary recalls how he had been enslaved by a Portuguese raiding party in 1850, only to be freed by a British frigate and deposited first in St Helena and then relocated to Tobago. The obituary recounts how Campbell had witnessed the mechanization of sugar, the construction of the great waterwheel at Speyside estate in 1871, only to outlive the sugar works: ‘King Sugar died, but Panchoo lived on. He saw sugar change to rubber, and then to cocoa and coconuts.’72 This is not just a rewriting of the past that emphasizes the British Empire’s role in abolition while silencing the earlier history of slavery. What is also happening is that old, obviously physical commodities, some personified like King Sugar, are being symbolically laid to rest. Panchoo Campbell’s life story is one being mapped out in the failure of commodities to maintain their value, and hence their disappearance as commodities; morally condemned by association with a derelict past represented by the ‘rust-riddled’ Speyside estate water wheel. Public rituals relating to commodities have a long association in Caribbean commerce. Notable examples are Thomas Clarkson’s chest that unpacked the commodities, human and otherwise, of the African trade, or, as slavery ended, the Baptist ministers of Jamaica organizing the ritual burial service of the practice by entombing a coffin filled with chains.73 In this context the appearance This practice carried on well into the 2000s. The Arnos Vale Hotel and estate ruins have fallen into severe disrepair since then. The website is still up, though. Jeremy Jacoby, ‘Arnos Vale Water Wheel Restaurant Re-Open’. Arnos Vale Hotel. 26 November (2007). Available online: http://arnosvalehotel. blogspot.com/, accessed 16 September 2022. 72 Alford, The Island of Tobago in the British West Indies, 129. 73 For Clarkson’s literal unpacking of commodities to reveal slavery, see Jane Webster, ‘Collecting for the Cabinet of Freedom: The Parliamentary History of Thomas Clarkson’s Chest’, Slavery & Abolition 38, no. 1 (2017): 135–54. For the burial of slavery, see Brown, The Reaper’s Garden, 250. 71

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of Panchoo Campbell’s life story in a guide book takes on an uneasy symbolism. Campbell’s story is deployed as a means of demarcating the moral framing of the newly emerging tourist industry. It is an act of necromantic politics, using the dead to symbolically bury the past, while masking the inequalities of the then present. The guide book is an attempt to forge a moral image of communal coherence based on a ritual closing of the past.74 Here we see the architects and beneficiaries of the new industry publicly rendering their commodity untainted by the history of what had gone before. The hotels being advertised in the pages of the guide book do not, as they would in later years, stress colonial romance and plantation imagery. Not one calls itself a plantation. Arnos Vale stresses en-suite rooms and modern conveniences as later does the Castle Cove Beach Hotel, with its beauty salon and mix of American and Chinese cuisine; the Bluehaven stresses that it is ‘American Plan Only’, Bacolet Guest House has ‘current American magazines’.75 The tourist product was shaped with new temporal and geographical associations brought with American guests and their conceptions of modernity.76 The new commodity is here performed in ways that purposively bury the past: ‘Robinson Crusoe did very well on his own, but in these days it’s better to get the descriptive literature and free information service provided by The Trinidad and Tobago Tourist Board’, advises one advert.77 There is a certain irony to this statement. Successive visitors to Tobago had started a trend for claiming, or trying to disprove, the alleged connection between the island and the setting of Robinson Crusoe.78 It is a pure coincidence that Marx used the Crusoe story as a thought experiment to show that use value is distinct from commodity value and that individual labour is distinct from social production in a society of producers, consumers and commodity exchange.79 The objects which Marx’s Crusoe uses for survival are merely useful objects. Objects which are exchanged between free individuals are commodities. If one wishes to participate in such an exchange one had better visit the Tourist Board. The caveat remains that one may not be as free to see what they are choosing as one might imagine.

For moral community in another post-slavery society and rituals invoking the dead, see David Graeber, Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007). 75 Alford, The Island of Tobago in the British West Indies, 30, 26–28, 25. 76 Thompson, An Eye for The Tropics, 220. 77 Alford, The Island of Tobago in the British West Indies, 12. 78 For the origins of the connection between Daniel Defoe’s writing and the intellectual influence and context of early attempts to colonize Tobago, see Grove, Green Imperialism, 227–9. 79 Marx, Capital, 169–70. 74

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Panchoo Campbell was 115 when he died in December 1938. Beside him Alford consigned ‘the horrors of the past’, while he described the branded mark on Campbell’s chest. Although the guide book contained reassuring descriptions of mosquito eradication and the armaments of the police, the modernity being described was a far cry from the moral vision of imperial obligation that Florence Nankivell had written into the Tourism Enquiry Bureau reports of the early 1930s. Here the imagery of branded and aged flesh is uneasily sandwiched between advertorials for beach equipment, hotels and fast food. The new morality eschewed the past with an aesthetic welter of beauty salons, palmfringed beaches and Chinese food. As Alford writes of the rights and wrongs of sending those rescued from slavers to the West Indies, it is ‘much too long a subject to discuss here’.80 All these myriad objects, desires and people came together on the page, making a modern and untainted commodity, invisible but there for all to see. This is how the last man in Tobago to have been branded a slave was laid to rest in the ageing, cheap paper pages of the island’s first modern guide book. I do not want the reader to be appalled by Alford’s work. I want to conclude this last vignette by recalling my earlier warning. A judgement that imposes ethics is an act of erasure and not an act of analysis. Being inspired in this way simply makes Alford and Campbell into components of a perceptual fetish. How tourism as a practice works gets obscured by the desire to deploy tourism as a metonym in a wider moral performance. A reader feeling outraged has unpacked nothing and is still at the mercy of the unseen. It is more useful to think of the fetish before Marx and pivot reflexively to see that Alford’s actions might not be so different from those of later commentaries on imperialism.

How to see the invisible The preceding vignettes are not a history of tourism in the Caribbean. Instead of a history they are an explanation of how a commodity can be made out of the making of history itself. I have sought to show that the production of value that precedes the commodity is not necessarily as clear and linear as a supply chain diagram. The value of a landscape, experience or object is rooted in individually situated webs of desire and geographically and temporally interlinked practices of

Alford, The Island of Tobago in the British West Indies, 129.

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meaning. In this sense the commodity, like development, can be comprehended as practice rather than as a singular thing. Those who produce commodities and render them for exchange are as guided by complexities of ethical intention as consumers of commodities seeking to satisfy their own ethics of desire. The key is to avoid placing the moral visions of oneself ahead of the moral visions one encounters. This separates an encounter with morality and economy from an encounter with the concept of moral economy. The latter is a binary between formal and informal market rules; the former is an account of the practices that bring individuals to the market as both producers and consumers.81 The key emphasis here is on the individual.82 No matter how collective entanglements with the market may appear, generalities about motive can be hard to sustain and do not necessarily explain how the practice of morality shifts over time. The purpose of this is not ethical relativism; rather, it is to maintain an awareness of how the visibility of things and beliefs is the work of individuals through their social existence. When all that is solid melts into air, when all that is sacred is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his real relations with his kind, the problem is that everyone can see something different.83 We choose the ghosts we wish to encounter, yet are still sometimes shaped and haunted by the ones that we have chosen not to see. There is a precursor to the study of tourism in the Caribbean which reinforces the salience of historical awareness in interpreting the ethnographic present. That precursor is a dialogue regarding the legacy of New World plantation economies. In 1989 Michael Taussig launched a broadside review of two works and got an acerbic response from the authors Sydney Mintz and Eric Wolf. Taussig’s review

For a sharp delineation between classical and contemporary uses of the phrase moral economy, see James G. Carrier, ‘Moral Economy: What’s in a Name’, Anthropological Theory 18, no. 1 (2018): 22. 82 This is a conscious contradiction to the approach taken in ibid., 32. Carrier suggests that relationships and obligations are a superior focus of analysis to individuals. He opposes the open usage of the phrase moral economy as being redundant except in its original context. The problem is that this does not readily explain why people do not approach economic activity with uniform motives. Rather than being nebulous, the broad use of the phrase moral economy offers a means to reflect on how the practice of morality renders individuals economically visible. This is a sharp contradiction to the limited notion of moral economy Carrier finds in the works of E. P. Thompson or James Scott. That definition distinguishes between common moral expectations and purely neo-classical conceptions of market relations. A reflection on morality is an appreciation of how individuals can diverge from any supposed prescriptive sense of common expectation or conduct. Not everyone who is starving joins a bread riot, nor do those that do have uniform motives, even when they use the same idioms of expression. It is likewise no more accurate to say that those who observe marketing literature experience identical messages. 83 With apologies to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967 [1888]), 83. 81

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decried their rejection of a focus on the mystical aspects of commodity fetishism. Mintz and Wolf ’s sharp retort was that the relationship between producer and consumer is only one facet of the commodity. To understand how one gets to that point, the moment of exchange, the point where the visible vanishes, one has to have a sense of the temporal to arrive at an interpretative view. You cannot pivot without standing upon something first. Mintz and Wolf argued that the story of how a particular commodity emerges as an object of desire is a distinct and no less profitable approach than considering the practices that render a thing into a commodity. Describing a commodity is to describe the ways in which desires shape intentions and in turn lead to effects. Fetishism is not the product of random decisions but the result of a complex, geographically and temporally diffused web of social interactions driven by purposive desires and the ethics they embody. What tourism in the Caribbean reveals to us is a complex and globally grounded web of meanings, beliefs and practices that have led to the reshaping of landscapes and the subtle shaping of behaviours. This is an insight into the operation of morality as a practice as distinct from the morality of the observer; that is to say, ‘A moral anthropology has no moralising project’.84 Here is something that invests the meanings of labour, mobility and trade in ways we cannot visibly see. The tourism product is a theatre of virtue similar to the rituals of corporate public relations.85 What is produced is a virtuous experience that others may become players within. One can pay homage to dead landowners, fulfil the improving schemes of social reformers or help entrepreneurs clean away the traces of a failed past. None of these things require the receiver of the tourist product to know what they are actually getting. Each of the examples chosen in this chapter was picked to highlight how commodities are rooted in the ritual production of history. These were acts aimed at producing memorials, shaping futures or legitimating the present. In this sense commodities are essential products and, like the business of Essential Products, we see them only through the global movement of peoples, objects and ideas. This practice may be in relation to something invisible but, like a poltergeist, it has its effects as an exercise in power. Its architects move on beggars, charge entry to beaches, kill the wrong kind of birds to make way for Didier Fassin, ‘Introduction: Toward a Critical Moral Anthropology’, in A Companion to Moral Anthropology, ed. Didier Fassin (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 3. 85 Dinah Rajak, ‘Theatres of Virtue: Collaboration, Consensus and the Social Life of Corporate Social Responsibility’, in The Anthropology of Corporate Social Responsibility, ed. Catherine Dolan and Dinah Rajak (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2018), 44–45. 84

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those nobody can see and cleanse themselves by association with the dead, yet a singular commodity of tourism is never seen. The landscapes created by tourism in the Caribbean are not made by discourses of paradise which mask authorial intent and erase their subjects. These landscapes are part of a wider Gothic Americas, a place where invisible ocean spanning webs of desire wreak visible effects, some peculiar, some seemingly benign and others terrible.86 In a world of commodities, we are at the mercy of invisible things which we desire and locked in a gothic landscape of our own unequal making.

Brown, The Reaper’s Garden, 260.

