Indian Cotton Textiles in West Africa: African Agency, Consumer Demand and the Making of the Global Economy, 1750–1850 [1st ed.] 978-3-030-18674-6;978-3-030-18675-3

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xviii
Introduction (Kazuo Kobayashi)....Pages 1-27
West African Seaborne Trade, 1750–1850: The Transition from the Transatlantic Slave Trade to ‘Legitimate’ Commerce (Kazuo Kobayashi)....Pages 29-80
Guinées in the Lower Senegal River: A Consumer-Led Trade in the Early Nineteenth Century (Kazuo Kobayashi)....Pages 81-125
Procurement of Indian Textiles for West Africa, 1750–1850 (Kazuo Kobayashi)....Pages 127-164
Western European Merchants and West Africa, 1750–1850: Continuity and Change (Kazuo Kobayashi)....Pages 165-194
Conclusion (Kazuo Kobayashi)....Pages 195-209
Back Matter ....Pages 211-256

Citation preview

MIGRATION, DIASPORAS AND CITIZENSHIP

Indian Cotton Textiles in West Africa African Agency, Consumer Demand and the Making of the Global Economy, 1750–1850 Kazuo Kobayashi

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series Series Editors Richard Drayton Department of History King’s College London London, UK Saul Dubow Magdalene College University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK

The Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series is a collection of studies on empires in world history and on the societies and cultures which emerged from colonialism. It includes both transnational, comparative and connective studies, and studies which address where particular regions or nations participate in global phenomena. While in the past the series focused on the British Empire and Commonwealth, in its current incarnation there is no imperial system, period of human history or part of the world which lies outside of its compass. While we particularly welcome the first monographs of young researchers, we also seek major studies by more senior scholars, and welcome collections of essays with a strong thematic focus. The series includes work on politics, economics, culture, literature, science, art, medicine, and war. Our aim is to collect the most exciting new scholarship on world history with an imperial theme. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/13937

Kazuo Kobayashi

Indian Cotton Textiles in West Africa African Agency, Consumer Demand and the Making of the Global Economy, 1750–1850

Kazuo Kobayashi Faculty of Political Science and Economics Waseda University Tokyo, Japan

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ISBN 978-3-030-18674-6 ISBN 978-3-030-18675-3  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18675-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Rapp Halour/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book evolved from my Ph.D. thesis submitted to the London School of Economics and Political Science. Parts of the original thesis have been substantially revised and new discussion added to the narrative text. First and foremost, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to my supervisors, Tirthankar Roy and Leigh Gardner. Their learned guidance and encouragement have enabled me to fulfil my aim of completing this project. Janet Hunter and Alejandra Irigoin also made useful comments on my Ph.D. project at the early stages. I am enormously grateful to my thesis examiners, Gareth Austin and Toby Green, for their valuable input and suggestion in enhancing the quality of my research work. In the context of south-south economic history, I mainly focus on early modern economic connections between South Asian textiles on the one hand and consumers in Africa south of the Sahara on the other hand. The idea originated while I was studying in Japan, where the initial development took place. For this, I am deeply indebted to Ichiro Maekawa of Soka University, and Shigeru Akita and Takao Fujikawa of Osaka University. Richard Drayton provided me with rich insights into the study of history when I was a visiting doctoral student at King’s College London between 2010 and 2011. Early versions of this were presented at seminars, workshops and conferences held in Frankfurt (Oder), Heidelberg, Kolkata, Kyoto, London, Montreal, Nottingham, Osaka, Pittsburgh, Seoul, Tokyo and Warwick. I wish to thank all the organiser hosts and participants for giving me opportunities to present my papers. Suggestions from renowned v

vi   

Acknowledgements

scholars during and after these events helped enrich my work further. I am also grateful to all those who met to discuss my research project or responded to my enquiries via emails. They include the late Christopher Bayly, Jody Benjamin, Maxine Berg, Gwyn Campbell, Mariana Candido, Felicia Gottmann, Masashi Haneda, Karolina Hutková, Adam Jones, Hilary Jones, Makoto Kishida, Colleen Kriger, Gerold Krozewski, Akinobu Kuroda, Debin Ma, Pedro Machado, Pat Manning, Peter Marshall, Tsukasa Mizushima, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Richard Roberts, Radhika Seshan, Masato Shizume, Anka Steffen, Sarah Stockwell, Heather Streets-Salter, Silke Strickrodt, John Stuart, John Styles, Lakshmi Subramanian, Kaoru Sugihara, Miki Sugiura, Hideaki Suzuki, Hidenao Takahashi, Masayuki Tanimoto, John Thornton, Jim Webb, Klaus Weber, Jutta Wimmler and Koji Yamamoto. Particular mention may be made of Michael Aldous, Marisa Candotti, Kate Frederick, Tony Hopkins, Atsushi Kobayashi, Jeremy Prestholdt, Alka Raman, Giorgio Riello, Gerardo Serra, Kohei Wakimura and Mengxing Yu who kindly read draft manuscripts of this book and offered useful comments. Any errors and omissions are all mine. I also would like to express my thanks to the librarians and the directors of the libraries and archives that I visited and whose valuable collections I consulted: in particular, the National Archives (United Kingdom), British Library, the LSE library, Foyle Special Collections Library, Maughan Library, SOAS Library, Institute of Historical Research, Liverpool Record Office, Sydney Jones Library, Tamil Nadu State Archives, Archives Nationales du Senegal, Institut fondamental d’Afrique noire, Musée national des douanes, Archives départementales de la Gironde, Archives Nationales d’Outre Mer (ANOM), and Oral Archives—Research and Documentation at the National Centre for Arts and Culture (The Gambia). R. K. Raghavan, R. Maria Saleth and Derek Elliot helped me gain access to the Tamil Nadu State Archives in October 2012. Hiroyuki Suzui, Nobuyuki Suzui and Vincent Hiribarren helped me during my trip to Senegal in 2014 and provided access to the Archives Nationales du Senegal. Robyn Orr helped me find material that I wanted to consult, at the Sydney Jones Library, in 2017. Hassoum Ceesay and Lamin Yarbo offered their full support during the entire period of my visit to The Gambia in 2018. The Foyle Special Collections Library, the National Archives (UK) and the ANOM very kindly gave me permission to reproduce their archival material.

Acknowledgements   

vii

This project was supported by generous funds from LSE (Economic History Research Studentship, Postgraduate Travel Funds and Radwan Travel and Discovery Fund), the Economic History Society, the SocioEconomic History Society, the Government of Japan, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) (KAKENHI Grant Numbers 16J00121 and 18H05710), and the Konosuke Matsushita Memorial Foundation. The JSPS postdoctoral fellowships helped to continue my research at the University of Tokyo from 2016 to 2018, where I enjoyed strong support from Ryuto Shimada. My special thanks go to Giorgio Riello and Anne Gerritsen for having me as a visiting scholar at the Global History and Culture Centre, University of Warwick, in 2018. My friends and colleagues have broadened my perspectives in many ways. Special mention should be made to Michael Aldous, Yasin Arslantaş, Mattia Bertazzini, Sam Betteridge, Marisa Candotti, Mina Ishizu, Steven Ivings, Enrique Jorge-Sotelo, Shinichi Kobayashi, Leonard Kukić, Cecilia Lanata Briones, Takaaki Masaki, Sohail Nazir, Sumiyo Nishizaki, Yoshitaka Okamoto, Andrea Papadia, Teerapa Pirohakul, Beatriz Rodriguez-Satizabal, Ryoji Sakai, Greta Christine Seibel, Gerardo Serra, Ayako Suzuki, Kayoko Yukimura and Sono Yuan Werhahn. They have enriched my life immensely and stimulated my thinking. I immensely appreciate Haimanti Dey for improving the readability and for making the manuscript fit for its intended purpose. Finally, my parents, Shigezo and Yaeko, and my grandparents, the late Jukichi (1910–2011), the late Tazuko (1914–2014), Teruaki and Hisae, always and firmly believed in me. I dedicate this book to them with heartfelt respect and gratitude. Spring 2019

Kazuo Kobayashi

Contents

1 Introduction 1 Rethinking African Agency in Global History 3 Indian Cotton Textiles in the Pre-industrial World 7 South-South Economic History 12 Sources 13 Organisation of the Book 15 Conclusion 17 2 West African Seaborne Trade, 1750–1850: The Transition from the Transatlantic Slave Trade to ‘Legitimate’ Commerce 29 The Transatlantic Slave Trade and Jihad in West Africa, 1750–1850 31 Exports from West Africa in the Early Nineteenth Century 38 Imports into West Africa 53 Conclusion 68 3 Guinées in the Lower Senegal River: A Consumer-Led Trade in the Early Nineteenth Century 81 What Is a Piece of Guinée? 82 Why Did West African Consumers Prefer Indian Guinées? 83 Commercial Networks in the Lower Senegal River 87 Guinées as a Currency 95 Conclusion 111 ix

x   

Contents

4 Procurement of Indian Textiles for West Africa, 1750–1850 127 Rethinking the Procurement of Indian Textiles 128 English Investment in Textile Production in South India 129 French Investment in Textile Production in Pondicherry 144 Conclusion 153 5 Western European Merchants and West Africa, 1750–1850: Continuity and Change 165 British Merchants and West Africa 166 French Merchants and West Africa 174 Conclusion 186 6 Conclusion 195 Economic Development in Nineteenth-Century West Africa 196 Africa, Empire and Global History 199 Multiple Globalisation in the Emergence of the Modern Global Economy 201 Bibliography 211 Index 241

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Textiles imported from Britain to West Africa, 1699–1808 (pounds sterling) (Source Marion Johnson, Anglo-African Trade in the Eighteenth Century: English Statistics on African Trade 1699–1808 [Leiden: Centre for the History of European Expansion, 1990], pp. 54–5) Fig. 2.1 Slave trade by flag, 1751–1850 (Source Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (TSTD), http://www.slavevoyages.org [accessed 23 March 2015]) Fig. 2.2 Slaves embarked by region, 1751–1850 (Source TSTD) Fig. 2.3 Exports of palm oil from West Africa to Britain, 1801– 1850 (cwt) (Sources 1801–1844: British Parliamentary Papers [BPP], 1845, XLVI [187]: palm oil. An account of the quantity of palm oil annually imported into the United Kingdom from the western coast of Africa, since the year 1790, to the 31st day of December 1844. 1845–1850: BPP 1854, LXV [296]: Tallow, & c. Return of the quantities of tallow, palm oil, train oil, spermaceti, hemp, flax seed, hides and skins, and sheep’s wool, imported into the United Kingdom during the years 1844–1853 inclusive, specifying the quantities imported from each country. Note Records for 1813 destroyed by fire) Fig. 2.4 Exports of gum arabic from Senegal to France, 1827–1850 (tonnes) (Sources France: Direction générale des douanes, Tableau décennal de commerce de la France

10 32 33

40

xi

xii   

List of Figures

avec ses colonies et les puissances étrangèrs, 1827 à 1836 [Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1838]; France. Direction générale des douanes, Tableau général du commerce de la France avec ses colonies et les puissances étrangères [Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1839–1851]) 47 Fig. 2.5 Imports of English cotton goods from Britain to West Africa, 1827–1850 (yards) (Source The National Archives [NAUK, Kew, the United Kingdom], CUST 8/25-72) 54 Fig. 2.6 Imports of Indian cotton textiles from Britain to West Africa, 1827–1850 (pieces) (Source NAUK, CUST 10/18-41) 60 Fig. 2.7 West African imports of Indian dyed cotton textiles from Britain and France, 1827–1850 (pieces) (Sources France: Fig. 2.4. For the 1832 data, J.-P. Duchon-Doris, Commerce des toiles bleues dites guinées [Paris, 1842], appendis. Britain: Fig. 2.6. Note The French official trade statistics somehow lack the data for Senegal in 1832) 62 Fig. 2.8 West African imports of cowrie shells from Britain, 1751–1850 (tonnes) (Source Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade [Cambridge University Press, 1986], pp. 58–60, 67. Note Records for 1813 destroyed by fire) 66 Fig. 3.1 Shipping of guinées from India via France into Saint Louis (Source Author’s original) 89 Fig. 3.2 The river trade of guinées and gum arabic in the lower Senegal River (Credit: Rapp Halour/Alamy Stock Photo) 91 Fig. 3.3 Commercial networks around the lower Senegal River region in the early nineteenth century (Source Kazuo Kobayashi, ‘Indian Textiles and Gum Arabic in the Lower Senegal River: Global Significance of Local Trade and Consumers in the Early Nineteenth Century’, African Economic History 45/2 (2017): 40) 94 Fig. 5.1 British shipping of Indian textiles to West Africa and the British slave trade, 1772–1849 (Sources Indian cotton textiles: NAUK, CUST 10/3–41; CUST 17/1–29. Slaves: Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database [TSTD]. www.slavevoyages.org. Accessed 23 March 2015) 167 Fig. 5.2 Proportions of Bordeaux and Marseille in the re-exports of guinées from France, 1832–1850 (Sources Direction générale des douanes, Tableau décennal de commerce de la France avec ses colonies et les puissances étrangères,

List of Figures   

xiii

1827 à 1836 [Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1838]; Direction générale des douanes, Tableau général du commerce de la France avec ses colonies et les puissances étrangères [Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1839–1851]. See also Kazuo Kobayashi, ‘Indian Textiles and Gum Arabic in the Lower Senegal River: Global Significance of Local Trade and Consumers in the Early Nineteenth Century’, African Economic History 45/2 [2017]: 33) 178 Fig. 5.3 Guinée trades from French India to France and from France to Senegal, 1827–1850 (pieces) (Source Kobayashi, ‘Indian Textiles’, 36) 181 Image 1.1 Imitations of Indian cotton textiles for West African trade (Source The National Archives [Kew, the United Kingdom], T 70/1517: Letter from W. Norris to William Hollier, Chorley, 7 May 1751. Note A niccanee [above] is of the blue strips with some white and two red cross strips [19 threads per cm]. A superfine chellow [below] is of blue and white checks [20 threads per cm]) 11 Image  3.1 Sample guinées (Source Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer [Aix-en-Provence, France], Inde 494, Dossier 871: L’Arrêté signé par Gouverneur Du Camper, 23 August 1844, Pondicherry. Note The guinées are stamped with the following words in red: ‘ORDONNANCES ROYALES DES 18 MAI ET SEPTEMBRE 1843’ around the outer border of the mark, whose diameter is 56 millimetres, ‘PONDICHERY’ at the upper centre, ‘GUINÉE’ on the left of centre, and ‘Poids 2k 30, Longr 16m 50, Largr 1[m] 00’ in the centre) 83 Image 3.2 A princess of Trarza (Source L’A. P.–David Boilat, Esquisses Sénégalaises [Paris, 1853], Planche XII, General Research Division, The New York Public Library. ‘Princesse Mauresse, Trarzas.’ New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed 11 August 2017. http:// digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47df-79ef-a3d9e040-e00a18064a99) 85 Image 3.3 Gum harvesting in Senegal (Source J. P. L. Durant, Atlas pour servir au voyage du Sénégal [Paris, 1802], Planche 29. Note I gained permission to reproduce this image from King’s College London, Foyle Special Collections Library) 95

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List of Figures

Image 4.1 The cotton spinning and weaving mill of Poulain and Duboy in 1831 (Source Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer [ANOM, Aix-en-Provence, France], Inde 494, Dossier 865: Inde Française, Manufactures de Pondichéry) 149 Image 4.2 Cardboard attached to the guinées in Pondicherry (Source ANOM, Inde 494, Dossier 871: L’Arrêté signé par Gouverneur Du Camper, 18 December 1843, Pondicherry) 153

List of Tables

Table 2.1 Types of palm oil, the fermentation process and labour required 38 Table 2.2 White calicoes imported from Britain to West Africa, 1827–1850 56 Table 2.3 Printed calicoes imported from Britain to West Africa, 1827–1850 57 Table 2.4 Indian dyed cotton textiles imported from Britain to West Africa, 1827–1850 61 Table 2.5 Prices of guinées in France and Senegal, 1817–1849 (French francs) 64

xv

1... Saint Louis 2…Dakar 3… Bathurst 4… Free town 5… Cape Coast Castle 6… Bonny 7… Old Calabar 8… Kano

Sahara Desert Mauritania Senegal River

1

Cape Verde

2

Gambia 3 River

Lake Chad 8

Fuuta Portuguese Jalon Guinea 4 Sierra Leone 5

Bight The Gold Coast of Benin

6 7

Bight of Biafra

Cameroon

Atlantic Ocean

Source Author’s original.

Map 1  West Africa

Sahara Desert

Atlantic Ocean

I…Trarza emirate II…Brakna emirate III… Waalo IV… Fuuta Toro V… Kajoor VI… Gajaaga 1… Saint Louis 2… Darmancour (escale) 3… Desert (escale) 4… Coq (escale) 5… Dagana 6… Bakel 7… Portendick 8… Arguin

Source Author’s original.

Map 2  Senegal

Punjab

Indus River

Ganges River Bengal

Gujarat

Arabian Sea

Calcutta ● Bombay

Bay of Bengal

Deccan Plateau ●

Indian Ocean

Source Author’s original.

Map 3  South Asia

●

Madras

Ceylon

*RGDYDUL5LYHU 

1RUWKHUQ &LUFDUV







.ULVKQD5LYHU 

 



  .DYHUL 5LYHU 











 



 Source ,QGLDQ2FHDQ Author’s original.

Map 4  South India

&H\ORQ

%D\RI%HQJDO

«*DQMDP «9L]DJDSDWQDP «3DOYDQFKD «+\GHUDEDG «*ROODSXGL «1DJXOYDQFKD «0DVXOLSDWQDP «1HOORUH «0DGUDV «3RQGLFKHUU\ «&XGGDORUH «1DJRUH «6DOHP «&RLPEDWRUH «7ULFKLQRSRO\ «7DQMRUH «0DGXUDL «7LQQHUYHOO\ «&RFKLQ «*RD

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The world witnessed a series of political and economic transformations from 1750 to 1850. Historians often describe this dynamic period as the age of revolutions that brought about the modern world.1 Among them is the Industrial Revolution which, for economic historians, is a matter of utmost importance, as they assume that it was industrialisation that led the British economy to capital-intensive development and thereby triggered the divergence with other regions of the world. With the growing discipline of global history, economic historians have explored industrialisation in a wider context; namely, why this happened first in Britain, not China or India, in the mid-eighteenth century. They examine a variety of factors, including the use of a new energy source, namely coal, useful knowledge, the mechanisation of the cotton industry and the role of global trade.2 In the following century, industrialisation diffused into continental Europe and North America. It is often argued that these industrialising ‘core’ regions exported manufactured goods into and imported primary products from the ‘periphery’ in the global economy, such as Africa, Asia and Latin America. In this view, the core–periphery relationship structured the modern global economy.3 In the meantime, from the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, similar to other regions of the world, West Africa underwent a series of political movements in the interior savannah. On the coast, there was the transition from the Atlantic slave trade to ‘legitimate’ commerce, and thus the growth of cash-crop production that stimulated the West © The Author(s) 2019 K. Kobayashi, Indian Cotton Textiles in West Africa, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18675-3_1

1

2  K. KOBAYASHI

African economy. This transition overlapped with the increasing colonisation of West Africa. For historians of Africa, West Africa’s contribution to the origin and development of Britain’s Industrial Revolution has long been the focus of intense debate since Eric Williams’s seminal work, Capitalism and Slavery, appeared in 1944.4 In his work, Joseph Inikori highlights that the diaspora from the African continent such as the Atlantic slave trade played a crucial role in the plantation production of commodities in the Americas and in the formation of the Atlantic economy, which, he argues, provided large export markets for British manufactured goods, such as cotton textiles produced in Lancashire. He also argues that West African consumer tastes stimulated the development of modern manufacturing in Britain.5 So far, historians of Africa have made great efforts to reveal African agency and to unpack the complexity and diversity of the history of the continent, but these valuable findings have yet to be fully incorporated into global history.6 This book addresses the significant role of West African consumers in the development of the global economy during this revolutionary period. In particular, it throws fresh light on the fact that their demand for Indian textiles not only determined a part of global trade but also influenced economic development in Western Europe and South Asia from the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. It is also a challenge to the prevailing account of the core–periphery model by offering a view on how consumers in a region often regarded as ‘periphery’ shaped the trajectory of economic globalisation, or the process of integrating different areas into a larger regional or global economy. The key perspective is a south-south economic history, namely the economic linkage that connected West Africa (south of the Sahara) with South Asia. Yet, it should be noted that, in the period concerned, European merchants mediated this connection through European imperial and commercial expansion. As will be shown in this book, not only does the south-south perspective explore African agency in global history, but it also shows that the performance of Indian weavers played as large a role as the African consumers in the development of a global economy. By doing so, we will illustrate that the south-south economic history played an essential part in some of the key phases in global history, namely the development of the slave-based Atlantic economy, the British Industrial Revolution and the emergence of the modern global economy. This history shows the dimension of entanglement with the early modern European commercial and imperial expansion.7

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3

Rethinking African Agency in Global History This section provides a historiography of (West) African agency to reveal several issues within the literature that are central to this book. Economic historians of Africa have long engaged in exploring the African past since Kenneth Onwuka Dike’s 1956 book marked the beginning of the modern research of African economic history.8 Ayodeji Olukoju points out that the field of research has developed mainly with two different approaches: the mainstream orthodox and the radical political economy. The former, represented by A. G. Hopkins, originated from historical scholarship in Western Europe, and the latter, for example, the Zaria School in Nigeria, was rooted in the dependency and radical Marxist approaches influenced by Walter Rodney and Frantz Fanon.9 When postcolonial African countries joined the international community from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s, economic historians of Africa stressed the agency of African actors of the past. During this period these historians, A. G. Hopkins and Philip Curtin, in particular, posed challenges to the prevailing paradigm of dualism that had dominated modes of thought in the colonial period.10 Economic history was expected to respond to the agenda of writing national, decolonised histories and scholarly interests mainly focused on African enterprise, trade and politics.11 One of the pioneering achievements was that of J. Forbes Munro who published a textbook of modern Africa and the international economy.12 In the meanwhile, radical national and Black Power movements in the late 1960s, the burst of post-independence euphoria and an increasing influence of neo-colonialism led radical scholars to gain the upper hand in the field.13 Thus, the 1970s to mid-1990s saw a growing influence of dependency theorists such as Andre Gunder Frank, Walter Rodney and Samir Amin.14 For example, Boubacar Barry’s monograph of Senegambia in the era of the Atlantic slave trade was first published in French in 1988 and later translated into English to appear as a series in African Studies by Cambridge University Press.15 Also, Immanuel Wallerstein, a historical sociologist whose original research interest focused on Africa as well as India, developed world-system theory as a variation of dependency theory. Although he did pay attention to the Atlantic slave-based economy in the early modern period, world-system theory primarily focused on European agency in the rise and development of the capitalist world-economy. Hence, it obscured African agency

4  K. KOBAYASHI

as well as the contribution of Indian cotton textiles in the emergence of the Atlantic economy.16 As John Thornton critically noted, despite their sympathetic attitude towards Africa and other Third World countries, there was irony in the fact that dependency theory reinforced the view that Africa was a victim of Atlantic and wider history.17 This kind of pessimism in the literature partly reflected the harsh world of reality, such as failure of economic growth, poverty, and political and social problems that undermined much of Africa in the 1980s and early 1990s, that marked a sharp contrast with the rapid growth of the East and Southeast Asian economy.18 Around the turn of the century, however, there were changes in the field. One of the stimuli was brought by new institutionalists in the 2000s. In the ‘reversal of fortune’ thesis formulated by Daron Acemoglu and his coauthors, they argued that settler mortality encouraged Europeans to introduce different types of institutions that exercised a lasting impact on economic growth, and as a consequence, sub-Saharan Africa, which was relatively rich as of 1500, had become relatively poor by 1995.19 Similarly, Nathan Nunn elaborated this argument with reference to the Atlantic slave trade.20 Their research provoked reactions from A. G. Hopkins and Gareth Austin. In particular, Austin argues that these authors deny African agency under colonial rule and alerts to their methodological problem of what he calls ‘compression of history’.21 Another impulse is related to the recent economic growth in many countries in Africa from the late 1990s that changed The Economist’s view on Africa from ‘the hopeless continent’ (11 May 2000) to ‘a hopeful continent’ (2 March 2013). Exploration of the origin of the current economic growth in Africa attracted economic historians of Africa. It is also important to note that the surge in African economic history research, which is also referred to as the renaissance of African economic history, is underpinned by the ‘Data Revolution’.22 The third impetus that rejuvenated African economic history was the rise of global (economic) history. In the past two decades, global history has developed as an approach to the past which comprises two key styles: comparisons and connections. Although both of these modes are not necessarily new, the reality of our time, partly represented by economic, cultural and intellectual globalisation, gave them a prominent place in the study of history, the reason being that: these styles would enrich our understanding about similarity, difference and diversity in the past; different scales of the local, national, regional and global were entangled

1 INTRODUCTION 

5

with each other; the processes towards interdependence and integration were on a global scale from past to present. Also, these modes should prevent us from falling into ethnocentric appreciations of what was achieved.23 Global approaches to the past came out of at least two contexts. First was a reaction against the increasing fragmentation of the study of history that was the byproduct of specialisation24; second was a reaction against Eurocentrism. The economic growth of China and the four Asian tigers in the late twentieth century encouraged economic historians to challenge the prevailing Eurocentric account of modern history.25 As Gareth Austin emphasises, Eurocentrism is split into that of agency and of concept. The former is the assumption that it was mainly Europeans (or Westerners), rather than other people in the world, who had changed the world since the fifteenth century. The latter is the dominance of concepts in historical and social science research derived from perceptions of European or Western experience.26 For Africanists, in order to tackle conceptual Eurocentrism, it would be important to follow the principle of ‘reciprocal comparison’ undertaken by Kenneth Pomeranz. In this principle, we avoid seeing one side of the comparison as the norm, and instead see deviations on both sides of the comparison.27 While reciprocal comparisons might offer one solution to the problem of Eurocentrism, in order to tackle the Eurocentrism of agency, it is essential to position the African role in the formation of linkages and networks that connected Africa with the world. In particular, as Frederick Cooper stresses, historians should discuss the structures and limits of the connecting mechanisms, namely how Africa and other regions were linked and bounded.28 However, as Toby Green alerts, existing works of global history tended to focus on ‘links created to or from Africa rather than by Africans’. This was particularly the case with the study of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism.29 Thus, this book pays attention to consumer agency in West Africa that contributed to creating trans-oceanic links that extended from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and shows that locally shaped consumer taste influenced patterns of global trade and production outside Africa during the age of revolutions. Marina Bianchi proposed the term ‘active consumer’ to direct attention to the fact that consumer choice affects the production of commodities.30 Historical research of consumption shows much about dynamic relationships between consumers in one region and their external

6  K. KOBAYASHI

economies. Global trade transformed material culture, whereas consumer demand for particular commodities influenced trade and production elsewhere, and the demand was often rooted in social need and cultural value.31 As C. A. Bayly argued, ‘Trade, like artisan production, was also a “moment in culture”’. Trade goods partly reflect a specific cultural value and use value among consumers.32 In the literature of precolonial Africa since the pioneering work by David Richardson, historians have illuminated the fact that regional differences in consumption patterns in West and West-Central Africa influenced Europe’s economic activities in the continent in the era of the transatlantic slave trade.33 In other words, the expansion of the trade to meet the American demand for labourers in the production of tobacco, rice, indigo and cotton in North America, and of sugar and coffee in the Caribbean and Brazil for European consumers, hinged on the demand for imported goods in Atlantic Africa. It has been shown that African entrepreneurs and consumers had a strong preference for Indian cotton textiles among the imports from Europe into the continent, and that British manufacturers had to gain a competitive edge for Lancashire cotton goods over rivals, namely production by South Asian weavers. It is important to note that such consumer-led connections with South Asian production was predicated on early modern European imperial and commercial expansion.34 This fact encourages us to investigate how African consumer demand for Indian goods influenced European trade and procurement of the fabric in Asia. The chapters that follow will explore what became of the aforementioned linkages in the post-abolition period, especially after 1807, when Britain, the country which conducted the largest slave trade in the northern Atlantic, withdrew from the trade. Because the existing works have focused mainly on the era of the transatlantic slave trade, they paid less attention to the West African contribution to economies outside the region after the decline of the Atlantic slave trade. This book seeks to fill this lacuna in the literature by reconstructing the consumer demand for Indian textiles and, to some extent, the new competitors from Lancashire during the first half of the nineteenth century. It should be remembered that Africans imported and consumed not only textiles but also alcohol, tobacco, beads, furniture and many other goods through the slave trade and legitimate trade. As Mariana Candido underlines in her recent study of Benguela in West-Central Africa, ‘the engagement in the slave trade and, later, in legitimate commerce allowed Africans to become global consumers.’35 In this book, it is shown that

1 INTRODUCTION 

7

West African consumers were also fully integrated into the global economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth century and helped to shape business and production in other parts of the world through highly selective demand preferences.

Indian Cotton Textiles in the Pre-industrial World Before we proceed into further detail, it is useful to note that Indian cotton textiles were in great demand in a number of world regions—including West Africa—before the British Industrial Revolution. By describing the journey of Indian textiles to West Africa as well as other regions of the world before 1800, this section highlights the fact that West African trade and consumption of Indian textiles in the early nineteenth century is an endless frontier of research. South Asia, similar to West Africa and Meso-America, had a long-established history of cotton textile production. Cotton textiles manufactured in India had long been sought after in the Indian Ocean world well before Europeans entered the Asian seas to participate in maritime trade. In the Indian subcontinent, there were four core production regions of cotton textiles for foreign and overseas markets: Punjab, Gujarat, the Coromandel Coast and Bengal. Skilled weavers efficiently responded to changing consumer tastes in various local markets throughout the Indian and Atlantic Ocean worlds.36 Indeed, as Giorgio Riello notes, their finishing processes such as printings, paintings and pencilling placed South Asia at the fore of production of cotton textiles in the pre-industrial world.37 Indian cotton textiles played a crucial role in connecting different regions in the early modern world, shaped patterns of global trade, transformed material culture and influenced textile production outside South Asia.38 Textiles produced in the Punjab were transported by land to Afghanistan, Persia and Central Asia, or by river to the ports of Sind.39 Armenian merchants played a large role in the overland trade that transported manufactured items from Northern India, via Persia, to the Ottoman market. With their colours and designs, Indian cotton textiles initially attracted wealthy consumers in the Ottoman Empire and became a model for imitation among manufacturers.40 The Indian Ocean was a major theatre of maritime textile trade during the early modern period.41 According to Kirti Chaudhuri, up to the eighteenth century, the Indian Ocean had been divided into three

8  K. KOBAYASHI

sub-regions: the Chinese Seas, the eastern Indian Ocean and the western Indian Ocean.42 In the intra-Asian trade that connected the eastern Indian Ocean with the Chinese Seas, cotton textiles were exported from India into Southeast Asia, especially the Malay Archipelago, in exchange for pepper, spices, birds of paradise, aromatic woods and resins, tin and gold; some of these goods were also carried to China and Japan. Before the sixteenth century, the textiles and spice trade between India and Southeast Asia had been mainly in the hands of Arabs who sailed from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. However, after the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama arrived in India at the end of the fifteenth century, the Europeans replaced the Arabs as the major traders in the eastern Indian Ocean. With American silver, they purchased cotton and silk textiles in Asia. The interactions with Europe through the East India Companies caused a shift of the main markets for Bengal textiles from Upper India to Europe.43 On the other hand, in the western Indian Ocean, Gujarati merchants played a leading role in the monsoon-based regional trade through their extensive commercial networks that connected western India with the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf and East Africa. They exported cotton textiles produced in Gujarat to East Africa, from where they obtained ivory and gold. Their predominance in the dhow trade across the western Indian Ocean persisted throughout the early modern period.44 As for the early modern Europe-Asian trade, it was mainly the European East India Companies who imported a large number of Indian cotton textiles as well as spice, pepper, tea, coffee, silk, porcelain and cowries (as ballast) into their home countries.45 North-western Europe offered a huge market for these luxury goods from Asia, which provided European consumers with new tastes and transformed material cultures from the elite to plebeians. The long-distance trade expanded the range of marketed items that created commercial incentives to drive households to reallocate their productive resources (such as the time of family members) to market-oriented activities. This choice was made in order to expand household earnings, subsequently used to purchase marketed goods.46 Maxine Berg has elaborated how the desire for, and ability to consume, luxuries among British consumers was stimulated by a global trade in Asian products such as textiles and porcelain. This propelled the invention of a ‘new luxury’ and economic growth in early modern Britain.47 In the Atlantic world, North America also imported increasing number of textiles made both in Asia and in Europe since the colonial

1 INTRODUCTION 

9

period.48 In terms of value, woollen textiles accounted for the highest proportion in the import from Britain until the American Revolution, while in terms of volume the pre-independence period witnessed the growth of the import of linens and fustians made in England, Scotland and Ireland. Moreover, North America offered an important market for re-exported Indian calicoes and muslins banned from the European mother countries such as England and France.49 The newly independent United States established direct trade with Bengal, and thereafter American merchants dominated the trade in Indian textiles into the North American country. The trade continued to flourish until the late 1810s when the US Congress imposed a tariff to protect the domestic industry.50 The early modern period, the eighteenth century in particular, witnessed rapid development of the Atlantic economy. It was characterised by slave-based plantations in the Americas and the Caribbean Islands that produced commodities such as sugar and tobacco for European consumers. A constant supply of labour from the African continent, mostly from West and West-Central Africa, was thus key to maintaining production. In order to purchase African captives as well as tropical products along the Atlantic coast, the goods offered by Europeans had to reflect African preferences, because African merchants were known to reject goods that did not appeal to their local customers. Throughout the eighteenth century, textiles were predominant in the commodities carried by the European ships into Atlantic Africa.51 West and West-Central Africa, similar to North America, imported a variety of textiles from overseas. Figure 1.1 shows that among all the textiles Indian fabrics were the single largest textile among the imports from Britain from the second quarter of the century. Similar patterns can be found in the imports from France and the Netherlands during the eighteenth century.52 The list made by Stanley Alpern names more than three dozen different types of Indian textiles imported into Atlantic Africa, including bafts (blue or white cotton textiles), calicoes, chellow (striped or checked textiles woven with coloured threads rather than dyed after weaving), chintz (cotton textiles block-printed with floral and other motifs, often in one colour), long cloth (cotton textiles distinguished by its length, around 37 yards, see Chapter 4) and nicanees (blue and white striped cotton textiles woven with dyed thread).53 Indian textiles and cowries were shipped from Europe into these coastal regions and, as discussed in Chapter 3, these goods from the Indian Ocean served as

10  K. KOBAYASHI 3,500,000 3,000,000 2,500,000 British cottons 2,000,000 Indian cottons 1,500,000 1,000,000

Linens Woolens

500,000 0

Fig. 1.1  Textiles imported from Britain to West Africa, 1699–1808 (pounds sterling) (Source Marion Johnson, Anglo-African Trade in the Eighteenth Century: English Statistics on African Trade 1699–1808 [Leiden: Centre for the History of European Expansion, 1990], pp. 54–5)

currencies in market exchanges in West Africa.54 Such south-south economic linkages were initially established by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century and intensified by merchants from North-western Europe in the following two centuries. The demand for Indian cotton textiles in West Africa was so large that European manufacturers sought to produce and sell imitations there in the eighteenth century. Figure 1.1 also suggests that the second half of the century witnessed a rapid increase in the import of British ‘cotton’ goods to West Africa. These were British-made imitations of Indian piece goods as illustrated in Image 1.1.55 While the existing studies, notably ones by Inikori, highlight the increasing amount of Lancashire goods imported into West Africa, evidence suggests that Senegal demanded more Indian textiles than European products at least until the mid-nineteenth century.56 Philip Curtin, Roger Pasquier, James Webb and Richard Roberts have shown that, during the first half of the nineteenth century, Senegal remained a major market for Indian dark-blue cotton textiles, called guinées in French, rather than European copies and counterfeits, and that guinées served as an important exchange medium in the trade in gum arabic

1 INTRODUCTION 

11

Image 1.1  Imitations of Indian cotton textiles for West African trade (Source The National Archives [Kew, the United Kingdom], T 70/1517: Letter from W. Norris to William Hollier, Chorley, 7 May 1751. Note A niccanee [above] is of the blue strips with some white and two red cross strips [19 threads per cm]. A superfine chellow [below] is of blue and white checks [20 threads per cm])

along the Senegal River.57 Despite these contributions, we have yet to understand exactly why the consumer demand for Indian textiles turned out to be so resilient in Senegal well into the nineteenth century. If we can throw new light on this problem, we should then be able to start unveiling hitherto neglected global interactions that persisted from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. Thus, Indian cotton textiles spread to different corners of the pre-industrial world, lubricated local and global trade, and shaped material culture in societies. Recent studies have highlighted cultural and social meanings of consumption, rather than price, as a key determinant of consumer demand. Jeremy Prestholdt underscored the significance of social or cultural logics in forming consumer desire and demand.58 Beverly Lemire argued that ‘Indian cottons were imbued with different meanings by different societies and peoples … desire rooted in cultural contexts of those societies where the requirements of self-definition, hierarchical display, and ritual gift giving shaped the flow of cottons. In whatever context, whether to sustain customary cultural forms or to feed powerful new consumer forces, culture shaped markets’.59 As for the French trade in Indian calicoes, the eighteenth-century French historian Jacob Nicolas

12  K. KOBAYASHI

Moreau noted that ‘It is not their low prices … it is fashion, and it is a certain vanity that makes the women of the lower classes so curious about calicoes. Dresses in light or printed cottons, they think themselves no longer at the same level of women of their social station … they think themselves superior to their social condition because ladies of quality too wear calicoes’.60 As these quotes suggest, it is worth examining social and cultural contexts of textile imports into West Africa as well. This point of view helps us explore what factors shaped West African demand for South Asian fabrics in the eighteenth to nineteenth century.

South-South Economic History The fabric of the Indian Ocean, especially its connection with the Atlantic world, indicates a significant continuity in early globalisation throughout the eighteenth century.61 Thanks to the dataset of the eighteenth-century Anglo-African trade compiled by Marion Johnson, historians have recognised the quantitative significance of the trans-oceanic connection woven by Indian textiles.62 However, the nineteenth-century link between these two oceanic regions has been relatively under-researched.63 In this regard, this book demonstrates that even after British manufacturers started to spread their machine-made cotton goods to replace their Indian counterparts in the global market, there was still continued strong demand for Indian textiles in parts of West Africa at least up to 1850. This West African demand for South Asian goods played a key role in important phases from the eighteenth to nineteenth century, including the transatlantic slave trade and the British Industrial Revolution. In this book, I refer to such a perspective of economic connection between Africa south of the Sahara (mainly West Africa in this book) and South Asia as a south-south economic history. This connection offered a channel through which economic interests in these two regions interacted with each other, and such economic interests sprang from the mixture of various local factors. It must be noted that it was mainly Europeans who created such a trans-oceanic linkage. In other words, the south-south economic history unravelled in this book had mutually constitutive relationships with the early modern European commercial enterprise and colonisation in the extra-European world. This point also indicates multiple origins of the modern global economy. The south-south economic connection discussed in this book had spatial and chronological dimensions. This linkage resulted from the early

1 INTRODUCTION 

13

modern Portuguese maritime enterprise in Africa and Asia. As early as the sixteenth century they established an original, but weak, connection between West Africa and South Asia by bringing Indian textiles and cowrie shells into the Atlantic coast of Africa. The tie became stronger in the era of the Atlantic slave trade, especially in the eighteenth century, when the slave trade reached its peak (see Chapter 2). Indian cotton textiles played a crucial role in the purchase of African captives in Atlantic Africa in this century (Fig. 1.1), as textiles and cowries functioned as currencies in precolonial West Africa. As such, this south-south economic linkage provided the global foundation for the early modern Atlantic slave-based economy. What is more, in relation to the chronological dimension, as highlighted in the chapters that follow, in the early nineteenth century, the south-south connection remained a key axis in the procurement of a raw material available around the Senegal River valley, namely gum arabic, which was indispensable in dyeing textiles in industrialising Western Europe. Therefore, attention to this trans-oceanic connection shows us critical aspects of the early modern Atlantic economy, the industrialisation in Western Europe and the emergence of modern global economy. It should be noted that the demand for Indian textiles in West Africa in the period concerned arose from the complexities of various factors such as consumer taste for quality goods, local textile production, the natural environment, and social and cultural value. On the other hand, the procurement of cotton textiles by Europeans for West Africa also hinged on a variety of local conditions in South Asia, including performance of weavers and price of raw materials. In short, the south-south economic linkage concerned here was entangled with such changeable, local conditions in these respective regions which had global influences.

Sources This book uses both quantitative and qualitative sources collected from Britain, France, India, Senegal and The Gambia. The main quantitative sources are the British and French official trade statistics that recorded annual imports and (re-)exports at the customs offices in both countries over the period of this study. Economic historians are familiar with these sources. Ralph Davis and Elizabeth Schumpeter produced the pioneering works on eighteenth-century British overseas trade using the statistical sources. However, in their work, the Anglo-African trade statistics were simply incorporated into the categories of ‘America and Africa’ or

14  K. KOBAYASHI

‘Africa and East Indies’. Therefore, it is impossible to accurately calculate the trade in Indian cotton textiles imported from Britain into West Africa from their works.64 Davis also published another work using nineteenth-century British trade statistics. Although he presented some data of the Anglo-African trade during the era of the Industrial Revolution (1784–1856), there is, again, no detailed information about the trade in Indian cotton textiles.65 This information for the case of the eighteenth century became accessible through the publication of the dataset compiled by Marion Johnson in 1990.66 Joseph Inikori also provided data for the second quarter of the nineteenth century.67 British trade statistics show only a part of the quantitative evidence of the maritime trade of Indian cotton textiles that were shipped into West Africa, for the region imported the goods from France as well. Therefore, unless the combined data from the British and French trade statistics are provided, it is more likely to underestimate the volume of trade in Indian cotton textiles into West Africa in this period. Chapter 2 utilises a new set of quantitative data obtained from both British and French trade statistics to reveal the peculiar trend of the imports of Indian cotton textiles into Senegal in comparison with other regions of West Africa. The French trade statistics show not only the trade between France and other regions and countries, but also which port cities in France engaged in the trade. Chapter 5 uses the quantitative data to illustrate and analyse the predominance of Bordeaux in the guinée trade among the French ports in the early nineteenth century. Patrick Manning said that ‘imports can be used as a window on demand’.68 The quantitative evidence used in this book suggests that Indian cotton textiles continued to be in demand in West Africa, and Senegal in particular, even after British machine-made cotton goods were increasingly imported into West Africa from the late eighteenth century. However, in order to explain why West African consumers preferred Indian cotton textiles, it is necessary to rely on qualitative sources such as archival documents and contemporary publications. Chapters 2 and 3 draw on British House of Commons Parliamentary Papers and contemporary publications written by European travellers and merchants to explore why local consumers in Senegal continued to choose Indian cotton textiles over European goods; these records highlight that they preferred the quality of cotton textiles made in India. In addition, qualitative sources offer information about particular areas of the textile production in India for West Africa. Chapter 4

1 INTRODUCTION 

15

uses documents of the English East India Company held at the Tamil Nadu Archives (Chennai, India) and the British Library illustrating that Cuddalore, Salem and Nagore in South India produced indigo-blue cotton textiles for West Africa. These documents also describe the organisation of textile procurement, based on business networks between inland weaving villages and port towns in India. Documents at the French colonial archives in Aix-en-Provence show the reconstruction of Pondicherry where the French government and private entrepreneurs set up a workshop. This became a major producer of guinées for Senegal from the 1830s. The documents at the French colonial archives and the National Archives of Senegal include correspondence between France and Senegal. These are used in Chapters 2 and 3 to explain why gum arabic from Senegal mattered in Europe, despite the invention of dextrin, a cheaper substitute than the Senegalese product. They also account for the use of the guinées as an exchange medium and unit of account in the gum trade in the Senegal River region. Material objects are of great help for us to have a vivid image of textiles circulated from India and Europe into West Africa. The British National Archives holds samples of cotton textiles that Lancashire manufacturers imitated from Indian textiles for the African market around 1750 (Image 1.1). Samples of guinées (probably produced in 1843 or 1844) presented in Chapter 3 still remain in the collection at the colonial archives in France. Likewise, contemporary publications provide us with valuable visual materials. For example, David Boilat, a nineteenthcentury Senegalese priest, drew some pictures of inhabitants around the Senegal River region, which show how they consumed Indian guinées. Finally, in order to complement the discussion of this book, I have used oral histories. I interviewed professional weavers and dyers in The Gambia in March 2018, and my resource persons offered valuable information on materials used in textile production in Senegambia. The transcript of oral interviews held in the National Centre for Arts and Culture (Fajara, The Gambia) also gives us information about the history of the local handicraft industry.