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Conclusion The chains of empire: Some thoughts on commodity history as method Erika Rappaport

A visitor to the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, which opened in 1886, would have been unaware of the countless hours of toil that brought so many treasurers and people to London that year. Yet, that visitor could not have missed the spectacle’s larger message that the British Empire was a vast emporium in which one could and should taste, touch, smell and buy a huge variety of artistic and everyday ‘colonial’ commodities. While selling a global message, this show was not an international exhibition. Rather it was a material celebration of the British Empire, which organized things by British overseas possessions. If a visitor ventured into the Bengal Court, for example, he or she could admire the ‘celebrated Dacca Muslins’ and a half-scale copy of a window from an ‘ancient monastery in the town of Patna’. Then a short walk to the Courts of the Northwest Provinces and Oudh brought ‘artistic pottery, soapstone ornaments, copper, brass, silver, and lacquer ware, and some very beautiful carpets’ into view. The Burmah Court likewise awed spectators with an impressive carved teak screen, intricate silverware and ‘native-made laces and embroideries’. Likewise, the Hyderabad Court impressed sightseers with highly decorative arches crafted from blackened pewter, inlaid with gold, silver and copper, ‘curious lacquer-work bottles, vases, &c.’ and ‘dazzling gold embroideries’.1 The fact that Hyderabad was a princely state that was not incorporated into the Raj was a political nuance ignored by organizers and viewers alike. These were just a few of the myriad

Royal College of Surgeons in England, Colonial and Indian Exhibition: Official Guide (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1886), 15–17.

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displays, lectures and other commercialized entertainments the Colonial and Indian Exhibition offered to late-Victorian fairgoers. In 1886, exhibition planners categorized commodities as luxuries, necessities and useful goods – that is materials used for manufacturing. The Economic and Imperial Court, for example, displayed ‘a vast collection of useful products from India’ arranged into twelve categories: Foods, Beverages, Narcotics, Oils, Medicines, Gums, Dyes and Tans, Fibres, Skins and Leathers, Canes and Basket Work, Minerals and Ores, and Timbers. Tea, tobacco and silks were so important that they merited their own larger displays outside of the Economic Court.2 Even the catering facilities reinforced the association between places and commodities. One could order, for example, a simple ‘British’ meal of meat or fish, bread and potatoes for 6d in the National Training School of Cookery’s dining room, or sample wines from the Australian colonies and the Cape Colony at the Colonial Wine Bar.3 Colonized subjects were also commodified and categorized, with the violence of colonialism on show as well. One of the most disturbing examples of this process was a scene that ‘real’ colonized people performed in a replica village from northern India. In this scene white colonial violence was projected on to a Zaminder (local landlord), who while sitting on his verandah dispensed justice, which in this case meant he was watching over a ‘beating being administered to a culprit’.4 It is not clear whether fairgoers literally watched the beating, but they would have understood that nonwhite subjects had to be controlled by violence. A remarkable archive of imperial political economy, the Colonial and Indian Exhibition typified how in the late nineteenth-century imperialism and capitalism were enmeshed systems of power and money, entertainment and education, and pleasure and pain.5 Like all international exhibitions, it sold things, ideas and experiences, legitimizing an identity for the masses as that of  consumer.6 Intra-imperial rivalries, such as that between India and Ceylon, contributed to how goods were displayed. See Erika Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). On the importance of this exhibition, see 171–73. 3 Colonial and Indian Exhibition: Official Guide, 19. 4 Ibid., 20. 5 On imperial archives, see Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London and New York: Verso, 1993) and Antoinette Burton, ed., Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005). 6 The literature on exhibitions is very large. One early work is John Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), especially chapter four. An important key work that centres on imperial shows is Peter H. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Also see Jeffrey A. 2

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Walter Benjamin famously described these fairs as ‘training schools in which the masses, barred from consuming, learned empathy with exchange value. Look at everything; touch nothing’.7 Building on this insight, literary scholar Thomas Richards argued that the Great Exhibition of 1851 ‘prescribed the rituals by which consumers venerated the commodity for the rest of the century’.8 By 1886, during the most intense phase of the so-called Scramble for Africa, shopping was not only a legitimate pursuit; it had become a colonial practice.9 Exhibitions, museums, restaurants, theatres, large and small shops, and advertising produced knowledge about and desire for imperial things, places and people.10 Much popular culture in the late nineteenth century demonstrated the workings of commodity fetishism by obscuring the labour that produced commodities and empires.11 In truth, labour was not exactly hidden so much as turned into spectacle, often presented as a link at the beginning of a commodity chain.12 Imperial propaganda such as the Colonial and Indian Exhibition contributed to the use of the chain metaphor to exhibit capitalism as a European creation. Especially during the era of free trade, companies often represented Europeans as in control of commodity chains in their advertising and publications. Plantations, factories, ships, trains and other elements of a commodity’s journey from the point of production to that of consumption were stock elements in nineteenth-century advertising. While telling a global story, these abridged narratives implied stability and simplicity and divided people, activities and places by race, class and gender. During the nineteenth and early twentieth

Auerbach and Peter H. Hoffenberg, Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851 (London: Routledge, 2008). For a recent overview, see John McAleer and John M. Mackenzie, eds., Exhibiting the Empire: Cultures of Display and the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015). 7 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project. Trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1999), 201. 8 Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 17. 9 See, for example, Joanna de Groot, ‘Metropolitan Desires and Colonial Connections: Reflections on Consumption and Empire’, in At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, eds. Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 166–90. This transformation was contested; see Erika Rappaport, ‘Art, Commerce, or Empire? The Rebuilding of Regent Street, 1880–1927’, History Workshop Journal 53, no. 1 (2002): 94–117. 10 Other foundational texts on imperial propaganda include Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); John Mackenzie, ed. Imperialism and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986) and Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn, eds., Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). 11 Karl Marx, ‘The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof ’, in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, ed. Frederick Engels (1867; New York: The Modern Library, 1906), 81–96. 12 Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

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centuries, representations of commodity chains inevitably placed white men as producers in control of colonial economies, white women as irrational but necessary consumers, and colonized people only as labourers.13 Imperial ideologies were thereby built into modern understandings of global capitalism. The chain metaphor featured how things moved around the globe, but if used uncritically by scholars today this device can inadvertently reproduce a Eurocentric vision of the global economy.14 ­Across Colonial Lines: Commodities, Networks and Empire Building successfully upends the vision of global capitalism and empires that the Victorians bequeathed to us. Using a variety of perspectives and focused on different time periods, regions and commodities, this volume demonstrates the entangled history of commodities and empire in ways that question the static nature of categories. The volume challenges the stability of political borders, the nature of empires, and the definitions of things. It highlights how global exchange was always a social, political and cultural formation. Building on the understanding of commodity chains put forth by Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal and Zephyr Frank, Willem van Schendel argues in his chapter on indigo, commodity chains were not ‘smooth supply channels orchestrated by corporations’ and/or states. Rather they were ‘concrete social relations in which different actors struggle over power and take local decisions that affect the chain’s embedding, functioning and survival’.15 [p. 115]. Across Colonial Lines uses commodity history as a method to explore large-scale and intimate struggles over power, which produced empires and material exchange over the past 500 or more years. In exploring the history of commodities and empire, Across Colonial Lines looks anew at older and yet still very relevant topics. The authors ask, for example,

See for example, Piya Chatterjee, A Time for Tea: Women, Labor, and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001); Anandi Ramamurthy, Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British Advertising (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire. 14 Several scholars have avoided this trap. See William G. Clarence-Smith and Steven Topik, eds., The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia and Latin America: 1500–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr L. Frank, eds., From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Jonathan Curry-Machado, ed., Global Histories, Imperial Commodities, Local Interactions (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Sandip Hazareesingh and Harro Maat, eds., Local Subversions of Colonial Cultures: Commodities and Anti-Commodities in Global History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Also see the work associated with the Commodities of Empire research project. https://commoditiesofempire.org.uk 15 Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal and Zephyr Frank, ‘Commodity Chains in Theory and in Latin American History’, in From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000, eds. Steven Topik, Zephyr Frank and Carlos Marichal (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006).

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why and how did the desire for exotic, foreign and new things encourage European states and individuals to conquer vast territories in the early modern and modern periods.16 Did encountering new things and new wealth justify this quest for territory? What role did indigenous elites and masses play in shaping global capitalism? Did slavery and commodity trade finance European industrialization, and/or impoverish many areas of the Global South?17 How did European rivalries over markets, investments and access to raw materials contribute to the timing and nature of colonial empires? Was imperialism at the turn-of-the-twentieth century, as V. I. Lenin described it, the highest stage of capitalism?18 To answer these questions, this volume compares empires and commodities across time and distance, recognizes the centrality of imperial rivalries, and highlights the role of social networks and religious and ethnic diasporas in facilitating global trade and imperial formations. Merchants, planters and officials are important actors in this book, but so too are Akan traders, Angolan farmers, the wives of British seafarers and Indian indentured workers. Commodities here are not fixed things, or even ‘tangible goods of consumption’. As the editors propose in their introduction, ‘commodities invent and reinvent their own definitions and milieux and are far from static descriptive categories’. [pp. 3, 4]. By tracing things and people in motion and over time, we see how empires facilitated but did not contain all the people and activities that went into the growing, manufacturing, transportation, sales and commodification of things such as tea and coffee, gold, indigo, silk, spices, indentured labour and tourist spaces. In his chapter on the Venetian Republic’s maritime trade between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries, Andrew Blackler argues that ‘commodity trade was an essential defining feature of the Venetian empire and that the administrative and economic instruments developed to support and exploit this trade provided the foundations for the establishment of later colonial empires’. [pp. 31–32].

There is now a large literature on imperial commodities. Some of the most influential studies have been Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1985); Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane, Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014). 17 This older topic has been reimagined, especially aided by the availability of new digital tools such as the Legacies of British Slavery database, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/details/ 18 Vladimir I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917). Several new books have affirmed Lenin’s argument: Steven Press, Blood and Diamonds: Germany’s Imperial Ambitions in Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021) and Gregg Mitman, Empire of Rubber: Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia (New York and London: The New Press, 2021). 16

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Commodity trade in the Mediterranean basin led to the growth of concepts such as limited liability, insurance, banking and accounting, which were critical tools in the growth of capitalism and the expansion of European early modern empires. These institutions, Blackler shows, facilitated the flow of goods and assisted the control of disparate territories and populations. Edmond Smith’s study of the West African gold trade and the Portuguese empire in the sixteenth century initiates the volume’s theme of imperial rivalry. The emergence of the Dutch as a maritime trading power led the Portuguese crown to desire full political control over its overseas interests in West Africa. Yet rather than creating only a system of state monopoly, the crown allowed private individuals to trade in spices and other formerly contraband goods. Here we see monopoly and ‘free trade’ as overlapping and flexible systems. A similar interpretation of imperial political economy comes out in Jagjeet Lally’s chapter. Imperial rivalry is at the centre of this study of tea and networks of trade within the Eurasian continental interior. Rather than focus on the great struggle between China and Britain for control of maritime trade, Lally zooms in on how the Russian and Burmese empires competed to create alternative commodity chains and markets for tea. This chapter illustrates how local consumer markets and overland Eurasian trade remained important for centuries after the classic era of the silk road.19 At the same time, oceans and maritime trade cannot be downplayed. Richard Blakemore, for example, argues that oceans were sites of labour, the exchange of knowledge and marketplaces. Focusing on sailors, Blakemore shows how they ‘played multiple roles’ within large social networks. They were ‘suppliers, negotiators, consumers, and even trend-setters’. [p. 96]. Sailors’ female family members’ capital and ‘tastes and decisions’ also contributed to the shape and nature of long-distance commodity trade. Blackmore’s rich archive of family correspondence illustrates how social networks built around families and communities provided money, knowledge and motivations, while also serving as insurance against the physical and financial risks of long-distance trade. Willem van Schendel’s chapter on indigo focuses on the economic and political rivalries among the British, Dutch and French Empires in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, to explore how knowledge shaped For two new books that make that argument, see Jagjeet Lally, India and the Silk Road: The History of a Trading World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021); Manuel Perez-Garcia, Global History with Chinese Characteristics: Autocratic States along the Silk Road in the Decline of the Spanish and Qing Empires, 1680–1796 (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