Organisation of the Book This book consists of six chapters. Chapter 2 employs a quantitative approach to analyse ‘legitimate’ commerce, or the trade in commercial agriculture, in early nineteenth-century West Africa. The chapter refers

16  K. KOBAYASHI

to major commodities exported from or imported into West Africa at that time: palm oil, gum arabic, groundnuts, British and Indian cotton textiles, and cowries. In doing so, it explores the extent to which patterns of West African overseas trade changed from the previous century. I argue that, despite the staggering increase of the imports of British textiles into West Africa during this period, Senegal had a peculiar upward trend of the import of Indian cotton textiles, more precisely guinées, which accounted for the largest proportion of the imports into the region. I also indicate that cowries from the Indian Ocean showed another continuity in south-south economic history from the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Chapter 3 focuses on the consumer side of the south-south economic history in question, and examines why Senegal continued to import Indian textiles in the first half of the nineteenth century. The maps of commercial networks around the lower Senegal River show how the circuit along which guinées travelled from the coast to consumers in the interior formed part of the complex regional trade networks. In order to identify how consumer tastes for Indian guinées had been historically shaped, I investigate various factors that underpinned the regional demand for Indian textiles during the nineteenth century, and ultimately influenced the south-south economic connection woven by South Asian handicrafts. Chapter 4 turns to the production side of this south-south linkage. It examines how European merchants procured cotton textiles in India for West African markets from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Using correspondence of the English East India Company and French colonial records, I aim to explore which areas of India produced cotton goods for West Africa. I study the production side and seek to understand how these regions responded to demand in West Africa for Indian cotton textiles. The comparative case studies of the British possessions of South India and the French in Pondicherry showed an incentive problem in European enterprises in pre-colonial and colonial India. Chapter 5 complements the discussions in the preceding chapters by looking at the shipping of Indian cotton textiles from India by way of Western Europe into West Africa. It focuses on European business networks that connected production and consumption areas of cotton textiles produced in South Asia. I also discuss the commercial environment before and after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.

1 INTRODUCTION 

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Chapter 6 reviews the findings presented in this book and locates the contributions in three areas within the larger historiographical literature: the economic development of the tropics, Africa and imperial history, and the history of globalisations.

Conclusion This chapter has set out the context of this book. Following the rich historiographical discussion on African and global economic history, it has shown the part that consumer demand for Indian textiles in West Africa played in the pre-industrial world, including the Atlantic slave-based economy. While the transatlantic slave trade might have decreased productivity and human capital within West Africa, the significant role of West African consumers enables them to be seen as actors who shaped the trajectory of early modern economic globalisation. This motivates us to examine the aspects of consumption, trade and production in more detail in the chapters that follow. This chapter has offered an overview of the dynamic role of Indian textiles in connecting South Asia with different parts of the world, especially with West Africa, before 1800. I have also argued that such economic linkage between South Asia and West Africa emerged owing to the early modern European commercial enterprise and colonisation in the extra-European world. The rest of the book discusses continuity and change in this south-south economic history during the first half of the nineteenth century, and seeks an implication for understanding the emergence of modern global economy.

Notes



1. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe, 1789–1848 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962); David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire (London: Penguin Books, 2007). 2.  Notably, Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2009); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Prasannan

18  K. KOBAYASHI









Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2011); Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2013). 3. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730–1840s (New York: Academic Press, 1989); Jeffrey Williamson, Trade and Poverty: When the Third World Fell Behind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). 4. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). 5. Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (Cambridge University Press, 2002). 6.  Megan Vaughan, ‘Africa and Global History’, in Maxine Berg, ed. Writing the History of the Global: Challenges for the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 200–1. 7. In this book, I use the terminology ‘early modern’ in a wider sense to address the period from the seventeenth to early nineteenth century. 8. Kenneth Onwuka Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta 1830–1885: An Introduction to the Economic and Political History of Nigeria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956). 9.  Ayodeji Olukoju, ‘Beyond a Footnote: Indigenous Scholars and the Writings of West African Economic History’, in Francesco Boldizzoni and Pat Hudson, eds., Routledge Handbook of Global Economic History (New York, NY: Routledge, 2016), p. 378. 10. A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (London: Longman, 1973); Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade, 2 Vols. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975). 11. Gareth Austin, ‘African Economic History in Africa’, Economic History of Developing Regions 30/1 (2015): 87. 12.  J. Forbes Munro, Africa and the International Economy, 1800–1960 (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1976). 13.  Patrick Manning, ‘African Encounters with Global Narratives’, in Boldizzoni and Hudson, eds., Global Economic History, pp. 413–5. 14.  Andre Gunder Frank, ‘The Development of Underdevelopment’, Monthly Review 18/4 (1966): 17–31; Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London and Dar-es-Salaam: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications and Tanzanian Publishing House, 1973); Samir Amin, Unequal Development: an Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism, trans. Brian Pearce (Hassocks: The Harvester Press, 1976).

1 INTRODUCTION 











19

15. Boubacar Barry, La Sénégambie du XVe au XIXe siècle. Traite négrière, islam et conquête coloniale (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1988); Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade, trans. Ayi Kwei Armah (Cambridge University Press, 1998). 16. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System II: Capitalism and the Consolidation of the European WorldEconomy, 1600–1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System III; Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System IV: Capitalist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 17. John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 1–9. 18.  Gwyn Campbell, ‘Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the “Early Modern”: Historiographical Conventions and Problems’, in Toyin Falola and Emily Brownell, eds., Africa, Empire and Globalization: Essays in Honor of A. G. Hopkins (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2011), pp. 82–5. Although some important works of African economic history from a long-term perspective by Ralph Austen, Paul Zeleza and John Iliffe were published in the last decades of the twentieth century, the decline of economic history in general and the rise of postmodernism led to diminishing interest in African economic history. Ralph A. Austen, African Economic History: Internal Development and External Dependency (London: James Currey, 1987); Paul T. Zeleza, A Modern Economic History of Africa, Vol. 1: The Nineteenth Century (Dakar: CODESRIA, 1993); John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent (Third Edition, Cambridge University Press, 2017. The original edition was out in 1995); A. G. Hopkins, ‘The New Economic History of Africa’, Journal of African History 50/2 (2009): 156–7. 19. Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson, ‘Reversal of Fortune: Geography and Institutions in the Making of the Modern World Income Distribution’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 117/4 (2002): 1231–94. 20.  Nathan Nunn, ‘The Long-Term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 123/1 (2008): 139–76. 21.  Hopkins, ‘New Economic History’; Gareth Austin, ‘The “Reversal of Fortune” Thesis and the Compression of History: Perspectives from African and Comparative Economic History’, Journal of International Development 20 (2008): 996–1027.

20  K. KOBAYASHI

22. Gareth Austin and Stephen Broadberry, ‘Introduction: The Renaissance of African Economic History’, Economic History Review 67/4 (2014): 893– 906; Johan Fourie, ‘The Data Revolution in African Economic History’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 47/2 (2016): 193–212; Ewout Frankema and Marlous van Waijenburg, ‘Africa Rising? A Historical Perspective’, African Affairs 117/469 (2018): 543–68; Felix Meier zu Selhausen, ‘Africa Rising in Economic History’, African Economic History Network Blog, 19 November 2018. Accessed 1 December 2018. https://www.aehnetwork.org/blog/africa-rising-in-economic-history/. 23. Patrick O’Brien, ‘Historiographical Traditions and Modern Imperatives for the Restoration of Global History’, Journal of Global History 1/1 (2006): 3–39; A. G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History (London: Pimlico, 2002); A. G. Hopkins, ed., Global History: Interactions Between the Universal and the Local (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Richard Drayton and David Motadel, ‘Discussion: The Futures of Global History’, Journal of Global History 13/1 (2018): 1–21. The pioneering works of global history that employed these two modes of research include C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); C. A. Bayly, Remaking the Modern World 1900–2015: Global Connections and Comparisons (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell, 2018). 24. Gareth Austin, ‘Global History in (Northwestern) Europe: Explorations and Debates’, in Sven Beckert and Dominic Sachsenmaier, eds., Global History, Globally: Research and Practice Around the World (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 25–6. 25. For example, Kaoru Sugihara, ‘The European Miracle and the East Asian Miracle: Towards a New Global Economic History’, Sangyo to Keizai [Industry and Economy] 11/2 (1996): 27–47; Andre Gunder Frank, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 26. Austin, ‘Global History’, pp. 25–6. Austin mainly focuses on historiography in north-western Europe, but these reactions can be found elsewhere in the world. On Japan, see Masashi Haneda, Toward Creation of a New World History, trans. Makito Noda (Tokyo: Japan Library, 2018). However, it should be noted that educational programmes in world history in secondary, higher and postgraduate education play a larger role in the growth of global history in North America than other regions of the world. Patrick Manning, Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Jerry H. Bently, ‘The World History Project: Global History in the North American Context’, in Beckert and Sachsenmaier, eds., Global History, pp. 127–41.

1 INTRODUCTION 

21

27.  Gareth Austin, ‘Reciprocal Comparison and African History: Tackling Conceptual Eurocentrism in the Study of Africa’s Economic Past’, African Studies Review 50/3 (2007): 1–28; Pomeranz, The Great Divergence. 28.  Frederick Cooper, ‘Africa and the World Economy’, African Studies Review 24/2–3 (1981): 1–86; Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 91–112; Frederick Cooper, ‘Africa in World History’, in J. R. McNeill and Kenneth Pomeranz, eds., The Cambridge World History, Vol. VII: Production, Destruction, and Connection, 1750–Present, Part I: Structures, Spaces, and Boundary Making (Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 556–84; Inikori, Africans; Joseph E. Inikori, ‘Africa and the Globalization Process: Western Africa, 1450–1850’, Journal of Global History 2/1 (2007): 63–86. 29. Toby Green, ‘Beyond an Imperial Atlantic: Trajectories of Africans from Upper Guinea and West-Central Africa in the Early Atlantic World’, Past and Present 230 (2016): 94. 30.  Marina Bianchi, ed., The Active Consumer: Novelty and Surprise in Consumer Choice (London: Routledge, 1998). 31. Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 1986); Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Frank Trentmann, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption (Oxford University Press, 2012); Beverly Lemire, Global Trade and the Transformation of Consumer Cultures: The Material World Remade, c. 1500–1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2018). 32. C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Third Edition, Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 74. 33.  David Richardson, ‘West African Consumption Patterns and Their Influence on the Eighteenth-Century English Slave Trade’, in Henry A. Gemery and Jan S. Hogendorn, eds., The Uncommon Market: Essays in the Economic History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Academic Press, 1979), pp. 303–30; David Richardson, ‘Consuming Goods, Consuming People: Reflections on the Transatlantic Slave Trade’, in Philip Misevich and Kristin Mann, eds., The Rise and Demise of Slavery and the Atlantic Slave Trade (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2016), pp. 31–63; Joseph C. Miller, ‘Imports at Luanda, Angola 1785–1823’, in G. Liesegang, H. Pasch and A. Jones, eds., Figuring African Trade: Proceedings of the Symposium on the Quantification and

22  K. KOBAYASHI Structure of the Import and Export and Long Distance Trade in Africa 1800–1913 (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1986), pp. 163–246; Joseph C. Miller, Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Marion Johnson, Anglo-African Trade in the Eighteenth Century: English Statistics on African Trade 1699–1808 (Leiden: Centre for the History of European Expansion, 1990); Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550–1750: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society (Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 201–2; Thornton, Africa and Africans; Stanley B. Alpern, ‘What Africans Got for Their Slaves: A Master List of European Trade Goods’, History in Africa 22 (1995): 5–43; Inikori, Africans; Joseph E. Inikori, ‘English Versus Indian Cotton Textiles: The Impact of Imports on Cotton Textile Production in West Africa’, in Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, eds., How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 85–114; Roquinaldo Amaral Ferreira, ‘Transforming Atlantic Slaving Trade, Warfare and Territorial Control in Angola, 1650– 1800’ (PhD Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2003), pp. 48–68; Mariana P. Candido, ‘Merchants and the Business of the Slave Trade at Benguela, 1750–1850’, African Economic History 35 (2007): 5–6, 13–7; Mariana P. Candido, ‘Women’s Material World in NineteenthCentury Benguela’, in Mariana P. Candido and Adam Jones, eds., African Women in the Atlantic World: Property, Vulnerability & Mobility, 1660–1880 (Oxford: James Currey, 2019), pp. 70–85; Colleen E. Kriger, Cloth in West African History (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2006); Colleen E. Kriger, ‘“Guinea Cloth”: Production and Consumption of Cotton Textiles in West Africa Before and During the Atlantic Slave Trade’, in Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi, eds., The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850 (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 105–26; Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, The Atlantic Slave Trade from West Central Africa, 1780–1867 (Cambridge University Press, 2017); Bronwen Everill, ‘“All the Baubles That They Needed”: “Industriousness” and Slavery in Saint-Louis and Gorée’, Early American Studies 15/4 (2017): 714–39; Chris Evans and Göran Rydén, ‘“Voyage Iron”: An Atlantic Slave Trade Currency, Its European Origins, and West African Impact’, Past and Present 239 (2018): 41–70. 34. Kazuo Kobayashi, ‘The British Atlantic Slave Trade and Indian Cotton Textiles: The Case of Thomas Lumley & Co.’, in Tomoko Shiroyama, ed., Modern Global Trade and Asian Regional Economy (Singapore: Springer, 2018), pp. 59–85. 35. Candido, ‘Women’s Material World’, p. 71.

1 INTRODUCTION 

23

36.  Sir Joseph Hutchinson, ‘The History of Relationships of the World’s Cottons’, Endeavour 21 (1962): 5–15; K. N. Chaudhuri, ‘The Structure of Indian Textile Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Tirthankar Roy, ed., Cloth and Commerce: Textiles in Colonial India (New Delhi: Sage, 1996), pp. 36–48. 37. Riello, Cotton, pp. 37–83. 38. Roy, Cloth and Commerce; Riello and Parthasarathi, The Spinning World; Riello and Roy, How India Clothed the World; Riello, Cotton; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf Publishing Group, 2014). 39. S. P. Sangar, ‘Export of Indian Textiles to Middle East and Africa in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of Historical Research 17/1 (1974): 1–5. 40.  Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘Ottoman Cotton Textiles: The Story of a Success That Did Not Last, 1500–1800’, in Riello and Parthasarathi, eds., The Spinning World, pp. 97–8. 41. Riello and Roy, How India Clothed the World; Pedro Machado, Sarah Fee and Gwyn Campbell, eds., Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean: An Ocean of Cloth (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 42.  K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge University Press, 1985). See also Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (New York, NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), Part III; Philippe Beaujard, ‘The Indian Ocean in Eurasian and African World—Systems Before the Sixteenth Century’, Journal of World History 16/4 (2005): 411–65. 43. Chaudhuri, ‘The Structure’, pp. 40–3; John Irwin and P. R. Schwartz, Studies in Indo-European Textile History (Ahmedabad: Calico Museum of Textiles, 1966), p. 28; Kenneth R. Hall, ‘The Textiles Industry in Southeast Asia, 1400–1800’, Journal of the Social and Economic History of the Orient 39/2 (1996): 87–135; Anthony Reid, ‘Southeast Asian Consumption of Indian and British Cotton Cloth, 1600–1850’, in Riello and Roy, eds., How India Clothed the World, pp. 31–51; Ryuto Shimada, The Intra-Asian Trade in Japanese Copper by the Dutch East India Company During the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2006); Kayoko Fujita, ‘Japan Indianized: The Material Culture of Imported Textiles in Japan, 1550–1850’, in Riello and Parthasarathi, eds., The Spinning World, pp. 181–203. 44. Edward A. Alpers, ‘Gujarat and the Trade of East Africa, c. 1500–1800’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 9/1 (1976): 22–44; Pedro Machado, ‘Awash in a Sea of Cloth: Gujarat, Africa, and the Western Indian Ocean, 1300–1800’, in Riello and Parthasarathi, eds.,

24  K. KOBAYASHI The Spinning World, pp. 161–179; Pedro Machado, ‘Cloths of a New Fashion: Indian Ocean Networks of Exchange and Cloth Zones of Contact in Africa and India in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, in Riello and Roy, eds., How India Clothed the World, pp. 53–84; Pedro Machado, Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2014); Hideaki Suzuki, Slave Trade Profiteers in the Western Indian Ocean: Suppression and Resistance in the Nineteenth Century (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 45. K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760 (Cambridge University Press, 1978); Philippe Haudrère, La campagne française des Indes au XVIIIe siècle (1719–1795), 4 Vols. (Paris: Librairie de l’Inde éditeur, 1989); Om Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Maxine Berg, ‘In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present 182 (2004): 85–124; Maxine Berg, Felicia Gottmann, Hanna Hodacs, and Chris Nierstrasz, eds., Goods from the East, 1600–1800: Trading Eurasia (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Chris Nierstrasz, Rivalry for Trade in Tea and Textiles: The English and Dutch East India Companies (1700–1800) (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Felicia Gottmann, Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of Economic Liberalism: Asian Textiles in France 1680–1760 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 46. Jan de Vries, ‘The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution’, Journal of Economic History 54/2 (1994): 249–70; Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2008). It is important to note that such consumption-driven revolution, or what Jan de Vries terms the ‘industrious revolution’, cannot be applied to artisans at Silesia in Central Europe, where feudalism and low-wages prevented them from increasing their economic freedom of choice. Anka Steffen and Klaus Weber, ‘Spinning and Weaving for the Slave Trade: Proto-Industry in Eighteenth-Century Silesia’, in Felix Brahm and Eve Rosenhaft, eds., Slavery Hinterland: Transatlantic Slavery and Continental Europe, 1680– 1850 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2016), pp. 87–107. 47.  Berg, ‘In Pursuit of Luxury’; Maxine Berg, Luxury & Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2005). See also Beverly Lemire, ‘Revising the Historical Narrative: India, Europe, and the Cotton Trade, c. 1300–1800’, in Riello and Parthasarathi, eds., The Spinning World, pp. 205–26.



1 INTRODUCTION 

25

48. Robert DuPlessis, The Material Atlantic: Clothing, Commerce, and Colonization in the Atlantic World, 1650–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2015). In an older literature, the majority of colonial households was seen as self-sufficient units that relied on home-spun cloth. However, Simon D. Smith shows that they were highly integrated into market exchange because there was a relative shortage of textile-making equipment and fibre supplies. Simon D. Smith, ‘The Market for Manufactures in the Thirteen Continental Colonies, 1698–1776’, Economic History Review 51/4 (1998): 676–708. 49.  Maureen F. Mazzaoui, ‘Introduction’, in Maureen F. Mazzaoui, ed., Textiles: Production, Trade and Demand (Aldershot and Brookfield: Ashgate, 1998), pp. xx–xxi; Robert DuPlessis, ‘Cottons Consumption in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century North Atlantic’, in Riello and Parthasarathi, eds., The Spinning World, pp. 227–46. 50. Susan S. Bean, ‘The American Market for Indian Textiles, 1750–1820: In the Twilight of Traditional Cloth Manufacture’, in Textiles in Trade: Proceedings of the Textile Society of America Biennial Symposium, 14–16 September 1990, Washington, DC (1990), pp. 43–52; Susan S. Bean, ‘Bengal Goods for America in the Nineteenth Century’, in Rosemary Crill, ed., Textiles from India: The Global Trade (Calcutta, Oxford, and New York, NY: Seagull Books, 2006), pp. 217–32. 51. Kobayashi, ‘The British Atlantic Slave Trade’. The European focus on Africans was based on three factors: their relative immunity to disease, the low transport cost (because of their relative proximity to the Americas), and their low purchase price resulting from low productivity of agriculture in most of sub-Saharan Africa. Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 21. 52. Jean Tarrade, Le commerce colonial de la France à la fin de l’Ancien Régime: L’évolution du régime de « l’Exclusif » de 1763 à 1789, Vol. 1 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), pp. 125–6; Johannes Menne Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade 1600–1815 (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 103–5; Herbert S. Klein, ‘Economic Aspects of the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Slave Trade’, in James D. Tracy, ed., The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long Distance Trade in the Early Modern World 1350–1750 (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 290–3; Andrea Reikat, Handelsstoffe: Gründzüge des europäisch-westafrikanischen Handels vor der Industriellen Revolution am Beispiel der Textilien (Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe, 1997). 53. Alpern, ‘Master List’, 6–8. 54. Hopkins, Economic History, pp. 67–70; Curtin, Economic Change, Vol. 1, pp. 233–70; Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson, The Shell Money of the

26  K. KOBAYASHI Slave Trade (Cambridge University Press, 1986); Linda Newson, ‘The Slave-Trading Accounts of Manoel Batista Peres, 1613–1619: DoubleEntry Bookkeeping in Cloth Money’, Accounting History 18/3 (2013): 343–65; Colleen Kriger, Making Money: Life, Death, and Early Modern Trade on Africa’s Guinea Coast (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2017); Toby Green, A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 2019). 55. It should be noted that, while Indian cotton textiles imported into West Africa by way of Europe were all cotton goods, British ‘cotton’ textiles were mostly linen-cotton mixes at least until the 1770s, because British manufacturers at that time faced technological challenges that led to using cotton yarn for the weft of fabrics and linen yarn for the warp. For example, a nicanee shown in Image 1.1 was a fabric of half-linen and half-cotton. A. P. Wadsworth and J. De Lacy Mann, The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire 1600–1780 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1931); John Styles, ‘Fashion, Textiles and the Origins of the Industrial Revolution’, East Asian Journal of British History 5 (2016): 161–89. Linen was mainly imported from Germany, Ireland and Scotland. Alex Johnston Warden, The Linen Trade Ancient and Modern (Second Edition, London, 1867), p. 373. I would like to thank John Styles for the detailed information about yarns used in the fabrics in Image 1.1. 56. Inikori, Africans, pp. 444–7. 57. Curtin, Economic Change, Vol. 1, pp. 261–3, 268–70; Roger Pasquier, ‘Les comptoirs du Sénégal au milieu du XIXe siècle’, in Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, ed., Actes du colloque entreprises et entrepreneurs en Afrique (XIXe et XXe siècle) (Paris: Harmattan, 1983), pp. 141–63; James L. A. Webb, Jr., ‘The Trade in Gum Arabic: Prelude to French Conquest in Senegal’, Journal of African History 26/2 (1985): 149–68; Richard Roberts, ‘West Africa and the Pondicherry Textile Industry’, in Roy, ed., Cloth and Commerce, pp. 142–74. 58. Prestholdt, Domesticating the World. 59. Lemire, ‘Revising the Historical Narrative’, p. 208. 60. Cited in Giorgio Riello, ‘The Globalization of Cotton Textiles: Indian Cottons, Europe, and the Atlantic World, 1600–1850’, in Riello and Parthasarathi, eds., The Spinning World, pp. 266–7. 61. Prasannan Parthasarathi and Giorgio Riello, ‘The Indian Ocean in the Long Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 48/1 (2014): 1–19. 62. Johnson, Anglo-African Trade; Inikori, Africans; Riello, Cotton; Kobayashi, ‘The British Atlantic Slave Trade’.

1 INTRODUCTION 

27

63. One notable exception is the work by Pedro Machado, who made use of archival sources in Goa, Mumbai, Lisbon, London and Mapudo (Mozambique), revealing interactions of the southern Atlantic with the Indian Ocean in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Machado, Ocean of Trade. 64.  Ralph Davis, ‘English Foreign Trade, 1700–1774’, Economic History Review 15/2 (1962): 285–303; Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter, English Overseas Trade Statistics, 1697–1808 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960). 65. Ralph Davis, The Industrial Revolution and British Overseas Trade (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979). 66. Johnson, Anglo-African Trade. 67. Inikori, Africans, p. 444. It is important to note that the value data shown in the British trade statistics are constant official values set in 1696, not market value (or current prices) in each year, and that there was a discrepancy between these values after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Yet, it is still possible to view the data of official value as an indicator of quantitative changes in the volume of the trade. Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole, British Economic Growth, 1688–1959: Trends and Structure (Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, 1967), pp. 319–22. 68. Patrick Manning, Slavery, Colonialism and Economic Growth in Dahomey, 1640–1960 (Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 115.

CHAPTER 2

West African Seaborne Trade, 1750–1850: The Transition from the Transatlantic Slave Trade to ‘Legitimate’ Commerce

Indian textiles, as well as cowries, imported by the East India Companies into Europe, made a decisive contribution to the making of the southsouth connections that were crucial in the development of the Atlantic economy in the eighteenth century. However, these connections have often been missing from the literature of nineteenth-century globalisation, while the development of Lancashire’s cotton industry and the rapid growth of exports of their products into the global market have grabbed scholarly attention. This chapter addresses the question: how did West African seaborne trade affect the south-south economic linkage during the early nineteenth century? By using a range of sources, I explore what became of the trade connections between South Asia and Africa south of the Sahara as a consequence of the development of the English cotton industry. The major contribution of this chapter is to unravel the continued demand for Indian textiles in Senegal, compared with other areas of West Africa, during this period. In West Africa, the century up to 1850 is known as the transitional phase from the transatlantic slave trade to ‘legitimate’ commerce in agricultural goods on the coast and jihad (Muslim holy war) in the interior savannah region. The major export items in the coastal trade gradually shifted from slave labour for the Americas to raw materials for industrialising Europe.1 Palm oil, and later groundnuts alike, were used as a lubricant for machinery and railways and were also made into soaps and candles in Europe.2 Gum arabic was a key material in dyeing textiles as © The Author(s) 2019 K. Kobayashi, Indian Cotton Textiles in West Africa, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18675-3_2

29

30  K. KOBAYASHI

a stiffener, manufacturing printed cottons and was also used for medical and confectionary preparations and papermaking in Europe.3 At the same time, West Africa continued to import from Western Europe a large number of textiles, especially British and Indian, and cowrie shells along with other goods such as iron, weapons, alcohol and tobacco.4 By studying the numbers of these major commodities that were traded from and into West Africa, this chapter will set the broad context to address how the transition of West African coastal trade affected the south-south connections up until 1850. As the subject involves a lot of statistical work the major sources used here are trade statistics recorded at the customs offices—in both Britain and France. A time series for the exports of palm oil from West Africa for the early nineteenth century is available from the British Parliamentary Papers. A. J. H. Latham and Martin Lynn used these sources to narrate the accounts of the palm oil trade between West Africa and Britain.5 James Webb provides price data for guinées in France and Senegal.6 Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson’s study provides trade volumes of cowrie shells imported from Britain into West Africa.7 Joseph Inikori also draws on the British trade statistics to argue that West Africa witnessed a massive inflow of British machine-made cotton textiles that replaced the leading position of Indian textiles.8 However, his analysis missed the imports of textiles from France. This chapter uses both the British and French trade statistics to present a more balanced picture of textile imports into West Africa and shows that Senegal exhibited a particular demand for Indian cotton textiles rather than European textiles during this period. Furthermore, the discussion of British trade statistics reveals various types of British and Indian cotton textiles imported into West Africa and also the emergence of regional differences in their demand. In addition, a study of the records maintained by the colonialists, also known as the Blue Books, helps in bringing forth statistics of groundnut exports from the Gambia River and the goods exchanged for textiles imported to Sierra Leone from Britain. Some correspondences between France and Senegal help to provide price information of gum arabic in Senegal and the proportion that guinées made up of the imports from France into Senegal. The next section examines an overview of the transatlantic slave trade from 1751 to 1850, taking into account that this period covers part of the age of jihad in West Africa. This will help the reader to understand under what political and economic circumstances West Africa, Senegal in particular, engaged with a global trade during this period.

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Following this, the discussion will focus on major exports from West Africa in the early nineteenth century—palm oil, followed by gum arabic and groundnuts—before moving on to major imports into West Africa during the same period. While the imports of English cotton textiles into most of the West African coasts expanded, Senegal continued to import Indian cotton textiles rather than European goods. This chapter will underscore that, apart from Indian cotton textiles, West Africa continued to import cowrie shells from the Maldives via Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade and Jihad in West Africa, 1750–1850 West Africa’s external slave trade, both in the Sahara and on the Atlantic, has attracted an enormous amount of attention from historians. As discussed briefly in the previous chapter, the demand for labour in the plantations in the Americas, along with the relative immunity of the African against tropical diseases, low transportation costs and low purchase price, propelled the growth of this trade. But it is also essential to understand the internal mechanisms of the slave trade that responded to external demands. In the context of West Africa, A. G. Hopkins explained that ‘the external slave trade existed only because the return on exports was greater than on employing labour in the domestic economy.’9 Low productivity of labour in West Africa has been confirmed by later studies. Patrick Manning pointed out that low productivity of agriculture limited the value of labour, leading to the low price of slaves.10 The endowment analysis by Gareth Austin showed that, in precolonial sub-Saharan Africa, there was generally land-abundance in combination with fragile soil fertility, and thereby such conditions hindered economies of scale in production.11 More recently, Klas Rönnbäck and Dimitrios Theodoridis supported this view with some evidence from Senegambia on the low level of agricultural productivity. These studies concluded that low productivity in West Africa provided an economic rationale for the transatlantic slave trade.12 The transatlantic slave trade database (TSTD) compiled by David Eltis and others estimates that as many as 12.5 million slaves were forcibly taken from Africa to the Americas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century.13 Figure 2.1 shows the pattern of the slave trade by each

32  K. KOBAYASHI 400,000 350,000 300,000 250,000 200,000 150,000 100,000 50,000 -

Spain/Uruguay

Portugal/Brazil

Great Britain

U.S.A.

France

Denmark/Baltic

Netherlands

Fig. 2.1  Slave trade by flag, 1751–1850 (Source Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (TSTD), http://www.slavevoyages.org [accessed 23 March 2015])

participant from Europe and the Americas from 1751 to 1850; the data are based on five-year periods. It is clear that Portugal/Brazil, Britain and France were the major three participants in the transatlantic slave trade during the eighteenth century, while, after the British and French withdrawals from the trade, Portugal/Brazil came to be the leading player, followed by Spain/Uruguay. The TSTD also suggests that 1787 was the peak of the trade, which began to decline thereafter.14 Figure 2.2 shows the volume of slaves that embarked from West and West-Central Africa between 1751 and 1850. Except for West-Central Africa, the largest region—especially for the Portuguese/Brazilian slave shipping—which was West Africa in general, underwent a decline in slave exports for Atlantic markets from the 1780s. The Bight of Biafra was the largest source of slaves among the West African coasts, particularly for Britain, while Senegambia, Sierra Leone and the Windward Coast exported fewer slaves than other coasts of West Africa.15 Speaking of Senegambia, the focus of the next chapter, slave exports reached their peak in 1774. Subsequently, the trade declined and hit a trough in 1797,

2  WEST AFRICAN SEABORNE TRADE, 1750–1850 … 

33

300,000

250,000

200,000

150,000

100,000

50,000

-

Senegambia

Sierra Leone

Windward Coast

Gold Coast

Bight of Benin

Bight of Biafra

West Central Africa and St. Helena

Fig. 2.2  Slaves embarked by region, 1751–1850 (Source TSTD)

followed by a temporary revival at the beginning of the nineteenth century and a further decline towards 1850.16 Paul Lovejoy underscores the significance of the jihad movement that spread across West Africa from the late seventeenth through the nineteenth century for this unequal distribution. He argues that ‘the jihad movement was an inhibiting factor that reduced the involvement of Muslim regions in the transatlantic trade and forced European buyers to go elsewhere to buy slaves.’17 During this period West African jihads were carried out by Muslim scholars (marabouts) and military leaders to undertake reforms and build theocratic Muslim states.18 The earliest movement started in the Senegal River valley in the late seventeenth century as a response to the transatlantic slave trade. The growth of slave exports for the Americas made it difficult for nomads on the northern bank of the river to get access to slave labour which would have been used for both production and trade with North Africa. Escalation of the Atlantic trade also redirected the cereal supplies of the river valley from the northern bank towards Saint Louis. The redirected supplies were used to feed slaves who were held

34  K. KOBAYASHI

until embarkation. Political and social antagonism worsened around the valley and led to the disintegration of Berber society in the region. To weather the crisis, Nasir al-Din, a marabout, waged his jihad by attacking Fuuta Toro, the granary in the middle valley, where rice and millet were produced. This attack not only defeated the kingdoms of Waalo, Fuuta Toro, Kajoor and Jolof, where the ruling aristocracies sold their own subjects to purchase European commodities, but it also dealt a heavy blow to the French slave trade at Saint Louis. As soon as Nasir al-Din died in Mauritania in 1674, the French intervened to offer direct military and financial support to aristocracies in Waalo, Fuuta Toro, Kajoor and Jolof, thus allowing them to regain power.19 As the followers of Nasir al-Din passed on their visions of state-building to the future generations south of the Senegal River, Senegambia experienced a series of jihad from the end of the seventeenth century to the eighteenth century. In this process, the warrior groups, called hassani, gained political control in the region of south-west Sahara, and eventually founded the nomadic emirates of Trarza, Brakna and others. At the same time, Hassaniya supplanted the local Berber language and become the lingua franca from Mali to Senegal in the south and at the northern desert edge, such as at Wad Nun and Tinduf. In the 1690s, some refugees from Nasir al-Din’s jihad settled in the upper Senegal River valley, and reportedly Malik Si led them to found the Islamic State of Fuuta Bundu which straddled the upper Senegal and Gambia Rivers. Bundu benefited from its strategically important location compared to the Sahel in the north, the Atlantic in the west and the gold fields of Bure in the east. Following the death of Malik Si, the Muslim clerical class of Torodbe, who identified with the Fulbe pastoralists, led the jihad movement in the region. In the mid-1720s, the jihad spread into the highlands of Fuuta Jalon under the leadership of Karamkho Alfa, who earned the political title almami.20 However, his death around 1751 marked the beginning of a new phase in the jihad in Fuuta Jalon that affected coastal trade: military leaders now replaced marabouts as pivotal players in the jihad movement. Karamkho Alfa’s successor Ibrahima Sori became almami and adopted an aggressive policy against neighbouring countries through an alliance with the Jalonke kingdom of Solimana, which is a part of modern Sierra Leone. His military campaign intended to procure slaves and booty, and slaves not only served as the domestic labour of the ruling aristocracy but also met the growing demand for the Atlantic trade.

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35

In other words, while Ibramina Sori consolidated the Fuuta Jalon domination of Solimana in the 1770s, Fuuta Jalon continued with their engagement with the Atlantic slave trade insisting that the enslaved were not Muslims.21 Slaves were often sold to Europeans at the ports of what is now Guinea-Bissau, Guinea-Conakry and Sierra Leone.22 Boubacar Barry made an argument on this point: As in the case of the kingdom of Dahomey or that of the Asante Confederation, the historical development of Futa Jallon [sic] makes sense only when placed in the global context of the slave trade. At the time, slave trading was the dominant commercial activity on the African coast. These kingdoms were originally founded to combat the deleterious effects of slave raids. Once consolidated, however, they too made slave trading their exclusive business. Sometimes the reason was the need for self defense against neighboring states. But there were instances where the initiatives came from the new states themselves, eager as they were to share in profits from the slave trade. In such cases, Islam was simply another opportune ideology that served to maintain and consolidate the power of the incumbent aristocracy.23

Thus, the transatlantic slave trade shaped the trajectory of newly emerged Muslim states in Senegambia in the eighteenth century. At the same time, because of aridification, the mid-eighteenth century was a period of drought and famine in West Africa that gave rise to political disturbances in the middle Senegal River valley from which the jihad emerged in Fuuta Toro.24 Fuuta Toro was situated in a rich floodplain that produced millet and rice which were exported to Saint Louis along with cotton and indigo. Thus, it attracted herders, traders and settlers. However, the ruling warrior regime of Denyanke was facing both internal strife and external threat from the nomadic emirate of Brakna, north of the Senegal River. The political instability prompted the Torodbe to carry out jihad under the leadership of Sulayman Baal. This reform movement also challenged the practice of selling Muslims as slaves to Europeans on the Atlantic coast. Sulayman Baal was killed in the battle of 1776, and then Abdul Kader Kan, as his successor, became the first almami of a new regime. Thus, the reform movement entered an expansionist phase until 1796. Abdul Kader gained support from the royal court of Fuuta Bundu and his rule established in Kajoor. Also, he negotiated a settlement with the Denyanke dynasty in which the former ruling elite was allowed to retain autonomy, though their territory was

36  K. KOBAYASHI

confined to the eastern periphery of the floodplain. Thereafter, he redistributed land to his supporters of the movement, built 30–40 mosques, and appointed judges and teachers in the villages. In 1785, he made a treaty with the French that imposed on them the ‘customs’ for the right to passage up the Senegal River to purchase gum and slaves. However, the treaty banned the purchase of slaves in the land of Fuuta Toro. In the following year, there were skirmishes between Abdul Kader and the Trarza emirate, and from 1789 to 1791 the former set up garrison villages at the fords of the Senegal River in order to prevent the Trarza attacks. By then, the jihad state of Fuuta Toro held hegemony over the Senegal River valley from the Atlantic coast to Fuuta Bundu.25 However, their hegemony was short-lived. From 1796, Fuuta Toro faced a series of challenges from Kajoor, Waalo and Fuuta Jalon. In 1807 Abdul Kader died during a battle against Fuuta Bundu. Thus, the jihad in Senegambia declined and the French extended their influence along the Senegal River further into the interior. They built fortified posts at Dagana in 1821, subsequently followed by Merinaghen, Lampbar, Senoudebou and Podor. In 1850, these posts were lumped together under the name of Sénégal et Dépendance. The French expansion policy into the Upper Senegal River continued through the late nineteenth century.26 It is worth noting that the spread of the jihad movement across West Africa was fully tied with the Fulbe. They were also known as Fulani in today’s Northern Nigeria and Peul by the French. Indeed, the prefix ‘Fuuta’, which is found in the names Fuuta Bundu, Fuuta Jalon and Fuuta Toro, indicates the ethnic association with the Fulbe. According to Paul Lovejoy, the majority of them had been considered Muslims at least since the sixteenth century. Their scholarly and religious elites were wealthy enough to own cattle. Their transhumance migration patterns and their shared language, Fulfulbe, spread the idea of the reform movement from Senegambia to Lake Chad from the late seventeenth into the eighteenth century.27 Indeed, by the second half of the eighteenth century, the jihad movement reached a Fulbe community in the north-western part of Hausaland, located in modern northern Nigeria. The two key leading figures in the reform movement were Uthman dan Fodio and his son, Muhammad Bello. Uthman dan Fodio’s ancestors migrated from the west—David Robinson presumed that they came from Fuuta Toro—some centuries before his jihad. In the late eighteenth century,

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as mentioned above, West Africa underwent times of warfare and ecological crises. Against this backdrop, Uthman dan Fodio refined his idea of reform and gained a large following: the majority were the Fulbe of Hausaland but some were also Hausa and Tuareg. In 1804, he declared jihad against the Hausa state of Gobir. In this military campaign, the Sultan of Gobir was captured in 1808, and Sokoto, as a new capital, was constructed on the Rima River in 1809. When Uthman died in 1817, Muhammad Bello succeeded his father and became the first caliph. His succession marked the beginning of a new phase of jihad in the Central Soudan that lasted until his death in 1837. By then, they had established 28 emirates and the twin capitals at Gwandu and Sokoto.28 As a consequence of this jihad, the Sokoto Caliphate was founded in the Central Soudan. This powerful caliphate integrated many Hausa states, large parts of the Oyo Empire, Western Borno and others into its territory. It was, therefore, the largest state in Africa since the collapse of the Songhay Empire in the early 1590s. The Sokoto Caliphate removed the political and economic barriers and conducted major demographic changes, leading to economic development thereafter. In addition, the Caliphate promoted agricultural expansion, increased market demand for foodstuffs, manufactures and raw materials, and developed favourable conditions for foreign investment and merchants. Agricultural and artisanal production grew with the help of an expanding supply of slaves from the smaller societies to the south, where slaves were in greater demand in the production of palm oil, as discussed below.29 In particular, Kano was renowned for cloth weaving and dyeing using locally produced cotton and indigo. The scale of textile production was remarkable enough to receive attention from Heinrich Barth when he visited Kano in 1851.30 The Niger River continued to serve as an important trade route through which cowrie shells flowed into the interior from the southern coasts of West Africa.31 The jihad movement and the British withdrawal from the slave trade in 1807 and its subsequent naval campaign to eradicate the trade along the West African coast had two implications. One was the shift of the major points of slave embarkation from West Africa to West-Central Africa, and Mozambique.32 The other was that the Sokoto Caliphate played a large role in supplying slave labour for palm oil plantations on coastal West Africa. As will be discussed in detail below, the demand for labour on the coast was increasing as ‘legitimate’ commerce expanded from the early nineteenth century.