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such contests and how imperial rivalries triggered political changes and ‘transimperial movements of people, ideas, resources and plants’. [p. 113]. Specifically, this chapter compares the knowledge systems that moulded local and global supply chains in a way that radically challenges the static and racialized image that the Colonial and Indian Exhibition sold to the Victorians. Van Schendel demonstrates how, as Christopher Bayly theorized, such rivalries were not merely European contests, but ‘colonial knowledge was based on shifting alliances between powerful local informants and Europeans struggling to makes sense of unfamiliar surroundings’.20 [p. 111] Historian Chris Bayly defined the era that van Schendel studies as the first phase of the birth of the modern global world.21 Historians have criticized this periodization but we do see in this and other chapters in the volume how the political, technological, social and intellectual, and consumer revolutions of this period intensified the growth of empires, capitalism and consumer cultures.22 Van Schendel acknowledges this backdrop but shifts from large-scale approach to see how local ecologies and peasant knowledge were critical to the success and failure of indigo production and export. Though he does not employ this framework explicitly, van Schendel demonstrates the comparative study of commodity frontiers. This approach examines how capitalism operates within, transforms and is transformed by rural societies. As a number of scholars have recently summarized, the commodity frontier is ‘not simply a place’. It is ‘a relational concept that grasps the flows of materials and energy between nature and society […] these flows connect regions of extraction with the sites of production that organize capitalist modernity on a world scale’.23 Purba Hossain’s work on Indian indentured labour in the sugar industry acknowledges that capitalism transformed the life of rural workers, but her study of female indentured plantation labour is a sobering story. She shows how in the wake of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in the 1830s, ‘free’ labour remained decidedly unfree. While we know how the system of indenture and other forms of forced labour grew after abolition, Hossain argues

Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 21 Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004). 22 For a comprehensive and comparative study of the forces of globalization in this era, see Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Trans. by Patrick Camiller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014). 23 Sven Beckert, Ulbe Bosma, Mindi Schneider and Eric Vanhaute, ‘Commodity Frontiers and Global Histories: The Tasks Ahead’, Journal of Global History 16, no. 3 (2021): 466–9. 20

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that the ideology of labour shortages that circulated within the imperial sugar industry created ‘a rubric for the ideal post-slavery plantation worker’. [p. 180]. Jelmer Vos’s chapter on consumption and the Angolan coffee economy and Lowell Woodcock’s final chapter on Caribbean tourism further complicate our understanding of how nonwhite workers were commodified as we move into the twentieth centuries. Even during an intense era of colonial domination, Vos argues that Angolan smallholders began to grow coffee for export to have the cash to consume foreign things. Consumerism was not frivolous activity, he points out, but rather it was a means by which Angolan smallholders gained social influence. The Portuguese colonial government helped Europeans by passing and enforcing land and tax laws and unfair labour contracts, but Vos shows how and why Angolan farmers and consumers gained power and new identities by buying and selling in the global marketplace.24 Thus, in a sense African farmers contributed to their own transformation into global consumers. This reveals African agency but ultimately it yoked Africans to a new kind of imperialism in which global business sought their pocketbooks as well as their labour. A similar dynamic emerged in postcolonial nations, as we see in the final chapter in Across Colonial Lines. After the collapse of European empires in the second half of the twentieth century, extractive forms of commodity exchange, consumerism and Orientalism shaped the political and cultural economies of new nations in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas. In the Caribbean, for example, white tourists sought ‘adventure’ and ‘romance’ in foreign tropical spaces, much as explorers and other colonizers had done before them. For the price of a hotel room, plane ticket and numerous drinks, tourists purchased a commodified experience. When they travelled to the Caribbean, for example, tourists expected to see West Indians that looked like those on show in exhibitions and other Orientalist texts. Woodcock demonstrates, however, that tourism in the Caribbean was not just an imperial legacy but rather it was an imperial industry. He shows how British colonial officials established a foreign-owned tourist industry as early as the 1930s. By the mid-1950s the tourist infrastructure was well established;

See, for example, Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Brenda Chalfin, Shea Butter Republic : State Power, Global Markets, and the Making of an Indigenous Commodity (New York: Routledge, 2004); Jean Allman, ed., Fashioning Africa: Power and Politics of Dress (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004); Bianca Murillo, Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2017).

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and it grew rapidly after independence from colonial rule. It promised but never delivered the freedom and development these new nations desired, however. Woodcock concludes his chapter by emphasizing how ‘the story of how a particular commodity emerges as an object of desire is a distinct and no less profitable approach than considering the practices that render a thing into a commodity’. [p. 222]. That is, empires manufactured commodities and consumers. Commodity histories are not then so much a topic of historical inquiry as a method to help us understand how the desire for things contributed to the growth and shape of empires and states. They also help us see how European men and institutions were never fully in control of this process. Of course, European racism left us with a world divided and with historical sources that have made it difficult to see how nonwhite people and white women produced and consumed tea, other foods and drugs, primary commodities, finished goods, and commodified entertainments and experiences. This volume thus represents some but not all of the new perspectives on the political economy of empires that seek to unearth how those living outside of North America and Europe shaped the circulation of things, ideas and capital in the modern world.25 Across Colonial Lines shows how capitalism and imperialism were violent processes that nevertheless did not always lead to the same outcomes. Commodities, people and ideologies regularly crossed regional, national and colonial boundaries, making and unmaking empires, environments and communities. The modern, materialistic and extractive culture that emerges in this volume led to wealth and poverty. It has been the foundation of global climate change and its uneven effects.26 It has also produced a global world in which we are all equally vulnerable to a deadly virus but have unequal access to vaccines and health care.

See, for example, Sherene Seikaly, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016); Fahad Ahmad Bishara, A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Tariq Omar Ali, A Local History of Global Capital: Jute & Peasant Life in the Bengal Delta (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); Andrew Liu, The Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020); Arunima Datta, Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021); Melissa Macauley, Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on China’s Maritime Frontier (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021). 26 Christopher Otter makes this point in Diet for a Large Planet: Industrial Britain, Food Systems, and World Ecology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). 25

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Aslanian, Sebouh. From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011. ­Auerbach, Jeffrey, and Peter H. Hoffenberg. Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851. London: Routledge, 2008. Austin, Gareth. ‘Mode of Production or Mode of Cultivation: Explaining the Failure of European Cocoa Planters in Competition with African Farmers in Colonial Ghana’. In Cocoa Pioneer Fronts since 1800: The Role of Smallholders, Planters and Merchants, edited by William Gervase Clarence-Smith, 154–75. London: MacMillan, 1996. Austin, Gareth. ‘Commercial Agriculture and the Ending of Slave-Trading and Slavery in West Africa’. In Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade and Slavery in Atlantic Africa, edited by Robin Law, Suzanne Schwarz and Silke Strickrodt, 243–65. Woodbridge: James Currey, 2013. Baillie, Britt, Afroditi Chatzoglou and Shadia Taha, ‘Packaging the Past: The Commodification of Heritage’. Heritage Management 3, no. 1 (2010): 51–71. Bair, Jennifer. Frontiers of Commodity Chain Research. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. Balfour-Paul, Jenny. Indigo. London: British Museum Press, 1998. Ball, Jeremy. Angola’s Colossal Lie: Forced Labor on a Sugar Plantation, 1913–1977. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Ballantyne, Tony. ‘Colonial Knowledge’. In The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives, edited by Sarah Stockwell, 177–97. Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008. Ballantyne, Tony. Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press, 2012. Barringer, Tim, and Tom Flynn, eds. Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Bayly, Christopher A. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Bayly, Christopher A. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons. Oxford; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. London: Vintage, 2014. Beckert, Sven. ‘Commodities’. In Princeton Companion to Atlantic History, edited by Joseph C. Miller, 116–19. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Beckert, Sven, Ulbe Bosma, et al. ‘Commodity Frontiers and Global Histories: The Tasks Ahead’. Journal of Global History 16, no. 3 (2021a): 466–9. Beckert, Sven, Ulbe Bosma, et al. ‘Commodity Frontiers and the Transformation of the Global Countryside: A Research Agenda’. Journal of Global History 16, no. 3 (2021b): 435–50. Beckford, George. Persistent Poverty: Underdevelopment in Plantation Economies of the Third World. Mona: University of the West Indies Press, [1972] 1999. Benjamin, Thomas. The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians and Their Shared History, 1400–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

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Benton, Lauren. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ­Berg, Maxine. ‘In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century’. Past & Present 182 (2004): 85–142. Berg, Maxine. Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Besson, Jean. Martha Brae’s Two Histories: European Expansion and Caribbean CultureBuilding in Jamaica. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Biedermann, Zoltán, Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, eds. Global Gifts: The Material Culture of Diplomacy in Early Modern Eurasia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Bigelow, Allison. ‘Incorporating Indigenous Knowledge into Extractive Economies: The Science of Colonial Silver’. The Extractive Industries and Society 3, no. 1 (2016): 117–23. Birmingham, David. ‘The Coffee Barons of Cazengo’. The Journal of African History 19, no. 4 (1978): 523–38. Birmingham, David. ‘A Question of Coffee: Black Enterprise in Angola’. Canadian Journal of African Studies 16, no. 2 (1982): 343–6. Bishara, Fahad Ahmad. A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Blackler, Andrew. ‘The Medieval Landscape of Euboea (Negroponte): A Framework for Interpreting the Byzantine and Frankish Towers of Greece’. PhD diss., University of Birmingham, 2020. Blakemore, Richard J. ‘Navigating Culture: Navigational Instruments as Cultural Artefacts, c. 1550–1650’. Journal for Maritime Research 14, no. 1 (2012): 31–44. Blakemore, Richard J. ‘The Politics of Piracy in the British Atlantic, c. 1640–1649’. International Journal of Maritime History 25, no. 2 (2013): 159–72. Blakemore, Richard J. ‘West Africa in the British Atlantic: Trade, Violence, and Empire in the 1640s’. Itinerario 39, no. 2 (2015a): 299–327. Blakemore, Richard J. ‘Orality and Mutiny: Authority and Speech amongst the Seafarers of Early Modern London’. In Spoken Word and Social Practice: Orality in Europe (1400–1700), edited by Thomas Cohen and Lesley Twomey, 253–79. Leiden: Brill, 2015b. Blakemore, Richard J. ‘Pieces of Eight, Pieces of Eight: Seamen’s Earnings and the Venture Economy of Early Modern Seafaring’. Economic History Review 70, no. 4 (2017): 1153–84. Blakemore, Richard J. ‘Law and the Sea’. In The Routledge Companion to Marine and Maritime Worlds, 1400–1800, edited by Claire Jowitt, Craig Lambert, and Steve Mentz, 388–425. London: Routledge, 2020. Blakemore, Richard J., and Elaine Murphy. The British Civil Wars at Sea, 1638–1653. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2018.