38  K. KOBAYASHI

Exports from West Africa in the Early Nineteenth Century Palm Oil In the era of ‘legitimate’ commerce, palm oil emerged as one of the leading commodities exported from West Africa. Oil palm (elaeis guineensis), which is of African origin, grew wild widely from the Gambia to Angola, while palm production was concentrated in particular in the hinterland of the Bight of Biafra, or central and southern Igboland.33 The increasing demand for West African palm oil in the nineteenth century was closely linked to the growing population in industrialising Britain.34 From the 1820s to the 1850s, West Africa was the de facto sole source of palm oil in Britain, accounting for 97–100 per cent of British imports, as there were no competitors in the production of palm oil in the global market.35 The palm oil was divided into two types: ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ in terms of its free fatty acid (FFA), and in turn this difference affected its use and the price in Britain (Table 2.1).36 Soft oil was used in the production of soap, lubricants for machines, especially for the railways and tinplate processing, while hard oil was used in the production of candles and certain kinds of soap.37 The hardness or softness of palm oil depended on the duration of fermentation that released the enzymes to create the FFA. For harder oil, the fermentation could take as long as three months, while the fermentation for softer oil was shorter. In the meanwhile, the duration of fermentation affected the labour and fuel input in the production process. Longer fermentation required less boiling in water, pounding and labour, while less fermentation needed more labour and fuel. Warri (in the Bight of Benin), Nembe, the Niger River, Table 2.1  Types of palm oil, the fermentation process and labour required

Free fatty acid (FFA) Duration of fermentation Labour Market price in Britain Use-value

Soft

Hard

Low Shorter More needed High Soap, lubricants, tinplate processing

High Longer Less needed Low candle, certain kinds of soap

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Elem Kalabari (in the Bight of Biafra), the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and the Congo were known as sources of hard oil, which was sold at a lower price in British markets. Old Calabar, Bonny, Opobo and the Cameroons (in the Bight of Biafra) were vital sources of soft oil, which fetched a higher price in Britain. In particular, a certain type of oil, called ‘fine Lagos’, was known as the softest oil amongst the British buyers and gained a premium of as much as 20 per cent.38 The determinant factors for which type of oil to produce were several: types of trees, climate conditions, factor endowments (especially land and labour) and the market price. There were differences in the yield of the fruit between wild and cultivated palms. One estimate shows that the cultivated palm produced five times more than the wild palm. Thus, the amount of labour required depended on the volume and yield and, subsequently, the method of production. Also, climate conditions, in particular rainfall and sunshine, mattered in the yield. Neither excessive nor scanty rainfall led to a good harvest; lack of sunshine reduced output; and drought could decrease next year’s yield. Depending on rainfall patterns, there was a cycle of four to six years in the output of the fruit. This cycle also corresponded with the export of palm oil from West Africa to Western Europe.39 Why did West African producers choose different methods to produce soft and hard oil? The answer lies in factor endowments such as availability of labour and natural resources and the price differential in the market. The production of soft oil required much more labour and other inputs such as water or fuel than that of hard oil. As for time required for the production of a tonne of oil, Martin Lynn estimated that it took 420 working days in the case of soft oil. This was more than three times longer than the case of hard oil (132 working days). He stressed that the critical factor was labour—to collect natural resources and transport palm oil, whether by head loading across land or by canoes.40 Figure 2.3 shows the export of palm oil from West Africa to Britain in the early nineteenth century. The chief destination among the British ports was Liverpool.41 Figure 2.3 features a cyclical rise throughout the period, which, according to Lynn, can be divided into three phases of expansion. The first phase was in the 1810s.42 Until the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the export of palm oil had usually been less than 10,000 hundredweights (cwt). Thereafter, trade began to expand with four-year cycles and more than doubled in ten years, between 1808

40  K. KOBAYASHI 600,000 500,000 400,000 300,000 200,000 100,000

1801 1803 1805 1807 1809 1811 1814 1816 1818 1820 1822 1824 1826 1828 1830 1832 1834 1836 1838 1840 1842 1844 1846 1848 1850

-

Fig. 2.3  Exports of palm oil from West Africa to Britain, 1801–1850 (cwt) (Sources 1801–1844: British Parliamentary Papers [BPP], 1845, XLVI [187]: palm oil. An account of the quantity of palm oil annually imported into the United Kingdom from the western coast of Africa, since the year 1790, to the 31st day of December 1844. 1845–1850: BPP 1854, LXV [296]: Tallow, & c. Return of the quantities of tallow, palm oil, train oil, spermaceti, hemp, flax seed, hides and skins, and sheep’s wool, imported into the United Kingdom during the years 1844–1853 inclusive, specifying the quantities imported from each country. Note Records for 1813 destroyed by fire)

and 1818. The Bight of Biafra, especially Old Calabar and Bonny, was home to the export of palm oil to Britain during this period.43 The second expansion phase lasted from the late 1820s to the early 1830s. The volume of palm oil almost tripled from 94,000 cwt in 1827 to 270,000 cwt in 1834. In the decade until 1834, the price of palm oil in Britain was relatively stagnant between £24–£26 per tonne except during 1830–1832, when the price was as high as £31–£34 per tonne.44 The Bight of Biafra remained dominant in the export trade of oil to Britain, but this decade saw the growth of exports from other regions of West Africa such as the Bight of Benin and the Gold Coast.45

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The third expansion phase took place during the late 1830s to the early 1840s. The peak year of this period was 1845 with 501,000 cwt. This was accompanied by the decrease of palm oil prices in the British markets from £40 per tonne in 1838 to £27 in 1844. The Bight of Biafra maintained the leading position of exports to Britain. A growing contribution of the Bight of Benin was also remarkable, while the Gold Coast accounted for around 10 per cent of the total imports of palm oil into Britain.46 In this manner West African exports of palm oil into Britain increased throughout the early nineteenth century. The volume increased by more than a hundred-fold—from 3900 cwt in 1801. A large number of new trading firms arrived in the Bight of Biafra as well as other regions of West Africa for trade. However, former slave traders, such as John Tobin from Liverpool, turned to the palm oil trade around 1807 and continued to play a major role in the trade.47 Continuity from the days of the Atlantic slave trade characterised not only the trade routes between West Africa and Britain but also those within West Africa in the early nineteenth century. As for the trade between West Africa and Britain, Liverpool was dominant in the imports of palm oil, and the rest of the imports was divided between London and Bristol. As for the trade routes within West Africa, brokerage networks of trade were key in nineteenth-century palm oil. African traders brokered between the interior producing areas and the coast. Such traders mostly emerged as slave suppliers for the Atlantic market in the course of the eighteenth century. In the case of Old Calabar in the Bight of Biafra, Efik groups, as the intermediary, purchased palm oil from the Ibibio and Igbo producers in the interior markets along the Cross River, and transported the goods on canoes to Old Calabar.48 Figure 2.3 clearly suggests that the rapid growth of the palm oil trade following the British abolition of the slave trade reflected the unprecedented level of demand for palm oil in Britain. But how did West African producers respond to such an increasing external demand within that period? It is important to explain labour utilisation in West Africa since intensive labour was needed for cultivating, harvesting, carrying loads such as water and fuels, and transporting the finished product to markets. Economists and historians have long debated this issue. One famous explanation is based on modification of the ‘vent-forsurplus’ theory. This theory originated in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and later was revisited by the Burmese economist, Hla Myint,

42  K. KOBAYASHI

who applied this theory of nineteenth-century international trade in regions like West Africa and Southeast Asia. The vent-for-surplus theory has three assumptions for the development of international trade in underdeveloped regions: the population is static; there is no technological innovation; the expansion of international trade does not sacrifice production for the domestic market. These assumptions formed the crux of the theory that the increase in the production of exports in the underdeveloped regions, when exposed to international trade, was made possible by the utilisation of factors of production such as land and labour that had been under-utilised before. Therefore, the under-utilised factors of production provided a vent. Myint also assumed that the process of reallocation of the factor of production in such regions was ­economically ‘costless’.49 By the 1980s, the theory profoundly influenced both neo-classical and Marxian writers, so that it became ‘an unexamined bedrock of Western thought on Third World problems’.50 The vent-for-surplus theory of export growth has long been subject to debate in African economic history since Hopkins’s seminal work, An Economic History of West Africa.51 The debate has so far concentrated on the ‘cash-crop revolution’ that occurred in forest zones of tropical Africa like the southern region of Asante of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Susan Martin’s research showed that the theory explains the origins and expansion of palm production for export in the Ngwa region in eastern Nigeria.52 On the other hand, John Tosh highlighted the limitation of this model: it does not fit well with savannah. For example, the cases of Senegambia and Kano demonstrate that expansion of cash-crop production like groundnuts for overseas markets curtailed food production for domestic markets.53 Yet, the application of the theory to forest zones of West Africa also needs qualification. As for the reallocation of labour to export agriculture, Gareth Austin recently criticised the assumption of the vent-for-surplus theory that ‘the labour force on the eve of the “cash-crop revolution” consisted entirely of farmers and free family members’ and their neglect of ‘the fact that slavery had ever existed within African societies’.54 Austin paid attention to the role of slavery in the mobilisation of labour for cash agriculture in the precolonial Gold Coast. The British official withdrawal from the Atlantic slave trade brought about the over-supply of slaves within internal markets of West Africa, which in turn caused a decline in slave price for a short while. This facilitated the growth in the use of slaves in Asante societies for commodity production both for overseas and domestic markets.55

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This criticism of the theory is relevant to the palm oil production in wider areas of West Africa during the period of ‘legitimate’ commerce. During the decade or so after the British abolition of the slave trade, according to Paul Lovejoy and David Richardson, slave prices along the West African coasts dropped. This slump in slave prices enabled largescale production of agricultural commodities by slaves within West Africa and the transport of the goods from production areas to the coast. The increasing demand for slave labour in the production of commodities and foodstuff for local consumption and external trade triggered the recovery of slave prices in the 1820s.56 Since palm oil production was labour intensive, the increased demand for it from Europe would increase demand for slave labour within West Africa, especially where population density was low. For example, palm oil producers in Yoruba and Igbo societies around the Bight of Biafra imported slaves from the Sokoto Caliphate, and the Bamenda plain in present north-western Cameroon was also a source of slaves for the Igbo and Cross River regions during this period. Slaves were paid for with cowrie shells and textiles in the regions.57 Therefore, the shift to ‘legitimate’ commerce and the take-off of the palm production and trade in West Africa in the early nineteenth century were closely associated both with the intensive use of slaves and also with increasing imports of cowrie shells and textiles. As Lovejoy argued, ‘there is no reason to believe that the general level of enslavement declined significantly [due to the end of the Atlantic slave trade]. The only difference [between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries] was that slaves were not sent to the Americas but instead were used domestically’.58 The development of ‘legitimate’ commerce also shed light on the role of female labour in productive activities and marketing within West Africa. As Martin stressed, there was a division of labour by gender in the palm production and trade. While men climbed palm trees to harvest and claimed the right to the saleable goods, women carried the harvested fruits to the compound to process, separated them from the spiky bunch, boiled and pounded it, extracted oil from it, transported the oil and, as petty independent traders, sold the product.59 Furthermore, fetching water was a predominant domain of female labour in some areas like Abomey in the Dahomey kingdom, where water was scarce and brought from distant areas.60 Development of trade in palm products, in particular that of palm kernels that increased in the second half of the century, benefited West African women who sold the product.61

44  K. KOBAYASHI

The roles of slaves and women in the period of ‘legitimate’ commerce are also linked to the debate about the relative importance of largescale and small-scale enterprise. A. G. Hopkins argued that slave trade had been in the hands of a small number of large entrepreneurs, such as political elites, whereas the trade in agricultural products was open to a mass of small producers, including women, free Africans and even slaves.62 Their participation in the ‘legitimate’ commerce had political repercussions because they could use cash-crop profits to purchase not only imported and domestic textiles but also weapons that would later become a serious challenge to the traditional rulers in West Africa.63 Gum Arabic Gum arabic was also one of the leading trade items from West Africa, in particular the most important commodity from Senegambia, in the early nineteenth century. As S. M. X. Golberry observed, it is a solidified vegetable juice which ‘oozes from clefts in the bark of’ acacia trees, such as acacia verek or acacia Senegal, ‘either naturally or by incision, and which afterwards coagulates’.64 In West Africa, gum arabic was likely to have fed slaves or provided nourishment during famines.65 The name ‘arabic’ originated from the fact that this product came from North Africa to Europe. However, gum arabic from Mauritania and Senegal was more mucilaginous and adhesive than any other gum such as the one brought from Arabia to Marseille via Egypt. In the course of the eighteenth century, gum arabic replaced all other types of gums in European markets.66 It was the Dutch merchants who introduced gum arabic to Europe from the coastal areas of southern Mauritania and Saint Louis in the early seventeenth century. Arguin and Portendick had been major trading posts in Mauritania where European merchants competed for gum arabic, along with slaves and other goods, supplied by desert merchants. It was the Portuguese who were the first settlers in the rocky island of Arguin in 1445, and in the seventeenth century this became a disputed territory between the Dutch, English, French and Prussian—all fighting over its jurisdictions. After the French attacked the Dutch establishment at Arguin in 1678, desert merchants turned to Portendick—situated 48 leagues to the south of Arguin—and Saint Louis at the mouth of the Senegal River as the new principal destinations to sell gum arabic.67 In the eighteenth century, aridification made Arguin unsustainable, and Portendick followed the same fate as Arguin by the middle

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of the nineteenth century. Instead of these Mauritanian ports, Saint Louis at the mouth of the Senegal River, which runs between southern Mauritania and northern Senegal, became the single source of gum arabic during this period (Map 2).68 James Searing described the gum trade as ‘the lifeblood of Saint Louis’ in the early nineteenth century,69 and Georges Hardy also mentioned that ‘gum became “the palladium of Senegalese industry and commerce”; it demanded “an exclusive cult” and any other conception of how Senegal could become a rich country was regarded as “heresy”’.70 Saint Louis was one of the earliest European outposts in West Africa and the first French colonial settlement in Senegal. In 1659, a permanent fort was founded on the island, and it enabled the French to control the trade along the Senegal River.71 The island of Saint Louis, or ‘N’Dar’ in Wolof, is located where the Senegal River joins the Atlantic Ocean. There is a long sandbar, called Langue de Barbarie (whose meaning is tongue of Barbary), that stretches from Mauritania and separates the island from the Atlantic Ocean (see also Chapter 3). There are shallows between the sandbar and the continent that prevents large ships from sailing up the river and thus they had to anchor at sea while smaller boats brought in their cargo to land. Thus, the Europeans were dependent on local fishermen to negotiate this natural obstacle.72 As gum arabic was used as a vital raw material in European calico printing and papermaking, there was stiff competition to monopolise the gum trade among three European countries: France, the Dutch Republic and Britain. France attempted to control the trade from Mauritania to Senegal by declaring the doctrine of the exclusive rights called ‘pacte colonial’ from 1713 to 1763. This campaign aimed to keep the Dutch and British interlopers out of the Mauritanian coast; however, it ended in failure. Following this, the competition over gum arabic trade heated up and turned into what André Delcourt called ‘the gum wars’ that lasted from 1717 to the Seven Years’ War. The gum wars involved not only these countries but also Waalo and Trarza around the Senegal River because these local rulers supplied the gum to areas not controlled by the French.73 During the Seven Years’ War, Britain and France fought each other in Senegambia over not only gum arabic but also slaves. Their sporadic war persisted up to the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The French did business exclusively in the Senegal River until Saint Louis and Gorée were captured by the British in 1758.74 As the only French outposts in West

46  K. KOBAYASHI

Africa, it was strategically crucial for the British to attack and occupy these places and thereby damage the French slave trade to the Caribbean Islands.75 With the treaty of Paris in 1763, Saint Louis was officially conceded to Britain and the French were forced to transfer their headquarters to the island of Gorée.76 In 1764 Senegambia was put under the committee of the British Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, a new company founded in 1751 to replace the Royal African Company and to engage in fortification. In 1765, an Order in Council of 1 November placed the Province of Senegambia under the direct control of the British government as a crown colony subject to the Navigation Acts, while Saint Louis became the capital of the territory. Thus, the province formed a part of the British Atlantic common market, within which all British subjects were allowed to trade freely, but from which all others were excluded during the British occupation that ended in 1783.77 As far as Saint Louis was concerned, France recaptured the island in 1778 and transferred their headquarters there once again from Gorée Island. With the treaty of Paris in 1783, the Gambia was conceded to Britain, but France obtained an agreement about the right to control both Saint Louis and Gorée Island. Yet, during the Napoleonic Wars, Britain once again seized Gorée Island in 1800 and Saint Louis in 1809 and held them until British Colonel Thomas Brereton received official instructions to turn them over in 1817. After the shipwreck of the Méduse, the new Governor of Senegal, Colonel Julien Schmaltz, arrived in Saint Louis in July 1816 with instructions to end the slave trade; however, the French did not really withdraw from it until 1831.78 The second quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed the growth of the gum trade to Western Europe from Senegambia, mainly from Saint Louis. In particular, there was the ‘gum fever’ around 1830, when a French agricultural project in Waalo, which started in 1819 to make Senegal into another Caribbean with the hope of maintaining France’s commercial dominance, resulted in failure.79 Senegambia exported to France 200–400 tonnes of gum arabic annually from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. This increased to more than 1000 tonnes in the mid-1820s, while the annual average during the 1830s was even higher at 3143 tonnes. Gum arabic exports from Senegambia accounted for 70–90 per cent of the total export value in the early nineteenth century.80

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It is important to note that this period saw the invention of dextrin in France, which was intended to serve as a cheaper alternative to gum arabic. However, a letter from the Minister of Agriculture and Commerce noted that dextrin deteriorated easily and that it did not suit some of the purposes that gum arabic served.81 Thus, the gum trade from Senegal to France (and other European countries) continued even after dextrin was invented in Europe. The volume of trade increased more than the previous century, and even in 1834, the trough year of the trade, more than 500 tonnes of gum was exported from Saint Louis (Fig. 2.4). Figure 2.4 shows the export of gum arabic from Senegal to France in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, whose data are based on the French official trade statistics. During this period the French mercantile policy called exclusif or pacte colonial allowed only French vessels to do trade in its colonies.82 This commercial regulation was modified in 1832 so that French vessels were allowed to ship gum arabic directly 4,000 3,500 3,000 2,500 2,000 1,500 1,000 500 0

Fig. 2.4  Exports of gum arabic from Senegal to France, 1827–1850 (tonnes) (Sources France: Direction générale des douanes, Tableau décennal de commerce de la France avec ses colonies et les puissances étrangèrs, 1827 à 1836 [Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1838]; France. Direction générale des douanes, Tableau général du commerce de la France avec ses colonies et les puissances étrangères [Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1839–1851])

48  K. KOBAYASHI

from Senegal to foreign countries including Britain, which offered a large market for the commodity.83 For example, one source on the exports of gum arabic from Saint Louis from 1837 to 1843 records that 4738 tonnes of gum arabic was shipped from Saint Louis in 1837. It also indicates that that number declined by 77 per cent to 1068 tonnes in 1843.84 At the same time, most of the gum arabic transported into France was further brought to other countries in Europe. In 1832, for example, only 18 per cent of gum arabic imported from Saint Louis of Senegal to France was consumed within the latter.85 There were fluctuations in the gum trade during this period, reflecting both unpredictable productivity of the gum tree at the desert’s edge and warfare around the Senegal River valley. The production of gum arabic is determined by two ecological conditions. One factor is the harmattan, the hot and dry north-easterly trade wind from the Sahara Desert that splits the acacia bark. The harmattan, blowing across the Sahara from the beginning of November to March–April, was crucial in determining the output of gum harvesting, and thereby determining the gum trade season in the Senegal River. The best season for harvesting was from March to May. The harmattan weakened as it approached the savannah partly due to blockages such as trees and shrubs at the desert edge. The decrease in intensity created different productivity zones between the north and south banks of the Senegal River. In the early nineteenth century, the northern zones (the domains of Muslim emirates) were major producing regions of good quality gum arabic.86 The other factor in determining the amount of gum exuded is rainfall. Excess rainfall increases the moisture inside gum trees, so it can prevent the bark from cracking, leaving the quality of gum friable. The best quality gum arabic was produced in the areas where rainfall was 400 millimetres per annum. On the other hand, severe droughts that occurred serially for four or five years might have also seriously affected the exudation of the gum trees.87 James Webb notes that ‘the most productive years are when intense wind and little rainfall follow years of plentiful rainfall’.88 As James Searing noted, the ecological conditions were highly unfavourable at the desert edge during the period between 1827 and 1835, a period of severe drought in West Africa.89 That would probably have affected the gum harvest along the Senegal River valley. Warfare between the French and African states and changing relations between the French and the nomadic emirates around the lower

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Senegal River affected the gum trade in the early nineteenth century. Searing describes it as follows: By 1820 the colony of Senegal [Saint Louis] was at war with the Trarza and with Fuuta Toro, leading to a boycott of the gum trade and the collapse of commerce. Warfare continued in 1821, when the Trarza threatened French commerce by boycotting river markets and selling their gum to the British at Portendick, located to the north of the Senegal River on the Mauritanian coast.90

Political instability of the early nineteenth century compelled the French to continue to depend on the habitants, Afro-European métis in Saint Louis so that these agents established the terms of trade from 1824 to 1827.91 In 1833 the Governor of Senegal, Germain Quernel, waged a war against the Trarza and the Waalo-Waalo (inhabitants of Waalo), to separate the latter from the former, who de facto had conquered Waalo which was indispensable to the expansion of French trade. The war— that ended in 1835—posed a serious threat to the French position in the Senegal River, and thus the gum trade recovered from a temporal decline.92 The repercussions of the expanding gum trade in the early ­nineteenth century were found in the population growth of Saint Louis and slavery in Senegal. During the greater part of the eighteenth century, the island’s population had been around 3000, but grew rapidly in the last two decades of the century, when the gum trade became more important than ever and came to rival the slave trade. The population continued to grow to approximately 9000 in 1819 and reached 13,500 in the 1840s.93 This growth was made possible in part by food imports from neighbouring African states such as Kajoor, Fuuta Toro and Gajaaga. Because Saint Louis accepted such a large migration of free traders from these African states and Waalo during this period, habitants faced new competition for profits from the gum trade in the Senegal River valley. Meanwhile, the growing demand for gum arabic from Europe would probably fuel demand for labour in the desert along the lower Senegal River, Saint Louis and its surrounding grain-producing region. There was a continuous demand in labour—from the era of the Atlantic slave trade until the 1840s, when trade in groundnuts expanded.94

50  K. KOBAYASHI

Groundnuts While gum arabic dominated exports from Senegal in the early nineteenth century, groundnuts emerged as a new staple product exported from the Upper Guinea Coast,95 especially from the Gambia. This agricultural crop was brought by the Portuguese from Brazil to Africa as early as the sixteenth century, but we do not know an exact date, and to which area of the Upper Guinea Coast, the plant was first introduced.96 In his observation in the early 1820s, Thomas Edward Bowdich noted that groundnuts were a principal food for Gambian horses, which were stronger and lived longer than those in other coasts of West Africa.97 Before the 1840s, like Fuuta Toro, Sine-Saloum, Kajoor and Bawol, the Gambia River basin was also a major grain producing region. Gambian farmers cultivated millet, maize, findo, basso and rice, according to ethnic preferences.98 Until the 1830s the principal articles of export from the Gambia had been beeswax, which accounted for 90 per cent of the total export value in the region in 1817, followed by hides, gold, gum and ivory.99 According to the Blue Books of Gambia, 1829 marked the first year of the export of groundnuts from the region: it was only four bushels of groundnuts, valued at £1, exported from the Gambia to the Caribbean Islands. The following two years also witnessed exports of small amounts of groundnuts from the Gambia to the Caribbean Islands, but they disappeared in the statistical records for 1832 and 1833. In 1834, 213 baskets of groundnuts, valued at £23, were exported from the Gambia: while Britain accounted for only one-tenth of the trade, the majority of Gambian groundnuts went to ‘foreign destinations’.100 It seems likely that the groundnut exports from the Gambia for these few years had been carried out for experimental purposes. In 1834 Foster and Smith of London, one of the leading British companies engaged in West African trade in the early to mid-nineteenth century, brought samples of Gambian nuts worth £2 back to London to explore the home market. In the following year, a mill was constructed in London to crush the groundnuts.101 From the mid-1830s to the 1840s, groundnut exports from the Gambia took off, rising to 129 tonnes, worth £1558 in 1836, and reaching 1210 tonnes, worth £15,209, in 1840. Thereafter, the export of the item continued to increase and reached 6009 tonnes, worth £72,237, in 1850. Among the destinations for the exports, the United States offered the largest market from 1837 to 1840.102 Both the repeal of the British

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51

Navigation Acts in West Africa and the equalisation of import duties on articles from Britain and foreign countries, which applied to Sierra Leone in 1834 and the Gambia in 1835, encouraged New England and New York merchants to actively participate in West African trade. In contrast to Britain and France, where groundnuts were in demand basically for industrial purposes, in the United States groundnuts were regarded as a foodstuff. However, the American trade with the Gambia was disrupted by the 1842 tariff in the United States, which was aimed to protect American growers in the South. Thereafter, the major markets for Gambian groundnuts shifted from the United States to France.103 As previously discussed, the growing demand for groundnuts was due to the industrialisation in Western Europe. Like palm oil, groundnuts were also used to produce soap, which had been made from animal fats before. Although palm oil could be made into soft yellow soap that was not popular among French consumers, French soap makers mixed groundnut oil with olive oil to produce a soap that would attract them. Meanwhile, groundnuts attracted French manufacturers, because the product was one variety of nut, which was not taxed or only lightly taxed, while the French government imposed high duties on most types of oil nuts.104 Among the French ports, Marseille played a leading role in the groundnut business: the Mediterranean port absorbed more than 95 per cent of all groundnuts exported from West Africa to France in the late 1840s.105 John Gray pointed out a uniqueness in the Gambian groundnut production and export among the histories of staple crops in British tropical Africa. When the British founded Bathurst in 1816, the groundnut was already being cultivated, but not for export. Neither did the British government promote groundnut production through official assistance, nor did they support it in its early production phase. It was the Africans, not the British, who cultivated the crop and that too without the knowledge of the British administration during the period under review.106 In other words, the growth of cash-crop production was due to the initiative of Africans. Cultivation of groundnuts rather than grains was the result of the new income opportunity that they saw.107 Kenneth Swindell and Alieu Jeng also have highlighted a significant contribution by migrant labourers, such as the Mandinka or the Soninke from interior regions, in the growth of groundnut production for export. These migrant labourers known as ‘strange farmers’ frequently stayed in the lower Gambia River basin for two or three years by hiring

52  K. KOBAYASHI

land from local chiefs in order to cultivate groundnuts for exchange with cloth or other goods, with which they returned home.108 In 1852, Governor Richard Graves MacDonnell recorded that at least one-third of the groundnuts exported from the Gambia was produced by these strange farmers thereby contributing to the growth of production that was beyond local farmers.109 In addition to strange farmers, it is noteworthy that, as was the case with palm oil production in the wet areas along the Gulf of Guinea, groundnut production also stimulated the slave trade on the Upper Guinea Coast. Bouët-Willaumez, Édouard, Governor of Senegal, offered the case of the lower Melakori River basin in Sierra Leone that, during the era of the legitimate commerce that replaced the Atlantic slave trade, local people continued to purchase slaves brought from the interior for groundnut cultivation in large quantities.110 Lieutenant Forbes also noted in the late 1840s that thriving groundnut trade in Sierra Leone required the Mandinka to secure domestic slaves to transport loads to the market, and that for that purpose they assisted the Sherbro people to engage ‘in their wars for a half-share of the prisoners, whom they make domestic slaves’ or went to ‘as far as the foreign factories at Gallinas to purchase domestic slaves for carrying on of this trade’.111 Thus, strange farmers, as well as intensive use of slaves, enabled the take-off of the groundnut production for export in the Upper Guinea Coast from the 1830s. These cases also lend support to the criticism of the vent-for-surplus theory that we have seen in the discussion on palm production for export along the coasts bordering the Gulf of Guinea. As a consequence of employing strange farmers, there was a change in the medium of exchange in the Gambia River: the transition from assortment bargaining to the French five-franc coin. The silver coin came to be known locally as the dollar and had been legal tender in the Gambia from 1843.112 It should be noted that this change occurred even before the beginning of colonial rule in the Gambia. Silver dollars helped increase market transactions, since they were acceptable for virtually all goods and services. Under such circumstances, as Hopkins argued, ‘African producers and traders had more freedom of choice: they were no longer tied to the firm which bought their produce, and they enjoyed greater independence from rulers who previously had exercised a degree of central control over export sales and over the distribution of foreign trade earnings’.113 In sum, groundnuts became one of the three major commodities exported from West Africa, following palm oil and gum arabic, in

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53

response to demand in the industrialising West. Similar to the production of palm, in contemporary West Africa, the expansion of groundnut production for industrial input was also the initiative of Africans and witnessed the absorption of slaves into the plantations. Strange farmers who sought profits to purchase imported goods also made a large contribution in expanding the limits of the local production of cash crops and thereby increasing the volume of groundnut exports towards the late nineteenth century.

Imports into West Africa Cotton Textiles During the first half of the nineteenth century, the expansion of ‘legitimate’ commerce shifted the terms of trade in favour of West Africa. This shift enabled Africans to purchase imported goods, among which textiles continued to be the largest share in imports into Atlantic Africa.114 This section focuses on two groups of fabrics imported into West Africa in the first half of the nineteenth century: English and Indian cotton textiles. Existing works have stressed the rapid expansion of the inflow of English cotton textiles into West Africa owing to the industrialisation in Lancashire.115 They have argued that the competitiveness of English goods came to be superior to its rivals manufactured by Indian weavers during the period under review. Notably, drawing on the British trade statistics classified as ‘CUST 8’ and ‘CUST 10’ at the National Archives in Kew, Joseph Inikori argued that ‘the trend from 1806 … is clear; British cottons were decisively taking over the Western African market … Thus, British cottons won a decisive victory over East India cottons in Western Africa very early in the nineteenth century’.116 Inikori is right in that the British trade statistics show the rapid expansion of English cotton goods into West African markets and a relative stagnation of Indian cotton goods in the West African imports from Britain in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. However, it is important to note that the first quarter of the century was still the experimental period for English manufactured cotton goods. Some types of Indian goods such as chintz and romals were successfully imitated in Lancashire, while other types such as blue bafts were not.117 More importantly, as we will see later in this section, it is noteworthy that West Africa also imported textiles from France in the early nineteenth century,

54  K. KOBAYASHI

which is completely missing from Inikori’s analysis. This section will show that his argument needs firm qualification at least when it came to Senegal. Furthermore, CUST 10 presents more detailed information than Inikori presented. First, the data of English cottons imported from Britain into West Africa have sub-categories such as ‘white and plain calicoes’, ‘printed and checked calicoes’, ‘plain muslins’, ‘printed and checked muslins’ and ‘fustians’. The trade data of English cottons under such sub-categories were available for the years from 1827 to 1850. CUST 10 also reveals which regions of West Africa imported what types of cotton textiles during that period. Figure 2.5 presents the details of English cotton goods imported from Britain to West Africa. As for constructing ‘West Africa’ as a region, I take the data from the sub-units of the Cape Verde islands, Senegal, the Gambia and Sierra Leone, the Windward Coast, the Cape Coast Castle (or the Gold Coast) and the Volta River to the Cape of Good Hope (or Western coast of Africa). The category of ‘Rio Volta to the Cape of Good Hope’ does not include the Cape of Good Hope, and thereby it means the coastal regions from the Bight of Benin to Angola.        

                       



&DOLFRZKLWH

&DOLFRSULQWHG

0XVOLQSULQWHG

)XVWLDQ

0XVOLQZKLWH

Fig. 2.5  Imports of English cotton goods from Britain to West Africa, 1827–1850 (yards) (Source The National Archives [NAUK, Kew, the United Kingdom], CUST 8/25-72)

2  WEST AFRICAN SEABORNE TRADE, 1750–1850 … 

55

Considering the increasing importance of palm oil trade from the Bights of Benin and Biafra in the early nineteenth-century Anglo-West African trade, it is fair to say that this category signifies mainly the Bights of Benin and Biafra. Calicoes, both plain and non-plain, accounted for more than 90 per cent of total English cotton goods imported into West Africa, and almost 100 per cent after 1836. The dominance of these calicoes during this period could be found in other regions of the world.118 In addition, West Africa imported certain amounts of muslins, both plain and nonplain, and fustians from Britain, although their amounts were negligible and smaller than total amounts of Indian cotton textiles imported from Britain to West Africa. Indeed, the British trade statistics even suggest that the volume of these English goods did not increase in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Hence, English calicoes, in particular printed or painted ones, gained competitiveness in West Africa in the same period, though this was not the case with other types of English cotton goods.119 Furthermore, as mentioned above, the British trade statistics offer information of regional differences of trade. Table 2.2 shows how much each region accounted for in the imports of white calicoes from Britain into Atlantic Africa. Coastal regions from the Volta River to the Cape of Good Hope, mainly corresponding to the Bights of Benin and Biafra and West-Central Africa, made up the largest proportion. Its contribution to the imports of plain calicoes into West Africa increased from 40 per cent in the late 1820s (except 1829) to 75 per cent in the six years until 1843. The Gambia and Sierra Leone ranked second in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, on average at 34 per cent, and the Cape Coast Castle followed at 11 per cent during this period. These three coastal regions exported a large amount of palm oil and other products, so white and plain calicoes would be exchanged for these commodities on African coasts. Table 2.3 shows the imports of printed and checked calicoes from Britain into Atlantic Africa from 1827 to 1850. Similar to Table 2.2, the Bights of Benin and Biafra and West-Central Africa made up the largest proportion in the imports of these English products into Atlantic Africa during this period, at an average of 47 per cent. The quantity rapidly increased from 564,000 yards in 1830 to more than 11.5 million yards in 1850. This increase was probably related to the fact that the Bight of Biafra was the most important source of palm oil from West Africa, as we

0 31.5 0 3.5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4.4 0 0 0.4 1.5 4.4 4.2 5.0 3.8 2.6 0

Percent

5100 5.6 0 0.0 0 0.0 0 0.0 0 0.0 15,000 1.8 14,000 1.6 0 0.0 0 0.0 37,080 2.6 1204 0.2 0 0.3 0 0.0 0 0.0 0 0.0 0 0.0 35,140 0.1 0 0.0 8100 0.9 42,390 1.7 239,080 10.8 165,910 5.0 255,547 10.0 96 0.0

Percent

Senegal

Yards

Source NAUK, CUST 8/25-72

1827 0 1828 60,930 1829 0 1830 20,216 1831 0 1832 0 1833 0 1834 0 1835 0 1836 0 1837 0 1838 0 1839 0 1840 52,924 1841 0 1842 0 1843 24,320 1844 27,922 1845 41,371 1846 103,752 1847 112,096 1848 127,663 1849 66,220 1850 0

Yards

Cape Verde Islands

34,509 21,471 94,585 288,996 190,919 196,515 189,242 148,419 190,302 268,816 336,281 648,197 281,752 216,209 275,559 392,549 668,164 552,915 582,586 1,012,393 1,210,425 608,884 676,749 1,061,583

Yards 37.9 11.1 46.2 50.4 31.8 23.9 22.2 42.9 48.0 19.1 60.8 37.3 20.6 18.0 23.1 9.4 9.8 28.8 62.4 41.0 54.5 18.3 26.6 58.2

Percent

Gambia and Sierra Leone

680 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 25,540 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Yards 0.7 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

Percent

Windward Coast

22,337 18,220 107,533 60,844 90,577 252,866 22,524 45,901 36,943 76,261 48,873 85,499 151,342 58,853 60,454 18,847 74,100 1,018,062 205,230 61,300 123,516 207,948 291,187 138,070

Yards 24.5 9.4 52.5 10.6 15.1 30.7 2.6 13.3 9.3 5.4 8.8 4.9 11.0 4.9 5.1 0.4 1.1 53.1 22.0 2.5 5.6 6.3 11.4 7.6

Percent

Cape Coast Castle

Table 2.2  White calicoes imported from Britain to West Africa, 1827–1850

28,400 93,064 2688 203,464 319,032 358,720 625,996 152,004 169,430 1,027,979 166,645 1,005,984 937,470 875,400 858,460 3,747,540 5,983,808 318,750 96,002 1,250,214 536,020 2,214,286 1,258,332 624,281

Yards 31.2 48.0 1.3 35.5 53.1 43.6 74.5 43.9 42.7 72.9 30.1 57.8 68.4 72.7 71.9 90.1 87.9 16.6 10.3 50.6 24.1 66.6 49.4 34.2

Percent

Western coast of Africa

91,026 193,685 204,806 573,560 600,528 823,101 851,762 346,324 396,675 1,410,136 553,003 1,739,680 1,370,564 1,203,386 1,194,473 4,158,936 6,811,342 1,917,649 933,289 2,470,049 2,221,137 3,324,691 2,548,035 1,824,030

Yards

100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100

Percent

West Africa (Total)

56  K. KOBAYASHI

0 0.7 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1.1 1.3 1.0 0.2 0.2 0.1 0.4 0.6 0.5 0.1 0

Percent

9613 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 112,400 0 15,050 0 0 0 7003 0 7003 14,230 10,800 8820 90,060 84,436 0

1.1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1.8 0 0.3 0 0 0 0.1 0 0.1 0.2 0.1 0.1 0.8 0.6 0

Percent

Senegal

Yards

Source NAUK, CUST 8/25-72

1827 0 1828 9518 1829 0 1830 0 1831 0 1832 0 1833 0 1834 0 1835 0 1836 0 1837 0 1838 0 1839 0 1840 102,637 1841 92,849 1842 76,942 1843 23,113 1844 17,570 1845 15,051 1846 27,226 1847 64,224 1848 58,360 1849 13,540 1850 0

Yards

Cape Verde Islands

345,675 228,592 402,434 533,211 456,338 871,388 486,310 668,835 734,990 1,258,928 1,308,701 1,631,431 1,489,556 1,282,702 1,293,358 1,740,889 1,105,147 1,289,678 2,170,266 1,903,890 1,888,152 1,194,082 1,114,617 1,259,371

Yards 40.8 17.3 24.5 28.4 28.1 30.6 12.6 16.1 35.2 20.3 30.0 29.5 19.2 13.6 17.8 22.0 11.3 15.9 20.7 26.8 18.1 10.4 7.5 8.4

Percent

Gambia and Sierra Leone

118,981 202,721 119,484 103,482 0 132,000 4320 40,000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 39,105 167,876 91,425 66,635 0 0 0 0 0

Yards 14.0 15.4 7.3 5.5 0 4.6 0.1 1.0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.5 1.7 1.1 0.6 0 0 0 0 0

Percent

Windward Coast

224,645 507,646 444,327 679,235 653,089 614,515 1,374,631 2,044,911 148,943 2,366,531 1,679,422 1,895,398 2,616,247 2,873,485 2,935,086 1,724,092 3,770,865 3,184,331 3,146,786 1,058,184 2,079,483 2,028,150 3,734,125 2,232,809

Yards 26.5 38.5 27.0 36.1 40.3 21.6 35.6 49.1 7.1 38.2 38.5 34.3 33.7 30.5 40.4 21.8 38.6 39.3 30.0 14.9 20.0 17.7 25.3 14.8

Percent

Cape Coast Castle

Table 2.3  Printed calicoes imported from Britain to West Africa, 1827–1850

148,151 369,225 678,673 564,389 511,411 1,230,024 1,990,955 1,408,526 1,202,678 2,450,527 1,327,198 1,986,085 3,668,878 5,175,676 2,939,415 4,329,415 4,701,399 3,514,779 5,071,249 4,113,594 6,376,959 8,112,228 9,840,518 11,564,397

Yards 17.5 28.0 41.3 30.0 31.6 43.2 51.6 33.8 57.6 39.6 30.4 35.9 47.2 54.9 40.5 54.7 48.1 43.4 48.4 57.8 61.2 70.6 66.5 76.8

Percent

Western coast of Africa

847,065 1,317,702 1,644,918 1,880,317 1,620,838 2,847,927 3,856,216 4,162,272 2,086,611 6,188,386 4,360,321 5,527,964 7,774,681 9,434,500 7,260,708 7,917,234 9,768,400 8,104,786 10,474,217 7,113,694 10,417,638 11,482,880 14,787,263 15,056,577

Yards

100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100

Percent

West Africa (Total)

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58  K. KOBAYASHI

have seen before. The Cape Coast Castle ranked second in the imports of these types of English calicoes into Atlantic Africa. Its quantity more than trebled in the two decades through 1850. The Gambia and Sierra Leone also imported an increasing amount of these manufactured goods from Britain from 533,000 yards in 1830 to 1.26 million yards in 1850. From the above it is clear that West Africa imported a massive amount of English cotton calicoes in the early nineteenth century. However, it would be wrong to assume that Lancashire had produced cotton textiles that were perceived to be of good quality right from the beginning of the century. One report on the Gold Coast in 1842 indicated that the cheapness of Lancashire goods reached the lowest among the African community. It is noteworthy that the report itself did not mention their quality.120 Indeed, as P. H. Lamb, Director of Northern Nigeria’s Department of Agriculture, said in 1913, that consumers in northern Nigeria preferred locally hand-woven textiles to ‘the cheaper but less durable Lancashire cloth’,121 it would be fair to claim that Lancashire goods became competitive in terms of cheapness, not in terms of quality, throughout the period under study. The link between Lancashire goods and non-affluent consumers suggests that the growth of ‘legitimate’ commerce allowed small-scale producers of palm oil and groundnuts to purchase cheap English cotton goods. In the 1810s the committee of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa investigated the state of the settlements and forts on the coast of Africa, and the reports from the Governors at the Company’s forts bore evidence to the fact that there were problems with the quality of English cotton goods in West African markets. George Richardson, the Governor at the Annamaboe fort on the Gold Coast, answered the following questions by the British commissioners on 29 May 1810 as follows: Q. 44. What proportion of the goods chiefly demand among the natives, is of English production or manufacture, and what foreign? A. 44. Cloth of India manufacture is chiefly in demand; the Manchester goods, and English iron and lead, find a market. I cannot say as to the proportion of each, but the India goods have a preference, and are sold in much greater quantities. Q. 45. Is it probable that new English articles of trade could be advantageously introduced; could they be made to supplant foreign articles, or are the natives so much attached [to] old customs, as to render this change hopeless?

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A. 45. This change is hopeless, unless they were deprived of India goods altogether.122

The Governor at Succondee, William Mollan, gave more detailed information about the problem of English cotton goods. To the question on the prospect of English cotton textiles mentioned above, his answer (on 20 August 1810) was: Unless there were an entire prohibition to the importation of India goods, the manufactures of Great Britain could not be introduced to supplant foreign articles. Many attempts have been made at Manchester to imitate the India fabric, but they appear to be chiefly defective in the colours (some not being fixed) and in the strength of the cloth.123

As Mollan’s statement indicates, it was the quality of textiles that made Indian cottons competitive against English manufacturers and continue to find a market in West Africa after the British withdrawal from the slave trade.124 The first decades of the nineteenth century would probably be an experimental phase for English cotton textiles in West Africa. As we have seen in Tables 2.2 and 2.3, increase in imports of these manufactured items in the second quarter of the century could be in large part explained by the development of ‘legitimate’ commerce, which enabled even small-scale African traders to acquire these textiles and other goods using cash-crop profits. CUST 10 contains sub-categories of Indian cotton textiles imported from Britain to West Africa. Piece goods of Indian cotton are largely classified into two: ‘white or plain’ and ‘dyed in India but not printed’.125 Figure 2.6 shows the imports of Indian cotton textiles from Britain to West Africa between 1827 and 1850. As a whole, the imports of Indian cotton goods into West Africa by way of Britain slightly decreased in this period. This might be in part because English cotton goods gradually replaced Indian textiles in West African markets. However, it is clear from the statements of Richardson and Mollan that the persistence of demand in West Africa for Indian cotton textiles was probably attributed to the quality of Indian textiles that met with consumer tastes. Figure 2.6 also suggests that, among the Indian cotton textiles, dyed cloths were dominant in the West African import of such textiles from Britain. The quantity fluctuated between 30,000 pieces and 88,000 pieces from 1827 to 1850. At the same time, West Africa seldom

60  K. KOBAYASHI 100,000 90,000 80,000 70,000 60,000 50,000 40,000 30,000 20,000 10,000 0

White or plain

Dyed

Total

Fig. 2.6  Imports of Indian cotton textiles from Britain to West Africa, 1827– 1850 (pieces) (Source NAUK, CUST 10/18-41)

imported more than 10,000 pieces of white cotton textiles manufactured in India—from Britain—in a single year. CUST 10 shows regional differences of the imports of Indian textiles from Britain into West Africa. While Tables 2.2 and 2.3 show that Sierra Leone, the Cape Coast Castle and the coastal regions from the Volta River to the Cape of Good Hope were three major West African markets for English cotton goods from 1827 to 1850, Table 2.4 shows that Sierra Leone offered the single largest West African market for Indian dyed cotton goods. Their proportion increased from 50–60 per cent in the early 1830s to 80–99 per cent from the mid-1830s onwards. Moreover, the import of Indian dyed cotton goods from Britain into Sierra Leone relatively increased towards the middle of the nineteenth century. Considering that Upper Guinea was a part of the cloth-currency zone, these dyed textiles would probably be exchanged for regional products such as timber, camwood, palm oil, groundnuts and ginger.126 In order to measure the scale of the nineteenth-century imports of Indian cotton textiles into West Africa in detail, it is absolutely necessary to analyse French trade statistics as well as English sources. Indeed, French statistics offer a different view of textile trade into West Africa

0 3225 0 0 0 0 0 0 240 223 0 0 0 0 0 0 360 0 0 19,602 1200 1401 5261 6977

Pieces

0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.8 0.8 0 0 0 0 0 0 0.6 0 0 23.0 2.3 4.2 13.0 0

Percent

Source NAUK, CUST 10/18-41

1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850

Unit

Senegambia

27,490 35,725 50,790 20,478 25,558 24,263 30,783 46,337 27,162 22,317 47,324 40,820 42,575 43,542 39,646 35,171 55,889 48,521 64,047 46,478 48,247 29,340 34,516 30,843

Pieces 44.6 51.2 57.8 41.0 61.6 66.5 54.5 82.1 91.1 84.8 98.7 93.1 90.8 92.2 81.1 94.7 93.0 99.6 99.7 54.5 94.1 87.9 85.1 98.3

Percent

Sierra Leone

1250 0 0 0 0 0 711 420 0 0 0 180 120 0 0 120 2809 180 180 0 0 0 0 0

Pieces 2.0 0 0 0 0 0 1.2 0.7 0 0 0 0.4 0.3 0 0 0.3 4.7 0.4 0.3 0 0 0 0 0

Percent

Windward Coast

17,259 16,175 14,822 18,783 5070 3432 4534 2527 1015 594 0 0 10 510 1067 60 0 0 0 240 60 229 20 120

Unit 28.0 23.2 16.9 37.6 12.3 9.4 8.0 4.5 3.4 2.2 0 0 0 1.1 2.2 0.1 0 0 0 0.3 0.1 0.7 0 0.4

Percent

Cape Coast Castle

15,620 14,615 22,306 10,690 10,690 8798 20,475 7153 1401 3172 601 2841 4195 3177 8162 1783 1017 0 0 18,893 1760 2400 780 420

Unit 25.3 21.0 25.4 21.4 25.9 24.1 36.2 12.7 4.7 12.1 1.3 6.5 8.9 6.7 16.7 4.8 1.7 0 0 22.2 3.4 7.2 1.9 1.3

Percent

Coastal regions from the Volta River to the Cape of Good Hope

Table 2.4  Indian dyed cotton textiles imported from Britain to West Africa, 1827–1850

61,619 69,740 87,918 49,951 41,318 36,493 56,503 56,437 29,818 26,306 47,925 43,841 46,900 47,229 48,875 37,134 60,075 48,701 64,227 85,213 51,267 33,370 40,577 38,360

Unit

100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100 100

Percent

West Africa (Total)

2  WEST AFRICAN SEABORNE TRADE, 1750–1850 … 

61

62  K. KOBAYASHI

than that which we have seen above. They show that Indian cotton textiles remained more competitive than European textiles in the imports from France into Senegal during the first half of the nineteenth century when other coastal regions of West Africa saw massive imports of English cotton goods. In the total value of imports into Senegal, Indian cotton textiles accounted for 50 per cent between 1820 and 1823 and 40 per cent between 1824 and 1828.127 In the late 1830s and the late 1840s, they accounted for 47 per cent and 37 per cent, respectively, while the proportion of European textiles was 28 and 24 per cent.128 Therefore, the aforementioned argument by Inikori that English cotton goods were superior to Indian textiles in West Arica in the early nineteenth century needs revision when it comes to Senegal. Figure 2.7 reveals some divergence between the West African imports of the Indian textiles from Britain and France from the late-1820s to 1850. Indian dyed cotton textiles imported via France continually 350,000 300,000 250,000 200,000 150,000 100,000 50,000

1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850

-

France to West Africa

France to Senegal

Britain to West Africa

Fig. 2.7  West African imports of Indian dyed cotton textiles from Britain and France, 1827–1850 (pieces) (Sources France: Fig. 2.4. For the 1832 data, J.-P. Duchon-Doris, Commerce des toiles bleues dites guinées [Paris, 1842], appendis. Britain: Fig. 2.6. Note The French official trade statistics somehow lack the data for Senegal in 1832)

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increased towards the mid-nineteenth century, from 56,000 pieces in 1828 to 216,000 pieces in 1848, while those imported via Britain stagnated (Fig. 2.6). It is remarkable that almost all of the Indian dyed cotton textiles imported from France into West Africa were shipped into Senegal. Additionally, the quantity of Indian dyed cotton textiles imported from France to Senegal was more than those brought from Britain into West Africa for the most part since 1827. As will be discussed in Chapter 3, the trade of Indian dyed cotton textiles, called guinées, from France into Senegal was closely linked with the gum trade in the Senegal River valley. Table 2.5 shows the price of guinées per piece in France and Senegal from 1817 to 1849. The price data for France are based on the 1842 pamphlet by J.-P. Duchon-Doris Jr., an entrepreneur from Bordeaux, while those for Senegal (f.o.b.) are based on Webb’s 1985 article. Neither source covers every year during the period, but indicates downward trends in prices in both places. The price of guinées in France and Senegal fluctuated from year to year and from place to place.129 The drop in the price in France in the late 1830s is attributed to the 1838 prohibition in the Dutch colony of the Sunda Islands in Southeast Asia from importing guinées from both British and French India. This caused an over-supply of guinées into the Bourbon Islands, France and Senegal.130 The guinée price varied in large part by market conditions of the gum trade in Senegal. According to James Webb, because desert harvesters did not understand gum tree growth properly, and because it took one to two years for an order for guinées to arrive in Saint Louis, over-supply of guinées would occur. In such cases French merchants turned to dumping guinées in Senegal.131 After the good harvesting years of the mid1830s, guinées reached saturation in the markets along the Senegal River valley for some years after 1838, leading to a relative increase of the gum price in Senegal. Correspondence between the Minister of the Navy and the Colonies in Paris and the Governor in Saint Louis recorded that the exchange rate between a piece of guinée and gum arabic around the lower Senegal River fell from 40 livres (15–20 kilograms) of gum arabic per piece of guinée in June 1839 to 27 livres in May 1840.132 Such a commercial scenario had a significant implication for French merchants and Senegalese middlemen and brought institutional changes to the gum trade in the 1840s, as we will see in Chapter 5.