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­Crespo Solana, Ana. ‘A Network-Based Merchant Empire: Dutch Trade in the Hispanic Atlantic (1680–1740)’. In Dutch Atlantic Connections, 1680–1800: Linking Empires, Bridging Borders, edited by Gert Oostindie and Jessica V. Roitman, 139–58. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Croft, Pauline. ‘English Mariners Trading to Spain and Portugal, 1558–1625’. Mariner’s Mirror 69, no. 3 (1983): 251–66. Curry-Machado, Jonathan, ed. The Global and Local History of Commodities of Empire. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013a. Curry-Machado, Jonathan, ed. Global Histories, Imperial Commodities, Local Interactions. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013b. Curtin, Philip D. Cross-Cultural Trade in World History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Curtin, Philip D. The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Curtis, Kenneth. ‘Smaller Is Better: A Consensus of Peasants and Bureaucrats in Colonial Tanganyika’. In The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 1500–1989, edited by William Gervase Clarence-Smith and Steven Topik, 312–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. da Silva, Daniel B. Domingues, and David Eltis. ‘The Slave Trade to Pernambuco, 1561–1851’. In Extending the Frontiers: Essays on the New Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, edited by David Eltis and David Richardson, 95–129. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Daaku, Kwame Y ‘Aspects of Precolonial Akan Economy’. The International Journal of African Historical Studies 5, no. 2 (1972): 235–47. Darrac, Pierre-Paul, and Willem van Schendel. Global Blue: Indigo and Espionage in Colonial Bengal. Dhaka: University Press Limited, 2006. Datta, Arunima. Fleeting Agencies: A Social History of Indian Coolie Women in British Malaya. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Davis, Ralph. The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1972. de Groot, Joanna. ‘Metropolitan Desires and Colonial Connections: Reflections on Consumption and Empire’. In At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, edited by Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, 166–90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Dean, Warren. Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber: A Study in Environmental History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. DeCorse, Christopher. An Archaeology of Elmina: Africans and Europeans on the Gold Coast, 1400–1900. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2001. Eagle, Marc. ‘The Early Slave Trade to Spanish America: Caribbean Pathways, 1530–1580’. In The Spanish Caribbean and the Atlantic World in the Long Sixteenth Century, edited by Ida Altman and David Wheat, 139–62. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2019.

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­Eckert, Andreas. ‘Comparing Coffee Production in Cameroon and Tanganyika, c.1900–1960s: Land, Labor, and Politics’. In The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 1500–1989, edited by William Gervase Clarence-Smith and Steven Topik, 286–311. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Edney, Matthew H. Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Ellis, Markman, Richard Coulton, and Matthew Mauger. Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World. London: Reaktion Books, 2015. Elson, Robert E. Village Java under the Cultivation System 1830–1870. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994. Eltis, David. Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Eltis, David. ‘The Slave Trade and Commercial Agriculture in an African Context’. In Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade and Slavery in Atlantic Africa, edited by Robin Law, Suzanne Schwarz, and Silke Strickrodt, 28–53. Woodbridge: James Currey, 2013. Eltis, David. ‘Sugar and the Slave Trade in the Development of Atlantic Maritime Trade’. In The Sea in History: The Early Modern World, edited by Gérard Le Bouëdec and Christian Buchet, 275–85. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2017. Fasseur, Cornelis. The Politics of Colonial Exploitation: Java, the Dutch, and the Cultivation System. Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1992. Fauvelle, François-Xavier. The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Ferreira, Roquinaldo. ‘Agricultural Enterprise and Unfree Labour in NineteenthCentury Angola’. In Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade and Slavery in Atlantic Africa, edited by Robin Law, Suzanne Schwarz, and Silke Strickrodt, 225–42. Woodbridge: James Currey, 2013. Fisher, Michael H. ‘Working across the Seas: Indian Maritime Labourers in India, Britain, and in between, 1600–1857’. International Review of Social History 51, no. S14 (2006): 21–45. Font, Mauricio A. Coffee, Contention and Change in the Making of Modern Brazil. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1990. Fortini-Brown, Patricia. ‘The Venetian Loggia: Representation, Exchange, and Identity in Venice’s Colonial Empire’. In Viewing Greece: Cultural and Political Agency in the Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean, edited by Sharon E. J. Gerstel, 209–35. Turnhout: Brepols, 2016. Fury, Cheryl A. Tides in the Affairs of Men: The Social History of Elizabethan Seamen, 1580–1603. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. Fury, Cheryl A. ‘Seamen’s Wives and Widows’. In The Social History of English Seamen, 1485–1649, edited by Cheryl A. Fury, 254–75. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2012.

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­Fusaro, Maria, Bernard Allaire, Richard J. Blakemore and Tijl Vanneste, eds. Law, Labour, and Empire: Comparative Perspectives on Seafarers, c. 1500–1800. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Fusaro, Maria, Colin Heywood and Mohamed Salah-Omri, eds. Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Braudel’s Maritime Legacy. London: I.B. Tauris, 2010. Fusaro, Maria, Richard J. Blakemore and Benedetta Crivelli et al. ‘Entrepreneurs at Sea: Trading Practices, Legal Opportunities and Early Modern Globalization’. International Journal of Maritime History 28, no. 4 (2016): 774–86. Games, Alison. ‘“The Sanctuarye of Our Rebell Negroes”: The Atlantic Context of Local Resistance on Providence Island, 1630–41’. Slavery & Abolition 19, No. 3 (1998): 1–21. Gaspar, Joaquim Filipe Figueiredo Alves. ‘From the Portolan Chart of the Mediterranean to the Latitude Chart of the Atlantic: Cartometric Analysis and Modeling’. PhD diss., Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2010. Gereffi, Gary, and Miguel Korzeniewicz, eds. Commodity Chains and Global Capitalism. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1994. Gerritsen, Anne. ‘Domesticating Goods from Overseas: Global Material Culture in the Early Modern Netherlands’. Journal of Design History 29, no. 3 (2016a): 228–44. Gerritsen, Anne. ‘From Long-Distance Trade to the Global Lives of Things: Writing the History of Early Modern Trade and Material Culture’. Journal of Early Modern History 20, no. 6 (2016b): 526–44. Gerritsen, Anne. The City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Gerritsen, Anne, and Giorgio Riello. The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World. Abingdon: Routledge, 2015. Gerritsen, Anne, and Giorgio Riello, eds. Writing Material Culture History. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021. Gertwagen, Ruth. ‘The Contribution of Venice’s Colonies to Its Naval Warfare in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Fifteenth Century’. In Mediterraneo in Armi (Secc. Xv-Xviii), edited by Rossella Cancila, 113–73. Palermo: Quaderni di Mediterranea, 2007. Geschiere, P. L., and Wim van Binsbergen, eds. Commodification: Things, Agency, and Identities (The Social Life of Things Revisited). Berlin; Munster: Lit Verlag, 2005. Gomez, Michael. African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018. Graeber, David. Lost People: Magic and the Legacy of Slavery in Madagascar. Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007. Gragg, Larry. ‘“To Procure Negroes”: The English Slave Trade to Barbados, 1627–60’. Slavery & Abolition 16, no. 1 (1995): 65–84. Greif, Avner. ‘Institutions and International Trade: Lessons from the Commercial Revolution’. The American Economic Review 82, no. 2 (1992): 128–33.

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­Grove, Richard H. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism 1600–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Guhathakurta, Meghna, and Willem van Schendel, eds. The Bangladesh Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2013. Hair, P E. H., and James D. Alsop. English Seamen and Traders in Guinea, 1553–1565: The New Evidence of Their Wills. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Hernæs, Per. ‘A Danish Experiment in Commercial Agriculture on the Gold Coast’. In Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade and Slavery in Atlantic Africa, edited by Robin Law, Suzanne Schwarz, and Silke Strickrodt, 158–79. Woodbridge: James Currey, 2013. Harvey, Mark. ‘Slavery, Indenture and the Development of British Industrial Capitalism’. History Workshop Journal 88 (2019): 66–88. Heywood, Linda Marinda. Contested Power in Angola, 1840s to the Present. New York: University of Rochester Press, 2000. Higgins, David M. and Brian D. Varian. ‘Britain’s Empire Marketing Board and the Failure of Soft Trade Policy, 1926–33’. European Review of Economic History 25, no. 4 (November 2021): 780–805. Hoffenberg, Peter H. An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Hopkins, Antony G. ‘Innovation in a Colonial Context: African Origins of the Nigerian Cocoa-Farming Industry, 1880–1920’. In The Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of Africa and India, edited by Clive Dewey and Antony G. Hopkins, 83–96. London: The Athlone Press, 1978. Hubbard, Eleanor. ‘Sailors and the Early Modern British Empire: Labor, Nation, and Identity at Sea’. History Compass 14, no. 8 (2016): 348–58. Jackson, Richard P. ‘From Profit-Sailing to Wage-Sailing: Mediterranean OwnerCaptains and Their Crews during the Medieval Commercial Revolution’. Journal of European Economic History 18, no. 3 (1989): 605–28. Jacoby, David. ‘Silk Economics and Cross-Cultural Artistic Interaction: Byzantium, the Muslim World, and the Christian West’. Dumbarton Oaks Papers 58 (2004): 197–240. Jacoby, David. ‘Western Commercial and Colonial Expansion in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea in the Late Middle Ages’. In Rapporti mediterranei, pratiche documentarie, presenze veneziane: Le reti economiche e culturali (XIV– XVI sec.), venezia, 10–12 settembre 2015, edited by Gherardo Ortalli and Alessio Sopracasa. Venice: istituto veneto di scienze, 2017. James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins. London: Penguin, [1938] 2001. Kale, Madhavi. ‘Projecting Identities: Empire and Indentured Labor Migration from India to Trinidad and British Guiana, 1836–1885’. In Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora, edited by Peter van der Veer, 73–92. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.

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Kale, Madhavi. Fragments of Empire: Capital, Slavery, and Indian Indentured Labor Migration in the British Caribbean. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Kelly, John D. ‘“Coolie” as a Labour Commodity: Race, Sex, and European Dignity in Colonial Fiji’. The Journal of Peasant Studies 19, nos. 3–4 (1992): 246–67. Kling, Blair B. The Blue Mutiny: The Indigo Disturbances in Bengal, 1859–1862. Calcutta: Firma KLM Private Ltd., 1966. Klooster, Wim. ‘Anglo-Dutch Trade in the Seventeenth Century: An Atlantic Partnership?’. In Shaping the Stuart World, 1603–1714: The Atlantic Connection, edited by Allan I. Macinnes and Arthur H. Williamson, 261–82. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Knight, G. Roger. ‘The Blind Eye and the Strong Arm: The Colonial Archive and the Imbrication of Knowledge and Power in Mid-Nineteenth Century Java’. Asian Journal of Social Sciences 33, no. 3 (2005): 544–67. Kopytoff, Igor. ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’. In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–91. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Kull, Christian A., and Haripriya Rangan. ‘Acacia Exchanges: Wattles, Thorn Trees, and the Study of Plant Movements’. Geoforum 39, no. 3 (2008): 1258–72. Kumar, Prakash. Indigo Plantations and Science in Colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Kumar, Prakash. ‘Planters and Naturalists: Transnational Knowledge on Colonial Indigo Plantations in South Asia’. Modern Asian Studies 48, no. 3 (2014): 720–53. Kurlansky, Mark. Salt: A World History. New York: Vintage, 2003. Kwass, Michael. ‘Production and Export of Tobacco: The Development of Atlantic Maritime Commerce’. In The Sea in History: The Early Modern World, edited by Gérard Le Bouëdec and Christian Buchet, 298–307. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2017. Lally, Jagjeet. ‘Trial, Error and Economic Development in Colonial Punjab: The AgriHorticultural Society, the State and Sericulture Experiments, c. 1840–70’. The Indian Economic and Social History Review 52, no. 1 (2015): 1–27. Lally, Jagjeet. ‘Salt and Sovereignty in Colonial Burma’. The Historical Journal 64, no. 3 (2021a): 650–73. Lally, Jagjeet. India and the Silk Roads: The History of a Trading World. London: C. Hurst & Co., 2021b. Law, Robin ed. From Slave Trade to ‘Legitimate’ Commerce: The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Law, Robin, Suzanne Schwarz, and Silke Strickrodt eds. Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade and Slavery in Atlantic Africa. Woodbridge: James Currey, 2013. Lawson, Philip. The East India Company: A History. London: Longman, 1987. ­Lee, Chinyun. ‘From Kiachta to Vladivostok: Russian Merchants and the Tea Trade’. Region 3, no. 2 (2014): 195–218. Lee, Debbie, and Tim Fulford. ‘Virtual Empires’. Cultural Critique 44 (2000): 3–28.

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Lemire, Beverly. ‘“Men of the World”: British Mariners, Consumer Practice, and Material Culture in an Era of Global Trade, c. 1660–1800’. Journal of British Studies 54, no. 2 (2015): 288–319. Lemire, Beverly. ‘A Question of Trousers: Seafarers, Masculinity and Empire in the Shaping of British Male Dress, c. 1600–1800’. Cultural and Social History 13, no. 1 (2016): 1–22. Lemire, Beverly. Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures: The Material World Remade, c. 1500–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Linden, Marcel van der. ‘The “Globalization” of Labour and Working-Class History and Its Consequences’. In Global Labour History: A State of Art, edited by Jan Lucassen, 13–36. Oxford: P. Lang, 2006. Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. London: Verso, 2000. Liu, Andrew B. Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. Loades, David. ‘The Elizabethan Maritime Community, 1500–1650’. In The Social History of English Seamen, 1485–1649, edited by Cheryl A. Fury, 5–26. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2012. Lopez, Robert S. The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Lottum, Jelle van, Jan Lucassen and Lex Heerma van Voss. ‘Sailors, National and International Labour Markets and National Identity, 1600–1850’. In Shipping and Economic Growth, 1350–1850, edited by Richard W. Unger, 309–51. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Lucassen, Jan, and Richard W. Unger. ‘Shipping, Productivity and Economic Growth’. In Shipping and Economic Growth, 1350–1850, edited by Richard W. Unger, 3–44. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Luetchford, Peter. ‘Brokering Fair Trade: Relations between Coffee Cooperatives and Alternative Trade Organisations – A View from Costa Rica’. In Development Brokers and Translators: The Ethnography of Aid and Agencies, edited by David Lewis and David Mosse, 127–48. Bloomfield: Kumarian Press, 2006. Lutgendorf, Philip. ‘Making Tea in India: Chai, Capitalism, Culture’. Thesis Eleven 113, no. 1 (2012): 11–31. Lydon, Ghislaine. On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and CrossCultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ­Maat, Harro, and Sandip Hazareesingh, ed. Local Subversions of Colonial Cultures: Commodities and Anti-Commodities in Global History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

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Macauley, Melissa. Distant Shores: Colonial Encounters on China’s Maritime Frontier. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Mackenzie, John. Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Mackenzie, John, ed. Imperialism and Popular Culture. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986. Majeed, Javed. Colonialism and Knowledge in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019. Major, Andrea. ‘“Hill Coolies”: Indian Indentured Labour and the Colonial Imagination, 1836–38’. South Asian Studies 33, no. 1 (2017): 23–36. Manjapra, Kris. ‘Asian Plantation Histories at the Frontiers of Nation and Globalization’. Modern Asian Studies 52, no. 6 (2018a): 2137–58. Manjapra, Kris. ‘Plantation Dispossessions. The Global Travel of Agricultural Racial Capitalism’. In American Capitalism: New Histories, edited by Sven Beckert and Christine Desan, 361–87. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018b. Martin-Leake, Hugh. ‘An Historical Memoir of the Indigo Industry of Bihar’. Economic Botany 29, No. 4 (1975): 361–71. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Volume One. London: Penguin [1867] 1990. McAleer, John, and John M. Mackenzie, eds. Exhibiting the Empire: Cultures of Display and the British Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. McCook, Stuart. Coffee Is Not Forever: A Global History of the Coffee Leaf Rust. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2019. McCusker, John J. Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–1775. London: Macmillan, 1978. McGillivray, Gillian. Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class, and State Formation in Cuba, 1868–1959. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Metcalf, Thomas. Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Miller, Daniel. Capitalism: An Ethnographic Approach. New York: Berg, 1997. Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin Books, 1986. Misra, Maria. Business, Race, and Politics in British India c. 1850–1960. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Mitman, Gregg. Empire of Rubber: Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia. New York and London: The New Press, 2021. ­Moore, Jason W. ‘Sugar and the Expansion of the Early Modern World-Economy: Commodity Frontiers, Ecological Transformation, and Industrialization’. Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 23, no. 3 (2000): 409–33. Morris, Jonathan. Coffee: A Global History. London: Reaktion Books, 2018.

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Muldrew, Craig. The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 1998. Murillo, Bianca. Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2017. Myint-U, Thant. The Making of Modern Burma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Nadri, Ghulam A. The Political Economy of Indigo in India, 1580–1930: A Global Perspective. The Hague: Brill, 2016. Neal, Stan. Singapore, Chinese Migration and the Making of the British Empire, 1819–67. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2019. Newitt, Malyn Dudley Dunn. Portugal in Africa: The Last Hundred Years. London: C. Hurst & Co., 1981. Newitt, Malyn. ‘Formal and Informal Empire in the History of Portuguese Expansion’. Portuguese Studies 17, ‘Homage to Charles Boxer’ (2001): 1–21. Nixon, Angelique V. Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015. Northrup, David. Africa’s Discovery of Europe, 1450–1850, 3rd edn. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Norton, Marcy. Sacred Gifts, Profane, Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. Olukoju, Ayodeji. ‘Accumulation and Conspicuous Consumption: The Poverty of Entrepreneurship in Western Nigeria, ca. 1850–1930’. In Africa’s Development in Historical Perspective, edited by Emmanuel Akyeampong, Robert H. Bates, Nathan Nunn, and James A. Robinson, 208–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Palacios, Marco. Coffee in Colombia, 1850–1970: An Economic, Social and Political History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Palit, Chittabrata. Tensions in Bengal Rural Society: Landlords, Planters and Colonial Rule, 1830–1860. Calcutta: Progressive Publishers, 1975. Palma, Nuno, and Jaime Reis. ‘From Convergence to Divergence: Portuguese Economic Growth, 1527–1850’. Journal of Economic History 79, no. 2 (2019): 477–506. Palmer, Colin A. Eric Williams & the Making of the Modern Caribbean. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Paquette, Gabriel. ‘After Brazil: Portuguese Debates on Empire, c. 1820–1850’. Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 11, no. 2 (2010): 1–18. Paquette, Gabriel. Imperial Portugal in the Age of Revolutions: The Luso-Brazilian World, c. 1770–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ­Parker, Charles H. Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, 1400–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pastoureau, Michel. Blue: The History of a Color. Princeton; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000.

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Pendergrast, Mark. Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World. New York: Basic Books, 2010. Perez-Garcia, Manuel. Global History with Chinese Characteristics: Autocratic States along the Silk Road in the Decline of the Spanish and Qing Empires, 1680–1796. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Pluymers, Keith. ‘“Pirates” and the Problems of Plantation in Seventeenth-Century Ireland’. In Governing the Sea in the Early Modern Era, edited by Peter C. Mancall and Carole Shammas, 79–107. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2015. Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press, [1944] 2001. Polónia, Amélia. ‘Women’s Contributions to Family, Economy and Social Range of Maritime Communities in Sixteenth-Century Portugal’. Portuguese Studies Review 13, no. 1–2 (2005): 269–86. Pomeranz, Kenneth, and Steven Topik. The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present. New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2006. Press, Steven. Blood and Diamonds: Germany’s Imperial Ambitions in Africa. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. Raffield, Ben. ‘The Slave Markets of the Viking World: Comparative Perspectives on an “Invisible Archaeology’’’. Slavery & Abolition 40, no. 4 (2019): 682–705. Ramada Curto, Diogo, and Francisco Bethencourt, eds. Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Ramamurthy, Anandi. Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British Advertising. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Rao, Amiya, and B. G. Rao. The Blue Devil: Indigo and Colonial Bengal, with an English Translation of Neel Darpan by Dinabandhu Mitra. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992. Rappaport, Erika. ‘Art, Commerce, or Empire? The Rebuilding of Regent Street, 1880–1927’. History Workshop Journal 53, no. 1 (2002): 94–117. Rappaport, Erika. A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Rediker, Marcus. Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Reese, Ty M. ‘“Eating” Luxury: Fante Middlemen, British Goods, and Changing Dependencies on the Gold Coast, 1750–1821’. William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 4 (2009): 851–72. Reinert, Sophus, and Pernille Røge, eds. The Political Economy of Empire in the Early Modern World. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. ­Reinhardt, Anne. Navigating Semi-Colonialism: Shipping, Sovereignity, and Nation Building in China, 1860–1937. Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2018.

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Ribeiro da Silva, Filipa. ‘Crossing Empires: Portuguese, Sephardic, and Dutch Business Networks in the Atlantic Slave Trade’. The Americas 68, no. 1 (2011): 7–32. Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Richards, Thomas. The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. London; New York: Verso, 1993. Riello, Giorgio. Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Riello, Giorgio, and Prasannan Parthasarathi, eds. The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Riello, Giorgio, and Tirthankar Roy. How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Rinehart, Nicholas T. ‘The Man That Was a Thing: Reconsidering Human Commodification in Slavery’. Journal of Social History 50, no. 1 (2016): 28–50. Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Verso, [1973] 2018. Roger, Thomas D. The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Rönnbäck, Klas, and Dimitrios Theodoridis. ‘African Agricultural Productivity and the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Evidence from Senegambia in the Nineteenth Century’. Economic History Review 72, no. 1 (2019): 209–32. Roseberry, William, Lowell Gudmundson, and Mario Samper Kutschbach. Coffee, Society, and Power in Latin America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Ross, Corey. ‘The Plantation Paradigm: Colonial Agronomy, African Farmers, and the Global Cocoa Boom, 1870s–1940s’. Journal of Global History 9, no. 1 (2014): 49–71. Ross, Robert, Marja Hinfelaar, and Iva Peša, eds. The Objects of Life in Central Africa: The History of Consumption and Social Change, 1840–1980. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Rossum, Matthias van, Lex Heerma van Voss, Jelle van Lottum and Jan Lucassen. ‘National and International Labour Markets for Sailors in European, Atlantic and Asian Waters, 1600–1850’. In Maritime History as Global History, edited by Maria Fusaro and Amélia Polónia, 47–72. St John’s, Newfoundland: International Maritime History Association, 2010. Rothman, Natalie. ‘Between Venice and Istanbul: Trans-Imperial Subjects and Cultural Mediation in the Early Modern Mediterranean’. PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2006. Roy, Tirthankar. ‘Indigo and Law in Colonial India’. Economic History Review 64, no. S1 (2011): 60–75. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1979. ­Sampeck, Kathryn E. ‘An Archaeology of Indigo: Changes in Labor and Technology in the Izalcos Region of Western El Salvador’. In Technology and Tradition in Mesoamerica after the Spanish Invasion: Archaeological Perspectives, edited by Rani T. Alexander, 167–88. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019.