64  K. KOBAYASHI Table 2.5  Prices of guinées in France and Senegal, 1817–1849 (French francs)

Year

France

Senegal (f.o.b.)

1817 1818 1819 1820 1821 1822 1823 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1849

40–45 30–35

N/A

51 N/A 25–28 35 N/A 15–18

12–15 15–18

21–25 20 17.5

N/A

8–11

N/A

16–17 N/A 12 N/A 13–14 13 13.5

Sources France: Duchon-Doris, Commerce, pp. 16–17. Senegal: James L. A. Webb, Jr., ‘The Trade in Gum Arabic: Prelude to French Conquest in Senegal’, Journal of African History 26/2 (1985): 162 f.o.b. Freight On Board

Cowries Apart from Indian cotton textiles, cowrie shells from the Maldives— islands in the Indian Ocean—also show continuity in the south-south trade connections from the eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Cowrie shells functioned as a currency in many areas of West Africa until the early colonial period. Those from the Maldives, called cypraera moneta, which means cowrie money, were used as small change for transactions in West Africa, in particular the Central Soudan, in the east, the

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southern Sahara Desert or present-day northern Niger in the north, Songhay on the Niger River in the west, and the confluence of the Niger and Benue Rivers in the south.133 Although the origin of shell money in the Central Soudan is not yet clear, the region had already absorbed cowries overland via the Sahara Desert from North Africa as early as the eleventh century. These shells served as a currency in the earlier empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhay, whose economic development was closely tied with the control of the trans-Saharan caravan trade with North Africa.134 According to Paul Lovejoy, the collapse of Songhay in the late sixteenth century brought to the area much slower economic development or even depression. However, the circulating volume of cowrie shells reached an unprecedented level in the eighteenth century in the Central Soudan when it experienced heightened commercial activity. The major development in this century was that, along with the Atlantic slave trade, the southern coasts of West Africa became a major source of cowries for many parts of West Africa, except for the Upper Niger basin which was supplied from Senegambia.135 It was the Portuguese who first established the triangular trade of cowries from the Maldives via Europe into West Africa in the early sixteenth century. Through this shipping network which was later followed by the Dutch and English in the seventeenth century, cowries were carried as ballast into Atlantic Africa, whence they were circulated inland as a currency.136 Both the Guinea Coast and the Niger River continued to be important channels for cowries to enter into interior areas of West Africa during the transition from the Atlantic slave trade to ‘legitimate’ commerce in the early nineteenth century. In the meantime, the expansion of palm oil trade in the Bights of Biafra and Benin turned Europe’s attention towards East Africa as an alternative source of cowries from the mid-1840s.137 Lovejoy argued that cowrie shells were ‘an ideal currency’ for certain characteristics, a chief reason being that they were not easily available in the region and also that they could not be counterfeited.138 Indeed, cowries were used mainly as a medium of exchange for small market transactions; in some regions they were also used as bridemoney and funeral offerings and for ritual or magical purposes.139 Yet, cowries had some problems as a currency. Frederick Lugard, in his Political Memoranda dated 1905, commented on their problems, namely ‘(a) the bulk and weight and the great time taken in counting;

66  K. KOBAYASHI 700 600 500 400 300 200 100

1751 1754 1757 1760 1763 1766 1769 1772 1775 1778 1781 1784 1787 1790 1793 1796 1799 1802 1805 1808 1811 1814 1817 1820 1823 1826 1829 1832 1835 1838 1841 1844 1847 1850

0

Fig. 2.8  West African imports of cowrie shells from Britain, 1751–1850 (tonnes) (Source Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade [Cambridge University Press, 1986], pp. 58–60, 67. Note Records for 1813 destroyed by fire)

(b) the wastage involved by breakage, leakage of bags, etc.; and (c) its fluctuating value’.140 Marion Johnson also noted that shells were ‘always cumbersome to carry, and increasingly so as their value declined in the nineteenth century’ and argued that the most important use of cowries may have been as market currencies that facilitated exchange within the market rather than transport from one market to another. Furthermore, there were instances where cowries were used as a unit of account. Literate merchants kept detailed accounts in terms of cowries without handling actual cowries in the market transaction.141 Figure 2.8 shows the time series of cowrie imports from Britain into West Africa from 1751 to 1850. The data, based on British trade statistics, are found in the 1986 book by Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson. Though they discussed cowrie transactions during the eighteenth-century Atlantic slave trade and that of the nineteenth-century palm oil trade separately, Fig. 2.8 combines both data to give a clear picture of the impact the British abolition had on the British shipping of cowries into West Africa from 1808 to 1818. The annual average of the imports from 1800 to 1807 reached 75 tonnes, which was more than double for the years from 1791 to 1798. The first decade after

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67

the British withdrawal from the slave trade saw a depression in cowrie imports from Britain to West Africa. The annual average of amounts was only 4.7 tonnes, which was almost 16 per cent of the amounts for the years from 1800 to 1807.142 However, Fig. 2.8 shows a revival of cowrie imports from Britain from around 1820, followed by rapid growth in the 1830s and 1840s. These expansions were linked to the fact that West Africa became the main source of palm oil for industrialising Britain. More importantly, it is remarkable that the scale of cowrie imports from the mid-1830s onwards was larger than that before 1807. In other words, Fig. 2.8 indicates the significant scale of the palm oil trade carried out by the British during this period, and that development of palm oil trade, stimulated by the British Industrial Revolution, reinforced the south-south trade connection even after abolition. The import scale reached an unprecedented level of 367 tonnes per annum from 1841 to 1850; 1845 was the peak year of cowrie imports from Britain in the first half of the century, at 628 tonnes.143 Brodie Cruickshank, a British member of the legislative council on the Cape Coast Castle, noted the linkage between the cowrie trade and the palm oil trade: The introduction of the cowrie-shell and its application to this purpose [utility as exchange medium] supplied the desideratum necessary for the prosecution of the trade in palm-oil, the supply of which is found to fluctuate according to the supply of the cowries. If these have been exhausted in the stores of the merchants, no oil is brought to the market unless in such small quantities as may be required for immediate consumption; and although the manufacture of oil may go on in the meantime, in the expectation of new importations of cowries, yet if these be long delayed, the activity of the labourer slackens and finally ceases; the object of his labour being to obtain what to him is tantamount to ready cash, which he can apply in any manner he think fit.144

A link of this kind was also found in the participation of small-scale producers including women and slaves in the palm oil trade. As we have seen earlier in this chapter, unlike the slave trade, palm production did not require much capital and hence palm oil could be sold even in small quantities in exchange for cowries. Robin Law pointed out that cowrie shells were ‘usually paid out in bulk (by weight or measure)’ in the slave trade, though they were ‘commonly counted out’ in the oil trade.

68  K. KOBAYASHI

Law also cited an account by Archibald Ridgway on Whydah to show ‘a number of women who were occupied in counting out a cask of cowries’. The British naval officer Frederick Forbes also recorded that ‘dozens of his own slaves were counting out cowries to pay for the produce’.145 In sum, the West African cowrie trade oscillated according to the decline of the transatlantic slave trade and the expansion of ‘legitimate’ commerce from 1750 to 1850. The shells from the Indian Ocean played a money role both in the slave trade and in the palm oil trade, and its function as small change played a significant role in the latter trade, as small-scale producers were able to participate in the market with small amounts of palm oil to be exchanged for cowries as well as other imports. The palm oil–cowrie exchange contributed to the revival of a south-south economic linkage during the early nineteenth century.

Conclusion The century up to 1850 was a period of transformation in West Africa, both on the coast and in the interior. A jihad movement began in the Senegal River Valley, partly in response to the Atlantic slave trade, and spread towards the Central Soudan in the course of the eighteenth century. With the abolition of the slave trade and industrialisation in the West, palm oil, gum arabic and groundnuts became new leading exports from West Africa during the first half of the nineteenth century. In spite of the commercial transition, European merchants continued to bring what African consumers coveted. Among the imports into West Africa, this half-century witnessed a massive inflow of Lancashire calicoes, except for Senegal, where Indian dyed cotton textiles remained among the most important articles to be exchanged for gum arabic in local transactions (Fig. 2.7). This is a case of the continued significance of the south-south trade connection that contributed to the development of West African overseas trade tied with industrialisation in Western Europe during this period. Why local consumers in Senegal continued to prefer South Asian textiles, not European textiles, will be the main focus of discussion in Chapter 3. This chapter has also highlighted the importance of the south-south trade connection through the cowrie trade. The growing demand for palm oil in industrialising Britain triggered the boom of the cowrie trade in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and the cowrie

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69

trade during this period was by far larger than when the British carried out the Atlantic slave trade. Thus, the transition from the slave trade to ‘legitimate’ commerce did not cut out the south-south trade connection. Rather, the development of the palm oil trade, stimulated by the Industrial Revolution, revived and even reinforced the south-south trade connection of cowries (Fig. 2.8) or at least until the inflation of cowries occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Notes





1.  Robin Law, ‘The Historiography of the Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa’, in Toyin Falola, ed., African Historiography: Essays in Honour of Jacob Ade Ajayi (Harlow: Longman, 1993), pp. 91–115; Robin Law, ‘Introduction’, in Robin Law, ed., From Slave Trade to ‘Legitimate’ Commerce: The Commercial Transition in Nineteenth-Century West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 1, 26; David Northrup, ‘The Compatibility of the Slave and Palm Oil Trades in the Bight of Biafra’, Journal of African History 17/3 (1976): 353–64; Elisée Soumonni, ‘The Compatibility of the Slave and Palm Oil Trades in Dahomey, 1818–1858’, in Law, ed., ‘Legitimate’ Commerce, pp. 78–92; Christopher Leslie Brown, ‘The Origins of “Legitimate Commerce”’, in Robin Law, Suzanne Schwarz, and Silke Strickrodt, eds., Commercial Agriculture, the Slave Trade & Slavery in Atlantic Africa (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), pp. 145–6, 151; J. E. Inikori, ‘The Economic Impact of the 1807 British Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade’, in Robin Law, Toyin Falola, and Matt D. Childs, eds., The Changing Worlds of Atlantic Africa: Essays in Honor of Robin Law (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2009), pp. 163–82. 2. Allan McPhee, The Economic Revolution in British West Africa (Second Edition, London: Frank Cass, 1971), pp. 30–1. 3.  S. M. X. Golberry, Travels in Africa, Vol. 1, trans. W. Mudford (London, 1803), p. 138; Geneviève Désiré-Vuillemin, ‘Un commerce qui meurt: la traite de la gomme dans les escales du Sénégal’, Cahiers d’outre-mer 17 (1952): 90. 4.  C. W. Newbury, ‘Credit in Early Nineteenth Century West African Trade’, Journal of African History 13/1 (1972): 83–4. 5.  A. J. H. Latham, Old Calabar, 1600–1891: The Impact of the International Economy upon a Traditional Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973); Martin Lynn, Commerce and Economic Change in West Africa: Palm Oil Trade in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

70  K. KOBAYASHI

6. James L. A. Webb, Jr., ‘The Trade in Gum Arabic: Prelude to French Conquest in Senegal’, Journal of African History 26/2 (1985): 162. 7. Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade (Cambridge University Press, 1986). 8. Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Development (Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 444. 9. A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (London: Longman, 1973), p. 105. 10. Patrick Manning, Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 21. 11.  Gareth Austin, ‘Resources, Techniques, and Strategies South of the Sahara: Revising the Factor Endowments Perspective on African Economic Development, 1500–2000’, Economic History Review 61/3 (2008): 587–624. 12.  Klas Rönnbäck and Dimitrios Theodoridis, ‘African Agricultural Productivity and the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Evidence from Senegambia in the Nineteenth Century’, Economic History Review 72/1 (2019): 209–32. 13.  Voyages Database. 2009. ‘Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (TSTD)’. http://www.slavevoyages.org. Accessed 23 March 2015. 14. TSTD. See also Gareth Austin, ‘Commercial Agriculture and the Ending of Slave-Trading and Slavery in West Africa, 1780s–1920s’, in Law, Schwarz, and Strickrodt, eds., Commercial Agriculture, pp. 243–65. 15. On the importance of the Bight of Biafra in the British slave trade, see Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘Trust, Pawnship, and Atlantic History: The Institutional Foundations of the Old Calabar Slave Trade’, American Historical Review 104/2 (1999): 333–55; Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘“This Horrid Hole”: Royal Authority, Commerce and Credit at Bonny, 1690–1840’, Journal of African History 45/3 (2004): 363–92. 16. TSTD. 17. Paul E. Lovejoy, Jihad in West Africa During the Age of Revolutions (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2016), p. 133. 18.  David Robinson, ‘Revolutions in the Western Sudan’, in Nahemia Levtzion and Randall L. Pouwels, eds., The History of Islam in Africa (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2000), p. 131. 19. Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade, trans. Ayi Kwei Armah (Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 50–4; David Robinson, ‘The Islamic Revolution of Futa Toro’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 8/2 (1975): 185. It is true that

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71

the Almoravid movement in the eleventh century was an earlier case of jihad in the history of West Africa, but as David Robinson noted, ‘it did not have a lasting impact in most areas and among most societies’. By contrast, as discussed in this chapter, Nasir al-Din’s jihad had a lasting impact in the region. Robinson, ‘Revolutions’, p. 132. 20.  Almami is a Pularised form of the Arabic imam. Barry, Senegambia, pp. 94–102; Robinson, ‘Revolutions’, pp. 133–5; Philip D. Curtin, ‘Jihad in West Africa: Early Phases and Inter-relations in Mauritania and Senegal’, Journal of African History 12/1 (1971): 11–24; Michael A. Gomez, Pragmatism in the Age of Jihad: The Precolonial State of Bundu (Cambridge University Press, 1992); Lovejoy, Jihad, pp. 40–1; Ghislaine Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 10, 93–4. 21. Barry, Senegambia; Robinson, ‘Revolutions’, pp. 133–5; Lovejoy, Jihad, pp. 41–2, 145. 22. Toby Green, ‘Dimensions of Historical Ethnicity in the Guinea-Bissau Region’, in Patrick Chabal and Toby Green, eds., Guinea-Bissau: MicroState to ‘Narco-State’ (London, C. Hurst & Co., 2016), p. 29. 23. Barry, Senegambia, p. 98. 24. Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade, Vol. 2 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), pp. 4–5; James L. A. Webb, Jr., Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change Along the Western Sahel, 1600–1850 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). 25. E. Bouët-Willaumes, Commerce et traite des noirs aux cotês occidentales d’Afrique (Paris, 1848), p. 34; Barry, Senegambia, pp. 102–6; Robinson, ‘Revolutions’, pp. 135–7; Robinson, ‘Futa Toro’; Oumar Kane, La première hégémonie peule: le Fuuta Tooro de Koli Tengella à Almaami Abdul (Paris and Dakar: Karthala—Presses Universitaires de Dakar, 2004), pp. 457–95; Lovejoy, Jihad, p. 44. 26. Gomez, Pragmatism, p. 110; Lovejoy, Jihad, p. 45. 27. Lovejoy, Jihad, pp. 45–7; Ousmane Oumar Kane, Beyond Timbuktu: An Intellectual History of Muslim West Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. 71–2. 28. Robinson, ‘Revolutions’, pp. 137–9; Lovejoy, Jihad, pp. 68–101. 29. Paul E. Lovejoy, ‘Interregional Monetary Flows in the Precolonial Trade of Nigeria’, Journal of African History 15/4 (1974): 571–5; Robinson, ‘Revolutions’, p. 138. 30. Heinrich Barth, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa: Including Accounts of Tripoli, the Sahara, the Remarkable Kingdom of Bornu, and the Countries Around Lake Chad (London: Ward, Lock

72  K. KOBAYASHI



















& Co., 1890, originally published in 1857–1858), pp. 300–2; Phillip Shea, ‘The Development of an Export Oriented Dyed Cloth Industry in Kano Emirate in the Nineteenth Century’ (PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1975); Marisa Candotti, ‘The Hausa Textile Industry: Origins and Development in the Precolonial Period’, in Anne Haour and Benedetta Rossi, eds., Being and Becoming Hausa: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 187–211. 31. Lovejoy, ‘Interregional Monetary Flows’, p. 573. 32. Lovejoy, Jihad, p. 31. On the slave trade from West-Central Africa, see Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, The Atlantic Slave Trade from West Central Africa 1780–1867 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 16–37. 33. Lynn, Commerce, pp. 1–2, 34–5. 34. McPhee, Economic Revolution, pp. 30–1. 35. Lynn, Commerce, pp. 16–7. 36. Whether palm oil was soft or hard depended on its FFA. The former was low in FFA, while the latter was high. Lynn, Commerce, pp. 46–7. 37. Braithwaite Poole, The Commerce of Liverpool (London and Liverpool, 1854), p. 114; McPhee, Economic Revolution, pp. 30–1. 38. Lynn, Commerce, pp. 46–8. 39. Lynn, Commerce, pp. 48–9. 40. Lynn, Commerce, p. 49. 41. Poole, The Commerce of Liverpool, p. 114. 42. Lynn, Commerce, pp. 15–6. 43. Lynn, Commerce, p. 21. 44. Lynn, Commerce, p. 29. 45. Lynn, Commerce, pp. 21–3. On the Gold Coast, see James Sanders, ‘Palm Oil Production on the Gold Coast in the Aftermath of the Slave Trade: A Case Study of the Fante’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 15/1 (1982): 49–63. 46. Lynn, Commerce, p. 26. On the palm oil trade around the Bight of Benin, see Patrick Manning, Slavery, Colonialism and Economic Growth in Dahomey, 1640–1960 (Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 12–9; Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving ‘Port’ 1727–1892 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004), Chapter 6; Silke Strickrodt, Afro-European Trade in the Atlantic World: the Western Slave Coast, c. 1550–c. 1885 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2015), Chapter 6. 47. Latham, Old Calabar, pp. 57–8. On John Tobin and his family, see Chapter 5. 48. Lynn, Commerce, p. 61; David A. Northrup, Trade Without Rulers: Pre-colonial Economic Development in South-Eastern Nigeria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 190–1.

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49.  As Myint noted, it was John Stuart Mill who labelled Smith’s theory ‘vent-for-surplus’ theory. Hla Myint, ‘The “Classical Theory” of International Trade and the Underdeveloped Countries’, Economic Journal 68/270 (1958): 317–37. 50. Cited from Susan Martin, Palm Oil and Protest: An Economic History of the Ngwa Region, South-Eastern Nigeria, 1800–1980 (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 6. 51. Hopkins, Economic History, pp. 231–6; Jan S. Hogendorn, ‘The Vent for Surplus Model and African Cash Agriculture to 1914’, Savanna, 5/1 (1976): 15–28; W. M. Freund and R. W. Shenton, ‘“Vent-for Surplus” Theory and the Economic History of West Africa’, Savanna 6/2 (1977): 191–6; Jan S. Hogendorn, ‘Vent-for-Surplus Theory: A Reply’, Savanna 6/2 (1977): 196–9; Martin, Palm Oil, pp. 2–11. For the most recent survey of the debate about the ‘vent-forsurplus’ model in Africa, see Gareth Austin, ‘Explaining and Evaluating the Cash Crop Revolution in the “Peasant” Colonies of Tropical Africa, ca. 1890–ca. 1930: Beyond “Vent for Surplus”’, in Emmanuel Akyeampong, Robert H. Bates, Nathan Nunn, and James Robinson, eds., Africa’s Development in Historical Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 295–320. 52. Martin, Palm Oil, pp. 33–4, 138. 53.  John Tosh, ‘The Cash-Crop Revolution in Tropical Africa: An Agricultural Reappraisal’, African Affairs 79/314 (1980): 91–4; Kenneth Swindell and Alieu Jeng, Migrants, Credit, and Climate: The Gambian Groundnut Trade, 1834–1934 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 16–8. 54.  Gareth Austin, ‘Vent for Surplus or Productivity Breakthrough? The Ghanaian Cocoa Take-Off, c. 1890–1936’, Economic History Review 67/4 (2014): 1055–6; Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Third Edition, Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 163–71. 55.  This point raises a question about the assumption of what Robert Szereszewski called ‘a large reserve of leisure’ as well. Austin, ‘Vent for Surplus’, pp. 1055–6; Robert Szereszewski, Structural Changes in the Economy of Ghana, 1891–1911 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965), p. 21. 56. The trend of slave prices in Angola was different from West Africa during the period observed by Lovejoy and Richardson. Therefore, the discussion here is the case of West Africa. Paul Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘British Abolition and its Impact on Slave Prices along the Atlantic coast of Africa, 1783–1850’, Journal of Economic History 55/1 (1995): 108, 113; Martin A. Klein, Slavery and Colonial Rule in French West Africa (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 41.

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57. Lovejoy, ‘Interregional Monetary Flows’, pp. 574–5. 58. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery, p. 144. 59. Susan Martin, ‘Slaves, Igbo Women and Palm Oil in the Nineteenth Century’, in Law, ed., ‘Legitimate’ Commerce, pp. 181–3. 60. Robin Law, ‘“Legitimate” Trade and Gender Relations in Yorubaland and Dahomey’, in Law, ed., ‘Legitimate’ Commerce, p. 202. 61. Martin, Palm Oil, pp. 47–8. 62. Hopkins, Economic History, pp. 125–6. 63. Hopkins, Economic History, pp. 144–5; Martin A. Klein, Islam and Imperialism in Senegal: Sine-Saloum, 1847–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968), pp. 36–8; Martin A. Klein, ‘Social and Economic Factors in the Muslim Revolution in Senegambia’, Journal of African History 13/3 (1972): 424. 64. Golberry, Travels in Africa, Vol. 1, p. 138. 65.  Jutta Wimmler, ‘Material Exchange as Cultural Exchange: The Example of West African Products in Late 17th and Early 18thCentury France’, in Veronika Hyden-Hanscho, Renate Pieper, and Werner Stangl, eds., Cultural Exchange and Consumption Patterns in the Age of Enlightenment: Europe and the Atlantic World (Bochum: Winkler, 2013), p. 142. 66. Golberry, Travels in Africa, Vol. 1, pp. 138–9; P. Bellouard, ‘La Gomme Arabique en A.O.F.’, Bois et Foréts des Tropiques 9 (1947): 4; Curtin, Economic Change, Vol. 1, pp. 215–6; Jutta Wimmler, The Sun King’s Atlantic: Drugs, Demons and Dyestuffs in the Atlantic World, 1640–1730 (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 47–9. 67. Golberry, Travels in Africa, Vol. 1, pp. 96, 138–9; Wimmler, The Sun King’s Atlantic, p. 49; António de Almeida Mendes, ‘Slavery, Society, and the First Steps towards an Atlantic Revolution in Western Africa (Fifteenth–Sixteenth Centuries)’, trans. Toby Green, in Toby Green, ed., Brokers of Change: Atlantic Commerce and Cultures in Pre-colonial Western Africa (Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 239–57; Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, ‘African Islands and the Formation of the Dutch Atlantic Economy: Arguin, Gorée, Cape Verde and São Tomé, 1590– 1670’, International Journal of Maritime History 26/3 (2014): 554–7. 68. Webb, ‘The Trade in Gum Arabic’, p. 153. 69.  James F. Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 166. 70. Georges Hardy, La mise en valeur du Sénégal de 1817 à 1854 (Paris: Émile Larose, 1921), p. 255. My translation. 71. Curtin, Economic Change, Vol. 1, pp. 102, 104; Barry, Senegambia, p. 47. 72. Ibrahima Thioub, ‘L’esclavage à Saint-Louis du Sénégal au xviiie–xixe siècle’, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin: Jahrbuch 2008/2009 (2010): 337.

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73. André Delcourt, La France et les établissements français au Sénégal entre 1713 et 1763 (Dakar: IFAN, 1952); Barry, Senegambia, pp. 69–71; Wimmler, The Sun King’s Atlantic, pp. 49–50; Maxine Berg, ‘In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present 182 (2004): 137. 74. Curtin, Economic Change, Vol. 1, pp. 105, 109. 75.  James F. Searing, ‘The Seven Years’ War in West Africa: The End of Company Rule and the Emergence of the Habitants’, in Mark H. Danley and Patrick J. Speelman, eds., The Seven Years’ War: Global Views (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 263–6. 76.  Andrew F. Clarke and Lucie Colvin Philips, Historical Dictionary of Senegal (Second Edition, London and Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1994), pp. 231–3. 77. Curtin, Economic Change, Vol. 1, pp. 110–2; J. E. Inikori, ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism and Imperialism in West Africa: Great Britain and Senegambia in the Eighteenth Century’, in Toyin Falola and Emily Brownell, eds., Africa, Empire and Globalization: Essays in Honor of A. G. Hopkins (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2011), p. 214. 78. Clarke and Philips, Historical Dictionary, pp. 231–3; Martin A. Klein, ‘Slaves, Gum, and Peanuts: Adaptation to the End of the Slave Trade in Senegal, 1817–48’, William and Mary Quarterly 66/4 (2009): 895–914. 79. Hardy, La mise, pp. 253–5. The proximate causes of the agricultural project were the loss of Saint Domingue and the suppression of the slave trade. As for the causes for failure of the project, the French faced ‘the pressure from neighboring peoples, the difficulties involved in the transfer of plantations, the difficulties in hiring a labor force, and the resistance of former slave traders from the post of Saint-Louis’. Boubacar Barry, The Kingdom of Waalo: Senegal before the Conquest (New York: Diasporic Africa Press, 2012), pp. 136, 151–61, 219, citation from p. 151. 80. Curtin, Economic Change, Vol. 2, pp. 96–7. Curtin noted that the information on the quantity of gum arabic from the Senegal River region does not necessarily reflect actual exports. Some numbers are based on expectations by the authors of the records he used. Also, his data seem to suggest that the years 1718 and 1750 were exceptional, as each year exported 2200 tonnes and 1028 tonnes of gum, respectively. At least, as he admitted, the former was based on expectation; not actual scale. Therefore, I ignore these numbers. 81. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM, Aix-en-Provence, France), Sénégal XIII, Dossier 33a: Correspondance du Ministère de l’Agriculture et du Commerce à l’Amiral, Paris, 3 December 1839.

76  K. KOBAYASHI



















82. Bernard Schnapper, ‘La fin du régime de l’exclusif: le commerce étranger dans les possessions françaises d’Afrique tropicale (1817–1870)’, Annales Africaines (1959): 149–199. At least during the years from 1831 and 1850, the French trade statistics show that there was no foreign vessel entering and leaving Senegal. France. Direction générale des douanes, Tableau général du commerce de la France avec ses colonies et les puissances étrangères (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1831–1851). 83. J.-P. Duchon-Doris, Commerce des toiles bleues dites guinées (Paris, 1842), p. 17. 84. ANOM, Sénégal XIII, Dossier 27a: ‘Notes annexées à l’Etat de commerce de Saint Louis (Sénégal) pour l’année 1843’. 85. Webb, ‘The Trade in Gum Arabic’, p. 150. 86. Webb, ‘The Trade in Gum Arabic’, p. 153–4. 87. Anne Raffenel, Nouveau voyage dans le pays des nègres, Vol. 1 (Paris, 1856), p. 79; Curtin, Economic Change, Vol. 1, p. 216. 88. Webb, ‘The Trade in Gum Arabic’, p. 153. 89. Searing, West African Slavery, p. 171. 90. Searing, West African Slavery, p. 169. 91. Searing, West African Slavery, p. 171. On habitants, see Chapter 3. 92. J. M. Gray, A History of the Gambia (New Edition, London: Frank Cass, 1966), p. 408; Barry, The Kingdom of Waalo, pp. 187–8. 93. Michael D. Marcson, ‘European-African Interaction in the Precolonial Period: Saint Louis, Senegal, 1758–1854’ (PhD Dissertation, Princeton University, 1976), pp. 162–8. However, Searing noted that these numbers underestimate the real population because free African migrants are not counted. Searing, West African Slavery, p. 165. 94. Searing, West African Slavery, pp. 165–7. 95. Upper Guinea is the region that stretches from the Senegal River in the north to Sierra Leone in the south. 96.  The Portuguese introduced to the Gambia orange, lime and papaw as well. Gray, Gambia, p. 15; George E. Brooks, ‘Peanuts and Colonialism: Consequences of the Commercialization of Peanuts in West Africa, 1830–70’, Journal of African History 16/1 (1975): 31. 97.  Thomas Edward Bowdich and Sarah Bowdich Lee, Excursions in Madeira and Porto Santo, during the Autumn of 1823, While on His Third Voyage to Africa (London, 1825), p. 256. 98.  Findo is a grass-like grain and basso is guinea corn. Assan Sarr, ‘Gender, Spirituality, and Economic Change in Rural Gambia: Agricultural Production in the Lower Gambia Region, c. 1830s–1940s’, African Economic History 45/2 (2017): 4–7. 99. Gray, Gambia, p. 379.

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100.  ‘Foreign destinations’ means the regions outside Britain, the British colonies and the United States. The National Archives (NAUK, Kew, United Kingdom), C 90/3-8: Gambia Blue Books. 101. Gray, Gambia, p. 381; Brooks, ‘Peanuts and Colonialism’, pp. 32–5. 102. As for 1840, the figures are based on the combined data from both shelled and unshelled items. The latter was 1127 tonnes, valued at £13,531. NAUK, CO 90/9-24: Gambia Blue Books. By the mid1840s, Portuguese Guinea also had begun producing groundnuts for export, but its take-off took place after the abolition of the Brazilian slave trade in 1850 and subsequent attention to the potential of groundnuts in the land. Joye L. Bowman, ‘“Legitimate Commerce” and Peanut Production in Portuguese Guinea, 1840s–1880s’, Journal of African History 28/1 (1987): 93–6. 103. Brooks, ‘Peanuts and Colonialism’, pp. 34–42. 104. Gray, Gambia, p. 380; Klein, ‘Slaves, Gum, and Peanuts’, p. 912. 105.  Xavier Daumalin, ‘Commercial Presence, Colonial Penetration: Marseille Traders in West Africa in the Nineteenth Century’, in Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, ed., From Slave Trade to Empire: Europe and the Colonization of Black Africa 1780s–1880s (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 213. 106. Gray, Gambia, p. 380. 107. As Assan Sarr has revealed, this shift of production brought about economic, religious and gender transformations. Sarr, ‘Gender’. 108. Swindell and Jeng, Migrants, Credit, and Climate, pp. 46–7. 109.  NAUK, CO 87/53: A dispatch from Governor Richard Graves MacDonnel to the Right Hon. Sir John S. Pakington, Bart., Government house, Bathurst, 12 July 1852. The significant role of migrant workers in groundnut production could also be found in Portuguese Guinea. The Manjaco from the Costa de Baixo and the islands of Jeta and Pecixe were important migrant labourers at plantation-like establishments, called feitorias, in Forria along the Rio Grande. The proprietors of feitorias were Luso-African, other Euro-African and European merchants. They dispatched hired agents to the Manjaco homeland to recruit the migrant workers needed in Forria. Bowman, ‘Legitimate Commerce’, pp. 87–98. 110. Bouët-Willaumez, Commerce, pp. 75–7. 111. F. E. Forbes, Six Months’ Service in the African Blockade from April to October, 1848, in Command of H. M. S. Bonetta (London, 1849), p. 16. 112. Gray, Gambia, p. 384. The 1843 order-in-council established the 3s 10½d rate in the Gambia, which was fixed until demonetisation in 1922. Leigh Gardner, ‘The Curious Incident of the Franc in the Gambia: Exchange Rate Instability and Imperial Monetary Systems

78  K. KOBAYASHI















in the 1920s’, Financial History Review 22/3 (2015): 291–314. On assortment bargaining, see Curtin, Economic Change, Vol. 1, pp. 247– 53. See also discussion in Chapter 3. 113. Hopkins, Economic History, p. 149. On cloth currency, see Chapter 3. 114. Hopkins, Economic History, p. 132; David Eltis and Laurence C. Jennings, ‘Trade Between Western Africa and the Atlantic World in the Pre-Colonial Era’, American Historical Review 93/4 (1988): 948, Table 2. On the latest estimate on West Africa’s terms of trade in the nineteenth century, see Ewout Frankema, Jefferey Williamson and Pieter Woltjer, ‘An Economic Rational for the West African Scramble? The Commercial Transition and the Commodity Price Boom of 1835– 1885’, Journal of Economic History 78/1 (2018): 231–67. 115. On the relative shares of the main markets of the world in the exports of the British cotton industry during the nineteenth century, see D. A. Farnie, The English Cotton Industry and the World Market 1815–1896 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 91–2. 116. Inikori, Africans, p. 447. The official names of CUST 8 and CUST 10 are the ledgers of exports of British merchandise under countries and the ledgers of exports of foreign and colonial merchandise under countries, respectively. 117. J. Adams, Remarks on the Country Extending from Cape Palmas to the River Congo (London, 1823), pp. 253–8; Edward Bold, The Merchant’s and Mariner’s African Guide (London, 1822), p. 58. See also, Sydney Jones Library, the University of Liverpool, LUL MS 107/3: Memoranda of African Trade. 118. Manuel Llorca-Jana, The British Textile Trade in South America in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 39–41. 119.  High demand for dyed and printed cotton textiles continued to be found in early colonial Dahomey (1890–1914). They constituted the majority of the imports of textiles into the region. Manning, Dahomey, pp. 124–6, 373–4. 120. British Parliamentary Papers (BPP), 1842, XI & XII (551). Report from the select committee on the west coast of Africa, Appendix no. 4, p. 134. 121. Cited in Jan S. Hogendorn, Nigerian Groundnut Exports: Origins and Early Development (Zaria: Ahmadu Bello University Press, 1978), p. 110. 122. BPP, 1816, VII Pt. B (506): Report from the Select Committee on the Papers Relating to the African Ports, pp. 163–4. 123. BPP, 1816, VII Pt. B (506): Report, p. 178. 124. This was not a problem specific to West Africa. English cotton goods faced a similar problem in Southeast Asian markets in the 1830s as well. One report on regional commerce noted, ‘[in recent] years it is said that Indian cloths have met with better sales, in consequence of the natives

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79

beginning to find out that they are far more durable than the English’. T. J. Newbold, Political and Statistical Account of the British Settlements in the Straits of Malacca, viz. Pinang, Malacca, and Singapore, Vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1839), p. 353, cited in Atsushi Kobayashi, ‘The Growth of Intra-Southeast Asian Trade in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century: The Role of Middlemen in Singapore’, in Tomoko Shiroyama, ed., Modern Global Trade and the Asian Regional Economy (Singapore: Springer, 2018), p. 50. 125. This data of Nankeen, textiles produced in China, is also available from CUST 10, but the amounts of the imports of the fabric from Britain to West Africa during the concerned period are negligible. Therefore, I omitted the goods for the sake of convenience. 126. NAUK, CO 272/1-27: Sierra Leone Blue Books. 127. ANOM, Sénégal XIII, Dossier 1: Notes sur système exclusif qui régit à l’importation et à l’exportation le Sénégal et ses dépendances by Bruno Devès, 1 February 1829, Bordeaux. 128. Curtin, Economic Change, Vol. 2, p. 88. 129. As we will see in Chapter 3, there were diverse types of guinées with different names according to the quality of cloth. This implies that each type of guinée would probably be sold at different prices. 130. Duchon-Doris, Commerce, p. 13. 131. Webb, ‘The Trade in Gum Arabic’, p. 163. There might have been an issue such as a problem of coordination (or lack of it) among individually small producers. 132.  Archives Nationales du Sénégal (ANS, Dakar, Senegal), 1B29: Correspondance du Ministère de la Marine et des Colonies à Ed Devès, 11 June 1839, Paris, F 181; 2B18: Correspondance du Gouverner à Ministère de la Marine et des Colonies, No. 156, 20 May 1840, Saint Louis, F 30. Webb noted that the gum price changed throughout the year, especially between the peak season and the rest of the year. Webb, ‘The Trade in Gum Arabic’, p. 159. 133. Lovejoy, ‘Interregional Monetary Flows’, pp. 564–75; Hogendorn and Johnson, Shell Money, p. 5; Peter Boomgaard, ‘Early Globalization: Cowries as Currency, 600 BCE–1900’, in Peter Boomgaard, Dick Kooiman, and Henk Schulte Nordholt, eds., Linking Destinies: Trade, Towns and Kin in Asian History (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2008), p. 13. 134. In this early period, Maghribi Jews and Genoese merchants played a large role in shipping cowries from the Indian Ocean to North Africa. Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trade, pp. 74–6; Nehemia Levtzion and John F. P. Hopkins, eds., Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History, trans. John F. P. Hopkins (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2000), pp. 269, 281.

80  K. KOBAYASHI 135. Lovejoy, ‘Interregional Monetary Flows’, pp. 564–8. 136. Hogendorn and Johnson, Shell Money, pp. 28–46. The eighteenth-century expansion of the Atlantic slave trade appeared to have had a global implication of cowries. Towards the end of the century, the growing demand for cowries in Atlantic Africa increased prices in Indian and other Asian markets. Bin Yang suggested that the soaring prices of cowries in these markets might cause the shell money to disappear in Yunnan and decline in Siam. Bin Yang, Cowrie Shells and Cowrie Money: A Global History (Oxford: Routledge, 2018), Chapter 7. 137. Lovejoy, ‘Interregional Monetary Flows’, pp. 572–3. 138. Lovejoy, ‘Interregional Monetary Flows’, p. 564. 139. Marion Johnson, ‘The Cowrie Currencies of West Africa. Part I’, Journal of African History 11/1 (1970): 18, 36, 47–9; Lovejoy, ‘Interregional Monetary Flows’, 564. 140. Cited in Hogendorn and Johnson, Shell Money, p. 149. 141. Johnson, ‘The Cowrie Currencies. Part I’, pp. 46–7. 142. Hogendorn and Johnson, Shell Money, p. 64. 143. Hogendorn and Johnson, Shell Money, pp. 65–9. 144. Brodie Cruickshank, Eighteenth Years on the Gold Coast of Africa, Vol. 2 (London, 1853), pp. 43–4. See also, Law, ‘Gender Relations’, p. 199. 145. Law, ‘Gender Relations’, pp. 199–200; Strickrodt, Afro-European Trade, p. 216.

CHAPTER 3

Guinées in the Lower Senegal River: A Consumer-Led Trade in the Early Nineteenth Century

In Chapter 2 we saw that, as a result of the development of Lancashire’s cotton industry, British cotton textiles were increasingly imported into West Africa in the early nineteenth century. On the other hand, imports of Indian cotton textiles from Britain to West African coasts seemed to have declined somewhat during this period. However, the imports of Indian cotton textiles into Senegal kept increasing towards the middle of the nineteenth century. These findings give rise to the question: why did Indian cotton textiles remain in demand in Senegal in the early nineteenth century, while the other regions of West Africa witnessed a decrease in the imports of Indian cotton goods? To provide answers to this, in this chapter we will study the consumption of Indian cotton textiles around the lower Senegal River region. The literature on the economic history of precolonial Senegal has emphasised the role played by Indian cotton textiles, called guinées, as an important medium of exchange in the trade in gum arabic. The suppliers of gum arabic were traders in the nomadic emirates of the Senegal River region, who preferred to receive Indian guinées rather than European copies and counterfeits.1 However, given that West Africa had a long-established position in the production, trade and consumption of textiles, there is still room to consider why this type of cotton textile continued to function as a currency in, and beyond, Senegal. Indeed, we are yet to understand exactly why the consumer demand © The Author(s) 2019 K. Kobayashi, Indian Cotton Textiles in West Africa, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18675-3_3

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for Indian guinées turned out to be so resilient in the lower Senegal River region well into the early nineteenth century. If we can shed new light on this problem, we should then be able to start unveiling the hitherto neglected global interactions between a part of West Africa and other regions of the world. The quality of Indian cotton textiles, unlike the European textiles, suited life in the savannah, Sahel and desert. In addition, the demand for guinées can be placed in the context of commercial networks in the lower Senegal River region that also brings forth the varieties of people and linguistic complexities involved. The networks indicate that there were extensive monetary ‘circuits’ that shaped the demand for a cloth currency in the region. This chapter will also focus on the social and ecological factors that underpinned the continued demand for guinées among consumers in Senegal. The continued demand for them will be situated within West Africa’s longue durée, in which high-quality textiles were produced, traded and consumed. In so doing, in this chapter I will argue that consumer behaviour in Senegal mattered not only for the gum trade but also constituted a part of global trade networks that extended from South Asia through Western Europe and which reached West Africa in the early nineteenth century.

What Is a Piece of Guinée? Before discussing the organisation of trade and consumption patterns of guinées around the lower Senegal River region, it is useful to see a guinée itself in some detail. A piece of guinée, or pièce de guinée in French, was one variety of Indian cotton textiles imported into West Africa from the era of the Atlantic slave trade onwards.2 This Gallic appellation of the cloth is derived from a coastal area of West Africa, namely Guinea. In the nineteenth century, guinée was the term given to dark-blue, fine cotton cloth produced along the Coromandel Coast in South India, in particular Pondicherry and Salem, mainly for European trade with Senegal (Image 3.1).3 Guinées were also known as ‘filature’, ‘opéapaléons’, ‘conjons’, ‘salem’ and others, according to the quality of finished products.4

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Image 3.1  Sample guinées (Source Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer [Aixen-Provence, France], Inde 494, Dossier 871: L’Arrêté signé par Gouverneur Du Camper, 23 August 1844, Pondicherry. Note The guinées are stamped with the following words in red: ‘ORDONNANCES ROYALES DES 18 MAI ET SEPTEMBRE 1843’ around the outer border of the mark, whose diameter is 56 millimetres, ‘PONDICHERY’ at the upper centre, ‘GUINÉE’ on the left of centre, and ‘Poids 2k 30, Longr 16m 50, Largr 1[m] 00’ in the centre)

Why Did West African Consumers Prefer Indian Guinées? In the early nineteenth century, major consumers of guinées imported into Senegal were both nomadic inhabitants on the right bank of the Senegal River as well as black Africans who settled in areas on the

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opposite side of the river such as Waalo, Fuuta Toro and Kajoor. Nomadic inhabitants were of mixed origins of Arab, Berber and Africans. They referred to themselves as Bidan (white men) and were commonly known as Moor/Moors in English or Maure/Maures in French. In particular, those in the nomadic emirates of Trarza and Brakna along the lower Senegal River enjoyed an advantage as they had direct access to guinées imported from South Asia via Western Europe.5 As shown in the picture by David Boilat of a Trarza princess (Image 3.2), they wrapped themselves with guinées loosely. Ghislaine Lydon has accounted for the loose clothing of desert nomads that ‘provided windshield, sunscreen, and ventilation, while functioning as a resting sheet’. Also, the indigo blue dye used for textiles ‘stained the skin, acting as a protective coating against sun rays’.6 This consumption pattern of guinées was linked to the climate in the lower Senegal River region. In other words, these indigo-blue textiles had use-value as clothing that suited the life in the areas of consumption. This is one major reason for the demand for Indian guinées in these regions. We have seen the evidence of consumer preferences for Indian cotton textiles on the Gold Coast in Chapter 2, but consumers along the lower Senegal River valley also showed a strong preference for the quality of guinées. More importantly, astute desert merchants such as those in the Trarza emirate were known to reject undesired imitation goods.7 S. M. X. Golberry, a French traveller, in his travelogue, recorded how these merchants in Senegal determined the difference between authentic Indian guinées and European copies and counterfeits: The Moors are paid for their gum in pieces of calico-dyed blue, which is manufactured in India, and is called in the commerce of western Africa, by the name of pieces of guinea. These pieces are seven or eight ells long, and half an ell in width. During my residence in Africa, they were considered as an essential and principal part in all the bargains which were contracted, and in fact the Moors would not take any other kind of merchandise in exchange. It has been attempted in France, to imitate these pieces of guinea, but they were doubtless imperfect, for the Moors were never deceived by them; they possess indeed so quick a sense in this respect, that they can tell immediately if a piece of guinea be fabricated in France or in India, and this discovery is not made either by the feel or the colour; they immediately put the piece to their nose, and ascertain its true quality by the smell.

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Image 3.2  A princess of Trarza (Source L’A. P.–David Boilat, Esquisses Sénégalaises [Paris, 1853], Planche XII, General Research Division, The New York Public Library. ‘Princesse Mauresse, Trarzas.’ New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed 11 August 2017. http://digitalcollections.nypl. org/items/510d47df-79ef-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99) These Indian calicoes, as well as the indigos used by the Indians in dyeing them, have doubtless a particular smell, which it is impossible to imitate. During the time which I passed in Africa, real Indian pieces of guinea were in high estimation, a preference which nothing could be found to equal, much less to supersede.8

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Golberry spoke about the important role of guinées as an ‘essential and principal’ exchange medium in the gum trade in Senegal—the role that is examined in some detail later in this chapter, as well as the fact that the smell of guinées formed an integral part of a ‘real Indian piece of guinea’ that differentiated themselves from European fabrications. He attributed ‘a particular smell’ of guinées to indigo used in India for the textiles for West African markets. It seems likely that such guinées would remain unwashed until they arrived in West Africa because the smell of indigo was easily lost when the cloth was washed.9 The importance of smell is also corroborated by a letter from the English East India Company to the Governor in Council at the Fort St. George in Madras that showed that Nagore in South India manufactured indigo-blue textiles whose odour was highly appreciated among consumers in West Africa.10 While Golberry’s account was based on his visit to Senegal in the mid1780s, local consumers’ preference for guinées from India persisted up to the early nineteenth century. Mireille Lobligeois argued that by the end of the 1820s manufacturers in Europe could imitate the colour of guinées, although it was impossible for them to imitate the smell of the Indian product.11 In a similar vein, the special report for the commission of the trading posts and the trade of African coasts submitted in June 1851 admitted that the fabrics produced in Rouen could not find the way to imitate Indian guinées, thereby did not meet the demand from the consumers in the Senegal River region yet.12 Apart from the quality of textiles, the French paid attention also to the weight and size of the South Asian goods shipped to Senegal in the early nineteenth century. In the early 1840s, the French merchants, the principal actors in shipping guinées from India into Senegal by way of France at that time, needed to send guinées to Senegal that were of uniform size. J.-P. Duchon-Doris Jr., who invested in Pondicherry’s guinée production, noted that each piece of guinée had to weigh 2–3 kilograms, 17 metres in length, and more than 1 metre in width.13 The French Royal Orders (Ordonnances du Roi) issued on 18 May and 1 September 1843 also defined the proper weight and size for each piece of guinée, as discussed in detail in Chapter 4. The Royal Order issued on 18 May 1843, which was to be enforced on 1 October of that year, defined that a piece of guinée must weigh more than 2.3 kilograms and be more than 16.5 metres in length and 1 metre in width.14 The Royal Order issued on 1 September 1843, in the second article, stipulated that guinées

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produced in Pondicherry for Senegal had to be marked or stamped by the local administration in Pondicherry. The mark or stamp guaranteed that the textiles met such official criteria defined in the formal order (Image 3.1).15 The aim of this measure was to prevent fraud by differentiating real Indian textiles from imitated textiles produced in Europe.16 However, African merchants would not receive even stamped guinées if they were found to be of inferior quality.17 As seen above, guinées were suitable to life in the savannah, Sahel and the desert, where inhabitants were exposed to the strong and relentless sun. But in the context of West Africa and the Sahara Desert, consuming foreign textiles or dyed textiles had a social meaning. Wearing indigo-dyed cloth, some from India and others from the production areas in the Western Soudan, had been a sign of luxury, which differentiated the wearer from farmers who wore white cloth.18 In the second half of the eighteenth century, there was a considerable increase in demand for guinées because not only the nomads on the right bank of the Senegal River but also the inhabitants in Waalo, Fuuta Toro and Kajoor emulated the clothing of the marabouts.19 Such was the pattern of conspicuous consumption that was seen widely in precolonial West Africa.20 Anthropological research by David Ames also confirmed that dyed cloth was more valuable than white cloth among the Wolof in the Gambia.21 Therefore, as long as the French merchants wanted to purchase gum arabic in Senegal, they had to bring Indian guinées that served as a principal currency in the gum trade in the Senegal River region since European manufacturers could not completely imitate Indian cotton textiles at least during the early nineteenth century. That is why guinées survived as the most important trading goods in Franco-Senegal trade throughout the period. The next section examines the major commercial networks in the lower Senegal River through which guinées were exchanged for gum arabic and received by consumers.

Commercial Networks in the Lower Senegal River The lower Senegal River formed an essential port for French merchants to purchase gum arabic of high quality that helped the development of the textile industry in Western Europe. While the literature on the economic history of precolonial Senegal relevant to the guinée trade tends to narrow its focus on the gum trade in the Senegal River region,22

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I have argued that the river trade was linked to West African and Saharan trade networks. In other words, the lower Senegal River functioned as a gateway of the Atlantic Ocean to the Sahara Desert. In the early nineteenth century the river trade witnessed the collaboration between French merchants and Senegalese métis who were called habitants. The upper river areas such as Bakel were used for the trading of slaves and gold before the French withdrawal from this trade in 1831. These regions also supplied gum arabic, but its quality was crumbly and lacked in richness compared to that of the lower river region such as Dagana.23 For example, in 1840, a piece of guinée could be exchanged for 27 livres of gum arabic in the lower river region, although it could fetch a price of 80 livres at Bakel in the upper river region.24 In addition, one official document noted that 70 per cent of gum arabic exported from Saint Louis of Senegal was supplied by the lower river region in the late 1840s.25 Therefore, this section pays close attention to the commercial network of the gum trade extending from Saint Louis through the lower Senegal River to the gum harvesting area.26 The following discussion visualises the commercial networks in the lower Senegal River in the early nineteenth century, in order to show who participated in the river trade in guinées and gum arabic, who entered and left each point of exchange, and what kind of commodities were traded. Between France and Saint Louis The seaborne trade between France and Saint Louis was the domain of the French merchants (Fig. 3.1 and Map 2). Their commercial supremacy was largely based on the regime of the French mercantilist policy called exclusif, or the pacte colonial. This policy banned trading between the French colonies, and allowed metropolitan merchants only to carry out commerce between France and its colonies.27 In addition, the geography around the island of Saint Louis, which was separated from the Atlantic by the Langue de Barbarie, the long sandbar extending southwards from Mauritania, would shape the trajectory of the maritime trade from Saint Louis, which maintained close connection with France during the period.28 Therefore, due to the combination of the French mercantilist policy and the geography around Saint Louis, guinées were always imported into Senegal via France.29 The trade between Saint Louis and the fixed seasonal markets in the lower river, called escales, was the domain of the habitants and their

3  GUINÉES IN THE LOWER SENEGAL RIVER: A CONSUMER-LED TRADE … 

Guinées, gun, etc.

Guinées

FRENCH MERCHANTS

India

89

France

HABITANTS

Saint Louis

Fig. 3.1  Shipping of guinées from India via France into Saint Louis (Source Author’s original)

river traders, who mediated between French merchants at Saint Louis and the nomadic emirates such as Brakna and Trarza at the escales. The habitants were free Africans or descendants of métis, mixed offspring of Europeans and Africans in Saint Louis and Gorée. By 1750 they had formed the core population in Saint Louis. Ibrahima Thioub described the habitants as the vertebral column of the social architecture of the island of Saint Louis. In Saint Louis society, they, including female habitants known as signares, were socially respectable and wealthy enough to own their own houses, boats and domestic slaves. These assets allowed them to enter into the trade in the Senegal River. Their ability to speak European languages enabled them to serve as translators for Europeans, and they profited not only from the intermediary business in the river trade, but also engaged in the overseas trade with France.30 French merchants needed their help for the river trade, partly because they had no immunity against tropical diseases, such as malaria and yellow fever, and partly because there were sometimes rivalries between the French and the Trarza emirate in the lower Senegal River.31 In other words, the European business of the time had to rely on local intermediaries to reduce potential risks associated with the trade in West Africa.32 In Saint Louis, French merchants offered guinées and other goods on credit to the habitants, who, as the intermediaries, were expected to carry an adequate amount of gum arabic to these French merchants by

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the end of the trade season. The habitants pledged their own slaves as collateral to secure their loans. In the case of non-fulfilment of the initial contract, the creditors would allow them time to conduct another river trade, although the second agreement could carry heavy interest, generally at 50 per cent per trade season. The failure to fulfil the second agreement meant that slaves of the debtor could be seized by the creditor.33 Between Saint Louis and Three Escales As shown in Fig. 3.2, in Saint Louis, the habitants consigned guinées, firearms and other goods to their river traders who conducted business on their behalf. The river traders included the laptots, the gourmets and the maître de langue. The laptots were skilled slave sailors; the gourmets served as pilots, helmsmen and boatswains; and the maître de langue were skilled Africans and métis who served as translators and interpreters between the French and the nomadic merchants. As they were familiar with the political and economic environments of both sides, their role as diplomats and intermediaries was crucial in Saint Louis and in the Senegal River region.34 The harmattan, the hot and dry north-easterly trade wind, blowing across the Sahara from the beginning of November to March–April, was crucial in determining the output of gum harvesting, and thereby determining the gum trade season in the Senegal River. The best season for gum harvesting was from March to May when the harmattan was strongest (see Chapter 2). Therefore, the major gum trade in the peak season (from January or February to July) was called the grande traite in French, while the minor one in the off-peak season from November to the end of January was known as the petite traite.35 The river traders carried guinées and other goods by boat from Saint Louis to the escales over several weeks. The latter included millet, salt and dried fish from both Waalo and Kajoor. Kajoor was a large kingdom stretching from north to central Senegal at that time; its production of foodstuffs accounted for half of the total value of the goods brought to the escales in 1852.36 A piece of guinée served as an exchange medium in the regional trade at that time, and so did millet.37 However, little is known about the accepted exchange rate between millet and guinée/gum. In this regard, the Compromis for the gum trade in the three escales in 1841 suggested that the price

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HASSANI

Protection

Mudarat

Guinées, gun, millet, etc.

ZWAYA

(Habitants’) HABITANTS

RIVER TRADERS Gum arabic

Millet, etc.

Kajoor

AFRICAN TRADERS

Saint Louis

Escales

Fig. 3.2  The river trade of guinées and gum arabic in the lower Senegal River (Credit: Rapp Halour/Alamy Stock Photo)

of a piece of guinée was fixed at 54 livres (27 kilograms) of gum arabic, and that the price of one barrel of millet was fixed at 2 pieces of guinées. This means that one barrel of millet was equal to 108 livres of gum in the escales.38 The exchanges between the imported goods shipped from Saint Louis and gum arabic took place in the escales along the lower Senegal

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River. In the early nineteenth century there were three escales: escale des Darmancours, escale du Coq and escale du Désert.39 By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Idaw al-Hajj (or the Darmancours) had established their escale at the nearest point from Saint Louis. The other two escales were held under the jurisdiction of the warrior nomads of the desert edge, called hassani or arab. Among the hassani groups, the Brakna controlled the escale du Coq, which was ranked second in importance to the escale du Désert controlled by the Trarza, the most powerful group in the lower river region. These hassani groups protected the clerical lineages, known as zwaya, who in return paid taxes, called mudarat, to the hassani, and designated the escales as the locations of transactions between the zwaya groups and the river traders.40 The hassani also imposed taxes on the river traders of the escales. These taxes fell into two categories. One tax was levied on the weight of gum traded: the river trader paid in goods and foodstuffs to the rulers of the escales, with the tax payment amounting to a piece of guinée per half a tonne of gum traded. The other, higher tax was based on boat tonnage and was independent of the size of the trade. This tax was an important source of revenue for the rulers of the escales, but it became burdensome for the river traders, especially during poor harvests. In such cases, the traders faced risks not only of losing money in the river trade but also of failure to repay the debt to the creditor in Saint Louis. Therefore, the river traders requested the abolition of the tax on boat tonnage at various points between the 1830s and the 1840s, and only the Darmancours accepted their request in 1847, when gum was not a major commodity traded at their escale.41 The river traders also gave gifts to the nomads and caravans at the escales till the time the gum was delivered. It could be a few weeks, or a few months. According to Geneviève Désiré-Vuillemin, the gifts included guinées, tea, sugar and grain.42 It is true that a large amount of sugar had been imported from France to Senegal between the 1830s and the 1840s. However, it seems that tea had not been carried so regularly from France into Senegal, and thereby into the Senegal River valley. Indeed, French trade statistics show that there was no tea trade between France and Senegal during the first half of the 1830s, and that 1836 was the first year of the tea trade. That year saw the import of 192 kilograms of tea from France to Senegal, followed by no tea trade in 1837.43

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Thus, the river traders paid much more than the market price to purchase gum arabic in the escales in the lower Senegal River. This means that market prices of gum per piece of guinée quoted in the official statistics and used in the existing literature should be treated with caution, especially if we try to estimate the profit from the exchange rate difference between Saint Louis and the escales. Since Michael Marcson did not take into consideration other costs, such as transport cost and the taxes mentioned above, his assumption regarding the exchange rate differential is inaccurate. Take the example of the exchange rate differential in 1841. Marcson estimated it at fewer than 21 livres (10.5 kilograms) of gum per guinée by subtracting the price in the escales (fewer than 54 livres) from that in Saint Louis (fewer than 33 livres). However, according to the correspondence dated 11 September 1841 that Marcson used, the transport cost per piece of guinée was 45 per cent of the price of 16.5 kilograms in Saint Louis, or 7.5 kilograms of gum. Taking into account the tax paid to the nomadic emirates, as well as the transport cost, the margin that the habitants gained from the trade was much smaller than Marcson thought.44 Gum Harvesting in the Senegal River Valley The zwaya merchants dispatched groups of up to 50 slaves with a supervisor to the harvesting area of gum, far away from their camps (Fig. 3.3). Three principal forests, where gum was available in abundance, were Sohel, Hel-Hiebar and Al-Fatack on the right bank of the Senegal River.45 These slaves, who were engaged in farming or herding in other seasons, included the slaves of the supervisor and those of his kinsmen and allies. They built huts near a well around the gum forest, and ate and slept there during the harvesting period.46 As discussed above, the harvesting period was linked to the harmattan season on the one hand, and to the slack season in agriculture that began at the end of October or the beginning of November, on the other. Under supervision, the slaves gathered gum in the forest (Image 3.3). In return for his services, the supervisor received the amount of one day’s labour of gum harvest per week from slaves who were not his. In an average year, 800 grams of gum were produced from a single acacia tree, but the output of gum harvesting varied. In addition, the output of a slave was 1–3 kilograms per day, but this also depended on his own strength and abilities, his diet and the

94  K. KOBAYASHI

HASSANI Salt, etc.

India

HABITANTS

FRENCH MERCHANTS

RIVER TRADERS

ZWAYA

Guinées (akhal), millet, etc.

SUPERVISOR & SLAVES

Gum arabic

Gum arabic

Saint Louis

Kajor

Millet, etc.

France

AFRICAN TRADERS

European merchants Europe

Protection

Guinées, gun, millet, etc.

Guinées, gun, etc.

Mudarat

Guinées

Saharan trade networks

Escales

Gum harvesting area

Fig. 3.3  Commercial networks around the lower Senegal River region in the early nineteenth century (Source Kazuo Kobayashi, ‘Indian Textiles and Gum Arabic in the Lower Senegal River: Global Significance of Local Trade and Consumers in the Early Nineteenth Century’, African Economic History 45/2 (2017): 40)

supervisor—whether his methods were abusive or not.47 The slaves put the harvested gum arabic into bags of oxhide and brought them on the backs of camels or cattle to the escales, where the gum was exchanged for guinées, millet and other goods that the river traders shipped from Saint Louis.48 Through such early nineteenth-century commercial networks, guinées were carried from Europe via Saint Louis into the Senegal River region, where they were also exchanged mainly for gum arabic that was carried in the opposite direction. Some guinées were consumed within the realm of the nomadic emirates, and others were further circulated under the names of akhal or baysa into the Sahara Desert via caravan trade networks as shown in Fig. 3.3. These networks brought a variety of goods from North Africa into the nomadic emirates, including salt, which was essential to the people and animals in the desert and savannah.49

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Image 3.3  Gum harvesting in Senegal (Source J. P. L. Durant, Atlas pour servir au voyage du Sénégal [Paris, 1802], Planche 29. Note I gained permission to reproduce this image from King’s College London, Foyle Special Collections Library)

Guinées as a Currency West Africa had a long-established tradition in the production, trade and consumption of cotton textiles, dated well before Europeans who arrived in the fifteenth century. In the regional trade within West Africa and within the Sahara Desert region, textiles were widely traded as consumer goods as well as an exchange medium. This tendency persisted well into the nineteenth century. But why did guinées matter as an exchange medium in the abovementioned regions and how did these imported

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textiles become a regional currency? In order to answer these questions, this section explores the historical background of textile production and consumption from the viewpoint of multiple currencies in precolonial West Africa. West African Early Textile Production, Trade and Consumption Consumer preferences for foreign textiles had been shaped by local textile production and trade in precolonial West Africa, which has had a long history of textile production, consumption and trade that dates back to the fifteenth century and which precedes contact with Europeans. The region had been rich in raw materials required for textile production, and textiles had been made from various kinds of fibres from animals or plants. In the northern savannah, Sahel and the Sahara Desert, textiles were made from sheep, camels and horses, while, in the forest zones of West Africa, the protein fibre from the silkworm was used. Weavers also used vegetable fibres such as flax, cotton, raphia and tree bark and leaves. In addition, West Africa offered plenty of other resources that could be used as dyestuff, including insects, shellfish, plants and minerals.50 Although the origins of cotton textiles in West Africa have been a mystery, archaeological findings have so far identified the earliest cloths produced in West Africa. One such cloth has been found in the modern Republic of Mali dating back to the eighth century,51 and another to the ninth or tenth century in what is now southern Nigeria.52 Based on linguistic evidence about the variants of the term ‘cotton’, Colleen Kriger has demonstrated that there were two distinct centres of cotton production in precolonial West Africa. One cluster covered the regions that included the river Niger, the river Gambia and the Senegal River. The other centres were the region surrounding Lake Chad. Also, archaeological findings suggest that the tenth century marked the beginning of cotton textile production in these two centres.53 The earliest cotton skirt was worn in the eleventh to twelfth centuries in what is now Mali.54 During the early stage of its spread into West Africa, Muslim merchants and their networks had played a crucial role in spreading the technology of textile production and stimulated demand for cotton cloth for wearing. Indeed, there were many workshops of weavers and tailors— they were also Muslim aristocrats—in Islamic centres such as Timbuktu and Jenne along the upper Niger River. The wearing of clothes was a

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custom adopted by converts that marked their membership of the ummah and distinguished them from followers of animism. Men who converted to Islam wore long flowing robes and baggy pants. From the seventeenth century onwards, during important Islamic ceremonies and burials, the people in Hausaland wore white clothes due to their association with Islam.55 In the sixteenth century, the Portuguese participated in the arbitrage trade along the coast of West Africa which skilled African merchants such as the Dyulas traders had established. As a consequence, they contributed to the spread of textile production and cloth currency along the Atlantic coast and from Senegambia to the Cape Verde Islands. The islands became a place where slaves taken from Senegambia wove textiles by using local cotton, and there were assimilations in both textile production and monetary systems between Senegambia and the Cape Verde Islands.56 In the precolonial period, the Portuguese and other European merchants sometimes exchanged imported textiles for locally woven textiles in Senegambia.57 In many areas of precolonial West Africa, textile production basically drew on the household division of labour. Spinning was usually the principal occupation for women during the dry agricultural off-peak season, and weaving was for men.58 The technology of textile production used in precolonial West Africa was simple. Male weavers were familiar with textile production on narrow horizontal looms with pulleys and foot treadles.59 The West African narrow looms were similar to those of other regions of the world and might have come from Eastern Soudan or further east, such as Arabia, but what distinguished the West African loom from others was in using a heavy dragstone to maintain the tension on the threads.60 In Senegambia, the treadle loom on which the weavers wove textiles was the horizontal one only, while vertical looms were found in the forest and south-savannah areas of West Africa.61 In contrast to the horizontal narrow loom used by men, the vertical loom was used by women to produce textiles which were wider than the narrow loom, but textiles produced on the vertical loom were narrower than most of those imported from overseas. Separate cloth units produced on the vertical loom were sewn together to make a wrapper or mantle.62 Using the horizontal narrow loom was a major feature in the textile industry in precolonial West Africa. The narrow loom was not costly, and it was easy to assemble and dismantle. Therefore, the weaver could take the loom indoors in case of rain.63 From the endowment point of view,

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A. G. Hopkins and more recently Gareth Austin have both explained that labour was scarce in terms of the size of the savannah region and the cultivable land. However, during the dry season, farming was not possible, labour was temporally abundant and the opportunity cost of labour was low. Under such conditions, Austin advanced an argument that it would be economically viable to use the narrow loom that required a labour-intensive method in order to produce textiles of good quality.64 Marion Johnson also stated that ‘for very many, weaving is practiced seasonally, in the non-farming season’. In addition to these part-time weavers, there were full-time weavers in West Africa, whose status was hereditary and founded in Senegambia and in the Sokoto Caliphate.65 Cotton was cultivated widely across the savannah during the period under study. West African cotton was a short-staple variety and consisted of the Old World family.66 The seed of cotton was often interspersed within fields of grain for a short period. Austin argued that this short duration for planting ‘imposed a trade-off between food security and cotton growing which, in turn, seriously limited the supply elasticity of the raw material to the most widespread handicraft industry on the continent, cotton weaving’.67 Cotton ripened later than grains like millet or sorghum, and thereby labour for harvesting cotton would not affect the grain harvest. Cotton was usually grown for domestic consumption but some areas produced it on a large scale for regional trade and textile production. It should also be noted that cotton cultivation demanded the phosphorous and nitrogen in the soil.68 By the fifteenth century, extensive commercial networks within and beyond West Africa were established. Locally woven textiles in the savannah, Sahel and desert areas were carried mainly through the network of Muslim merchants to consumer markets. In Senegambia, the Tukulor were reportedly the first group who wove textiles and spread the loom in the region. When he visited the town of Silli in Tukulor in the eleventh century, the Arab historian Al-Bekri noted that the Tukulor produced small cotton pagne, called chigguya, which was one of their major trade goods.69 In the course of time, the Mandinka Dyulas traders brought the concept of weaving into Senegambia. Here, weaving castes known as raabu among the Wolof and mabo among the Fulbe and the Tukulor came into being. Weaving was perceived to be an honourable occupation.70 Meanwhile, during the sixteenth century Kano became the manufacturing and commercial centre in Hausaland. The artisans in the city

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manufactured various cotton textiles, including indigo-dyed textiles, and the Tuareg traders from North Africa, who played a major role in the trans-Saharan trade, purchased cotton textiles in Kano in exchange for salt, copper and also North African and luxury European textiles that were imported from Tripoli.71 Once European merchants started to trade directly with African merchants on the coast, they realised the importance of textiles in the intra-African trade. For example, the Portuguese from Albreda brought textiles, salt, tobacco, coral and beads in exchange for Bandi cloth, beeswax, hides, gold dust, ivory and slaves supplied mostly by the Dyulas traders in the Senegambia.72 This kind of business would facilitate or extend the frontiers of existing African trading networks along the coast of West Africa.73 Thus, African weavers produced cotton textiles that spread through trade across and beyond West Africa and contributed to shaping consumers’ tastes in textiles for centuries in ways that influenced European commerce in the region. This was the major reason that African consumer taste was changeable, and therefore the knowledge of the market was crucial for European merchants to the success of a voyage.74 Since the early contacts with European merchants, European and Indian textiles started to come in large quantities to the coasts of West Africa by sea. European merchants brought textiles of various kinds in order to purchase African slaves and tropical products. However, as we know that West Africa had long been a source of sophisticated textiles, it is worth studying why West Africa imported a large amount of non-African textiles, especially Indian cotton, from Europe despite the fact that they themselves produced various textiles of high quality. This was partly due to conspicuous consumption trends among local consumers in West Africa. In precolonial days, the consumption of foreign cloth was a means of demonstrating wealth and prestige for all levels of consumers in this region. John Thornton argued that ‘acquiring luxury cloth, foreign cloth, and cloth with unusual colors, designs, textures, and shapes could also play a role in conspicuous consumption’.75 Foreignness would probably mean something difficult to get access to. This was the case with African textiles brought by Mandinka merchants from the interior for consumers in what is now coastal Ghana.76 The consumption of Indian and European textiles could be seen in this context. Also, as Phyllis Martin noted, the display

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of valuable cloth whose production required a considerable investment of labour indicated the ‘politics of costume’. In precolonial Loango, the consumption of prestige cloth was regarded as an association with power.77 The massive imports of textiles from Europe and Asia into West Africa raised another debatable question: whether there was any impact by imported textiles from Europe and Asia on African textile industry in the precolonial period. There are some arguments from conflicting viewpoints. As regards the scholars who stressed the negative impacts on West African handicraft industry as a whole, Walter Rodney assumed that from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century the European textile industry was able to copy fashionable Indian and African patterns, and eventually to replace them. Partly by establishing a stranglehold on the distribution of cloth around the shores of Africa, and partly by swamping African products by importing cloth in bulk, European traders eventually succeeded in putting an end to the expansion of African cloth manufactures.78 More recently, Joseph Inikori proposed a nuanced hypothesis that considering the fact that textile imports had been tied to the Atlantic slave trade, European and Indian textile imports inhibited the development of cloth production in West Africa between 1650 and 1850.79 By contrast, A. G. Hopkins stated that there is ‘no general evidence’ to support the claim about the decline of West African manufacturers. He has argued that the overseas trade led to the expansion of the market ‘in terms of the volume and range of goods’ rather than the replacement of local industries by the products imported from overseas.80 Marion Johnson also argued that there is no evidence that imported textiles from overseas caused the decline of the textile industry in West Africa, and presumed that most of the imported textiles entered the regions where no textile industry existed.81 Meanwhile, Colleen Kriger challenged Johnson’s presumption by stating that the regions which imported European and Indian textiles had their own textile industry. She, using archaeological findings, argued that foreign textiles could motivate local producers to manufacture new types of textiles.82 Paul Lovejoy offered a view that some imports would compete with local manufactures but, as a whole, imported textiles, as well as beads, tobacco and alcohol, supplemented African production. He has also argued that the West African market for textiles had been insatiable.83

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Some case studies on specific areas of West Africa presented different outcomes of the effects of the Atlantic trade on the textile industry in the precolonial period. For example, A. J. H. Latham argued that, in the case of nineteenth-century Old Calabar in the Bight of Biafra, the goods brought across by European merchants did not have a negative impact on the local economy. As for textiles, they seemed to have little impact on local industry, because the region produced raphia textiles from palmtree fronds only and these textiles were used for dresses meant for ceremonial occasions of the Ibibio and Efik’s secret societies. Moreover, he claimed that imported goods including textiles brought about a rather beneficial effect because they increased options for local consumers.84 Little Popo in the Bight of Benin also provides an interesting case of manufacturing in precolonial West Africa while dealing with Atlantic trade. According to Captain Henry Steward, weavers produced textiles from cotton cultivated locally. Their handicraft product was exchanged for English trade goods and taken windward as far as Accra or Cape Coast Castle, where it was sold for palm oil and gold dust. In Little Popo, English cotton goods enabled local manufacturers to weave redcoloured textiles because the material to dye scarlet was not available there at that time. They unpicked coloured cloth imported from Europe to produce their own textiles.85 A similar instance can be found in WestCentral Africa, where weavers used imported cotton to produce textiles and hence the local industry remained largely independent of foreign imports of a variety of textiles manufactured in Asia and Europe in the nineteenth century.86 Another type of complementary relationship between imported cotton goods and local handicraft industry is found in Asante, though it is recorded in the colonial period. Gareth Austin, based on the reports by the colonial administration, stated that the competition from European textiles had different effects on spinners and weavers in Asante; the former did not survive, but the latter adopted imported machine-spun yarn that enabled them to specialise in the production of various textiles of higher quality on the narrow loom.87 Yet another case was found in the Sokoto Caliphate. The Caliphate, established in the first decade of the nineteenth century after the jihad led by Uthman dan Fodio, offered institutional infrastructure such as a large domestic market and tax exemption for weavers in Kano, the commercial and manufacturing centre in the Caliphate.88 Kano became one of the largest cities in the Sokoto Caliphate, with an estimated

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population of 30,000–80,000 by the mid-nineteenth century. It formed a part of what Lovejoy calls the textile belt, where cotton and indigo were extensively cultivated for the local industry.89 As Phillip Shea revealed, throughout the nineteenth century, there was no decline of the local manufacturing industry, rather, there was technological innovation in dyeing in Kano that enabled economies of scale.90 More recently, Marisa Candotti argued that the trans-Saharan trade also contributed to the development of the textile industry in the Sokoto Caliphate.91 Apart from the debate over the impact of textiles from Europe and Asia on the local industry in precolonial West Africa, there is another argument that is related to the value of textiles imported by European merchants into West Africa. Presumably, there is little point in trying to discuss whether foreign textiles imported there were in general cheaper than African textiles, since the values of both local and foreign textiles varied substantially. Therefore, unfocused comparisons and general statements would be misleading. For example, Inikori assumed that European and Indian textiles imported into West Africa during the Atlantic slave trade were ‘cheap’.92 On the other hand, there was a proposition that could be categorised as the ‘shoddy goods’ claim. However, given that discerning African merchants actively pursued quality goods in the Atlantic trade, such claims seem improbable, and rather could be susceptible to criticism from the more micro-level studies.93 For instance, based on records of the Royal African Company, Kriger proposed that non-African wrappers were at least three times more expensive than locally made wrappers on the Upper Guinea Coast in the late seventeenth century. She concluded that English manufacturers could not lower their production costs of textiles more than those of West African textiles until the British Industrial Revolution.94 This case suggests that textiles produced in Europe and Asia were not necessarily cheaper than African textiles until the late eighteenth century. In other words, there were other reasons, such as conspicuous consumption and quality of textiles, to explain the market for imported textiles from overseas. Textiles as Money in Precolonial West Africa In precolonial West Africa, cloth strips were sewn together to make a piece of textile. Both cloth strips and a piece of textile were not simply used as clothes but also as a currency along with cowries, copper, iron, gold and silver coins in market exchange. Its monetary role lasted until

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the introduction and diffusion of colonial currencies. Despite its wide distribution, a large gap remains in our knowledge of cloth currency in precolonial West Africa, compared to that of cowrie shells.95 Therefore, it is crucial to fulfil the gap by discussing cloth currency in a broad context of precolonial West African monetary history. This discussion will also shed fresh light on the use of guinées as the major currency in the gum trade along the lower Senegal River in the early nineteenth century. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, existing literature on the economic history of precolonial Senegal treated guinées as an exchange medium and unit of account in the gum trade along the Senegal River. However, guinées were re-exported from the nomadic emirates of Trarza and Brakna and others around the Senegal River region further into the Sahara Desert to the north and the Western Soudan to the east. In the Sahara Desert, a piece of guinée was called baysa or akhal and served as an exchange medium in the trade of salt carried from North Africa (Fig. 3.3). This implies that there were more extensive trade zones for guinées in the Senegal River and the Sahara Desert regions than the existing literature assumes. Although sources on this are scarce, it would probably be the basis for the continued demand for guinées from merchants who controlled the supply of gum arabic along the Senegal River region, thereby maintaining continuity of the guinée trade from India in the early nineteenth century. In precolonial West Africa, commodities such as cloth strips, cowries, iron bars, copper and gold served as money. Precolonial currencies used to be one of the debated subjects in the studies of West African history. One of the major issues in the debate was about whether precolonial currencies in this region functioned as general-purpose money or as special-purpose money. The substantivists of economic anthropology such as Karl Polanyi supposed that precolonial currencies were classified as special-purpose currencies. This interpretation was based on the assumption of peripheral markets: the market principle was not necessarily widespread. However, substantivism drew criticism from formalists and historians from the 1960s and onwards, and the debate between substantivists and formalists is now over.96 Recent studies of precolonial currencies have moved beyond the paradigms of substantivists and formalists. Instead of using the dichotomy between ‘primitive’ and ‘modern’ monies, Jane Guyer has brought our attention to what she terms ‘interface currencies’ that were ‘largely

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created from the outside, and whose capacities to permeate economic relationships across the borderland were kept limited’. In the case of commodity currencies imported from Europe and the Americas into West Africa, they only became currencies when the Africans used them for African trade.97 What is more important is, ‘for interface currencies, some functions [of monies] were always more important than others’.98 Indeed, the concept of interface currencies is interesting and useful for us; particularly because textiles, including guinées, in precolonial West Africa apparently did not necessarily meet a trinity of monetary functions presumed in the present day: a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value. Before revisiting the monetary functions of textiles from the viewpoint of interface currencies, it is necessary to take a look at the transaction system. In this regard, Karl Polanyi referred to a standard unit of account as a ‘Trade Ounce’ in his 1964 article, and shortly thereafter Marion Johnson revised this concept to develop an eighteenth-century monetary history of West Africa. A key point emerging through their works was the transaction based on an assortment of goods, which was more complicated than simple barter.99 Philip Curtin also confirmed that this pattern of transaction was common in precolonial Senegambia.100 The detail of this dealing in the age of the Atlantic slave trade, when the standard unit of account in the region was the iron bar, is as follows: Bargaining between men who are both buying and selling normally involves two agreements, one on the price of the items being sold and one on the price of those bought in return. A Senegambian dealing with Europeans also involved two agreements. The first established the price of the export goods in [iron] bars—so many bars per slave, per quintal of ivory or wax, and so on. A second then established the assortment of goods in which those bars were to be paid. The whole transaction shares some aspects of a barter, but simple barter is the exchange of one commodity for another. These exchanges were rarely a single export against a single import. Even when slaves were sold alone, for example, the return goods always included an assortment of ten to fifty commodities.101

However, as the exports in gum arabic from and imports of guinées into the Senegal River increased, two changes occurred in the regional transactions from the late eighteenth century. One change was that a piece of guinée replaced the iron bar as a new standard unit of account in the region, since gum arabic was usually paid for in guinées.

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The other change was that, even after assortment bargaining wound down, this institution could still be found at some points in the early nineteenth century. For example, Curtin noted a case in which guinées functioned as a unit of account for assortments of goods for ransom paid by the French official Duranton to the king of Kaarta in 1829.102 Whether it was an iron bar, cloth strip or gold, functioning as a unit of account had another aspect: ‘ghost money’, which is also referred to as ‘imaginary money’. The prevailing view that the term ‘currency’ should be applied only to money physically circulating does not classify money without substance as currency. However, Akinobu Kuroda has recently shed fresh light on this riddle from the viewpoint of complementarity among monies. He states that ‘the majority of human beings through most of history dealt with concurrent currencies. … the coexistence of monies was not incidental but functional, since they worked in a complementary relationship. That is, one money could do what another money could not, and vice versa’.103 As for the complementarity between textiles and other currencies in precolonial West Africa, Marion Johnson has already stated that cloth strip rarely circulated alone, and that ‘there were frequently currencies of comparable value circulating alongside cloth strip. These might be other local products, such as iron hoes, or imports, including silver coin and cowries’.104 This kind of division of roles among monies was found in the trade in the lower Senegal River region during the early nineteenth century. Indeed, imported guinées and local grain formed a complementary relationship: a piece of guinée was suitable to pay for larger units such as gum arabic, while grain could serve as small change that was paid for services.105 That is probably why the compromis in 1841 cited above recorded the conversion ratios between gum arabic and millet, guinées and millet, at the escales.106 According to Kuroda, ghost money could be interpreted as ‘a part of the complementary monetary system, as far as it interfaced with assortments of currencies’. That means that ghost money could work as long as it was associated with other coexisting currencies. In this context, Kuroda unveils the importance of a ‘circuit’ along which a currency moved in a unilateral way, and, in fact, it is ‘a particular merchant circuit’ that enabled ghost money to exist.107 Hence, ghost money could exist only when it circulated along a particular circuit and alongside other coexisting currencies that likewise had circuits through which to move. Lars Sundström and Marion Johnson have also pointed out that some currencies in precolonial Africa tended to become ghost money,

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although they never accounted for what made it possible to function as a unit of account without substance.108 In that sense, Kuroda’s innovative approach to monetary history is helpful for us to consider precolonial West African currencies. Circuits along which currencies moved indicate another important element of the movement of money. As mentioned above, the monetary movement along a particular circuit was one-way. Kuroda demonstrates this point with reference to the Maria Theresa dollar that circulated in East Africa in the early twentieth century and the Japanese silver dollar in southern China during the same period.109 This pattern of circulation has also been confirmed by Johnson with the case of cloth currency in precolonial West Africa. In sub-Saharan Africa, cloth strip produced usually in the savannah circulated as money on the east–west axis, while other goods exchanged for cloth strip travelled in the opposite direction.110 What is common between the cases discussed by Kuroda and by Johnson is that a currency rarely returned to a starting point of circulation. The Maria Theresa dollar, which was minted outside the circuits in East Africa, landed in Aden, and then moved to Gore (in Ethiopia), where the route of the currency was divided into two streams. Some circulated via Gambela, Khartoum and Port Sudan by the Red Sea, while others via Addis Ababa and Djibouti. After the journeys along these routes, some of it finally returned to Aden.111 Also, it was unlikely that cloth currency in precolonial West Africa returned to the starting points of their origins, as Johnson identified the transport costs as the major reason.112 Guinées were manufactured in India, from where they were transported by French merchants via Bordeaux or other French ports, to Saint Louis of Senegal. This network that fed guinées into the circuit connecting Saint Louis with the Sahara resulted from two factors that have been discussed above. One was the French mercantilist policy (pacte colonial ) that regulated the metropolitan and colonial trade in this period. What this policy means is that Lancashire cotton goods were not freely imported into Senegal as they were imported into other areas of West Africa (see Chapter 2). As we will see in Chapter 4, the French colonial administration promoted the development of textile production in Pondicherry as a response to an increasing threat from the competition from the British machine-made textiles. The other was the geography around the island of Saint Louis, which was separated from

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the Atlantic by the Langue de Barbarie, which probably shaped the trajectory of the maritime trade from Saint Louis that maintained a close connection with France during the period.113 James Webb has also pointed out that textiles could deteriorate as time passed or be consumed as a commodity at some point during the circulation.114 This was particularly true of guinées that functioned as money in the Senegal River and Sahara Desert regions in the early nineteenth century. In Saint Louis, some pieces of guinée were consumed among the habitants or other individuals. The rest of the guinées were carried by Senegalese intermediaries alongside local grains (a small denomination currency) and others to the escales, where they were exchanged for gum arabic. Again, some quantity of guinées were consumed within the land of the nomadic emirates of Trarza and Brakna, and others further circulated into the interior of the Sahara alongside other commodities. So, although the current of guinées formed a circuit connecting West Africa with the Sahara Desert and moved unidirectionally from the coast of Senegal to the interior of the Sahara, it never returned to Saint Louis of Senegal (Fig. 3.3). Consumption of guinées as garments indicated a unique aspect of cloth currency, which was related to the function of store of value. Although guinées functioned as an exchange medium and a standard unit of account in the trade in the Senegal River and Sahara Desert regions, textiles had a disadvantage in that they needed space in which to be stored. The nomads on the right bank of the Senegal River lived in tents and therefore had limited space in which to store textiles, although they accepted guinées as an exchange medium in the gum trade. However, wrapping themselves with guinées could save a small amount of space in their tents. This uniqueness proved that commodity could become currency when necessary, and vice versa.115 In light of recent scholarship of monetary history such as interface currency and complementarities among monies, this section has so far revisited the monetary functions of textiles in precolonial West Africa in general; in particular, those of guinées around Senegal. The rest of the section will look briefly at how guinées replaced local textiles as a new currency in the precolonial period. Senegambia produced cotton textiles and used cloth strips as a currency as early as the eleventh century in the upper Senegal River.116 The geographical limits for the circulation of cloth currency were expanding during the precolonial period. The diffusion of cloth currency across

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the region was inextricably intertwined with Islam and the subsequent dispersion of textile production during the early stages of the spread of Islam into West Africa.117 By the fifteenth century, both cotton production as well as textile production had become established in Upper Guinea societies. In her recent work, Linda Newson revealed that locally woven indigo-dyed textiles called panos functioned as a unit of account in transactions in the Upper Guinea economy by the early sixteenth century.118 An oblong piece of textile made locally was called pagne in Senegalese French, ‘country cloth’ in English, soro in Pulaar and tama in Soninke. As the basic unit for transactions, each strip of cloth woven on the narrow loom measured approximately 2 metres long and 15–18 cm wide, and some strips were sewn together to make a piece.119 According to Johnson, cloth strip was quantified by length alone.120 Here, the case of the nineteenth-century Wolof societies is taken as an example. The findings from the fieldwork conducted by David Ames show there were different individual units of plain white cloth strip in Wolof societies. Wala wala or sech (for one strip of cloth) was the smallest individual unit of value, and xopa was the largest individual unit, which was equal to 16 strips of cloth.121 In the market exchange, textiles could serve as either money of large denomination or small change. In fact, cloth currency usually had flexibility in changing its monetary value by sewing strips into a piece of textile (made up of eight to ten strips) or cutting it into smaller pieces.122 Smaller pieces served the transactions with small-scale producers in nineteenth-century West Africa (see Chapter 2). In Wolof societies, the costs of goods and services were stated in these units of cloth strip, and the payments were made with textiles. Xasap (two strips of cloth) and xopa were often-used units of value to express the prices of the commodities in their economic exchanges. In the Wolof societies kola nut and grain were cheap commodities, whereas cattle, such as goat, cow, horse, slaves and bridewealth, were categorised as expensive payments. A fine horse cost 800 strips of cloth, which was equal to the combined price of two cows and one young female slave.123 Ames noted that a strip of plain white cloth was the basic unit of account in the Wolof societies, but dyed textiles were more valuable than plain white textiles. He added that dyed textiles with designs were even more valuable than dyed textiles without, and that it was rarely used in exchange.124 This information indicates that guinées would serve

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as a larger denomination currency in the Senegal River region and the Sahara. Indeed, a piece of guinée was equal to 10 soro in Senegal.125 In the precolonial period, the savannah of West Africa was home to cotton textile production. The major manufacturers in the Upper Guinea included the Wolof, Mandinka, Fulbe, Banhun, Casanga and Biafada; and in the land of Waalo workmen called ‘Rabeseyr’ produced piece goods of cotton.126 At that time, notably as the Atlantic slave trade expanded, uncertainties in the supply and demand in West African markets became so significant that they encouraged not only the emergence of a system of credit and delayed payments but also a medium of exchange. Theoretically speaking, in order for a commodity to be a currency, it was of essence that it was widely available and traded. In this regard, cloth in precolonial West African economies fulfilled these requirements, and thus West African textiles were circulated not only as a commodity but also as a currency.127 However, in the late eighteenth century the inhabitants along the Senegal River came to accept Indian guinées as a new standard unit of account.128 The guinée was exceptional among imported textiles in the Senegal River region, because imported textiles rarely became a currency in West Africa.129 This fact leads us to ask why Indian guinées could replace locally woven textiles as a new standard unit of account in the region. Unfortunately, there is no clear-cut explanation to this riddle among existing works. Curtin gave an explanation that compared guinées with iron bars in precolonial Senegambia. As for the comparative advantages of guinées over iron bars, guinées were lighter than iron bars, thereby easier to transport, and hard to counterfeit.130 It seems likely that to establish the second reason for the comparative advantage of guinées over iron bars it would be helpful to consider the case of why guinées, not local cloth, served as a principal currency in the gum trade in the Senegal River region. Apart from the significance of the tastes of the inhabitants within the nomadic emirates along the river, it must be remembered that a constant supply from outside the circuit ensured that the guinée maintained its role as a principal currency in the Senegal River region and the Sahara Desert in the early nineteenth century. As Kuroda highlights, it was necessary to supplement the existing flow with an additional supply of money or local credit in the one-way movement of money along a circuit.131 Therefore, the annual additional supply of guinées from India via France was essential to sustain the important role of the guinée as a regional currency.