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249

Samper K., Mario. ‘The Historical Construction of Quality and Competitiveness: A Preliminary Discussion of Coffee Commodity Chains’. In The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 1500–1989, edited by William Gervase ClarenceSmith and Steven Topik, 120–53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Scammell, Geoffrey V. ‘“A Very Profitable and Advantageous Trade”: British Smuggling in the Iberian Americas circa 1500–1750’. In Seafaring, Sailors and Trade, 1450–1750: Studies in British and European Maritime and Imperial History, edited by Geoffrey V. Scammell, 135–72. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003a. Scammell, Geoffrey V. ‘The English Chartered Trading Companies and the Sea’. In Seafaring, Sailors and Trade, 1450–1750: Studies in British and European Maritime and Imperial History, edited by Geoffrey V. Scammell, 1–26. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003b. Scott, David. ‘Colonial Governmentality’. In Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality, and Life Politics, edited by Jonathan Xavier Inda, 25–49. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Sell, Zach. ‘Asian Indentured Labour in the Age of African American Emancipation’. International Labor and Working-Class History 91 (2017): 8–27. Sharma, Jayeeta. ‘British Science, Chinese Skill and Assam Tea: Making Empire’s Garden’. The Indian Economic and Social History Review 43, no. 4 (2006): 429–55. Sharpe, Pamela. ‘Gender at Sea: Women and the East India Company in SeventeenthCentury London’. In Women, Work and Wages in England, 1600–1850, edited by Penelope Lane, Neil Raven, and Keith D. M. Snell, 47–67. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2004. Shaw, Rosalind. Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and the Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. Sheller, Mimi. Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies. London: Routledge, 2003. Shepherd, Robert. ‘Commodification, Culture and Tourism’. Tourist Studies 2, no. 2 (2002): 183–201. Silva, Maria do Mar de Mello Gago da. ‘Robusta Empire: Coffee, Scientists and the Making of Colonial Angola (1998–1961)’. PhD diss., Universidade de Lisboa, 2018. Simmel, Georg. The Philosophy of Money. London: Routledge Classics, [1900] 2011. Singh, S. B. European Agency Houses in Bengal (1783–1833). Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1966. Slight, John. ‘British Colonial Knowledge and the Hajj in the Age of Empire’. In The Hajj and Europe in the Age of Empire, edited by Umar Ryad, 81–111. Leiden: Brill, 2017. ­Smith, Edmond J. ‘“Canaanising Madagascar”: Africa in English Imperial Imagination, 1635–1650’. Itinerario 39, no. 2 (2015): 277–98. Smith, Edmond J. ‘Commercial Culture in Contested Spaces’. In Merchant Cultures: A Global Approach to Spaces, Representations and Worlds of Trade, 1500–1800, edited by Francisco Bethencourt and Cátia Antunes, 70–90. Leiden: Brill, 2022.

250

­Selected Bibliograph

Solomidou-Ieronymidou, Marina. ‘The Medieval Sugar-Mills of Episkopi-Serayia and Kolossi and Sugar Production in Medieval Cyprus’. In The Origins of the Sugar Cane Industry and the Transmission of Ancient Greek and Medieval Arab Science and Technology from the Near East to Europe: Proceedings of the International Conference Athens 23 May 2015, edited by Konstantinos D. Politis, 129–46. Athens: National and Kapodistriako University of Athens, 2015. Soluri, John. Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2021. Stanard, Matthew G. ‘Post-1945 Colonial Historiography and the New Imperial History’. In The Colonial Past in History Textbooks: Historical and Social Psychological Perspectives, edited by Karel Van Nieuwenhuyse and Joaquim Pires Valentim, 13–30. Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing Inc., 2018. Stanziani, Alessandro. Sailors, Slaves, and Immigrants: Bondage in the Indian Ocean World, 1750–1914. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Steckley, George F. ‘Merchants and the Admiralty Court during the English Revolution’. American Journal of Legal History 22, no. 2 (1978): 137–75. Stern, Philip J. The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Stoler, Ann Laura. ‘On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty’. Public Culture 18, no. 1 (2006): 125–46. Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Strachan, Ian Gregory. Paradise and Plantation: Tourism and Culture in the Anglophone Caribbean. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2002. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, ed. Merchant Networks in the Early Modern World. Aldershot: Routledge, 1996. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500–1700: A Political and Economic History, 2nd edn. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2012. Talbot, John M. ‘Tropical Commodity Chains, Forward Integration Strategies and International Inequality: Coffee, Cocoa and Tea’. Review of International Political Economy 9, no. 4 (2002): 701–34. Taussig, Michael. The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Taylor, Frank Fonda. To Hell with Paradise: A History of the Jamaican Tourist Industry. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993. Thomas, Deborah A. Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. ­Thompson, Krista A. An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Thomson, Janice E. Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns: State-Building and Extraterritorial Violence in Early Modern Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.

­Selected Bibliograph

251

Topik, Steven C. ‘Coffee’. In The Second Conquest: Coffee, Henequen and Oil during the Latin American Export Boom, edited by Steven C. Topik and Alan Wells, 42–85. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1998. Topik, Steven C. ‘The Integration of the World Coffee Market’. In The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 1500–1989, edited by William Gervase Clarence-Smith and Steven Topik, 21–49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Topik, Steven C., and Allen Wells. ‘Commodity Chains in a Global Economy’. In A World Connecting, edited by Emily S. Rosenberg, 593–812. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012. Topik, Steven, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank, eds. From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, 1500–2000. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Tosh, John. ‘The Cash-Crop Revolution in Tropical Africa: An Agricultural Reappraisal’. African Affairs 79, no. 314 (1980): 79–94. Tracy, James D., ed. The Political Economy of Merchant Empires. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Tracy, James D., ed. The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Trentmann, Frank. Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First. London: Penguin, 2016. Trivellato, Francesca. The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Trivellato, Francesca, Leor Halevi, and Cátia Antunes, eds. Religion and Trade: CrossCultural Exchanges in World History, 1000–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Tully, John. ‘A Victorian Ecological Disaster: Imperialism, the Telegraph, and GuttaPercha’. Journal of World History 20, no. 4 (2009): 559–79. Van Dongen, Irene S. ‘Coffee Trade, Coffee Regions, and Coffee Ports in Angola’. Economic Geography 37, no. 4 (1961): 320–46. Van Melkebeke, Sven. ‘“Changing Grounds”: The Development of Coffee Production in the Lake Kivu Region (1918–1960/62)’. PhD diss., Universiteit Gent, 2017. Van Niel, Robert. Java’s Northeast Coast: A Study in Colonial Encroachment and Dominance. Leiden: CNWS Publications, 2005. Van Schendel, Willem. ‘The Asianization of Indigo: Rapid Change in a Global Trade around 1800’. In Linking Destinies: Trade, Towns and Kin in Asian History, edited by Peter Boomgaard, Dick Kooiman and Henk Schulte Nordholt, 29–49. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2008. Van Schendel, Willem. ‘Green Plants into Blue Cakes: Working for Wages in Colonial Bengal’s Indigo Industry’. In Working on Labor: Essays in Honor of Jan Lucassen, edited by Marcel van der Linden and Leo Lucassen, 47–73. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012.

252

­Selected Bibliograph

Van Schendel, Willem. ‘What Is Agrarian Labour? Contrasting Indigo Production in Colonial India and Indonesia’. International Review of Social History 60, no. 1 (2015): 1–23. Van Schendel, Willem. ‘Staying Embedded: The Rocky Existence of an Indigo Maker in Bengal’. In Embedding Agricultural Commodities: Using Historical Evidence, 1840s–1940s, edited by Willem van Schendel, 11–29. London and New York: Routledge, 2017. Van Schendel, Willem. A History of Bangladesh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Vogt, John. ‘Portuguese Gold Trade: An Account Ledger from Elmina, 1529–1531’. Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 14, no. 1 (1973): 93–103. Vries, Jan de. The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Walker, Martin. ‘America’s Virtual Empire’. World Policy Journal 19, no. 2 (2002): 13–20. Wanderley, Sergio, and Amon Barros. ‘Decoloniality, Geopolitics of Knowledge and Historic Turn: Towards a Latin American Agenda’. Management & Organizational History 14, no. 1 (2019): 79–97. Wilks, Ivor. ‘Wangara, Akan and Portuguese in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: I, The Matter of Bitu’. The Journal of African History 23, no. 3 (1982a): 333–49. Wilks, Ivor. ‘Wangara, Akan and Portuguese in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: II. The Struggle for Trade’. The Journal of African History 23, no. 4 (1982b): 463–72. Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1944.

Index abolition 11, 63, 159, 160, 162, 163, 179, 181, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 192, 197, 218, 231 accounting 14, 31, 97, 104, 213, 230 accumulation 56, 83, 159, 173, 176, 177 Adriatic 15 advertisement 9, 206, 219, 227 Aegean 13, 15, 16, 19 Africa 1, 13, 18, 33–53, 88, 103, 116, 147, 154, 155, 157–77, 181, 227, 232 African 11, 18, 39, 40, 41, 44, 47, 53, 62, 109, 157–77, 190, 218, 232 Angola 6, 7, 11, 44, 90, 157–77, 229, 232 Congo 161, 165, 167, 170 Costa da Mina 38, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52 Egypt 24, 39, 101 Gold Coast (Costa do Ouro) 38, 163 Luanda 42, 159 São Jorge da Mina 40, 42, 44, 45, 49 Senegal 5, 11, 113, 116, 117, 145–52, 153, 154 West Africa 5, 6, 9, 10, 33–53, 88, 95, 158, 230 agency 3, 7, 9, 38, 68, 83, 86, 90, 95, 101, 110, 152, 175, 199, 232 agent 2, 7, 16, 39, 57, 61, 75, 76, 82, 99 agriculture 28, 57, 71, 114–15, 116, 120, 137, 138, 163, 164, 166, 167, 174, 175, 202, 203, 204 Akan 8, 33–53, 229 Americas 1, 4, 33, 42, 43, 45, 87, 102, 114–20, 124, 131–3, 140, 154, 155, 157, 162–7, 172, 175, 209, 213, 216, 219, 223, 232, 233 Brazil 6, 37, 42, 43, 47, 48, 50, 51, 93, 99, 145, 158, 162, 163, 164 Cuba 164 Guatemala 114, 121, 132, 153 Latin America 1, 162, 175 North America 120, 124, 132, 162, 233 United States 27, 134, 153, 154, 161, 166, 204, 209

American Revolution (1776) 117, 131 Anglo-Afghan War, Second (1878–80) 61 Ashanti 34, 51 Asia 1, 5, 10, 29, 31, 33, 43, 45, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 75, 76, 77, 80, 114, 116, 117, 134, 154, 155, 157, 161, 163, 191, 232 Afghanistan 60, 61, 62, 72, 75, 76 Arab region 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 29, 30, 31, 32 Asia Minor 29, 31 Bay of Bengal 66 Bengal 5, 11, 55, 66, 72, 73, 111–55, 193, 196, 225 Bombay 62, 186 Bukhara 61, 62, 75 Calcutta 68, 74, 75, 78, 111–55, 179–98, 180 Central Asia 57, 60, 61, 62, 72, 75, 76, 77, 80 China 10, 27, 55–80, 122, 134, 135, 137, 154, 179, 190, 191, 219, 220, 230 Chittagong 119 Damascus 18 Delhi 57, 60 Dutch East Indies 210 Goa 42, 43 Hankow 59, 60 India 6, 10, 12, 37, 42, 48, 50, 51, 55–80, 81, 82, 88, 95, 107, 108, 111–56, 179–98, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, 231 Indonesia (Java) 5, 11, 62, 111–55, 161, 176 Iran 61, 75 Irrawaddy Valley 64, 65 Kabul 60, 62, 75, 78 Kangra 72–6 Kochi 42 Kumaon 75, 76 Levant 16 Malacca 42, 43