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Meanwhile, as already discussed, endowment analysis in African economic history offers an insightful viewpoint to address the riddle mentioned above. The constraints, both land abundance as well as labour scarcity, combined with the climate, allowed the inhabitants of the savannah, including the Senegal River region, to choose between agriculture and cash crop production. Therefore, for many farmers, textile production was an activity during the agricultural slack season and was subject to climatic conditions. Therefore, it was difficult to increase cotton production in the savannah without posing any threat to food security.132 In this regard, more importantly, the period from 1600 to 1850 witnessed an increasing aridity that caused serious droughts and subsequent famines. As for the lower Senegal River region, the ecological zone shifted from the western savannah to the western Sahel (or the southern frontier of the Sahara) during this long period. Webb has noted that this ecological shift ‘pushed rainfed agriculture south to within 100 kilometres of the Senegal River’.133 Indeed, the aridification and subsequent ecological crises brought about a change in the economic and political life of the inhabitants in the region, and would have negatively affected agriculture and manufacture.134 As one of the effects of the arid conditions, droughts displaced the weaving industry from the Senegal River region around the middle of the eighteenth century. This means that this climate change made the production of textiles, and thereby the supply of cloth currency, more occasional.135 It is also worth noting that nomads in the desert and desert-edge relied on the supply of grain and cloth from sedentary farmers for their subsistence.136 The climate change would be consistent with the aforementioned fact that there was the growing demand for indigo-dyed textiles among consumers in Senegambia from the late eighteenth century. In this perspective, the displacement of the weaving industry from the Senegal River implies that the local weavers might have been unable to carry an adequate supply of textiles across and beyond the area. This is probably why guinées from India, not locally made cotton textiles, could serve as a new currency in the Senegal River region and the Sahara Desert in the early nineteenth century since it was possible for guinées to be constantly supplied from India in abundance by the French merchants.137

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Conclusion This chapter has explored the historical background that created the continued demand for Indian guinées in, and beyond, the lower Senegal River region in the early nineteenth century, from a long-term perspective. It had two main focuses. One is the trade along the lower Senegal River region in which guinées were exchanged for good quality gum arabic that was indispensable for industrialisation in Western Europe. Tracing the major trade network of guinées around the lower Senegal River region opened our eyes to the fact that the guinée trade was also linked with Saharan trade within the lands of the nomadic emirates of Trarza and Brakna. Guinées were not only a principal currency in the gum trade along the Senegal River region, but they also played a similar role in the desert trade. Examining consumption patterns of guinées in the region has highlighted the fact that the quality of guinées, not that of the European copies and counterfeits, met the approval of astute consumers and that it was also suitable to life in the savannah, Sahel and the Sahara Desert. The scope of the guinée trade in existing literature on the economic history of precolonial Senegal tended to limit itself to the Senegal River region, and rarely extended beyond it. However, the present narrative has shown that there was a more extensive circuit of guinées than previously discussed. The other focus is on consumption patterns of guinées. Guinées served desert life, consumer taste, conspicuous consumption and regional commerce as larger denomination money. In the savannah belt, Africans had long produced cotton textiles during the agricultural slack season, and used cloth as a currency in market transactions. Locally woven textiles had shaped West African consumers’ tastes for textiles before Europeans arrived in West Africa and brought a large number of textiles. However, the aridification around the right bank of the lower Senegal River from 1600 to 1850 transformed savannah into desert edge, and subsequently it became increasingly difficult to cultivate cotton in the former savannah region. Such an ecological shift and subsequent impact on the centres of textile production in Senegal would probably lay the foundation for guinées to be a new regional currency from the late eighteenth century. Also, in order to maintain monetary functions in the regional economies it was essential to continue to supply guinées from India via France to Saint Louis regularly. This indirect trade via France was the product of the commercial institution called exclusif.

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In the late nineteenth century, the French conducted military campaigns to expand their control in Senegal. As they made inroads into the upper Senegal River and into the Western Soudan, they faced serious problems, among which was to ensure food locally for the military. For this purpose, the military commander was aware of the need to have guinées, and ordered his people to pay the food suppliers by Indian goods in the late 1880s. This episode implies not only that guinées continued to function as money in market transactions around Senegambia but also that the cloth currency prevailed into the Western Soudan. Indeed, the quantity of guinées required exclusively for the military campaigns was 35,000–45,000 pieces in the first half of the 1880s, and increased to around 70,000 pieces in 1886–1887. The Maurel and Prom, a major company from Bordeaux, transported guinées to the fort at Médine in the upper Senegal River, and the company gained considerable profits from the trade. On the other hand, the Savana Mills in Pondicherry, which had operated under the name of La Société Poulain, Duboy et Cie in the early nineteenth century was still in charge of production of standard guinées for West Africa in the late nineteenth century. Even then the French could not cope with fake copies and counterfeits of Indian textiles. Thus, demand in the Senegal River region for guinées persisted beyond the mid-nineteenth century, and it was necessary for the French to meet effectively the local demand, notably that from food suppliers, for the success of their military conquests. For this purpose, Pondicherry continued to play a large role as the supplier of original guinées for West Africa even after the military campaign began in the 1850s.138

Notes

1. Geneviève Désiré-Vuillemin, ‘Un commerce qui meurt: la traite de la gomme dans les escales du Sénégal’, Cahiers d’outre-mer 17 (1952): 90–4; Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade, 2 Vols. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press 1975); Michael D. Marcson, ‘EuropeanAfrican Interaction in the Precolonial Period: Saint Louis, Senegal, 1758–1854’ (PhD Dissertation, Princeton University, 1976); Marion Johnson, ‘Cloth as Money: The Cloth Strip Currencies of Africa’, Textile History 11/1 (1980): 193–202; Roger Pasquier, ‘Les comptoirs du Sénégal au milieu du XIXe siècle’, in Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch,

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ed., Actes du colloque entreprises et entrepreneurs en Afrique (XIXe et XXe siècle) (Paris, 1983), pp. 141–63; James L. A. Webb, Jr., ‘The Trade in Gum Arabic: Prelude to French Conquest in Senegal’, Journal of African History 26/2 (1985): 149–68; Richard L. Roberts, ‘West Africa and the Pondicherry Textile Industry’, in Tirthankar Roy, ed., Cloth and Commerce: Textiles in Colonial India (New Delhi, 1996), pp. 142–74. 2.  For Indian cotton textiles of various kinds imported into West Africa, see George Metcalf, ‘A Microcosm of Why Africans Sold Slaves: Akan Consumption Patterns in the 1770s’, Journal of African History 28/3 (1987): 377–94; Stanly B. Alpern, ‘What Africans Got for Their Slaves: A Master List of European Trade Goods’, History in Africa 22 (1995): 5–43. 3.  J.-P. Duchon-Doris, Jr., Commerce des toiles bleues dites guinées (Paris, 1842), pp. 3–4; Saugnier, Relations de plusieurs voyages à la côte d’Afrique, a Maroc, au Sénégal, a Gorée, a Galam, etc. (Paris, 1791), p. 287. The assumption that a guinée was identical to guinea cloth may be misleading. Guinea cloth was also an Indian cotton textile. Like guinées, the English appellation is derived from the Guinea coast region in West Africa because these textiles produced by South Asian weavers served for the West African trade as well. However, according to John Irwin, it was produced in Western India and was ‘the generic term for a wide range of cheap, brightly-coloured Indian calicoes, mostly striped or chequered, and very popular with negroes’. That indicates that guinée cloth was one type of guinea cloth. In other words, guinea cloth was not always identical to guinées. For this reason, this book employs the term guinée/guinées in order to avoid the likelihood of confusion with other appellations. John Irwin and P. R. Schwartz, Studies in Indo-European Textile History (Ahmedabad: Calico Museum of Textiles, 1966), p. 65. It should be noted that India produced both guinée white and guinée blue in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. S. Jeyaseela Stephen, Oceanscapes: Tamil Textiles in the Early Modern World (Delhi: Primus Books, 2014), pp. 387–424; Colette Establet, Répertoire des tissus indiens importés en France entre 1687 et 1769 (Aix-en-Provence: IREMAN, 2017), pp. 106–7. 4. Le Sénégal et les guinées de Pondichéry: Note présentée à la commission supérieure des colonies par les négociants sénégalais (Bordeaux, 1879), p. 7; Dictionnaire universel théorique et pratique, du commerce et de la navigation, Vol. 2 (Paris, 1859–1861), pp. 918–19. 5. The term ‘Moor’ was originally the term for Muslim Spaniards, which in turn derived from the territory of Mauritania in the ancient Roman Empire. Ghislaine Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. xviii; Ann McDougall, ‘The Sahara in An Economic History of West Africa: A Critical

114  K. KOBAYASHI Reflection on Historiographical Impact and Legacy’, in Toyin Falola and Emily Brownell, eds., Africa, Empire and Globalization: Essays in Honor of A. G. Hopkins (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2011), p. 102, n. 42. 6. Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails, p. 60. 7. Saugnier, Relations, p. 287. 8. S. M. X. Golberry, Travels in Africa, Vol. 1, trans. W. Mudford (London, 1803), pp. 173–4. 9. Interview with Alasana Sanyang, dyer, Dippa Kunda, The Gambia, 9 March 2018. 10. British Library (BL), India Office Records and Private Papers, IOR/E/4/895: Madras dispatch, 19 June 1805, pp. 75–6; IOR/E/4/901: Madras dispatch, 6 March 1807, p. 747. 11. Mireille Lobligeois, ‘Ateliers public et filatures privées à Pondichéry après 1816’, Bulletin de l’ecole française d’extrême-orient 59 (1972): 22–3. 12. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM, Aix-en-Provence, France), Sénégal XIII, Dossier 3c: rapport spéciaux, June 1851. 13. Duchon-Doris, Commerce, pp. 3–4. 14.  No. 66, Ordonnance du Roi, 18 May 1843, in Sénégal, Bulletin Administratif des Actes du Gouvernement (Paris, 1846), pp. 87–8. 15. No. 88, Ordinnance du Roi, 1 September 1843, in Sénégal, Bulletin Administratif, pp. 125–6. 16.  Archives nationales du Sénégal (ANS, Dakar, Senegal), 2B24: Correspondance du Commandant Laborel au Ministre de la marine et des colonies, No. 145, 15 April 1844, Saint Louis, F 50; ANOM, Sénégal XIII, Dossier 3c: rapport spéciaux, June 1851. 17. Philip D. Curtin, ‘Africa and the Wider Monetary World, 1250–1850’, in John F. Richard, ed., Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 1983), p. 258. 18. Gaspard T. Mollien, Travels in the Interior of Africa, to the Sources of Senegal and Gambia (London, 1820), p. 256; Richard L. Roberts, Two Worlds of Cotton: Colonialism and the Regional Economy in the French Sudan, 1800–1946 (Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 54. 19. Webb, ‘The Trade in Gum Arabic’, p. 163; Mamadou Fall, ‘Marchés locaux et groups marchands dans la longue durée: des marchés du Cayor aux marches du Fleuve Sénégal XVIIIe – début XXe siècle’, in Boubacar Barry and Leonhard Harding, eds., Commerce et commerçants en Afrique de l’Ouest: L’Sénégal (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1992), p. 79. 20. John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 48–53. 21. David W. Ames, ‘The Use of a Transitional Cloth-Money Token Among the Wolof’, American Anthropologist 57/5 (1957): 1016.

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22.  For example, although Michael Marcson gives a detailed description of the commercial networks along the Senegal River in this period, the connections between the Senegal River region and Saharan trade are completely missing from his account. Marcson, ‘European-African Interaction.’ 23. Désiré-Vuillemin, ‘Un commerce qui meurt’, p. 92. There were three principal forests for gum harvest on the right bank of the Senegal River: Sohel, Hel-Hiebar and Al-Fatack. E. Bouët-Willaumez, Commerce et traite des noirs aux côtes occidentales d’Afrique (Paris, 1848), p. 6. 24. ANS, 2B18: Correspondance du Gouverneur du Sénégal au Ministre de la Marine et des Colonies, No. 202, 9 August 1840, Saint Louis, F 37–8. 25.  ANOM, Sénégal XIII, Dossier 2: Relevé comparatif des quantités exportées de la colonie à toutes destinations, pendant la période quinquennale de 1845 à 1849, 9 December 1850. 26.  This kind of commercial network, which extended from the coast through local intermediaries to the interior, was found in other regions of precolonial Africa. See David P. Gamble, Contributions to a Socioeconomic Survey of the Gambia (London: Colonial Office, 1949), p. 60; Martin Lynn, Commerce and Economic Change in West Africa: The Palm Oil Trade in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1997), Chapter 3; Mariana P. Candido, ‘Merchants and the Business of the Slave Trade at Benguela, 1750–1850’, African Economic History 35 (2007): 13–7. 27. Bernard Schnapper, ‘La fin du régime de l’exclusif: le commerce étranger dans les possessions françaises d’Afrique tropicale (1817–1870) ’, Annales Africaines 1 (1959): 149–99. See Chapter 2. 28. For example, the American vessels were not allowed to trade at Saint Louis until 1865. George E. Brooks, Yankee Traders, Old Coasters & African Middlemen: A History of American Legitimate Trade with West Africa in the Nineteenth Century (Boston, MA: Boston University Press, 1970), p. 299. 29. Other commodities shipped from France to Senegal in the early nineteenth century included European textiles, metals and metalware, arms and ammunition, beads and semi-precious stones, alcohols and tobacco. Curtin, Economic Change, Vol. 2, p. 88. 30. L’A. P. David Boilat, Esquisses Sénégalaises (Paris, 1853), pp. 209–12; Anne Raffenel, Nouveau voyage dans le pays des nègres, Vol. 2 (Paris, 1856), p. 23; Ibrahima Thioub, ‘L’esclavage à Saint-Louis du Sénégal au xviiie–xixe siècle’, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin: Jahrbuch 2008/2009 (2010): 338; George E. Brooks, ‘The Signares of Saint-Louis and Gorée: Women Entrepreneurs in Eighteenth-Century Senegal’, in N. J. Hafkin and E. G. Bay, eds., Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change (Stanford University Press, 1976), pp. 19–44; James

116  K. KOBAYASHI F. Searing, ‘The Seven Years’ War in West Africa: The End of Company Rule and the Emergence of the Habitants’, in Mark H. Danley and Patrick J. Speelman, eds., The Seven Years’ War: Global Views (Leiden: Brill, 2014), p. 271; Karen Amanda Sucker, ‘The Development of Creole Society and Culture in Saint-Louis and Gorée, 1719–1817’ (PhD Thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1999); Hilary Jones, The Métis of Senegal: Urban Life and Politics in French West Africa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013), Chapter 1; Bronwen Everill, ‘“All the Baubles That They Needed”: “Industriousness” and Slavery in Saint-Louis and Gorée’, Early American Studies 15/4 (2017): 714–39. On the case of the Gambia, see Peter A. Mark, “Portuguese” Style and Luso-African Identity: Precolonial Senegambia, Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), pp. 89–90; Hassoum Ceesay, Gambian Women: An Introductory History (Kanifing: Fulladu Publisher, 2012), pp. 21–5. For a comparison with similar female traders, called donas in Portuguese, at Benguela in WestCentral Africa, see Candido, ‘Merchants’, pp. 11–13. For the latest scholarship about brokerage in West Africa in the precolonial period, see Toby Green, ed., Brokers of Change: Atlantic Commerce and Cultures in Pre-colonial Western Africa (Oxford University Press, 2012). Southeast Asia is another place that offers a rich insight into female roles in trade. Anthony Reid, ‘Female Roles in Pre-colonial Southeast Asia’, Modern Asian Studies 22/3 (1988): 629–45. 31. Marcson, ‘European-African Interaction’, pp. 51–6. 32. The roles of the habitants in the gum trade in Senegal could be compared with those of trading companies. Trading companies can overcome obstacles such as lack of trust and lack of information on behalf of individual people, so they ‘can be seen as reducing search, negotiation, transaction, and information costs in international trade through their specialist knowledge of markets and business environment’. Geoffrey Jones, Merchants to Multinationals: British Trading Companies in the Nineteenth to Twentieth Centuries (Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 6. 33.  Saugnier and Brisson, Voyages to the Coast of Africa (London, 1792), pp. 278–9; James L. A. Webb, Jr., ‘On Currency and Credit in the Western Sahel, 1700–1850’, in Endre Stiansen and Jane I. Guyer, eds., Credit, Currencies and Culture: African Financial Institutions in Historical Perspectives (Stockholm: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1999), pp. 51–2. 34.  Marcson, ‘European-African Interaction’, pp. 11–13; Thioub, ‘L’esclavage à Saint-Louis du Sénégal’, p. 340; Searing, ‘The Seven Years’ War’, p. 269. 35. Gaston Donnet, Une mission au Sahara occidental (Paris, 1896), p. 46; James L. A. Webb, Jr., Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change

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along the Western Sahel, 1600–1850 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), pp. 117–24. See also the discussion in Chapter 2. 36. Marcson, ‘European-African Interaction’, p. 21. 37. Mollien, Travels, p. 60; James F. Searing, West African Slavery and Atlantic Commerce: The Senegal River Valley, 1700–1860 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 238. It should be noted that nomads in the desert edge had no or little access to grain and textiles due to their resource endowment. This would be an incentive to demand these goods from the river traders at the escales. Philip D. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 16. 38. ANS, Q18: Compromis pour les trois escales année 1841. In the standard weight and measure for 1827 in Senegal, one barrel was equal to 280 litres. France. Ministère de la marine et des colonies, Notices statistiques sur les colonies françaises, Vol. 3 (Paris, 1839), p. 306. However, considering that the prices of these goods in transactions would vary from season to season, from year to year, and from place to place, the real prices might not conform to the cited ones in the text. 39. Bouët-Willaumez, Commerce, p. 7. 40.  Marcson, ‘European-African Interaction’, pp. 4–5; Webb, Desert Frontier, p. 111; Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails, p. xx. The Idaw al-Hajj were a zwaya group. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, they migrated from the Gibra in western Sahel, across the Senegal River, into north-western Senegal, where they established themselves as teachers of Islam. Webb, Desert Frontier, pp. 35–36. In terms of the scale of the gum trade in each escale, the escale of Trarza supplied 695 tonnes of gum to the river traders, that of Brakna 605 tonnes, and that of Darmancours 84 tonnes from January to April 1840. ANOM, Sénégal XIII, Dossier 25: etat des gommes traitées aux escales 1er Janvier au 1er Mai 1840. 41. Webb, ‘The Trade in Gum Arabic’, pp. 157–9. 42. Désiré-Vuillemin, ‘Un commerce qui meurt’, pp. 90–2. 43.  France. Direction générale des douanes, Tableau général du commerce de la France avec ses colonies et les puissances étrangères (Paris, 1831–1851). 44.  Marcson, ‘European-African Interaction’, pp. 159–60; ANS, 2B18: Correspondance départ du Gouverneur du Sénégal au bureau du régime politique et du commerce, 11 September 1841, No. 390, F 119. 45. Bouët-Willaumez, Commerce, p. 6. 46.  Webb, ‘The Trade in Gum Arabic’, p. 154; Searing, West African Slavery, p. 168. 47.  F. Carrère and P. Holle, De la Sénégambie française (Paris, 1855), pp. 328–9; Webb, ‘The Trade in Gum Arabic’, pp. 154–5.

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48. Abdoulaye Ly, La compagnie du Sénégal (Dakar: Présence Africaine, 1958), p. 282. 49. Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails, pp. 251–2. For the significance of the Saharan salt trade, see E. Ann McDougall, ‘Salts of the Western Sahara: Myths, Mysteries, and Historical Significance’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 23/2 (1990): 231–57. 50.  Carolyn Keyes Adenaike, ‘West African Textiles, 1500–1800’, in Maureen F. Mazzaoui, ed., Textiles: Production, Trade and Demand (Aldershot and Brookfield: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 1–2. 51. Rita Bolland, Tellem Textiles: Archaeological Finds from Burial Caves in Mali’s Bandiagara Cliff (Amsterdam: Tropenmuseum, 1991). 52. Thurstan Shaw, Igbo-Ukwu: An Account of Archaeological Discoveries in Eastern Nigeria, Vol. 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), pp. 240–4. 53.  Colleen E. Kriger, ‘Mapping the Cotton Textile Production in Precolonial West Africa’, African Economic History 33 (2005), pp. 95–6; Colleen Kriger, Making Money: Life, Death, and Early Modern Trade on Africa’s Guinea Coast (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2017), p. 20. 54.  In the 1960s and 1970s the Institute of Human Biology of Utrecht University conducted an excavation in Mali. Bolland, Tellem Textiles, p. 28. 55. Heinrich Barth, Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa: Including Accounts of Tripoli, the Sahara, the Remarkable Kingdom of Bornu, and the Countries Around Lake Chad (London: Ward, Lock & Co., 1890, originally published in 1857–1858), p. 300; Charles Monteil, ‘Le coton chez les noirs’, Bulletin du comité d’Études historiques et scientifiques de l’Afrique occidentale française 9/4 (1926): 594; David W. Ames, ‘The Rural Wolof of the Gambia’, in Paul Bohannan and George Dalton, eds., Markets in Africa (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1962), p. 38; B. W. Hodder, ‘Indigenous Cloth Trade and Marketing in Africa’, Textile History 11/1 (1980): 203–4; B. K. Sagnia, ‘Minding Indigenous Industries: A Casestudy of the Historical Background, Nature of Dissemination and Production Technique of Manding Weaving in the Senegambia Region’, Occasional Publication of the Gambia National Museum 5 (1984): 4; Roberts, Two Worlds of Cotton, pp. 51–9; Marisa Candotti, ‘The Hausa Textile Industry: Origins and Development in the Precolonial Period’, in Anne Haour and Benedetta Rossi, eds., Being and Becoming Hausa: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 189, 193–4. 56. Curtin, Economic Change, Vol. 1, p. 212; Jody A. Benjamin, ‘The Texture of Change: Cloth, Commerce and History in Western Africa, 1700–1850’ (PhD Dissertation, Harvard University, 2016), pp. 38–62; Kriger, Making Money, pp. 23–31.

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57. Hodder, ‘Indigenous Cloth Trade’, pp. 204–5. 58. Monteil, ‘Le coton chez les noirs’, pp. 637–42; Paul E. Lovejoy, Jihad in West Africa during the Age of Revolutions (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2016), pp. 129–30. 59.  Marion Johnson, ‘Technology, Competition, and African Crafts’, in Clive Dewey and A. G. Hopkins, eds., The Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of Africa and India (London: Ashlone Press, 1978), p. 259. 60. For the various theories of the origins of the narrow loom in West Africa, see Marion Johnson, ‘Cloth Strips and History’, West African Journal of Archaeology 7 (1977): 169–79. See also, The Gambia National Museum, What about Textiles? Traditional Textiles in the Gambia (Banjul: New Type Press, Kanifing, 1992), p. 4. 61. Curtin, Economic Change, Vol. 1, p. 214. See also, Venice Lamb and Alastair Lamb, ‘The Classification and Distribution of Horizontal Treadle Looms in Sub-Saharan Africa’, Textile History 11/1 (1980): 22–62. 62.  Kriger, ‘Mapping’, p. 102; Colleen E. Kriger, Cloth in West African History (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006), pp. 19–60. 63. Angela W. Browne, ‘Rural Industry and Appropriate Technology: The Lessons of Narrow-Loom Ashanti Weaving’, African Affairs 82/326 (1983): 30–1. 64. A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (London: Longman, 1973), p. 15; Gareth Austin, ‘Resources, Techniques, and Strategies South of the Sahara: Revising the Factor Endowments Perspective on African Economic Development, 1500–2000’, Economic History Review 61/3 (2008): 602–6; Gareth Austin, ‘Labour-Intensity and Manufacturing in West Africa, c. 1450–c. 2000’, in Gareth Austin and Kaoru Sugihara, eds., Labour-Intensive Industrialization in Global History (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 202–3. 65.  Johnson, ‘Technology’, p. 261; Marisa Candotti, ‘Cotton Growing and Textile Production in Northern Nigeria: From Caliphate to Protectorate, c. 1804–1914’ (PhD Thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2015), pp. 91–3. 66. It seems likely that short-staple cotton, called gossypium herbaceum, originated from South India and diffused through Middle East and eastern Mediterranean islands into North Africa and West Africa. Roberts, Two Worlds of Cotton, pp. 43, 55. A relative species, gossypium punctatum, was also introduced from the Americas to Senegambia in the sixteenth century, and grown widely in the Western Soudan. Curtin, Economic Change, Vol. 1, pp. 211–2. 67. Austin, ‘Resources’, p. 604.

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68. Roberts, Two Worlds of Cotton, pp. 44–5, 55. The fact that cotton impoverished the soil implies that it was difficult to plant cotton with wheat, because the harvest season for wheat was later than cotton. Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 305. 69. Sagnia, ‘Minding Indigenous Industries’, pp. 4–5. 70.  Sagnia, ‘Minding Indigenous Industries’, pp. 8–9; National Centre for Arts and Culture, Research and Document Division, Oral History Archives (Fajara, The Gambia), File Nos. 422–427, interview with Samba Kamisa, Bassi, 17 April 1977. 71. Candotti, ‘The Hausa Textile Industry’, pp. 192–4. 72.  A. A. de Almada, Brief Treatise on the Rivers of Guinea (Liverpool: Department of History, University of Liverpool, 1984, original in 1594), p. 24; National Records Service (Banjul, The Gambia), CSO 18/3: Wuli District, 1933; Robin Law, The Slave Coast of West Africa, 1550–1750: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society (Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 44–6; Randy J. Sparks, Where the Negroes Are Masters: An African Port in the Era of the Slave Trade (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 88. 73. Adenaike, ‘West African Textiles’, p. 6. 74. The National Archives (Kew, the United Kingdom), T 70/20: A Letter from John Mildmay, Cape Cast Castle, 13 October 1680; John Atkins, A Voyage to Guinea, Brazil, and the West-Indies; in His Majesty’s Ships, the Swallow and Weymouth (London, 1735), pp. 158–68; Law, The Slave Coast, pp. 201–2. 75. Thornton, Africa and Africans, p. 50. 76. John Thornton, ‘Precolonial African Industry and the Atlantic Trade, 1500–1800’, African Economic History 19 (1990–1991): 18–9; Hodder, ‘Indigenous Cloth Trade’, p. 205. 77. Phyllis M. Martin, ‘Power, Cloth and Currency on the Loango Coast’, African Economic History 15 (1982): 2. 78. Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London and Dares-Salaam: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications and Tanzanian Publishing House, 1973), p. 104. 79. Joseph E. Inikori, ‘English Versus Indian Cotton Textiles: The Impact of Imports on Cotton Textile Production in West Africa’, in Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, eds., How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 85–114. 80. Hopkins, Economic History, p. 121. 81. Marion Johnson, ‘Commodities, Customs, and the Computer’, History in Africa 11 (1984): 364.

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82. Kriger, ‘Mapping’, pp. 106–7; Kriger, Cloth; Colleen E. Kriger, ‘“Guinea Cloth”: Production and Consumption of Cotton Textiles in West Africa Before and During the Atlantic Slave Trade’, in Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi, eds., The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850 (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 105–26. 83.  Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Third Edition, Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 106; Lovejoy, Jihad, p. 129. 84.  A. J. H. Latham, Old Calabar 1600–1891: The Impact of the International Economy upon a Traditional Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 75–9. 85.  British Parliamentary Papers, 1842, XI & XII (551), Report from the Select Committee on the West Coast of Africa; together with the Minutes of Evidence, Appendix, and Index. Part I—Report and Evidence, 117. See also, Silke Strickrodt, Afro-European Trade in the Atlantic World: The Western Slave Coast, c. 1550–c. 1885 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2015), pp. 59–60. 86.  Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, The Atlantic Slave Trade from West Central Africa 1780–1867 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 122–41. 87. Gareth Austin, Labour, Land and Capital in Ghana: From Slavery to Free Labour in Asante, 1807–1956 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2005), pp. 53, 75–7. 88. Paul E. Lovejoy, ‘Interregional Monetary Flows in the Precolonial Trade of Nigeria’, Journal of African History 15/4 (1974): 571. 89.  The textile belt also included northern Zaria, Zamfara and southern Katsina. Lovejoy, Jihad, pp. 107–9, 114. 90.  Phillip Shea, ‘The Development of an Export Oriented Dyed Cloth Industry in Kano Emirate in the Nineteenth Century’ (PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1975). 91. Barth, Travels and Discoveries, pp. 300–2; Candotti, ‘The Hausa Textile Industry’. For the significance of the trans-Saharan trade in northern Nigerian economy, albeit after the last quarter of the nineteenth century, see also Marion Johnson, ‘Calico Caravans: The Tripoli-Kano Trade After 1880’, Journal of African History 17/1 (1976): 95–117. 92.  Joseph E. Inikori, ‘Introduction’, in Joseph E. Inikori, ed., Forced Migration: The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African Societies (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1982), p. 55. 93. Hopkins, Economic History, p. 121. 94. Colleen E. Kriger, ‘The Importance of Mande Textiles in the African Side of the Atlantic Trade, ca. 1680–1710’, Mande Studies 11 (2009): 10, 13.

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95.  Lovejoy, ‘Interregional Monetary Flows’; Curtin, ‘Wider Monetary World’, p. 255; Marion Johnson, ‘The Cowrie Currencies of West Africa’, Journal of African History 11/1&3 (1970): 17–49, 331–53; Jan Hogendorn and Marion Johnson, The Shell Money of the Slave Trade (Cambridge University Press, 1986); Jan S. Hogendorn and Henry A. Gemery, ‘Continuity in West African Monetary History? An Outline of Monetary Development’, African Economic History 17 (1988): 127–46. 96. Paul Bohannan and George Dalton, ‘Introduction’, in Bohannan and Dalton, eds., Markets in Africa, pp. 1–26; Karl Polanyi, Dahomey and the Slave Trade: An Analysis of an Archaic Economy (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1966). On the critiques of substantivists from historians, see Hopkins, Economic History, pp. 68–70; Curtin, Economic Change, Vol. 1, pp. 233–7; Robin Law, ‘Posthumous Questions for Karl Polanyi: Price Inflation in Pre-colonial Dahomey’, Journal of African History 33/3 (1992): 387–420. See also Gareth Austin, ‘A. G. Hopkins, West Africa, and Economic History’, in Falola and Brownell, eds., Africa, pp. 61–2. 97. Jane I. Guyer, ‘Introduction: The Currency Interface and Its Dynamics’, in Jane I. Guyer, ed., Money Matters: Instability, Values and Social Payments in the Modern History of West African Communities (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1995), p. 8. 98. Guyer, ‘Introduction’, p. 9. 99. Karl Polanyi, ‘Sortings and “Ounce Trade” in the West African Slave Trade’, Journal of African History 5/3 (1964): 381–93; Marion Johnson, ‘The Ounce in Eighteenth-Century West African Trade’, Journal of African History 7/2 (1966): 197–214. 100. Curtin, Economic Change, Vol. 1, pp. 247–53. 101. Curtin, Economic Change, Vol. 1, p. 249. 102. Curtin, Economic Change, Vol. 1, p. 268. 103. Akinobu Kuroda, ‘What Is the Complementarity Among Monies? An Introductory Note’, Financial History Review 15/1 (2008): 7. 104.  Johnson, ‘Cloth as Money’, p. 197. Following Kuroda’s works, Africanist historians started to apply the concept of complementarity among monies to the history of money in Africa. Candotti, ‘Cotton Growing and Textile Production’; Toby Green, ‘Africa and the Price Revolution: Currency Imports and Socioeconomic Change in West and West-Central Africa During the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of African History 57/1 (2016): 1–24; Jane I. Guyer and Karin Pallaver, ‘Money and Currency in African History’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 1–29.

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105. The work by David Ames, on nineteenth-century Gambian Wolof societies, supports the complementarity between cloth currency and others. Here, I quote an interesting paragraph on this point from his work: Some commodities, like garden vegetables, were worth so little than they could not be paid for in cloth. Grain in small amounts, measured out in gourds, was the ‘petty cash’ used in such payments. At the same time, a very expensive commodity like a fine horse, worth two slaves, was rarely bought with cloth-money alone by people, whole granaries (worth 15 xopa), livestock, or other objects of value entered the exchange, often in conjunction with cloth. Some exchanges, then, especially the ‘expensive’ ones, were primarily or wholly barter, but even here most of the articles exchanged were evaluated in terms of clothmoney. (Emphasis in original) Ames, ‘Cloth-Money’, pp. 1018–19. 106. See Note 38 above. 107. Akinobu Kuroda, ‘Concurrent but Non-integrable Currency Circuits: Complementary Relationships Among Monies in Modern China and Other Regions’, Financial History Review 15/1 (2008): 28. 108. Lars Sundström, The Trade of Guinea (Uppsala: Studia Ethnographica Upsaliensia XXIV, 1965), pp. 167–168; Johnson, ‘Cloth as Money’, pp. 193–4. 109. Akinobu Kuroda, ‘The Maria Theresa Dollar in the Early TwentiethCentury Red Sea Region: A Complementary Interface Between Multiple Markets’, Financial History Review 14/1 (2007): 89–110. 110. Johnson, ‘Cloth as Money’, p. 196. 111. Kuroda, ‘The Maria Theresa Dollar’, pp. 103–8. 112. Johnson, ‘Cloth as Money’, p. 196. 113. See Chapter 2 and the previous section of this chapter. 114. Webb has estimated how quickly each commodity currency used in precolonial West Africa was consumed as goods in the end. In his estimate cloth was consumed within three years, which was as quick as salt, while iron was used as a currency longer than cloth and salt but shorter than brass manilas, cowries and gold. Although grain was not included in his estimate, it was likely that it was consumed more quickly than any other commodity currency. J. L. A. Webb, Jr., ‘Toward the Comparative Study of Money: A Reconsideration of West African Currencies and Neoclassical Monetary Concepts’, International Journal of African Historical Studies 15/3 (1982): 460–1. 115.  Johnson, ‘Cloth as Money’, p. 194; Webb, ‘Comparative Study of Money’, pp. 460–1. Precolonial Angola imported raphia textiles produced in Loango Coastal societies and used these textiles not only as money in local markets to buy foodstuffs and slaves. But these textiles

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were also sewn together to make tents which could withstand the wind and rain. This was also a case where currency became commodity. Martin, ‘Power’, p. 4. 116.  Johnson, ‘Cloth as Money’, p. 198; J. F. P. Hopkins and Nehemia Levtzion, eds., Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History (Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 78, 85, 385; Kriger, Cloth, p. 82. 117. Johnson, ‘Cloth as Money’, p. 201; Johnson, ‘Cloth Strips’, pp. 175–6. 118. Linda Newson, ‘The Slave-Trading Accounts of Manoel Batista Peres, 1613–1619: Double-Entry Bookkeeping in Cloth Money’, Accounting History 18/3 (2013): 356. 119. Bouët-Willaumez, Commerce, p. 4; Raffenel, Nouveau Voyage, Vol. 1, pp. 78–9; Monteil, ‘Les coton chez les noirs’, p. 594; Curtin, Economic Change, Vol. 1, p. 237. As for sewing strips into a piece of cloth, Walter Rodney noted that ‘the neat craftsmanship made the stitching virtually indiscernible’. Walter Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545–1800 (Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 181. 120. Johnson, ‘Cloth as Money’, p. 195. 121. Ames, ‘Cloth-Money’, p. 1018. 122. Sundström, The Trade of Guinea, p. 166; Johnson, ‘Cloth as Money’, p. 195. 123. Ames, ‘Cloth-Money’, pp. 1018–9. 124.  Ames, ‘Cloth-Money’, p. 1018. Indigo was available across the Senegambia and the Western Sudan. Raffenel, Nouveau Voyage, Vol. 1, pp. 407–8; Vol. 2, p. 218. 125. Curtin, Economic Change, Vol. 1, p. 238. 126. Rodney, Upper Guinea Coast, p. 181; Boubacar Barry, The Kingdom of Waalo: Senegal Before the Conquest (New York: Diasporic Africa Press, 2012), p. 26. 127. Newson, ‘The Slave-Trading Accounts’, p. 357. 128.  P. Dubié, ‘La vie matérielle des Maures’, in Mélanges ethnologiques (Dakar: IFAN, 1953), pp. 220–1. 129. Hogendorn and Gemery, ‘Continuity’, p. 131. 130. Curtin, Economic Change, Vol. 1, pp. 268–9. 131.  Akinobu Kuroda, Kahei shisutemu no sekaishi [A Global History of the Monetary System] (Second Edition, Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2014), p. 10. 132.  Austin, ‘Labour-Intensity’; Austin, ‘Resources’. See also, John Tosh, ‘The Cash-Crop Revolution in Tropical Africa: An Agricultural Reappraisal’, African Affairs 79/314 (1980): 79–94. 133. Webb, Desert Frontier, pp. 3–26. Quotation is from p. 11. For ecological crises such as droughts, locusts and famines in precolonial Senegambia, see Curtin, Economic Change, Vol. 2, pp. 3–7; Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade, trans. Ayi Kwei Armah

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(Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 108–12; George E. Brooks, Western Africa to c. 1860: A Provisional Historical Schema Based on Climate Periods (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University African Studies Program Working Papers Series, 1985), Part V. 134. On ecological factors in determining agricultural productivity in precolonial Senegambia, see Klas Rönnbäck and Dimitrios Theodoridis, ‘African Agricultural Productivity and the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Evidence from Senegambia in the Nineteenth Century’, Economic History Review 72/1 (2019): 209–32. 135. Hogendorn and Gemery, ‘Continuity’, pp. 131–2; Newson, ‘The SlaveTrading Accounts’, p. 358. 136. Roberts, Two Worlds of Cotton, pp. 56–7. 137. It is probably because of this fact and because there was the growing demand for guinées around the Senegal River region that cowries were not used as money there. 138. Roberts, ‘West Africa’, pp. 161–7. For the early history of the Savana Mills, see Chapter 4.

CHAPTER 4

Procurement of Indian Textiles for West Africa, 1750–1850

This chapter examines the dimensions of textile production and how European merchants procured cotton textiles in India for West Africa from 1750 to 1850, the period that covers the peak of the Atlantic slave trade and the growth of ‘legitimate’ commerce from West Africa. We have seen that during the era of ‘legitimate’ commerce the procurement of guinées for Senegal became crucial for the development of the textile industry while Western Europe was in the process of industrialisation. This chapter attempts to reveal that Indian producers played a significant role in maintaining the south-south trade connection. In this chapter, we will focus on the English East India Company (EIC) and the French enterprise. The EIC, like other European companies, played a pivotal role in the procurement of cotton textiles in South Asia to provide for home as well as foreign markets, including West Africa. Their supply of Indian textiles for the English Atlantic slave trade contributed in making Britain one of the largest participants in the Atlantic slave trade in the eighteenth century and thus to the rise and development of the Atlantic slave-based economy. Meanwhile, in the nineteenth century, the French undertook the rebuilding of Pondicherry, which turned out to be the vital source of guinées for Senegal to purchase gum arabic in the Senegal River valley. Based on the documents of the EIC available at the British Library and Indian archives, the literature has detailed various aspects of the procurement process of Indian cotton textiles for the English market, © The Author(s) 2019 K. Kobayashi, Indian Cotton Textiles in West Africa, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18675-3_4

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as shown in the next section. However, the procurement of textiles for West Africa is inadequately studied. This chapter aims to fill this lacuna by paying attention to the English business in Coromandel Coast, the major source of Indian textiles for West Africa, with the vicissitude of the English slave trade in mind. The chapter also attempts to compare the English business with the French business in textile procurement in South India. This comparative study shows different outcomes in their business that derived from incentive issues and different degrees of development of the manufacturing sector in Britain and France. By doing so, a clear picture of the production side of the economic linkage with West Africa emerges. The rest of the chapter is planned as follows. After a brief survey of relevant works on the English business to procure textiles in India, the discussion focuses on English investment in textile production in India, especially South India, with reference to the Atlantic slave trade. Following the geographical distributions of cotton production in South India and the basic network of textile procurement around the Coromandel Coast region until the late eighteenth century, we will discuss the institutional change to the procurement system by the EIC, followed by the impact of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade and British industrialisation. Following this, the discussion will move on to the French business of textile procurement in Pondicherry in the early nineteenth century and consider what caused the different results in textile procurement in South India between the English and the French.

Rethinking the Procurement of Indian Textiles There are a good number of original studies about the procurement and importation by European merchants of Indian cotton textiles for European markets up to the nineteenth century. The literature has so far advanced our knowledge about various aspects of the procurement process of cotton textiles in India—from the geographical distribution of raw cotton and the textile industry to the social organisation and structure of textile production, the commercial networks of cotton textiles between the producing regions and European markets, the institutional changes made by the colonial administration to the procurement system, and the response from the weaver.1 However, our knowledge about the procurement and import of Indian cotton textiles for West Africa is still very limited, compared

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with the case for East African markets.2 This is mainly due to the concentration of scholarly interest in Europe-Asian trade. As for the EIC, Kirti Chaudhuri noted that there was a resale of Indian cotton textiles in London for the consuming markets of Europe, the Americas and West Africa in the first half of the seventeenth century.3 Huw Bowen also touches on the increasing demand for Indian cotton textiles in the West African market in the early 1760s.4 But they provided no more than snapshots. This chapter covers this shortcoming. Research on the procurement of Indian cotton textiles for West Africa by the French in the said period has been relatively advanced compared to the English. Mireille Lobligeois and Jacques Weber extensively used archival documents to elaborate the process of the development of the textile industry and that of the rebuilding of Pondicherry in the nineteenth century.5 Richard Roberts masterfully linked this story with the French commercial interest in gum arabic from Senegal where gum was exchanged with guinées.6 Yet, the literature on Pondicherry needs to be incorporated into a broader context of the European procurements of textiles in India, in which a comparative perspective will shed light on the similarity and difference between the English and French enterprises in South India from the eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. In doing so, we can incorporate the production dimensions into our story of economic connections between West Africa and South Asia.

English Investment in Textile Production in South India Geographical Distribution of the Production of Cotton in South India The Indian subcontinent was, and is, rich in geographical diversity, which shaped regional economies and distinct cultures throughout history (Map 3).7 The core regions of the textile industry in the subcontinent were Punjab, Gujarat, the Coromandel Coast and Bengal. These regions shared some common features, such as active trade with different markets, both within and outside the subcontinent, availability of plenty of skilled labour, easy access to raw cotton, and the presence of an enterprising business class. Between 1500 and 1800 European merchants entered the Indian Ocean world to participate in the maritime trade in Asia; for example, Madras, Bombay and Calcutta were established as

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major port cities for the EIC, and Chandernagore and Pondicherry for the French. In geographical terms, South India was physically divided into three regions: the long and broad eastern coast that covers the Coromandel Coast, the shorter and narrower western coast that covers the Malabar Coast, and the plateau in the interior. These divisions were configured by the two chains of great mountains known as the Eastern and Western Ghats running parallel to the coasts.8 On the eastern side of South India were the three major rivers that ran through the Eastern Ghats to the Bay of Bengal in the Indian Ocean: the Godavari, the Krishna and the Kaveri as well as other minor rivers such as the Pennair and the Palaur. Northern Coromandel stretches from the Godavari Delta in the north to the Pennair Delta in the south. Southern Coromandel includes Madras, North and South Arcot, Chingleput, Salem, Trichinopoly and Tanjore (Map 4). In addition to these river basins, the rainfall fluctuations, caused by the seasonal monsoons, both north-east and south-west, determined the rhythm of a whole range of social and economic activities including the cotton production in South India. In addition, natural disasters such as inundations of the coast by the sea and cyclones, in the short run, caused disruptions of textile production, crippled shipping and transportation, and even devastated the low-lying ports.9 Prasannan Parthasarathi has offered an important note on the cotton cultivation process. Cotton was cultivated extensively on the red soils of South India, which were light and easy to plough without much labour. Ploughing the earth was usually carried out between April and June, followed by sowing between August and October. The usual method of manuring after sowing relied on a flock of cattle, sheep or goats which was reared within the enclosure. The cotton could be picked six to twelve months after sowing. A peasant household played a central role in the process of picking cotton but its practice varied from region to region. The extensive cultivation of cotton in South India did not require either much capital or labour, and this form of cultivation was widely found in Ganjam, Vizagapatnam, the Baramahal, South Arcot, Trichinopoly, Dindigul and other places.10 Peasants in South India usually cultivated cotton along with grains and other dry crops to reduce the risks posed by uncertainties in rainfall. The variety of cotton grown in the Tamil country was nadam (gossypium nanking) which had several advantages. The nadam cotton was a

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perennial crop that lasted three to five years. This type of cotton had an advantage in the long run. Even if it did not yield very well in times of poor rainfall which it could withstand, it would recover in the following picking seasons after good rainfall. In comparison with grains, the nadam cotton could withstand droughts. Hence, planting this type of cotton offered peasants in South India a sort of security.11 On the other hand, cotton was cultivated intensively on the black soils of South India particularly concentrated in districts such as Tinnevelly, Madurai, Coimbatore and the Ceded Districts (or part of the southern Deccan plateau). In common with extensive cultivation that was also practised in these regions, cotton seeds were interspersed with such crops as coconuts, oil-seeds, pulses and spices. In contrast to red soils, however, these soils were clay-like and heavy, so cotton cultivators needed to hire extra labour from outside their households. The hired labourers were required not only for sowing and ploughing that normally took place between mid-August and mid-September but also for picking that commenced in February or March and lasted until May. In the Ceded Districts, there were three pickings that were conducted with a two- to three-week interval between each, and women and children played a major role in the first of three pickings. Therefore, they needed more capital and labour in the intensive cultivation of cotton than those in extensive cultivation.12 While cotton was produced mostly in the interior, the weaving was concentrated on the coasts. Therefore, it was regional trade that connected the regions of cotton cultivation and those of weaving. The Deccan was a major supply centre of cotton for the weavers in the Northern Circars (northern Coromandel), the northern Tamil region and other places. The Deccan region produced quality cotton.13 Joseph Brennig noted that, ‘Northern Coromandel’s high humidity and frequent flooding in its lowlands made the region unsuited to cotton cultivation in appropriate quantities and qualities for an export industry’. Therefore, the Northern Circars relied on the caravan trade in raw cotton organised by the nomadic Banjara community ‘which escorted thousand of bullock loads of cotton from the Deccan to the coast every year’. This internal trade persisted at least from the 1630s into the early nineteenth century.14 Around the Godavari Delta, one of the major cash crops was indigo. One of the main areas of indigo production was what is now the Khamman district of Andhra Pradesh. The south-west monsoon that begins in June and lasts until September created the cycle of indigo

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production in the region. The sowing in sandy soil took place in June and July, followed by three cuttings. The first cutting took place in late August or early September, and the second and third ones from November to December. Because indigo harvested in later cuttings was of better quality than the first cutting, the busiest season for marketing lasted from October to February. Merchants bought indigo at important regional markets such as Nagulvancha, Palvancha and Gollapudi, and distributed this cash crop to the weaving villages along the Andhra Coast on the one hand, and those in Goa and Debhol on the other.15 The Deccan, the Raichur Doab in particular, also supplied cotton to the northern Tamil region and Mysore at least from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century. Cotton and yarn supplied from the Deccan were transported to Nellore, Walajapet and Mysore, from which some were re-exported to Salem. Parthasarathi has estimated the scale of these trades in the early nineteenth century, and the average scale for the years 1806, 1813 and 1814–1815) was 13,000 candies, or more than three tonnes. In addition to the Deccan region, the Tamil districts, Coimbatore and Tinnevelly in particular, also produced cotton and supplied the weavers inland and along the coast, including Salem and Cuddalore.16 These two cities played a large role in supplying the English merchants with cotton textiles for West Africa during the period under consideration.17 A Network of Intermediaries Between South India and Britain The Coromandel Coast was positioned at the centre of the trade networks of Indian cotton textiles for West African markets during the age of the Atlantic slave trade. There was no direct trade between India and West Africa at that time. Indian textiles were imported into European ports, and then were re-exported to West Africa. India and West Africa were connected by the growing demand for Indian cotton goods that were utilised for the early modern Europe-West African trade, namely the purchase of African slaves and products along the Atlantic coast of Africa. Hand-woven textiles included white goods and coloured goods (usually, blue or red). Blue-coloured cotton textiles were known as ‘bafts’ or more simply ‘blue goods’ and ‘blue cloths’ in English. The Coromandel Coast was also known for red dye from chay root (oldenlandia umbellata), as well as morinda in Western India, whose alizarin enabled local skilled artisans to produce red-coloured textiles.18

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One of the staple textiles manufactured in South India was long cloth, most of which was originally woven in Golconda in northern Coromandel in the early seventeenth century and later across the Tamil region. According to Radhika Seshan, long cloth was ‘perhaps the only typical cloth of the Coromandel’. This type of textile was ‘the best or “superfine” grades of plain white cloth’ in the region, and was known as being exceptionally long (around 37 yards) and 1¼ yards wide. Another was sallampores, which was also initially woven in Golconda and later in various parts of the Tamil region. This type of textile was usually produced in 16-yard lengths and one-yard widths.19 Initially, Cuddalore and Salem in the South Arcot district were the major production centres of these goods in southern Coromandel, and Nagore was also seen as an alternative source in the early nineteenth century.20 These places also produced red-coloured textiles, but apparently blue goods dominated the procurement process by the EIC.21 A letter from the Company to the Governor in Council at Fort St. George in Madras noted that even if the investment in Cuddalore was not successful, it was ‘highly necessary to supply the deficiency of blue goods from Nagore’ where their colour was superior to the standard set for African markets, and their odour was also highly appreciated.22 Unfortunately, for the entire eighteenth century, we have no data or figures on the proportion of cotton textiles that made up the total quantity of exports from India to Europe, for West Africa. As for the case of Bengal, Om Prakash has estimated that from the late seventeenth to the early eighteenth century, 10 per cent of the total manufacturers were engaged in the textile production for the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the EIC. That means that most of the artisans in India produced textiles for domestic consumption. Prakash has also assumed that demand from the European East India Companies became ‘a vehicle for an expansion in income, output and employment in the subcontinent’. This implies that growing demand from the Atlantic world would probably generate additional workforce to produce textiles for the consumers in Europe, West Africa and the Americas throughout the eighteenth century.23 Similarly, Parthasarathi has calculated that exports of cotton textiles by the EIC and the VOC accounted for 22 per cent of total textile production in South India in the first quarter of the eighteenth century. More importantly, he noted that purchase of Indian cotton textiles by Europeans not only increased the demand for the cloth, ‘but also changed the type of cloth demanded’: while patterned cloths, painted or printed, were in demand among Southeast Asian consumers, calicoes,

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or plain cloths, were sought by European consumers.24 As discussed later, blue goods represented demand from West African markets. In the case of South India, information on demands from African markets was transmitted through a network of intermediaries that included the EIC’s Court of Directors in London, the Board of Trade at Fort St. George in Madras and Commercial Residents of the Company. Commercial Residents had under their control washermen, weavers and dyers who worked for the EIC. Because of the absence of reliable sources, it is virtually impossible to specify how such information had travelled from West Africa through Britain to India. However, some archival sources show connections between West African demand for textiles and the textile production in South India in the eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. The EIC’s Directors informed the Board of Trade about market situations and which types of cotton textiles including length and colour were needed for the market. For instance, in response to the end of the Seven Years’ War, which revived the Atlantic slave trade, the Directors requested Fort William in Bengal, Fort St. George in Madras and the Council in Bombay to supply London with handloom articles to purchase slaves in West Africa. Among them, in particular, the letter to Fort St. George stressed that ‘you are upon no account whatsoever omit sending the full quantity of long cloths, sallampores blue as they in particular are very much wanted’ in West Africa.25 The Board of Trade in Madras informed Commercial Residents in Cuddalore and other places about the types of textiles the EIC required. They would rarely reveal the final destinations or the market situation, for Indian textiles of specific kinds.26 Therefore, Indian intermediaries and weavers would probably not know the fact that some of their products reached West Africa via London. In addition, the Board of Trade wanted a regular supply of textiles of acceptable quality for London. They carefully checked the texture, thickness, colour, variety and odour of these handloom articles against the standard musters in the warehouse after these goods were delivered from the weaving villages to the trading settlements on the coast.27 In reality, the handloom products varied in quality, and cloths that did not meet with the quality standards were rejected by the Board of Trade.28 This implies that procurement in India by the EIC of piece goods for West African markets was largely dependent upon the weavers’ performances, which in turn was based on the price of raw materials and food, access to water and ecological conditions.

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The Advance System of the Late Eighteenth Century In the eighteenth century, the organisation of textile production for the EIC on the Coromandel Coast was usually based on what Chaudhuri called the ‘advance system’. The system was not the same as the ‘putting out system’, under which merchants advanced raw material, not cash, to weavers, so that they could control capital. But there was no financial independence for the weavers. In the advance system, by contrast, the textile producers in South India could retain their independence to some extent to determine how to spend the cash advanced for textile production and choose their own livelihood.29 A sample cloth came to the EIC within six to eight weeks after cash was advanced, and the remaining followed within six months.30 It was not possible for the EIC to enter the weaving villages and to establish direct contact with the weavers due to the language barrier. Therefore, a solution to the advance system was Indian intermediaries who connected weavers’ villages with the export market on the coast. Some came from within the villages, and others from outside.31 A census taken in 1771 shows that, out of 246 households, 90 were landowning weavers, 68 cotton spinners and 40 merchants in a weaving village in the Chingleput district of the Madras Presidency. In this case, Indian merchants as intermediaries provided credit to artisans and supplied textiles to an export market outside the villages. The profit they earned from the textile trade was 4–5 per cent at most. This enabled the EIC to purchase textiles at low cost, and thereby Indian textiles remained highly profitable to them well into the eighteenth century.32 In the weavers’ villages, there were also brokers. Some brokers would be head weavers who acted as intermediaries between the weavers and the local merchants. In the north of the Godavari River such people were knowns as kopudarudu or copdar (contractor), who had some influence over the weavers. They received a commission of 3–5 per cent from the local merchants, the clients of the EIC. Their main business was to purchase textiles from the weavers or to advance loan on the loom. In addition, they helped the weavers in times of distress, and also provided foodstuff at an advantageous rate.33 In the course of time, some brokers became more independent and brought textiles from the weaving villages and directly sold them to the merchants outside. In such cases, they could earn more profits than the above-mentioned commission.34

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In the advance system, however, there was a problem between the brokers and the EIC. It was often the case that brokers made arrangements with purchasers other than the EIC. For example, at the close of the eighteenth century, Edward Holland, the then deputy secretary of the Madras Presidency, reported that, once the EIC rejected the goods of somewhat inferior quality, the brokers supplied those goods to the French at Pondicherry. This practice of the brokers frustrated the EIC and provided a reason for them to consolidate their control over textile procurement later.35 Thus, one of the features of the advance system was that it allowed the weavers to allocate the advanced cash to various requirements such as raw material for weaving, foodstuffs to feed their family members, maintenance of the loom and various other needs at their own discretion. This system also offered the weavers a chance to maximise their profits by choosing thread at the cheapest price. A major part of the advanced cash normally went for food. Therefore, the quality of their finished goods could vary according to the price of rice and not of cotton only, as they had to manage with the limited amount of money in producing the ordered goods.36 The EIC in South India from the 1770s to the 1780s The EIC’s performance in supplying Indian cotton textiles to London was not always satisfactory to the merchants who engaged in West African trade. For example, the EIC was unable to provide sufficient quantity of Indian blue cloths for merchants who invested in the slave trade around 1770. One such was a London merchant Gilbert Ross, who had interests in the slave trade with Senegambia. He presented a petition to the Lords of the Treasury to get a licence to purchase thousands of pieces of Indian cotton textiles in Rotterdam for trading.37 In their petition on 10 October 1770, Ross and other merchants claimed that ‘the article of East India Blue Long Cloths is absolutely necessary for carrying on the trade to Senegambia and make above three fourth in value of the whole goods exported thither. … there is no substitute whatever for the said article of East India Blue Long Cloths’ because they might have missed the season of the gum trade in Senegambia unless they secured enough quantity of Indian cotton goods of that type immediately. They also mentioned that apart from Senegambia ‘there is likewise a very considerable annual demand for the said article [Indian blue long cloths] for the other parts

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of Africa’.38 They referred to ‘an Act of the 5th of his present Majesty entitled an Act for more effectually supplying the export trade of this Kingdom to Affrica etc’ as the supportive evidence that I quote as follows: Provided that if the United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies [EIC] shall at any time refuse or neglect to keep this market supplied with a sufficient quantity of such goods at reasonable prices to answer the African trade it shall and may be lawfull to and for the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury on any three or more of them or the Lord High Treasurer for the time being of or they shall think proper to grant licenses to any other person or persons to import such goods into any port of Great Britain from any ports of Europe not within His Majesty’s dominions in such and the like manner and under such restrictions and limitations as are herein before prescribed and directed.39

In the late eighteenth century, the increase in the demand for Indian textiles from the Atlantic world, including West Africa, led to increasing demand for raw cotton, yarn and also foodstuffs. These came from the agricultural hinterland of South Asia that extended far beyond Bengal and the Coromandel Coast—both of which the EIC controlled.40 On the other hand, in response to this growing demand, more weavers, with their family members, devoted more time to work on the looms for the export market instead of agriculture.41 During this period, the procurement of cotton textiles in India for the European purchasers in London became a serious problem for the EIC. The famines of Madras from 1790 to 1792 affected the production of cotton textiles in the region.42 The prices of thread and indigo increased in Cuddalore; the price of thread increased by 50–60 per cent. John Kentworthy, Commercial Resident in Cuddalore, wrote to Ernest William Fallofield, President of the Board of Trade in Madras, that the rise in the price of those materials and the ‘indifference of colour’ caused ‘a general debasement in nearly every articles of Cuddalore goods’.43 A letter sent from London to Surat in Western India urged the Council in Bombay to ‘bring regularly to sale a considerable assortment of Surat Goods for the supply of the African Trade in particular’—the procurement of cotton goods for the Atlantic slave trade remained a matter of concern among the EIC in South India.44 Furthermore, the EIC faced adverse conditions both in Britain and Asia in the late eighteenth century. First, it faced a serious capital shortage

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in India after the Carnatic Wars and the Anglo-Mysore Wars. This financial problem led to a reduction in the investment in the textile procurement. In 1790 the EIC invested 1.6 million pagodas to purchase textiles in the Tamil coast, but the annual investment in textiles fell to 1.2 million pagodas in 1796.45 Second, the rise of the Lancashire cotton industry posed a challenge. The emerging manufacturers desired both new markets for their textiles as well as sources of raw materials such as cotton and indigo. In the political debate in Downing Street, they increasingly raised their voices for a complete ban on the import of Indian textiles into Britain. In 1774, the British Parliament prohibited the imports of Indian cotton goods except for plain chintz and muslins and those for re-export. Third, a new idea of political economy represented by Adam Smith emerged and extended its influence. This idea helped the promotion of free trade by attacking monopolies of trade, such as that of the EIC. Fourth, a 1787 instruction by Charles Cornwallis, Governor-General, eliminated private trade by the EIC servants. This reform operated in favour of the free merchants who carried out business, especially the country trade, on their own account outside the EIC, and contributed to the setting up of agency houses that played multiple roles in trade, shipping, remittances of wealth to Europe and investment in such plantation commodities as indigo. Thus, these difficult situations surrounding the EIC aided more private traders to participate in trading and financial business and production in India from the late eighteenth century.46 In fact, this period saw a growing number of private merchants who engaged in the Europe-Asian trade and the intra-Asian trade that extended from India to Southeast Asia, China and Japan.47 As for British private traders, there were three major groups. First, the EIC allowed their servants to pursue the profits arising from trade. Bengal played a pivotal role in the private business and after the Battle of Plassey (1757) private trade expanded. Second, a limited number of ‘free merchants’ and other private entrepreneurs were also permitted to engage in the trade between Britain and Asia, the country trade and the production of commodities, such as indigo, sugar and coffee. They could conduct this business unless they infringed the EIC’s monopoly of trade. Third, the EIC directors gave the commanders and officers of East Indiamen a substantial financial stake in each voyage to engage in freight-free private trade between Britain and Asia. They were allowed to export a wider range of goods from Britain than the EIC, which retained the right to export woollens, copper, gunpowder and firearms.48

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Among the British private merchants in Madras, for example, Thomas Parry from Wales and John Binny from Scotland developed a trading and private banking business from the late eighteenth to the nineteenth century. Since the EIC limited the number of remittances sent home by its employees, private banks, including those of Parry and Binny, could use surplus capital to invest in the plantations of indigo, sugar refining and textile production. Such British merchant houses in India not only invested in their own plantations but also nudged other merchants into investing their capitals in private business opportunities that were, however, maintained by these houses. The agency houses formed the foundation of the later British managing agency system that spread from India to other places.49 Failure of the Aumany System in South India These issues raised the question among EIC officials about improving and controlling the quality and prices, respectively, of textiles for export in India. As for South India, when the British increased their own influence as a colonial power in the 1770s, they started to enter the weaving villages to establish direct relationships between the Company and the weavers. The EIC also tried to eliminate the Indian intermediaries who under the advance system had brought finished cloths from the interior villages to the coast. Instead, the Company employed their paid servants, called gumastahs, as Indian agents, to make advance to weavers and superintend the looms. However, this institutional change, carried out under the name of the ‘aumany system’ met with hostility from the weavers, sometimes with violence. In the end, it turned out that the EIC could not break the nexus between the weavers and the Indian intermediaries who the EIC tried to eliminate.50 The aumany system was a replication of the system that had already been introduced in Bengal and elsewhere.51 The term ‘aumany’ meant land and weaving villages that were placed under the direct management of the collector.52 This system was designed to procure quality textiles through superintendents, such as peons, appointed by the EIC. These superintendents replaced intermediate Indian merchants who once had connected the EIC with the head weavers under the advance system. The superintendents knew the indigenous languages that enabled them to conduct all requisite transactions directly with the head weavers without local interpreters or delay.53

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In addition, the weavers, employed by the EIC, received subsistence instead of money that had been advanced under the former system. The aumany system appeared to the EIC ‘well calculated to answer the important purpose of furnishing our sales [in London] with ample and regular supplies of piece good’.54 They hoped that this new procurement system ‘may ultimately tend to stop the manufacture of inferior goods if the contractors are obliged to deliver them to us at considerable reduction of price they being also subject to penalty on account of any deficiency of standard goods’.55 At the very beginning of the nineteenth century, there were 15–20 villages within 50–60 miles of Cuddalore, having about 1000 looms, with which they produced blue and red handkerchiefs, sallampores and other things.56 Richard Kinchant, Commercial Resident in Cuddalore, informed the Board of Trade in Madras that the aumany system was ‘absolutely necessary’ to secure cotton textiles. One of the EIC’s concerns was to protect the Company’s interests against the investment of private traders. For this purpose, as far as cloths whose quality was inferior to the standard muster are concerned, they were ‘rejected and returned to the weavers, stamping every fold with a rejected mark to prevent its being again brought to the factory on account of the company’.57 Besides, the EIC intended to control the weavers by offering them certain benefits such as ‘a total reduction of the monthly tax, customs on thread’.58 It was during the French Revolutionary Wars when the aumany system was taking effect in South India. Despite the increased demand for piece goods of Indian cotton in continental Europe and West Africa, French hostility towards Britain made the supply erratic.59 However, such a challenging situation forced the EIC to review their investment in textile production in India. In May 1794, Edward Holland instructed John Kentworthy in Cuddalore: At present the demand for blue goods is not very brisk, the prices are consequently very low but this is to be attributed to the [French Revolutionary] War, we have not therefore relaxed from the extended plan of investment we have some time intimated it was our intention to adopt, not doubting that when peace shall return these goods will again become much in request.60 The Berlin Decree issued in 1806 excluded British commerce from continental Europe, so there were unsold cloths that accumulated at the EIC’s warehouses in London. The EIC sent a letter to Fort St. George in Madras in 1807, expressing the intention to limit the procurement

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to a much lower scale than had been ordered in previous years.61 On the other hand, the EIC regarded the dwindling state of cloth sales in Europe as ‘an opportunity more favorable than has ever occurred to restore and improve the fabric of the investment’ in Cuddalore of which Richard Kinchant was in charge.62 The French Revolutionary Wars affected both British trade and domestic consumption. One dispatch from the EIC to the Madras Presidency stated that ‘we must certainly expect to experience much inconvenience from the present War so long as it continues during this period our gains will be much reduced, as none but absolutely necessaries will find ready purchasers to exportation’ and the consumption of their invested goods such as calicoes were expected to be ‘very small’ during this period.63 In wartime, the British Atlantic slave trade scaled down by 40 per cent from 46,236 slaves in 1793 to 27,454 slaves in 1794. The year 1794 marked one of the sluggish years in the British slave trade during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.64 Sinnappah Arasaratnam noted that the EIC accomplished ‘a degree of control over the Carnatic handloom industry by 1780’.65 However, as a whole, the outcome of the aumany system seems not to have been in favour of the EIC, which tried to tighten control over the weavers in the South Indian weaving villages. It should be remembered that there was an incentive issue.66 The EIC did not give the weavers enough incentive to fulfil their contract obligations with it, despite the fact that they were granted such privileges as ‘a total reduction of the monthly tax and customs on thread’.67 The weavers around the Coromandel Coast were so mobile that they could set their looms up wherever they preferred and move from one place to another if they found better conditions were provided.68 They would escape from indebtedness to the EIC and Indian merchants to flee to Pondicherry around the turn of the nineteenth century.69 Potkuchi Swarnalatha presented the case of Vizagapatnam district in northern Coromandel region. Under the aumany system, the EIC dealt directly with the copdars and the head weavers, instead of relying on intermediary merchants who had connected the EIC and the weaving villages before. This change to commercial networks allowed the copdars and the head weavers to become more powerful. Indeed, soon after the introduction of the system ‘they began to take advantage of the Company’s contracts and used the Company’s services and peons for their own private trading’.70

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Moreover, the EIC’s investment in textile production in India was always subject to local and global circumstances. As we have already seen, for example, international politics in Europe and the Atlantic world would affect demand for Indian textiles. Also, British manufacturers tried to discourage the EIC from importing cotton textiles from India into Britain. In the meantime, political instability, including the Carnatic and the Anglo-Mysore wars and caste disputes, often affected textile procurement, as artisans fled to safer areas in such circumstances. In addition, there were intense competitions with other European merchants and private traders in the purchase of textiles. Furthermore, the weavers’ performance cannot be neglected. It was dependent on access to water for the washing and dyeing processes and the market for raw materials—whose price also mattered—and on ecological conditions including natural disasters and famines. It can be conjectured, therefore, that the effect of the aumany system was restricted from the beginning. Indeed, evidence illustrates that the aumany system did not necessarily solve the procurement problem. As for the procurement of textiles for West African trade, for example, the year 1802 saw an increased demand for coloured cloths, especially plain blue goods from Cuddalore and blue sallampores from Salem, at the Company’s sales in Britain. However, the Company complained about the inability of the Commercial Resident at Cuddalore to meet the EIC’s order for the purchase of textiles. In such a situation, Salem was expected to make up for the deficiency from Cuddalore, and Nagore’s blue long cloths were also regarded as suitable for the West African market.71 Also, an examination at a warehouse on the Tamil coast revealed ‘very great debasement and inferiority’ of the quality of textiles on which investment was already made, and there were bitter comments addressed to each of 16 assortments of the invested cloths.72 For example, one of three assortments of long cloth, called ‘Chennamanaickpollam’, was ‘of very bad quality throughout and loose in texture the cross threads particularly coarse this assortment inferior to N1 of Warriarpollam though invoiced at the same price’. The referred assortment of long cloth, Warriarpollam, was ‘very inferior with few exceptions the cross threads too coarse and goods flimsy’. Although bleaching and packing materials were approved, the generality of the pieces was ‘soiled with marking chop’. To this adverse situation, Holland requested the Commercial Resident at Cuddalore to explain the causes of the problem.73 The EIC

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suffered from protracted problems of this kind even into the first decade of the nineteenth century.74 After the British Withdrawal from the Atlantic Slave Trade In 1807, the British Parliament abolished the slave trade. This brought about a decline in the shipping of Indian cotton textiles from Britain to West Africa in the following years, the volume of which dropped from on average 256,800 pieces in the years from 1805 to 1807,75 hitting a trough in 1811 at 27,800 pieces.76 The shrinking demand for the West African trade made the EIC reconsider investment in textile production in the Madras Presidency: In consequence of the present situation of the trade with Africa, and adverting also to the want of a demand in the West Indies for the coloured piece goods usually consigned thither; we have considered that our stock of prohibited goods of every description, but more particularly of Blue Goods and Romals, is more than adequate to any probably [sic] demand. We have therefore been constrained to limit our investments at Masulipatam [Masulipatnam] and Cuddalore to the very inconsiderable sums hereafter mentioned and we have seen it necessary to reduce the amount of goods to be provided at Nagore to about thirty thousand pagodas.77

This letter was written to Fort St. George in Madras in 1812, just one year after the trough of the trade of Indian textiles from Britain to West Africa. Masulipatnam was a principal district for textile production for the markets of Europe and West Africa in the northern Coromandel, as was Cuddalore in southern Coromandel.78 This letter indicates that the EIC planned to reduce its investment to procure cotton textiles in South India for the Atlantic markets due to the shrinking demand for trade with West Africa and the West Indies. Nonetheless, it must be remembered that the demand for blue cloths among African merchants did not necessarily disappear during the first half of the nineteenth century. As discussed in Chapter 2, the shipping of Indian textiles continued, especially dyed goods, from Britain to West Africa in the early nineteenth century. In fact, the trade in Indian cotton textiles recovered somewhat after 1811, and until 1830 Britain shipped on an average 75,000 pieces of Indian textiles into West Africa.79

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Moreover, it is of great interest that the EIC continued to direct the Madras Presidency to supply blue cloths to London, despite technological innovations in Lancashire’s cotton industry from the late eighteenth century. At that time British imitations of Indian textiles found a market in West Africa. This development had an impact upon the EIC’s investment in textile production in South India, especially that of white cloths. In the second decade of the nineteenth century, Indian white calicoes became difficult to sell in the markets of Europe and the Americas owing to the challenge from Lancashire. Much is known about the development of the cotton industry in Lancashire that sharpened the competitive edge of their calicoes over their Indian counterparts on the global stage in the second decade of the nineteenth century.80 In the 1820s, British cotton goods were equal in appearance to an assortment of fine calicoes, both of Madras and Bengal, and produced at half the Indian price.81 The shrinking volume of Indian white calicoes shipped from Britain towards West Africa in the early nineteenth century largely mirrored the change of competitiveness between British and Indian cotton textiles. However, this was not true for blue goods. The price of Indian indigo-dyed cotton textiles at the EIC sale in London declined from 27 to 29 shillings per piece in 1820 to less than 15 shillings per piece in 1828.82 In the late 1820s, West Africa imported from Britain more than ten times as much Indian dyed cotton textiles as Indian white calicoes; at an average of 65,000 pieces per annum, most of the dyed goods went to Sierra Leone to be exchanged for timber, ginger and other things.83 It is fair to say that West African demand and consumption patterns played a role in the EIC’s continued investment in coloured cloths in South India in the first half of the nineteenth century.

French Investment in Textile Production in Pondicherry Pondicherry, or Pudu-Cheri (‘new settlement’ in Tamil), had been a land of agriculture and handicraft industry during the mediaeval period. The arrival of the Europeans brought considerable changes in its economy. The Portuguese built a lodge at Pondicherry to establish the first trading connection with Europe through which cotton textiles for West Africa were also shipped. While the Portuguese, the Danes and the Dutch settled there only for a short period of time before 1670, Pondicherry became a major French settlement on the Coromandel Coast in 1674. It

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had been a naval base and an entrepôt for the French in South Asia, with interruptions by the Dutch and the British.84 The French had a great interest in textiles in Pondicherry and encouraged artisans to produce a large number of textiles for export by giving them a piece of land to build houses and set up looms. The French offered such a conducive atmosphere that various groups of weavers, including the Kaikkolars, Devangas, Saliyars and Seniyars, castes from Kanchipuram, Arani, Arcot and other areas, migrated and settled in Pondicherry. They produced textiles under the same system as we have seen in other parts of South India. Here peasant women carried out twostep cotton cleaning. They separated the cotton lint from seeds and then removed dirt, leaves and other foreign matter in their homes so as to make it fit for spinning. The spinning was the domain of women and children in the low-caste peasant families. They spun cotton into threads by using a spindle and a sophisticated spinning wheel known as a charka. While both cotton cleaning and spinning were originally part-time occupations, in the course of time these became full-time professions of the artisans. The yarn was sold to merchants or passed to a weaver for the production of textiles.85 Initially, textiles were exported from Pondicherry to Southeast Asia to buy pepper and spices. In 1682, when the French East India Company (FIC) imported textiles from Pondicherry to France for the first time, these textiles included guinées and sallampores. Both the manufactured goods were popular in West Africa. The Superior Council originally established in Surat was transferred to Pondicherry in 1701, and thereafter Pondicherry functioned as the headquarters of the French in Asia. In the eighteenth century, Pondicherry produced a variety of cotton textiles, especially indigo-dyed piece goods, using cotton that came from Coimbatore, Salem, Madurai and Tiruchirappalli. During peacetime, the number of looms in Pondicherry tripled from 500 to almost 1500 during the first two decades of the century. However, battle and caste disputes had destructive impacts on the handicraft industry as many artisans escaped from the port city. The FIC—and private merchants after the end of the monopoly of the company—shipped cotton textiles from Pondicherry to French ports such as Lorient and Nantes, and then guinées and other cotton textiles were further shipped into West Africa in exchange for slaves, ivory, gum arabic and other things.86 Hence, the eighteenth century witnessed the re-establishment of the economic connection between Pondicherry and West Africa by the French.

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Rebuilding Under the Initiative of the French Government from 1816 to 1829 After the British attacked and occupied Pondicherry in August 1793, EIC officials tried to persuade the weavers to move to Cuddalore to settle and produce textiles for the Company.87 When Pondicherry was returned to France in 1816, the port city was in a disastrous situation: buildings were ruined, roads were in a bad condition, there were defective irrigation, unsuccessful cultivation and a shortage of jobs. This created poverty among the inhabitants.88 In those days, the French government gave low priority to the development of colonies, especially that of French India, and even sacrificed them in pursuit of metropolitan interests.89 However, Pondicherry was rebuilt with the initiative of the French government and private entrepreneurs towards the late 1820s. One of the remarkable features in this process was the development of a textile industry that employed the latest model of European spinning machines. As a result, the output of textile production and exports took off from around 1830. In the rebuilding of Pondicherry, one of the primary concerns for the local administration was the creation of jobs for the inhabitants. Governor-General Eugéne Desbassayns de Richemont became the prime mover in the rebuilding project in the late 1820s. He restored order in the administration and the finances, built an improved bazaar, established royal colleges and schools (where French teachers educated children, from the upper classes to the pariahs, and these students wore, as uniform, a blue jacket with a yellow collar), made improvements in agriculture, granted concessions to European projects to cultivate sugar cane, indigo, cotton, mulberry and others, and promoted the modernisation of the weaving and dyeing industries. He set up public workshops to give people jobs under the direction of the Comité de Bienfaisance (the Committee of Charity), reorganised by the Ordonnances of 24 July 1826. By April 1827, the workshops already employed 150 workers.90 Desbassayns de Richemont called for French weavers and dyers to improve textile production in Pondicherry. As for the weavers, Thomas Godefroy in Rouen was nominated the chief of Pondicherry’s workshops in May 1827 by the Minister of the Navy and the Colonies. Michael Gonfreville who worked as a dyer and chemist in his father’s place around Rouen was nominated as the government dyer. He was a renowned skilled dyer and worked at the Royal Manufacture of Goblins

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and at the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts and won some prizes at expositions in 1819 and 1823. He was dispatched with his loom on a royal transport vessel, and arrived in Pondicherry in September 1827.91 One of his remarkable achievements in his mission up to 1830 was that he created a building for the weaving and dyeing of cotton and silk in Pondicherry.92 In the early nineteenth century, Bengal was renowned for the cultivation and production of indigo, one of India’s major export products, and the region accounted for about three-quarters of the indigo trade from India to Britain. This was partly due to a small transit duty and partly due to the Calcutta-based agency houses, or IndoBritish partnership firms.93 On the other hand, Pondicherry was excellent in dyeing textiles, especially in blue. According to the pharmacist Bernard Plagne, who studied indigo and the water of Pondicherry in the late 1810s, ‘the blue dyeing among others has assured textiles of Pondicherry of uncontested preference in the market of the four parts of the world’. He also discovered the proportion of aluminium that explained the superiority of blue dyeing in Pondicherry.94 In May 1824, there were 57 indigo factories in Bengal of British India, while there were 19 factories in Pondicherry.95 The difference was owing to the shortage of apprentices for indigo production in Pondicherry.96 The number of indigo factories in the French territory dropped to only one by September 1829.97 Desbassayns de Richemont devoted himself to a plan for industrial development in Pondicherry. After he created the public workshop in 1826, he encouraged private enterprises such as Blin and Delbruck. On 27 September 1827, he wrote to Minister of the Navy and the Colonies to request establishing a European-style spinning mill in Pondicherry with an engineer to set it up, although this was initially rejected on the ground that India had imported cotton spun in Britain in the previous years.98 In order to justify this demand, Desbassayns wrote to the Minister again on 3 February 1828. In this letter, he drew attention to the current situation in India and Britain: a massive inflow of British cotton textiles into India along with British merchants who also planned to establish European-style factories there. However, this idea still faced objections because it seemed that the guiding principle of the British cabinet on free trade gave way to their personal interests and that the government or the EIC never permitted similar establishments.99 Desbassayns wrote about Pondicherry’s advantages:

148  K. KOBAYASHI The position of Pondicherry is 60 leagues from Tinnevély from which the most esteemed cottons in this part of India are extracted, the safety of our harbour, the cheap price of labour and cattle necessary to move the machines, many weavers that have established here and that it would be easy to multiply, the goodness of our water for the dyeing, and finally the former reputation of our textiles.100

His request to the Minister of the Navy and the Colonies was endorsed by two French merchants, Blin and Delbruck. Blin was a merchant in Pondicherry, and Delbruck a son of a Bordeaux merchant. Their project was to establish a large cotton spinning mill in Pondicherry with support from the French government.101 In the summer of 1828, the Minister of the Navy and the Colonies and the local administration in Pondicherry gave them permission to purchase a spinning machine. Le Prince et Poulain, a manufacturer in Paris, was in charge of sending the spinning machine to Pondicherry. The machine was first sent from Paris to Bordeaux, from where it was shipped on the vessel L’Alexander to Pondicherry, which also carried Charlemagne Poulain.102 Pondicherry and the West African Market from 1829 to 1850 Le Prince et Poulain thought that Blin and Delbruck’s single spinning mill was less than adequate. Le Prince et Poulain wrote to the Minister of the Navy and the Colonies on 18 February 1829 asking for special concessions and guarantees which they intended to use to quickly manufacture another spinning machine. According to their estimate, the daily output of the new machine was 600–700 kilograms of cotton, which was five times as productive as the first mill. Apart from Le Prince et Poulain, the association members included Charlemagne Poulain, Edouard Duboy (a manufacturer in Pondicherry), Blin, Delbruck, DuchonDoris Junior (a merchant in Bordeaux and a brother-in-law of Blin and Belbruck) and A. Decrouy (a merchant in Paris and a friend of Prince and Poulain). They too wanted to set up a weaving machine and a dyeing factory later.103 The Minister agreed to their request.104 While L’Alexandre was en route to Pondicherry, a new spinning machine was loaded onto the vessel La Laure that set off also for Pondicherry on 27 June 1829. The second machine was equipped with a steam engine for cotton spinning. La Laure arrived in Pondicherry around 25 February 1830, L’Alexandre on 30 March 1830. At this time

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there was, however, no spinning mill, either with Blin and Delbruck or with Le Prince et Poulain.105 In the letter to Saint Hilaire on 16 March 1830, Blin and Delbruck announced that they had merged into one firm in March that year and handed over all their land, machinery, tools, materials, buildings and everything in their establishment in Champ du Mars, and that the two establishments were united under the name of ‘La Société Poulain, Duboy et Cie’.106 However, soon after Governor General De Mélay ratified this transfer by the Arrêté of 19 March 1830 the new firm faced difficulty in securing financial aid. This was later sorted out by a Scottish merchant from Madras, George Clark Arbuthnot. Thus, with European spinning machines they launched the production of cotton textiles in Pondicherry in 1831.107 The designation ‘Poulain et Duboy’ became prominent between 1830 and 1832.108 Image 4.1 is a sketch of the company’s establishment in Pondicherry in 1831. The establishment was divided into two: the larger

Image 4.1  The cotton spinning and weaving mill of Poulain and Duboy in 1831 (Source Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer [ANOM, Aix-en-Provence, France], Inde 494, Dossier 865: Inde Française, Manufactures de Pondichéry)

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one, whose main gate faced the route de Villenour, had the two-storey building with two tall chimneys and a large pond; the smaller one facing the route d’Ariancoupon had a two-story building, small French gardens and a small pond. Outside the wall of the property was a two-storey residence.109 Mireille Lobligeois gave more importance to Le Prince et Poulain, and not Blin and Delbruck, as the former brought about a ‘revolution’ in the production of cotton textiles in India because theirs was a steam machine. The machine that Blin and Delbruck ordered needed human or animal force to run.110 Indeed, after the new machine was introduced production and trade in cotton textiles expanded. The number of weavers in Pondicherry increased from 191 in 1832 to 623 at the end of 1835, and the monthly output from 1300 pieces to 5300 pieces.111 In terms of quantity of cotton threads manufactured during the first half of the 1830s, Poulain’s machines produced 2451 livres of thread per month in 1831, which increased to 6501 livres in 1832 and 10,988 livres in 1833. Further, they produced 13,000 livres in March 1834 and 14,000 livres at the end of that year, and 188,776 livres in the first half of 1835, namely 31,462 livres per month.112 Thereafter, textile production flourished in Pondicherry, and the machine-made threads produced by Poulain replaced handmade ones for various purposes, especially in the production of guinées.113 Trade in guinées from Pondicherry to France in 1846 was almost double the amount in 1839. In the 1830s and 1840s, guinées were the flagship textiles exported from Pondicherry and accounted for 80–90 per cent of the total export of cotton textiles from there. White cotton textiles and other types were also exported from Pondicherry, but their proportions were marginal in terms of the total exports of cotton textiles from the colonial port.114 As we have seen, Pondicherry was renowned for dyeing cotton textiles. This practice was found also in other parts of the Coromandel Coast at that time. However, the dyed products in Pondicherry were known for their peculiar brilliancy of colour. British traveller, James Holman, who visited Pondicherry in 1830, recorded in detail how cotton textiles were dyed: To dye twenty pieces, or one corge per day, requires the services of an overseer and twelve coolies; the dye is contained in large earthen pots, about three and a half or four feet in depth, which are sunk in the earth, bringing their mouths on a level with the surface. Sixty of these pots are required to finish a corge per day; and they are divided into sets of fifteen

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each, which come into use by regular rotation: thus, after using a set of pots for a day, fresh indigo is added to them, and they are allowed to acquire strength, until their turn comes round again. In each set of fifteen pots, there are three different strengths of dye; into the weakest of which, after being well washed, the cloth is dipped twice for a few seconds, drying it in the sun between each dipping: this gives it a good deep sky blue: it is then dipped two or three times, as may be found necessary, in the second strength, drying it as before, between each dipping, which should give the cloth a dark but dull blue: it is then dipped in the third strength, which finishes the dyeing process, by giving the cloth a deep reddish, or coppery blue: it is then dried, and afterwards washed in a solution procured from a seed called “nacheny,” possessing the quality of starch, which stiffens the cloth: it is then dressed, by being beaten upon a smooth block of wood, with two heavy wooden mallets, by two coolies, which fits it for the market. The dye is obtained from about equal quantities of indigo and chunam [plaster], added to water filtered through a mixture of quick-lime, and a description of sand, containing a quantity of soda, which is procured in this neighbourhood; in passing through which the water becomes of a reddish colour: —to this is also added, a solution obtained by boiling a seed, called by the natives, “taggery,” which is of a yellowish colour. Before adding the indigo, it is well ground down; the mixture is stirred frequently for the first twenty-four hours. It is then allowed to stand for two or three days, by which time it is fit for use; and, if of proper strength, the composition should, when stirred up, appear of a deep madeira colour.115

It was important to maintain business relations that were a major concern for the metropolitan government. As for the textile trade from France, the government had to manage to preserve the interests of both French and Pondicherry’s manufacturers without showing any favour towards foreign competitors such as Britain and Belgium.116 In this context the government levied a duty of 20 per cent upon the entry of guinées into France from India to protect the French cloth industry, and that pressure from the French producers of cotton textiles led the French government to place a ban on the inflow of Indian textiles into France in 1828.117 Therefore, guinées faced difficulty in finding a market within the Hexagon. Furthermore, as we have seen in Chapter 3, the French mercantilist policy (pacte colonial) banned commerce between colonies and allowed only French merchants to conduct trade between France and its colonies. Hence, guinées had to be sent from Pondicherry into France first and then shipped to other markets.