254

Index

Mandalay 65, 69 Mongolia 58, 59, 77 Nepal 61, 75 Ormuz 42 Palaung 66, 67, 68 Persian Gulf 34, 62 Puer 65, 66 Punjab 57, 62, 72–6 Rangoon 57, 67, 69 Sichuan 65 Singapore 135, 141 South Asia 10, 57, 117, 183, 191 Southeast Asia 77–8 Surat 107, 108 Tashkent 61, 62 Tibet 65, 75, 77, 117 Turkestan 61, 75, 77 Yunnan 64, 65, 73 Atlantic coast 38, 39, 40, 42, 44, 51 Atlantic Ocean 8, 29, 48, 50 Atlantic slave trade 182, 186, 203. See under slavery banking 14, 16, 100, 230 boat 124, 131, 133 border 10, 11, 24, 25, 28, 31, 35, 46, 57, 60, 61, 65, 77, 112, 154, 215, 228 botanic garden 121, 146, 148, 150 boundary 1, 2, 5, 6, 14, 25, 31, 34, 36, 37, 38, 51, 52, 53, 102, 109, 111, 233 broker 37, 44, 74, 85, 163 capital 58, 131, 132, 144, 159, 163, 164, 172, 176, 177, 230, 233 capitalism 10, 12, 56, 57, 68, 71, 72, 78, 79, 129, 175, 183, 188, 201, 203, 226, 227, 229, 230, 231, 233. See also global capitalism caravan 59, 62, 65, 76, 78 cargo 16–20, 60, 81–110 Caribbean 1, 6, 7, 9, 11–12, 87, 90, 91, 118, 119, 120, 124, 126, 133, 137, 154, 179, 197, 199–223, 232 Haiti 114, 119, 132, 145, 147, 153, 154 Jamaica 180, 181, 200, 214, 218 Little Tobago 210–12 Tobago 199, 204, 209, 211, 212, 213, 214, 217, 218, 219, 220

Trinidad 181, 199, 202, 209, 211, 212, 213, 214, 217, 218, 219 West Indies 118–20, 124, 180, 187, 188, 190, 193, 211, 216, 220, 232 cartography 7, 8, 13, 29, 113. See also map cash 92, 98, 129, 132, 137, 143–4, 153, 165, 171, 232 cash crop 11, 123, 144, 157–60, 164, 165, 168, 170–1, 175. See also crop caste 181, 184, 188, 189, 192, 198 circulation 1, 8, 79, 81, 85, 233 citizen 14, 15, 16, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 31 (compare subject) climate 73, 78, 122, 123, 127, 151, 152, 180, 181, 188, 190, 233 tropical 43, 114, 117, 119, 132n73, 137, 145, 146, 147, 181, 184, 188, 190, 217, 232 collaborator 10, 57, 69, 70, 79 colonialism 2, 26–7, 57, 111, 116, 153, 161–2, 188, 192, 226–7 colonization 9, 27, 42, 46–51, 65, 78, 202–4 colonized 1, 27, 30, 67–8, 111, 153 commodity cocoa 79, 174, 218 coffee 6, 7, 11, 137, 157–77, 179, 229, 232 arabica 157, 161, 162, 163, 164 robusta 157, 158, 160, 161, 164, 165, 166 cotton 6, 19, 47, 48, 64, 65, 72, 115, 124, 164, 171, 172, 179 glass 16, 19, 29, 30, 87 gold 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 33–53, 58, 88, 95, 99, 162, 163, 225, 229, 230 indigo 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 67n58, 72, 77, 79, 104, 107, 108, 111–55, 179, 228, 229, 230, 231 ivory 44, 46, 52, 88, 92, 93, 107, 162 metalware 6, 41, 42, 88, 225 opium 55, 66, 72, 73, 118 porcelain 46, 58, 88 precious stones 58, 113 rubber 79, 131n71, 179n1, 197, 218 silk 14, 16, 18, 19, 29, 30, 58, 87, 89, 115, 118, 226, 229 silver 33n1, 48, 52, 58, 163, 225

Index spice 6, 14, 16, 19, 21n26, 42, 45, 52, 88, 89, 97, 107, 229, 230 sugar 6, 8, 11, 12, 17, 19, 42, 47, 48, 62, 87, 89, 93, 95, 99, 118, 120, 124, 128n62, 131n71, 137, 164, 179, 180, 182, 183, 195, 197, 198, 210, 217, 218, 231–32 tea 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 55–80, 122n44, 132n73, 171, 179n1, 196, 226, 229, 230, 233 tobacco 87, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 97, 99, 102, 164, 179, 226 wood 16, 18, 19, 48 wool 19, 115 commodification 3, 4, 5, 6, 8–12, 57, 65, 67, 79, 80, 83, 84, 157, 180, 182–4, 185, 187, 197, 226, 229, 232, 233 commodity chain 7, 9, 11, 12, 33, 34, 35, 37, 40, 50, 57, 81–110, 115, 117, 137, 144, 148, 149, 150, 152, 154, 227, 228, 230 commodity fetish 201, 202n12, 203, 206n26 commodity fetishism 12, 201, 206, 209, 222, 227 commodity network 1–12, 37, 40, 45, 52, 197–8 conquest 27, 28n49, 33n1, 48, 60, 63, 64, 65, 69 Constantinople 15, 18, 20, 22, 24, 28n49, 29, 31 consumer 7, 9, 10, 11, 58, 73, 83, 84, 89, 95, 96, 99, 100, 113, 114, 115, 116, 131, 135, 158, 159, 160, 165, 171, 172, 174–5, 199, 202, 206, 211, 213, 219, 221, 222, 226, 228, 230, 231, 232–3 consumption 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 33, 55, 57, 58, 62, 63, 65, 66, 69, 70, 73, 78, 80, 86, 99, 109, 117, 152, 157–77, 182, 207, 227, 229, 232 contract 11, 16, 24, 36, 75–6, 83, 90, 97, 98, 99, 106, 132, 138, 166–70, 176, 179–98, 232 coolie 184, 186, 187, 188, 191, 192, 193, 196, 197, 198 credit 35, 96–101, 104

255

crop 37, 72, 120, 123, 129, 136, 137, 138, 143–4, 148, 158, 163, 164, 165, 167, 175, 176. See also cash crop crosscultural 35, 36, 37, 85, 86 imperial 5, 11, 179, 181 Crusade, Fourth 15 cultivation 55, 72, 73, 119, 120, 122, 135, 137, 138, 139, 143, 144, 148, 157, 158, 160, 161, 163, 165, 171, 174, 176 cultivator 61, 73–4, 115, 116, 123, 124, 129, 130, 133, 138, 143–4, 148, 153, 154. See also farmer; peasant currency 33, 35, 52, 65, 132, 159, 172 debt 96–101, 129, 213 development 6, 161, 176, 199, 200, 204, 208–9, 215, 233 dye 11, 19, 30, 41, 88, 104, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 120, 122, 123, 124–8, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139–42, 146–7, 150, 152, 153, 155, 226 East India Company, Dutch (VOC) 98, 134 English (British) 88, 102, 107, 117, 118, 119, 121, 124, 131, 132 ecology 2, 71, 122, 123n48, 138, 150, 205, 231. See also environment elite 21, 29, 38, 82, 112, 144, 153, 159, 192, 204, 205, 212, 214, 229 Empire, British 6, 8, 10, 26, 55, 57, 58, 62, 67, 80, 87, 102, 160, 179, 181, 184, 185, 198, 204, 209, 210, 213, 216, 218, 225, 231, 232 Burmese 230 Byzantine 20, 21, 22, 25, 30 Dutch 161 French 146, 147, 151n153, 154, 181, 230 Portuguese 5, 29, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 40, 42, 43, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 52, 91, 103, 160, 161, 163, 164, 230, 232 Russian 10, 59, 80

256

Index

Spanish 29 Venetian 5, 8, 14, 16, 23, 26, 30, 31, 32, 87, 229 empire building 1–12, 33, 36, 45, 53, 228 entrepreneur 59, 60, 71, 75, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 143, 144, 145, 146, 148, 151, 153, 154, 160, 162, 164, 169, 170–4, 175, 176, 177, 218 environment 2, 51, 112, 138, 184. See also ecology ethnography 9, 113, 181, 201–6, 210–15, 221 Eurasia 5, 55–80, 154, 230 Europe 1, 2, 5, 11, 18, 19, 27, 29, 30, 34, 36, 37, 38, 39, 44, 45, 46, 47, 51, 52, 57, 63, 64, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 78, 79, 82, 87, 88, 89, 95, 111–18, 120–7, 131–9, 145, 147, 148, 150–5, 157, 159, 160–70, 173, 175, 176, 182, 184, 188, 194, 196, 198, 201, 209, 216, 227, 230–3 Amsterdam 96, 99, 101, 104, 134 Britain 10, 56, 57, 60, 61, 87, 112, 132, 133, 146, 181, 182, 185, 193, 198, 213, 214, 230 Crete 15, 16, 17, 18, 101 Euboea 13, 31 France 5, 11, 16, 29, 44, 46, 77, 88, 112–19, 122–6, 131–55, 170, 180, 181, 214, 230 Genoa 13, 15, 32, 79, 95 Germany 60, 117, 134, 179, 190 Greece 13, 15, 23, 27, 113 Italy 13–19, 25, 30–2, 117, 134 Kiakhta 59, 60, 61, 76 Lisbon 37, 95, 97 Moscow 59, 61 Negroponte 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 24 Netherlands 106, 113, 163, 166 Nizhnii Novgorod 59, 60 Paris 146, 150, 151 Peloponnese 16 Pisa 13 Portugal 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, 27, 29, 33–52, 91, 95, 97, 103, 145, 154, 157–78, 162, 164, 166, 167, 168, 218, 230, 232

Rotterdam 91, 95, 100 Russia 10, 56–62, 75–7, 80, 230 Venice 5, 8, 10, 39, 87, 95, 101, 102, 103, 110, 113, 132, 229 exchange 4, 5, 6, 11, 31–52, 58–65, 79–87, 91, 95, 162, 175, 179, 182–3, 187, 198, 201–19, 228, 230, 232 exhibition 225, 226, 227, 231 Colonial and Indian Exhibition (1886) 225, 226, 227, 231 Great Exhibition (1881) 227 export 13, 17, 18, 40, 56, 63, 113, 117, 118, 131, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 145, 146, 154, 158, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 169, 172, 173, 175, 177, 205, 231, 232 (compare import) factory 7, 45, 46, 59, 69, 74, 86, 115, 116, 118, 119, 121, 124, 126, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 144, 147, 149, 150, 151, 153, 227 farmer 11, 157–77, 229, 232. See also cultivator; peasant food cheese 18, 19, 88, 99 currant 87, 96, 103 fish 19, 92, 96, 173, 226 fruit 87, 88, 173, 211 meat 99, 150, 171, 173, 226 oil 6, 19, 67, 79, 87, 92, 99, 163, 205, 212, 214 rice 87, 129, 137, 173, 198 salt 17, 19, 47, 195, 198 wine 17, 18n14, 19, 42, 87, 106, 226 foreman 131, 139 forest 18n15, 34, 39, 73, 119, 130, 160, 164, 165, 167, 191, 195 Foucault 14, 23, 30–2. See also governmentality free trade 25, 227, 230 freight 81–110 frontier 6, 26, 59, 60, 62, 75, 76, 77, 80, 231 gender 11, 100, 101, 109, 172, 183, 193–7, 214, 227, 228, 230, 231, 233 wife 100, 109, 159, 172, 194, 229

Index gift 2, 4, 35n7, 174, 210, 211 global, capital 58 capitalism 162, 228, 229 history 2, 3, 6, 36, 80 market 56, 71, 232. See also market globalization 2, 6, 10, 11, 38, 52, 63, 78, 116, 212 governmentality 14, 21, 23, 30–2. See also Foucault health 29, 138n98, 140, 190 healthcare 29, 233 quarantine 29, 78 ideology 9, 12, 71, 113, 160, 190, 191, 192, 197, 204, 214, 228, 232, 233 imperialism 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 27n41, 30, 37, 55, 62, 63, 68n62, 123n48, 163, 164, 180, 226, 229, 232, 233 import 18n15, 44, 55, 56, 58, 59, 63, 68, 73, 75, 76, 114, 123, 126, 133n80, 134n80, 139, 145, 146, 147, 155, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 166, 171, 172, 173, 175, 199 (compare export) income 21, 47, 97, 109, 168, 171, 173–4, 213 indenture 6, 9, 11, 71, 74, 148, 179–98, 202, 229, 231. See under labour Indian Ocean 6, 8, 11, 42, 43, 50, 68, 77, 82, 88, 146, 179, 197 indigenous 7, 10, 11, 20, 56, 57, 69, 79, 89, 112, 116, 123, 128, 130, 148, 150, 153, 158, 161, 166, 169, 229 industrialization 68n62, 162, 229 industry 7, 11, 16, 30, 70, 74, 91, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 121, 122, 123, 124, 134, 138, 145, 146, 150, 151, 152, 182, 203, 205, 211, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 219, 231, 232 insurance 14, 16, 21, 31, 131, 144, 230 inter-imperial 5, 37, 96, 99, 101, 103 intra-imperial 2, 6, 65, 152, 226 invest 27, 90, 91, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99, 105, 109, 120, 131, 132, 133, 136, 152, 159, 164, 167, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 179, 210, 229

257

islands Cyprus 16, 26n39, 214 Fiji 181, 183–4 Madagascar 88, 163 Mauritius 134, 180, 181, 186, 187, 189, 195 Réunion (Bourbon) 118, 124, 146, 163, 181 see under Caribbean Kachin 64, 66, 68 knowledge, colonial 3, 7, 58, 69, 111–13, 128, 131, 146n126, 153, 154, 231 indigenous 7, 11, 111–55 local 7–8, 11, 48, 111–55, 231 labour 2, 6, 8, 9–10, 11, 24n33, 55, 56, 58, 68, 71, 73, 74, 82, 83, 85, 89, 114, 119, 120, 129, 130, 131, 137, 138, 142, 143, 149, 152, 160, 162, 163, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 173, 174, 176, 179–98, 201, 214, 219, 222, 227, 230, 231, 232 free labour 11, 148, 149, 168, 170, 183, 184–7, 231 indentured labour 6, 8, 11, 68, 148, 179–98, 229, 231 labourer 73, 74, 83, 85, 89, 90, 95, 101, 128, 130, 133, 137, 139, 148, 149, 150, 153, 154, 179–98, 228 maritime labour 9, 109, 181n7 seafaring labour 82, 90 slave (enslaved) labour 12, 43, 45, 116, 119, 120, 165, 179, 181, 183, 184, 190, 198 unfree labour 168, 182, 184–7 see also indenture see under slavery lançados 44, 51 landlord 120, 129, 130, 143, 153, 226 legal 10, 24, 25, 55, 84, 86, 94, 95, 102, 105, 106, 107, 131, 170, 185, 189, 198, 211 court 7, 27, 84, 87, 88, 94, 100, 102, 104, 106, 159, 187 law 24, 31, 86, 105, 184 lawsuit 91, 106, 108 littoral 13, 15 luxury 3n8, 16, 33, 109, 159–60, 199, 226

258

Index

manager 122n41, 128, 130, 131, 133, 137, 143, 145, 147, 153, 154 manual 124–6, 133, 139, 140, 142, 146, 150, 153, 154 map 9, 20, 26, 29, 212, 215. See also cartography mariner 28, 83–109 maritime 13–30, 38, 43, 48, 58, 60, 62–3, 66, 81–110, 229–30 (compare terrestrial) market 7, 11, 14, 18, 20, 21, 44, 46, 56, 59, 60, 62, 67, 70, 74, 75, 79, 85, 95, 107, 117, 131, 133, 134, 145, 148, 150, 158, 162, 183, 221 free market 14 see also global market Marxism 4, 27, 182, 201–2, 219–20 material culture 3, 57, 63–7, 80, 81, 82, 84, 88, 171, 175, 227 mechanization 142, 174, 218 Mediterranean 13–32, 82, 83, 87, 95–7, 101, 105, 230 mercenary 102, 131, 133 merchant 4, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13–32, 33–51, 55–65, 72–8, 81–110, 118, 131–4, 149, 162–6, 180, 182, 185–6, 188, 193, 198. See also trader migrant 22–3, 82–3, 89–90, 130, 148, 163–70, 179–98. migration 73–4, 78–80, 167–9, 179–98. modernity 36, 56, 68, 70–2, 171, 202–3, 209, 219–20, 231 monopoly 6, 17, 21, 46, 47, 52, 55, 82, 107, 108, 132, 230 navigation 13, 43, 94. See also cartography; shipping New World 13, 154, 221 Opium War (1839–42) 58, 59, 78 Ottoman 8, 13, 15, 26, 27, 82, 87 pamphlet 196, 215 parliament 179, 186, 189, 193, 198, 217, 218 peasant 21, 118, 122, 128, 130, 133, 137, 143, 152, 153, 154, 169–76, 231, 233. See also farmer; cultivator periphery 5, 21, 31, 65, 69, 175

piracy 21, 82–9, 102–3, 218 plague 15, 22–3, 78 Plague 1347–8 (Black Death) 29 plantation 2, 7, 10, 11, 12, 42–3, 47, 55–8, 64–73, 79, 115–53, 161, 164–70, 173–6, 179–98, 202–22, 227–8, 231–2. planter 6, 70–6, 117–33, 160, 162–70, 179–98, 210, 229. policy 118, 137, 146, 152, 166, 170, 177, 184, 200, 212, 216, 247 political economy 1, 2, 4, 6, 9, 11, 12, 35, 51, 71, 116–17, 132–3, 159, 175, 177, 226–7, 230, 233 port 7, 16, 53, 58, 59, 62, 95, 105, 106, 115, 144, 171, 180, 203, 207–8 poverty 161, 169, 175–7, 204, 233 power 6, 7, 11, 15, 16, 24–7, 34, 51, 58, 69, 143, 182–5, 200–2, 210, 226, 228, 230 price 41, 44, 45, 61, 76, 91, 98, 158, 160, 161, 165, 167, 171, 173, 174, 183, 204, 232 privateering 82–4, 102–3 production 1–11, 17–20, 30, 33–5, 38, 47, 52–3, 56–80, 83, 89, 112–55, 157–77, 179–98, 199–224, 225–31 profit 14, 21, 27, 56, 59, 70, 76, 89, 91, 95, 97, 99, 103, 121, 122, 137, 144, 147 punishment 50, 148, 183–4 Qing 55, 65–6, 77 race 8, 11, 22, 30, 57, 68, 71, 73, 78–9, 154, 170, 181–98, 204, 208, 227, 233 religion 18, 22, 28, 36, 37, 50, 189, 196, 201, 203–4, 229 Renaissance 28, 30 resistance 8, 89, 153, 163, 191, 205 revenue 65, 70–1, 119–20, 143, 170–1. See also tax rights 15, 22–3, 27, 73, 77, 97, 107, 120, 143, 185, 192 rivalry 57, 58, 60, 63, 77, 80, 113, 226n2, 229, 230, 231 ruler 34, 35, 46, 50, 52, 86, 111, 112, 114, 153, 154, 166 Caramança 39, 40 Sawbwa 69, 70, 71, 72 rural 120–44, 161, 175, 231. See also village

Index sailor 7, 8, 11, 81–110, 230 seafarer 6, 8–11, 81–110 seasonal 121, 130, 148, 191 seed 60, 73, 115, 121, 123, 138–9, 147, 150, 153, 154 servant 129, 179, 180, 181, 187, 194 settler 27, 60, 160, 161, 163, 166–70, 176, 194 Shan 63, 64, 66, 68, 69, 71 shipping 8, 11, 13–32, 41, 44, 45, 46, 59, 60, 81–110, 115, 127, 131, 132, 133, 135, 145, 150, 159, 163, 183, 207, 208, 215, 217, 227 cabotage 13, 20n23, 30 Encanto system 20, 21, 25, 31 shipmaster 88, 91, 94, 97, 101 slave ship 159, 163. See also slavery tramping 16, 21n26 Silk Road 61, 76, 130 slavery 6, 9, 12, 18, 19, 32, 37, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 52, 63, 68, 71, 82, 83, 89, 90, 91, 93, 109, 116, 119, 120, 137, 147, 148, 149, 179–98, 202–20, 229, 231, 232 enslaved 42, 44, 52, 89, 90, 91, 93, 109, 119, 159, 163, 165, 167, 182, 218 slave trade 6, 18, 42, 44, 63, 89, 148, 157–64, 182, 185, 186, 203 see under labour smallholder 120, 122, 129, 133, 138, 139, 143, 157–9, 160–76, 232 Stato da Mar 13, 15–16, 22–8 subaltern 7, 8, 79, 195 subject 7, 14, 21, 22, 23, 37, 69, 77, 81, 106, 159, 185, 197, 226 (compare citizen) subversion 3, 79 Suez Canal 59 tax 21–4, 70, 72, 75–6, 120, 143, 148, 168, 170–1, 232. See also revenue tariff 61, 75–6, 131, 144, 152, 163

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tea garden 10, 57, 58, 60, 68, 71–4 technology 9, 13, 32, 51, 56, 62, 70, 79, 142, 231 terrestrial 58–62, 72 (compare maritime) textile 41, 88, 107, 115, 159, 171–2, 173 calico 107, 108 fabric 6, 18, 42 woollen 99, 107 tourism 4, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 199–223, 229, 232 trade union 204, 214 trader 34, 39, 41, 42, 44, 46, 47, 49, 51, 59, 64, 81–110, 115, 123, 131, 132, 144, 145, 165, 229. See also merchant trans– Atlantic 89, 90, 159, 160, 162, 164 continental 42, 52 Eurasian 58, 60, 61, 62, 72, 80 frontier 58–9 imperial 5, 35, 37, 38, 44, 63, 80, 85, 113, 152, 153, 231 Saharan 41, 62 treaty 15, 20, 25, 59 urban 4, 29, 122, 174–5 village 40, 50, 137, 140, 143, 144, 168, 170, 176, 226. See also rural violence 50, 55–6, 102–4, 109, 131, 133, 193, 197, 204, 207, 226 Wa 64 wage 11, 41, 48, 83–4, 91–110, 130, 137, 149, 167–70, 179–94 warehouse 16, 24, 108, 131, 144–5 wealth 14, 95, 135, 161, 171–3, 176, 229, 233 World System 36, 41 World War, First 160, 165 World War, Second 158, 161, 166, 167, 168, 171

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