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The most important market for guinées, of Pondicherry in the nineteenth century, was Senegal in West Africa, where they were exchanged for gum arabic supplied by nomadic merchants in the lower Senegal River. As described in Chapter 2, gum fever was rising in Senegal around 1830, so it offered a timely market for Pondicherry’s guinées. In order to sell in Senegal, the details of guinées became a major issue in the Ordonnances du Roi that was issued on 18 May and 1 September 1843.118 In particular, the Ordonnance of 18 May—to be enforced from 1 October of the same year—defined that a piece of guinée had to weigh more than 2.3 kilograms and had to be more than 16.5 metres in length and one metre in width.119 However, this specification was not known to Pondicherry until 17 July, when some textiles had already been shipped. This shipment was to arrive in Senegal after 1 October, obviously not having met with the required conditions, and therefore was banned from entering Senegal.120 In response to this problem, Pondicherry entrepreneurs including Poulain and Blin sent a petition to the Minister of the Navy and the Colonies to postpone the enforcement of the Ordonnance that was to come into effect from 1 October 1844.121 On the other hand, Article 2 of the Ordonnance of 1 September stipulated that ‘each piece of guinée dispatched from the French establishments of India and destined to the commerce, will be covered, in the establishments, with a mark or stamp whose form will be determined by the local administration, and which indicates the weights and the dimensions of the fabric’.122 Article 4 of the Arrêté of 18 December 1843 also defined the mark that was in the form of cardboard (Image 4.2), which was ‘to be attached by a thread to one of the ends of a piece [of guinée]’.123 Image 3.1 shows valuable samples of marked guinées that have survived to this day. They were produced in Pondicherry, probably at some point between 1843 and August 1844. The following words are written on them: ‘ORDONNANCES ROYALES DES 18 MAI ET 1er SEPTEMBRE 1843’ (Royal ordonnances of 18 May and 1st September 1843) around the outer border of the mark, whose diameter is 56 millimetres, with ‘PONDICHERY’ on the upper centre, ‘GUINÉE’ on the left of centre, and ‘Poids 2k 30, Longr 16m 50, Largr 1[m] 00’ in the centre. However, these details did not necessarily work. In the end, the Ordonnances of 18 May and 1 September 1843 were revoked in the Décret of 17 January 1852. The general council session of 27 March 1852 even asserted that the application of the stamp was thoroughly useless.124

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Image 4.2  Cardboard attached to the guinées in Pondicherry (Source ANOM, Inde 494, Dossier 871: L’Arrêté signé par Gouverneur Du Camper, 18 December 1843, Pondicherry)

Conclusion This chapter has examined the procurement of cotton textiles in India by Europeans from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century. South India has been the main focus since the region was known for indigo-dyed cotton textiles that were in great demand in West Africa. Our focus has been divided between British and French enterprises in South India. Both studies clearly show that the economic linkage between West Africa and South Asia rested upon not only African consumer behaviour (see Chapter 3) but also the performance of Indian producers. Similar to African consumer demand, the performance of Indian producers also depended on a variety of local conditions. The adverse circumstances that negatively affected incentives for weavers posed a severe challenge to Europeans who had to procure cotton textiles; but favourable circumstances for quality guinées allowed Pondicherry to play a vital role in the south-south economic linkage during the nineteenth century.

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During this period, the EIC faced difficulties in procuring textiles in South India owing to financial problems that arose from a series of wars in India. The EIC documents have revealed that the demand for a variety of cotton textiles for Britain and foreign markets were rightly conveyed by them. Yet, there were uncertainties in their procurement. There were various reasons for these, such as natural disasters, the price of raw materials, weavers’ performances, Indian intermediaries’ behaviour, and competition with other European and private merchants. It was therefore crucial for the EIC to systematise the procurement process of cotton textiles in South India. Following the system that had already been introduced in Bengal and elsewhere, the Company carried out institutional changes. Under the aumany system, the EIC attempted to control the weavers directly, eliminating Indian intermediaries who had connected the two—the EIC and the weavers’ villages. However, this new system also did not bring about a change in textile production. It lacked sufficient incentives for the weavers to work for the Company; there were also reports that the quality of cotton textiles did not yet meet the EIC’s standard. Even worse, there were weavers who fled the Madras Presidency. In the early nineteenth century, the British abolition of the slave trade, the development of the cotton industry in Lancashire and the lobbying campaign by the emerging manufacturers who tried to discourage the EIC from importing Indian cotton textiles into Britain formed a deadly threat to the Company. These adverse situations forced EIC officials to reduce their investment in the production of cotton textiles in South India, though they still entertained a hope that blue goods could sell in the 1820s to some extent. French business in Pondicherry was different from the British one. Shortly after Pondicherry returned to France in the middle of the 1810s, rebuilding the establishment was the top priority for the local administration. In the early stage, Desbassayns devoted himself to institutional changes for industrial development, building public workshops to solve the problem of unemployment among Indians. Simultaneously, he encouraged private entrepreneurs such as Blin and Delbruck to invest in the textile industry in Pondicherry from the 1820s. Another period commenced in 1830 when Le Prince et Poulain introduced a steam machine to spin cotton into threads brought from France to Pondicherry. Consequently, the output of cotton textiles in the French colony increased. This chapter has emphasised that the growth of Pondicherry’s textile production was intertwined with a global conjuncture around 1830.

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While the metropolitan government protected the local textile industry via the tax levied on the import of guinées, French textiles could not compete with Indian guinées in Senegal, a region that emerged as the source of quality gum arabic at that time. Also, nomadic suppliers of gum arabic preferred the quality of authentic guinées. As such, in contrast to Britain, which would have the technological edge in the cotton industry during this period, France had not yet been successful in the production of textiles whose quality satisfied West African consumers. Such a technological gap created a path for Pondicherry’s textile industry to thrive towards the late nineteenth century.

Notes

1.  On the EIC and their textile procurement in India in general, see K. N. Chaudhuri, ‘The Structure of Indian Textile Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 11/2–3 (1974): 127–82. This article was reproduced in K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760 (Cambridge University Press, 1978), Chapter 11 (under the title ‘The Company and the Indian Textile Industry’) and in Tirthankar Roy, ed., Cloth and Commerce: Textiles in Colonial India (New Delhi: Sage, 1996), Chapter 2. On textile procurement in Bengal, see Hossain Hameeda, The Company Weavers in Bengal: The East India Company and the Organization of Textile Production in Bengal, 1750–1813 (Dhaka: University Press, 2010); Om Prakash, ‘From Market-Determined to Coercion-Based Textile Manufacturing in Eighteenth-Century Bengal’, in Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, eds., How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 217–51. On the case of western India, Lakshmi Subramanian, ‘Power and the Weave: Weavers, Merchants and Rulers in Eighteenth-Century Surat’, in Rudrangshu Mukherjee and Lakshmi Subramanian, eds., Politics and Trade in the Indian Ocean World: Essays in Honour of Ashin Das Gupta (Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 52–79. As for the case of South India, S. Arasaratnam, ‘Weavers, Merchants and Company: The Handloom Industry in Southeastern India, 1750–1790’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 17/3 (1980): 257–81; Joseph Brennig, ‘Textile Producers and Production in Late Seventeenth Century Coromandel’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 23/4 (1986): 333–55; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Rural Industry and Commercial Agriculture in Late Seventeenth-Century South-Eastern India’, Past and Present 126

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(1990): 76–126; Prasannan Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2001); Potkuchi Swarnalatha, The World of the Weaver in Northern Coromandel: c. 1750–c. 1850 (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2005); S. Jeyaseela Stephen, Oceanscapes: Tamil Textiles in the Early Modern World (Delhi: Primus Books, 2014), pp. 321–86. For the French East India Company, see Philippe Haudrère, La compagnie française des Indes au XVIIIe siècle (Second Edition, Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2005). For the Dutch East India Company, see Om Prakash, The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal, 1630–1720 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Om Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Glamann Kristof, Dutch-Asiatic Trade, 1620–1740 (Copenhagen: Danish Science Press, 1958); Els M. Jacobs, Merchant in Asia: The Trade of the Dutch East India Company During the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: CNWS Publications, 2006). 2.  For the procurement of Gujarati cotton textiles for East Africa, see Pedro Machado, Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 1750–1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2014). 3. Chaudhuri, The Trading World, p. 132; K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: The Study of an Early Joint-Stock Company 1600– 1640 (London: Frank Cass, 1965), pp. 147–50. 4.  H. V. Bowen, The Business of Empire: The East India Company and Imperial Britain, 1756–1833 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 238–9. 5.  Mireille Lobligeois, ‘Ateliers publics et filatures privées à Pondichéry après 1816’, Bulletin de l’ecole française d’extême-orient 59 (1972): 3–100; Jacques Weber, Les établissements français en Inde au XIXè siècle (1816–1914), 5 Vols. (Paris: Librairie de l’Inde, 1988); Jacques Weber, ‘French India (Nineteenth–Twentieth Century)’, in Claude Markovits, ed., A History of Modern India, 1480–1950 (London: Anthem, 2004), pp. 495–519. 6. Richard L. Roberts, ‘West Africa and the Pondicherry Textile Industry’, in Roy, ed., Cloth and Commerce, pp. 142–74. 7. Tirthankar Roy, India in the World Economy: From Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2012). 8. The word ‘Ghat’ means ‘gate’ in English. 9. Madras, Manual of the Administrations of the Madras Presidency, in Illustration of the Records of Government & the Yearly Administration Reports, Vol. 1 (Madras: Government Press, 1885), pp. 1–29. 10. Parthasarathi, Transition, pp. 62–4. 11. Parthasarathi, Transition, pp. 62–3. 12. Parthasarathi, Transition, pp. 50, 64–6.

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157

13. Parthasarathi, Transition, pp. 67–8. 14. Parthasarathi, Transition, p. 68; Brennig, ‘Textile Producers’, 335–6. 15. Subrahmanyam, ‘Rural Industry’, 87–9; Swarnalatha, The World of the Weavers, pp. 57–8. 16. Parthasarathi, Transition, pp. 67–71. 17. In addition to cotton imports by land from other areas of India into Cuddalore, cotton was also cultivated to the extent of 10,120 cawnies (54.15 square kilometres) in the district. There was no exportation of cotton from Cuddalore. East India Company, Reports and Documents Connected with the Proceedings in Regard to the Culture and Manufacture of Cotton-Wool, Raw Silk and Indigo in India (London, 1836), pp. 404–5. 18. Mattiebelle Gittinger, Master Dyers to the World: Technique and Trade in Early Indian Dyed Cotton Textiles (Washington, DC: The Textile Museum, 1982), pp. 19–21; Swarnalatha, The World of the Weaver, pp. 21–9. 19. John Irwin and P. R. Schwartz, Studies in Indo-European Textile History (Ahmedabad: Calico Museum of Textiles, 1966), pp. 39, 67, 70; Radhika Seshan, Trade and Politics on the Coromandel Coast: Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Delhi: Primus Books, 2012), p. 15; Stephen, Oceanscapes, pp. 615–6. 20. British Library (BL), India Office Records (IOR), E/4/888: Madras dispatch, 9 September 1801, p. 655. 21. BL, IOR, E/4/904: Madras dispatch, 16 January 1810, p. 478. 22. BL, IOR, E/4/895: Madras dispatch, 19 June 1805, pp. 75–6; BL, IOR, E/4/901: Madras dispatch, 6 March 1807, p. 747. On the significance of smell (of indigo), see Chapter 3. 23. Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise, pp. 316–7. 24. Parthasarathi, Transition, pp. 73–7. 25.  BL, IOR, E/4/863: Madras dispatch, 15 February 1765, p. 79; BL, IOR, E/4/997: a letter from London to Bombay, 22 March 1765, pp. 611–2; C. S. Sriktivasachari, ed., Fort William-India House Correspondence and Other Contemporary Papers Relating Thereto, Vol. 4: 1764–1766 (Delhi: Government of India, 1962), p. 92. 26.  Tamil Nadu State Archives (MRO, former Madras Record Office in Chennai, India), South Arcot 100/18464: a letter from Edward Holland, 28 May 1794, in a letter from J. William Junior to John Kentworthy, 19 January 1795, Fort St. George. 27. MRO, South Arcot 100/18464: a letter from Fallofield to Kentworthy, 1 May 1795, Fort St. George. 28. The annual dispatches from the Court of Directors in London to the Commercial Department at Fort St. George in Madras included comments and evaluations on the procured textiles in the Madras Presidency.

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29.  Advanced supply of raw materials was organised in eighteenth-­ century western India, but it was exceptional. Chaudhuri, The Trading World, pp. 253–62. For the putting out system, see Brennig, ‘Textile Producers’, 350–1. 30. Roberts, ‘West Africa’, p. 148. 31. For different views on the intermediaries in South India before 1800, see Vijaya Ramaswamy, ‘The Genesis and Historical Role of the Master Weavers in South India Textile Production’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 28/3 (1985): 294–325; Brennig, ‘Textile Producers’, 333–55. 32. Arasaratnam, ‘Weavers, Merchants and Company’, 264. 33. Swarnalatha, The World of the Weaver, p. 77. 34. BL, IOR, P/240/41: a report to Lord Pigot from George Stratten, export warehouse keeper, 22 July 1776, Fort St. George. There were a variety of brokers in the subcontinent, and the brokers to the European trading companies were one type of them. For more detailed discussions on the brokers, see Ashin Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, c. 1700–1750 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1979), pp. 84–5; A. Jan Qaisar, ‘The Role of Brokers in Medieval India’, Indian Historical Review 1/2 (1974): 220–46; M. N. Pearson, ‘Brokers in Western Indian Port Cities: Their Role in Serving Foreign Merchants’, Modern Asian Studies 22/3 (1988): 455–72; Arasaratnam, ‘Weavers, Merchants and Company’, 266–7. 35.  MRO, South Arcot 100/18464: a letter from Edward Holland to Resident in Cuddalore, 28 May 1794, Fort St. George. See also, BL, IOR, E/4/880: Madras dispatch, 28 May 1794, p. 745. 36. Arasaratnam, ‘Weavers, Merchants and Company’, 268. 37. In the eighteenth century, the Dutch ports such as Rotterdam played an alternative source of Indian cotton textiles for the English merchants who traded with Africa. BL, Add. Mss. 25,503: Minutes of the South Sea Company, 21 February 1729, p. 385. This was in part because the Dutch hardly imposed taxation on the VOC and their special arrangements for the re-exports of Asian goods. Chris Nierstrasz, ‘The Popularization of Tea: East India Companies, Private Traders, Smugglers and the Consumption of Tea in Western Europe, 1700– 1760’, in Maxine Berg, Felicia Gottmann, Hanna Hodacs, and Chris Nierstrasz, eds., Goods from the East, 1600–1800: Trading Eurasia (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 270. 38.  BL, IOR, E/1/54: a petition to Commissioner of His Majesty’s Treasury from Gilbert Ross, James Mill, William Crichton, John Shoollred, and Thomas Bell, 10 October 1770, London, pp. 250–2.

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159

As discussed in Chapter 3, the gum trade was linked to the trade in guinées produced by Indian weavers. 39.  BL, IOR, E/1/54: a petition to Commissioner of His Majesty’s Treasury from Gilbert Ross, James Mill, William Crichton, John Shoollred, and Thomas Bell, 10 October 1770, London, pp. 250–2. 40.  Frank Perlin, ‘The Problem of the Eighteenth Century’, in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Eighteenth Century in Indian History (Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 59. 41. Arasaratnam, ‘Weavers, Merchants and Company’, 263. 42. Stephen, Oceanscapes, p. 364. 43.  MRO, South Arcot 100/18464: a letter from John Kentworthy to Ernest William Fallofield, 13 March 1795, Cuddalore. Unfortunately, this source does not illustrate how the quality of textiles fell. 44. BL, IOR, Home/374: extract letter from London to Bombay, 4 May 1791, pp. 5–6. 45. Stephen, Oceanscapes, pp. 365–6. 46.  Arasaratnam, ‘Weavers, Merchants and Company’, 277; Anthony Webster, The Twilight of the East India Company: The Evolution of Anglo-Asian Commerce and Politics 1790–1860 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009), pp. 24–33; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014), p. 48. For the detailed discussion of the agency houses, see Anthony Webster, The Richest East India Merchant: The Life and Business of John Palmer of Calcutta 1767– 1836 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007); Geoffrey Jones, Merchants to Multinationals: British Trading Companies in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Oxford University Press, 2000), Chapter 2. 47.  Anthony Reid, ‘A New Phase of Commercial Expansion in Southeast Asia, 1760–1850’, in Anthony Reid, ed., The Last Strand of Asian Autonomies: Responses to Modernity in the Diverse States of Southeast Asia and Korea, 1750–1900 (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1997), pp. 57–81; Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise, pp. 286–97; Ryuto Shimada, The Intra-Asian Trade in Japanese Copper by the Dutch East India Company During the Eighteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2006). 48.  P. J. Marshall, East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); Webster, The Twilight, pp. 24–5; H. V. Bowen, ‘Sinews of Trade and Empire: The Supply of Commodity Exports to the East India Company During the Late Eighteenth Century’, Economic History Review 55/3 (2002): 467; H. V. Bowen, ‘Privilege and Profit: Commanders of East Indiamen as Private Traders, Entrepreneurs and Smugglers, 1760–1813’, International Journal of Maritime History 16/2 (2007): 43–88.

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49.  G. H. Hodgson, Thomas Parry: Free Merchant Madras 1768–1824 (Madras: Higginbothams, 1938); Stephanie Jones, Two Centuries of Overseas Trading: The Origins and Growth of the Inchcape Group (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press, 1986), pp. 9–10; Jones, Merchants to Multinationals, pp. 11–2; Tirthankar Roy, ‘Trading Firms in Colonial India’, Business History Review 88/S1 (2014): 31–2. 50.  BL, IOR, P/240/40: a letter from John Whitehill to Peter Baars of Jaggarnaikparam, 18 August 1775, Masulipatnam; Arasaratnam, ‘Weavers, Merchants and Company’, 271–4; S. Arasaratnam, ‘Trade and Political Dominion in South India, 1750–1790: Changing British– Indian Relationships’, Modern Asian Studies 13/1 (1979): 30. 51. British Parliamentary Papers, 1812, VII (397): The Fifth Report from the Select Committee on the Affairs of the East India Company, pp. 206–7; BL, IOR, E/4/889: Madras dispatch, 23 June 1802, p. 703; MRO, South Arcot 110/18474: a letter from Kinchant to Fallofield, 15 June 1802, Cuddalore. For the cases of Bengal and the Western India, see Prakash, ‘Textile Manufacturing’; Hameeda, The Company Weavers; Subramanian, ‘Power and the Weave’. 52. Swarnalatha, The World of the Weaver, p. 217. 53.  Peons were one of those who were employed to superintend the Company’s cloths. MRO, South Arcot 113/18477: a letter from C. Wynox to Commercial Resident at Caddalore, 4 January 1804, Fort St. George. 54. BL, IOR, E/4/889: Madras dispatch, 23 June 1802, pp. 705, 710–1. 55. BL, IOR, E/4/879: Madras dispatch, 25 June 1793, pp. 1009–14. 56.  MRO, South Arcot 110/18474: a letter from Richard Kinchant to Fallofield, 8 May 1802, Cuddalore. 57. MRO, South Arcot 110/18474: a letter from Kinchant to Fallofield, 15 June 1802, Cuddalore. 58. MRO, South Arcot 110/18474: a letter from Kinchant to Fallofield, 27 July 1802, Cuddalore; a letter from Kinchant to John Wallace (Collector of Tritchinopoly), 26 December 1802, Cuddalore. 59. BL, IOR, E/4/884: Madras dispatch, 2 March 1798, pp. 141–3. 60. MRO, South Arcot 100/18464: a letter from Edward Holland, 28 May 1794, in a letter from J. William Junior to John Kentworthy, 19 January 1795, Fort St. George. See also, BL, IOR, E/4/880: Madras dispatch, 28 May 1794, pp. 748–9. 61. BL, IOR, E/4/900: Madras dispatch, 10 June 1807, p. 211. 62.  MRO, South Arcot 113/18477: a letter from John Chameir to Kinchant, 23 October 1804, Fort St. George. 63. BL, IOR, E/4/879: Madras dispatch, 25 June 1793, p. 946.

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161

64.  Voyages Database. 2009. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (TSTD). http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed 23 March 2015). 65. Arasaratnam, ‘Weavers, Merchants and Company’, 278. 66.  A problem with incentives provided by the EIC has been discussed in more detail in Karolina Hutková, ‘Technology Transfers and Organization: The English East India Company and the Transfer of Piedmontese Silk Reeling Technology to Bengal, 1750s–1790s’, Enterprise & Society 18/4 (2017): 921–51. 67. MRO, South Arcot 110/18474: a letter from Kinchant to Wallace, 26 December 1802, Cuddalore. 68. Irwin and Schwartz, Indo-European Textile History, pp. 31–2. 69. Roberts, ‘West Africa’, p. 148. 70. Swarnalatha, The World of the Weaver, p. 77. 71. MRO, South Arcot 109/18473: a letter from Holland to the Commercial Resident at Cuddalore, 3 September 1802, Fort St. George; BL, IOR, E/4/889: Madras dispatch, 23 June 1802, pp. 765, 769–74. 72.  Of 16 assortments, three were long cloth Warriarpollam, three long cloth Chennamanaickpollam, six long cloth sheally and four long cloth sheally half pieces. In the same letter there was also a continuation of the examination of four assortments of Cuddalore goods: three were long cloth fine and one sallampores middling. 73.  MRO, South Arcot 109/18473: a letter from Edward Holland to the Commercial Resident at Cuddalore, 13 September 1802, Fort St. George. 74.  MRO, South Arcot 113/18477: a letter from C. Wynox to the Commercial Resident at Cuddalor, 28 March 1804, Fort St. George. 75. The National Archives (NAUK, Kew, United Kingdom), CUST 17/2729. The imports of Indian cotton textiles from Britain to West Africa were 281,000 pieces in 1805, 336,000 pieces in 1806 and 153,000 pieces in 1807. 76. NAUK, CUST 10/3. 77. BL, IOR, E/4/909: Madras dispatch, 3 June 1812, p. 187. 78. For Masulipatnam, see Swarnalatha, The World of the Weaver, p. 22. 79. NAUK, CUST 10/3-20. 80. Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 269–72. A recent empirical study also supported this point. Stephen Broadberry and Bisynupriya Gupta, ‘Lancashire, India, and Shifting Competitive Advantages in Cotton Textiles, 1700–1850: The Neglected Role of Factor Prices’, Economic History Review 62/2 (2009): 279–305. 81. BL, IOR, E/4/936: Madras dispatch, 29 October 1828, p. 228. 82. BL, IOR, E/4/936: Madras dispatch, 29 October 1828, p. 233.

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83. See Chapter  2. 84.  Narayani Gupta, ‘Pondichéry in the Nineteenth Century: A Port Without a Hinterland’, in Indu Banga, ed., Ports and Their Hinterlands in India (1700–1950) (New Delhi: Manohar, 1992), pp. 89–101; M. Manickam, ‘Trade and Commerce in Pondicherry (A.D. 1701–1793)’ (PhD Thesis, Pondicherry University, 1995), pp. 4–5. 85. Manickam, ‘Trade and Commerce’, pp. 10–41, 51–55; Parthasarathi, The Transition, pp. 53–61. 86. H. Dodwell, ed., The Private Diary of Ananda Ranga Pillai, Vol. 12 (Jan. 1760–Jan. 1761) (New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 2005), pp. 2–3, 7–9; Felicia Gottmann, Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of Economic Liberalism: Asian Textiles in France 1680–1760 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Philippe Haudrère, La campagne française des Indes au XVIIIe siècle (1719–1795), 4 Vols. (Paris: Librairie de l’Inde éditeur, 1989); Stephen, Oceanscapes, pp. 387–424. 87. Stephen, Oceanscapes, p. 365. 88. Lobligeois, ‘Ateliers publics’, 4. 89. Weber, ‘French India’. 90.  Lobligeois, ‘Ateliers publics’, 5, 11; Weber, ‘French India’, p. 500; James Holman, A Voyage Round the World Including Travels in Africa, Asia, Australasia, America, etc., etc., Vol. 3 (London, 1835), pp. 368–9. 91. Lobligeois, ‘Ateliers publics’, 5, 12, 33. 92. His request to set up the building was accepted by Article 1 of the Arrêté of 1 March 1828. Lobligeois, ‘Ateliers publics’, 14. 93. Tirthankar Roy, ‘Indigo and Law in Colonial India’, Economic History Review 64/S1 (2011): 61–2. 94. Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer [ANOM, Aix-en-Provence, France], Inde 537, Dossier 1034: Procés-verbal de la séance du conseil de gouvernement et d’administration qui a en lieu à l’hôtel du gouvernement, 26 August 1825, Pondicherry. My translation. 95. ANOM, Inde 537, Dossier 1034: le Gouverneur Civil, M. Du Puy, au Ministre Secrétaire d’Etat de la Marine et des Colonies, 9 March 1824, Pondicherry. 96. ANOM, Inde 537, Dossier 1034: le Gouverneur Civil, M. Du Puy, au Ministre Secrétaire d’Etat de la Marine et des Colonies, 10 April 1824, Pondicherry. 97. Lobligeois, ‘Ateliers publics’, 85. 98.  ANOM, Inde 534, Dossier 1002: l’Administrateur Général des Établissements français de l’Inde, Desbassayns, au Ministre Secrétaire d’Etat de la Marine et des Colonies, 27 September 1827, Pondicherry. 99.  ANOM, Inde 534, Dossier 1002: l’Administrateur Général des Établissements français de l’Inde au Ministre Secrétaire d’Etat de

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la Marine et des Colonies, 3 February 1828, Pondicherry; Lobligeois, ‘Ateliers publics’, 47. 100. Cited in Lobligeois, ‘Ateliers publics’, 47. My translation. 101. ANOM, Inde 534, Dossier 1000: Rapport au Ministre Secrétaire d’Etat de la Marine et des Colonies, 15 July 1828, Paris; Lobligeois, ‘Ateliers publics’, 48–9. 102. Lobligeois, ‘Ateliers publics’, 49–51. 103.  ANOM, Inde 534, Dossier 1000: Le Prince et Poulain au Ministre Secrétaire d’Etat de la Marine et des Colonies, 18 February 1829, Paris. 104. Lobligeois, ‘Ateliers publics’, 52–3; Roberts, ‘West Africa’, p. 152. 105. Lobligeois, ‘Ateliers publics’, 56–8. 106. The new firm was known as ‘Savana’ in the late nineteenth century. It is one of the origins of today’s Swadeshee and Barathee Textile Mills Ltd in Pondicherry. ANOM, Inde 534, Dossier 1000: Blin et Delbruck à l’Ordonnateur et Directeur de l’Intérieur à Pondichéry, St. Hilaire, 16 March 1830, Pondicherry. See also the website of the Swadeshee and Baratee Textile Mills Ltd. http://www.sbtml.com/ (accessed 1 February 2018). Little is known about Arbuthnot. As far as we know, Arbuthnot came to India as a captain in the EIC and came to conduct business on his own account as an early private British entrepreneur working in India in the early nineteenth century. He also became a partner of the Scottish merchant F. M. Gillanders, and had interests in the business of sugar, cotton and Assam tea. S. G. Checkland, The Gladstones: A Family Biography 1764–1851 (Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 318; Jones, Two Centuries of Overseas Trading, pp. 11, 29. 107. Lobligeois, ‘Ateliers publics’, 59–65; Roberts, ‘West Africa’, p. 153. 108. Lobligeois, ‘Ateliers publics’, 64. 109. Lobligeois, ‘Ateliers publics’, 64–5. 110. Lobligeois, ‘Ateliers publics’, 82. 111. France. Ministère de la marine et des colonies, Notices statistiques sur les colonies françaises, Vol. 3 (Paris: Imprimerie Royales, 1839), p. 102. 112. Weber, Les établissements français, Vol. 1, p. 406. 113. Lobligeois, ‘Ateliers publics’, 82, 85–6. 114. Jacques Weber, ‘Le port et le commerce maritime de Pondichéry au XIXe siècle’, Revue historique de Pondichéry 19 (1996): 73; J.-P. Duchon Doris, Commerce des toiles bleues dites guinées (Paris, 1842), p. 29. 115. Holman, A Voyage, Vol. 3, pp. 372–3. 116. Lobligeois, ‘Ateliers publics’, 86. 117. Gupta, ‘Pondichéry’, pp. 95–6; Weber, ‘French India’, p. 500. 118. No. 66, Ordonnance du Roi, 18 May 1843 and No. 88, Ordinnance du Roi, 1 September 1843, in Sénégal, Bulletin Administratif des Actes du Gouvernement (Paris, 1846), pp. 87–8, 125–6.

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119. Ordonnance du Roi, 18 May 1843, pp. 87–8. 120. Lobligeois, ‘Ateliers publics’, 88. 121. ANOM, Inde 494, Dossier 871: Amalric et al. au Ministre de la Marine et des Colonies, 7 August 1843, Pondicherry. 122. Ordinnance du Roi, 1 September 1843, pp. 125–6. 123. ANOM, Inde 494, Dossier 871: L’Arrêté signé par l’Gouverneur Du Camper, 18 December 1843, Pondicherry. My translation. 124. Lobligeois, ‘Ateliers publics’, 89–90.

CHAPTER 5

Western European Merchants and West Africa, 1750–1850: Continuity and Change

This chapter primarily concentrates on Western European merchants who connected South Asia and West Africa with the Indian textile trade from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century. In the south-south economic history discussed in this book, European merchants played a vital role as an intermediary during this period, which witnessed dramatic changes in the political and economic landscapes in all corners of the world. Western Europe was the setting of the French Revolution that gave rise to the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and that of the British Industrial Revolution. The slave insurrection at the French colony of Saint Domingue in the Caribbean ultimately led to the independence of Haiti in 1804. Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery in 1833, while they launched a naval campaign to suppress other countries’ slave trade. Meanwhile, as seen in Chapter 2, the age of revolutions in Europe and the Americas was simultaneously the age of jihad in West Africa. Each political upheaval and economic development had its own inter-regional or global repercussions. Also, trade, whether intra-regional or long-distance, was more or less subject to international relations. So, how did the age of revolutions affect the businesses of merchants, especially of those who shipped cotton textiles from South Asia to the Atlantic coast of West Africa? This chapter mainly addresses this question. In particular, it examines the continuity and change in the British and French businesses with West Africa. © The Author(s) 2019 K. Kobayashi, Indian Cotton Textiles in West Africa, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18675-3_5

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The business networks through which Indian cotton textiles flowed from India to West Africa via Western Europe have yet to be fully explored. As far as British involvement is concerned, there is a historiographical gap owing to a problem of source availability: at present, unfortunately no sales record of the English East India Company (EIC) exists, which means it is impossible to know from EIC records who were the buyers of Indian textiles from them for West African trade at that time. In order to shed fresh light on this, in the present chapter I use, as an alternative, the valuable accounts of Thomas Lumley, a London merchant who dealt with Indian cotton textiles, available at the National Archives in the United Kingdom, and the TSTD which includes information about the trade routes of each voyage. These sources and data enable us to illustrate some patterns of trade of Indian cotton textiles imported by the EIC through the hands of British merchants into West African markets, albeit for a limited period.1 The following section starts with Britain’s West African trade in Indian textiles during the transition from slave trade to ‘legitimate’ commerce. The records of Thomas Lumley show the detailed trade network of Indian textiles from India to West Africa via Britain. The later part of the section discusses the continuity and changes in British trade with West Africa. Finally, French trade with Asia and West Africa, with special reference to the guinée trade, is examined.

British Merchants and West Africa During the age of revolutions, a series of political and economic changes affected British merchants. Figure 5.1 shows the shipping of Indian cotton textiles from Britain to West Africa, which closely corresponds with the British slave trade until its abolition in 1807. It is worthy of remark that the American Revolution (1775–1783) disrupted not only the British slave trade from Africa to the Americas but also their textile trade from Britain to Africa. In 1775, British vessels shipped over 200,000 pieces of Indian cotton textiles from Britain to Africa, but the scale halved in the following year, and they carried 36,500 to 80,000 pieces from 1777 to 1782, annually. The abolition of the British slave trade in 1807 also impacted on their trade in Indian manufactured goods. The volume of shipping plunged by 80 per cent from 1807 to 1811. Although the demand for Indian textiles in West Africa still remained for carrying on the palm oil trade (Chapter 2),

167

600,000

60,000

500,000

50,000

400,000

40,000

300,000

30,000

200,000

20,000

100,000

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Slaves

(Unit) Pieces

5  WESTERN EUROPEAN MERCHANTS AND WEST AFRICA, 1750–1850 … 

1772 1775 1778 1781 1784 1787 1790 1793 1796 1799 1802 1805 1808 1811 1815 1818 1821 1824 1827 1830 1833 1836 1839 1842 1845 1848

0

Indian cotton textiles

Slaves

Fig. 5.1  British shipping of Indian textiles to West Africa and the British slave trade, 1772–1849 (Sources Indian cotton textiles: NAUK, CUST 10/3–41; CUST 17/1–29. Slaves: Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database [TSTD]. www.slavevoyages.org. Accessed 23 March 2015)

the British shipping of Indian textiles never came back to the pre-abolition levels. This stagnation during the post-abolition period was largely due to the development of the Lancashire cotton industry and the lobbying efforts by British manufacturers against the EIC’s import of Indian goods (Chapter 4). The question here is whether or not the abolition of the slave trade changed the business of British merchants who were engaged in the West African trade. During the age of revolutions, within the British Asian trade, the major players shifted from the EIC and their associated private merchants to private companies. As for the Anglo-West African trade, the EIC had long been a major supplier of Indian cotton textiles for the British merchants who invested in the Atlantic slave trade until it became illegal in 1807. Thereafter, the EIC continued to supply textiles for those who engaged in ‘legitimate’ commerce, but their role became even less important because of the Charter Act of 1813 that abrogated the monopoly of the EIC in the trade with India and thereby opened a window of business opportunities for new participants, notably John Palmer and Company.2 Meanwhile, in the British African trade, private merchants, mostly based in London, Bristol and Liverpool, had long enjoyed

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the dominant position, since the British Parliament had already repealed the monopoly of the Royal African Company to trade with Africa by the end of the seventeenth century.3 We shall now turn to British business networks that shipped Indian textiles into West Africa via Britain. When the British engaged in the slave trade, the EIC held auctions in London, and among the articles for sale were cotton textiles of various types for West African markets. Wholesalers and merchants who had a role in the slave trade were among the major purchasers.4 Thomas Lumley was one of the major merchants around the turn of the nineteenth century. There seems to be little surviving evidence regarding Lumley’s family background. However, the London Directory records Lumley as a warehouseman based in Guitter Lane in the City of London.5 As will be discussed in detail below, he regularly bought Indian cotton textiles from the EIC,6 and sold them to merchants in London, Liverpool and other places. His journal entries for the period 10 February 1801 to 1 October 1810 record this. Many such merchants were engaged in the slave trade, and Lumley too invested in this trade on eight occasions from 1803 to 1808.7 His business networks extended from Liverpool and Glasgow in Britain to Lisbon, Bologna and Livorno in continental Europe, and to Kingston and New York in the Americas. These networks were maintained even after Britain ceased to participate in the slave trade in 1807.8 Lumley’s journal also includes the dates of transactions, the names of the merchants to whom he sold Indian goods, the amounts and values of the Indian textiles that were being sold, the types of textiles, and the methods of payment. Above all, it gives the names of the vessels that carried the textiles from Liverpool to West and West-Central Africa.9 As I have done elsewhere, by combining this information with the data from the transatlantic slave trade database (TSTD), it is possible to build an accurate picture of the commercial networks that led from India via Britain to Atlantic Africa.10 The journal records the 130 Indian textile transactions in which Lumley participated in 1801. In 35 cases, his partners were Liverpool merchants who were also members of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, founded in 1750 as the successor of the Royal African Company. They included John, James and William Aspinall, John Bolton, P. W. Brancker, George Case, Thomas Hinde and Jonathan Ratcliff.11 They purchased Indian textiles as exchange goods for the slave trade. It is interesting to note that the amounts purchased for this

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reason were much greater than other transactions, since in most cases the sums paid exceeded £1500 while other transactions fetched less than £300. For example, on 18 April 1801, George Case paid as much as £2600 when purchasing Indian textiles for the Active.12 Lumley’s correspondence records also provide evidence that Liverpool merchants were ordering Indian textiles of various types as exchange goods for the slave trade.13 The Lumley papers corroborate the statistical evidence provided in Fig. 1.1 on the importance of Indian cotton textiles in Britain’s African trade along with his own significance in the Liverpool slave trade. The data from the TSTD gives an African dimension to the available information in Lumley’s documents by giving details of the destinations of Indian textiles that Lumley sold to Liverpool merchants. For example, in 1801, 21 vessels carrying Indian cotton textiles purchased from Lumley left Liverpool for Africa. Of these, seven vessels sailed to Bonny in the Bight of Biafra, which was the hub of Britain’s Atlantic slave trade from the middle of the eighteenth century. During that year, the TSTD records a total of 25 vessels as leaving Liverpool for Bonny. This means that Lumley supplied almost 30 per cent of the Indian textiles that made this journey in 1801.14 Similar patterns were followed in 1802 and 1803. In 1802, out of 22 voyages that left Liverpool for Bonny, six voyages shipped Indian textiles supplied by Lumley; in 1803, out of eight voyages, two were linked to Lumley. The sharp reduction in the number of vessels bound for Bonny in 1803 was probably due to the growing unpopularity of the slave trade as pressure for abolition increased. Indeed, the total number of slave ships that left Liverpool for Africa also decreased, from 128 in 1802 to 86 in 1803.15 In supplying other merchants with Indian cotton textiles purchased from the EIC, Lumley was acting as a wholesaler, but he also invested in the slave trade himself. It is not clear how this direct involvement came about, but the existing records identify an 1803 trip from London to West Africa by the Bedford as the first voyage in which he invested.16 During all the voyages in which he was an investor, Lumley remained in London as a co-owner of the ship and entrusted his cargo to the captain. This pattern of trading behaviour was commonly found so as to reduce individual risks among European merchants of the time. For the European merchants, the long-distance trade, such as that with West Africa, required larger amounts of capital for large-sized ships, cargoes, insurance and wages to the crew, and involved higher risks than any intra-European trade. The risks included disruption caused by piracy,

170  K. KOBAYASHI

shipwreck, natural hazards and seizure by ships of other countries. This method persisted even after the abolition of the slave trade. It was also common that partnerships were formed for a single voyage only and dissolved on its completion, and thereby it required new partnerships to be formed for another voyage.17 Martin Lynn noted this system as ‘immensely flexible, allowing firms to respond quickly to opportunities as they arose, but provided little stability over a longer period’.18 Among the Lumley papers, those concerning the third voyage of the Bedford, which took place in 1806, give the best insights into Lumley’s involvement with the slave trade, because they range from an invoice giving an account of a transaction for the purchase of slaves in West Africa, to records of the selling of slaves in Jamaica. The muster roll for the voyage reveals that the ship had a crew of about 30 men, whose ages varied from the mid-teens to the late thirties. They were from England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Sweden, Italy, the United States and Africa. As well as the captain, officers and ordinary seamen, there were a surgeon, a gunner, a carpenter, a cooper, a cook and some boys. Wages were paid monthly and varied according to qualifications. Partial advances could be made before a voyage began.19 The invoice, which was issued in London on 1 July 1806, records that the purpose of the voyage was to purchase slaves and African goods on the Windward and Gold Coasts. Lumley consigned the shipping of the cargo to the Bedford’s captain, Gilbert Wenman, an Irishman. The total value of the goods loaded at London including charges and insurance amounted to £7500. They were packed separately, in puncheons, bales or cases. Most were items to be exchanged for slaves and African products, but there were also bags of rice and beans for feeding the slaves. The invoice shows that textiles, especially those from South Asia, accounted for 70 per cent of the total number of items. In particular, there were 200 pieces of nicanees, chintz and Guinea stuff, and as many as 1,900 pieces of romals.20 The Bedford left London on 7 July 1806. By 4 December Wenman was at Cape Coast Castle. On that day he exchanged most of the textiles, including 229 out of a total number of 246 pieces of bejutapaux, 200 out of a total number of 230 pieces of nicanees, 96 out of a total of 100 pieces of chellows, 1747 out of 1896 pieces of romals, and 239 out of 300 pieces of Guinea stuff. In return, he received a total of 244 slaves. More textiles, and most of the other articles, were exchanged for goods including ivory and water at other places. In addition, some lead bars

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and pans were exchanged for gold. TSTD notes that 259 African slaves were embarked on the Bedford. If this figure is correct, slaves must have been among the additional goods obtained after the ship left Cape Coast Castle.21 After Wenman had bought slaves, ivory and other goods in West Africa, the Bedford set sail for Jamaica. While the vessel was crossing the Atlantic the slaves made an attempt at resistance. When the ship arrived in Kingston on 30 April 1807, the number of slaves had fallen to 233, 167 males and 66 females. They were all sold by auction during the period from 7 May to 8 August of that year. Men and women fetched different prices. During the first month of the auctions, slaves were often sold for £110 or so per head. The gross sales price was £24,300, but since auction-related expenses including charges were subtracted from this amount Lumley’s total earnings were £20,200. Meanwhile, Wenman purchased coffee, logwood and indigo. The Bedford started homewards on 4 October 1807, arriving at London on 6 January 1808.22 Thus, the third voyage of the Bedford demonstrates the importance of Indian cottons in the purchase of slaves in West Africa. Although the evidence for this finding is based on only one case study of a transaction that took place on the Gold Coast at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it must be remembered that, as we have seen in Fig. 1.1, this finding confirmed the fact that Indian textiles were important articles even in the final phase of the British involvement in the slave trade. It is appropriate to ask, therefore: how did British withdrawal from the slave trade impact on the economic life of the British slave traders? This question needs to be situated in the wider context of British overseas trade. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, British merchants faced problems in carrying out their overseas trade due to difficult economic and political relationships with Europe and the United States. The Continental System, represented by the Berlin and Milan Decrees, restricted British trade with Continental Europe and later with Northern Europe and the Baltic regions. This commercial blockade led to the exclusion of British colonial goods from the European markets, and consequently Anglo-Caribbean trade declined. During this period, the United States carried out trade in Europe, including France, under the neutral flag. However, Britain intended to prevent such trade by Orders of Council of 1807 and 1808. These policies by Britain provoked the United States to retaliate. As a consequence, British trade with the United States was disrupted. The ending of the slave trade took place in

172  K. KOBAYASHI

such a situation, and it was difficult for the vessels of the slave trade to find alternative employment.23 Therefore, it was not surprising that, in the short run, many merchants faced bankruptcy or a huge loss of profits from the slave trade soon after the formal abolition. Under such circumstances, Thomas Lumley sent a petition on behalf of London merchants to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Spencer Perceval, to seek compensation from the government for this loss.24 John Aspinall, a leading Liverpool merchant, had also been out of business for four or five years after the abolition, but later became an important palm oil trader.25 Thus, the Anglo-West African trade switched from the slave trade to ‘legitimate’ commerce in agricultural products in the early nineteenth century. However, there was continuity in this transition. First, Lloyd’s Register of Shipping for the years 1808 to 1811 reveals that ‘the great majority of slave trade vessels found fresh employment, and found it relatively speedy, after abolition’.26 Indeed, around half of the slave vessels that appeared on Lloyd’s Register found new owners in the years after abolition. Following the emerging markets of the Caribbean and Latin America, West Africa offered an opportunity for these redeployed vessels to develop ‘legitimate’ commerce.27 Second, merchants from London, Bristol and Liverpool remained the leading players in the palm oil trade, and chief destination among them was Liverpool for imports from sub-Saharan Africa.28 Liverpool merchants who once invested in the slave trade became leading palm oil traders in the early nineteenth century, because they had the skill and knowledge of the West African trade through their past business contacts. In particular, their knowledge of the Niger Delta, which was a prominent region for British slave trade from the middle of the eighteenth century, was useful as the region became a major palm oil producing centre in West Africa before other regions began to expand. In the early nineteenth century, especially in the 1830s and 1840s, a handful of large firms in Liverpool, such as the Tobin and Horsfall families, played a leading role in the Anglo-West African trade. They undertook several voyages to West Africa with large ships for large amounts of palm oil each year.29 The Tobin family, in the time of Patrick Tobin (1735– 1794) in the Isle of Man, became established by the profits from slave trade and estates in the Caribbean Islands, and in 1798 his eldest son, John Tobin (1763–1851), married Sarah Aspinall, a daughter of James Aspinall of Old Dock. The marriage marked a turning point for the

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business of the Tobins, because the Aspinall family was rich and prominent in Liverpool’s slave trade, especially in the Niger Delta and Angola. Their financial support was crucial in operating their business, while their connection with the Caribbean Islands supplied Tobin with sugar and rum for the African trade.30 In the 1790s Tobin sailed to Africa for slave purchases several times for major Liverpool merchants, such as George Case, the Aspinalls and Gregsons. His major destinations were Loango and Anomabu on the Gold Coast.31 From his marriage in 1798 to the first decade of the nineteenth century, Tobin co-owned the ships, most of them with William Aspinall, for the slave trade, and the principal destination was Bonny in the Niger Delta.32 His connections with the Caribbean Islands and the Aspinall family put him in a leading position in the palm oil trade. According to the 1835 Customs Bills of Entry, he imported 6054 casks of palm oil that accounted for the largest quantity (19.5 per cent) among all the British palm oil merchants of the year.33 During the first two decades after abolition, John Tobin came to be involved in the local politics of Liverpool as he was elected Mayor in October 1819, but he continued with the palm oil trade with the Niger Delta, especially with Old Calabar. In Old Calabar, Tobin bought palm oil from Duke Ephraim (died in 1834), who monopolised the region’s overseas trade and imported mainly cheap Cheshire salt, Indian cotton textiles and rum from the Caribbean Islands. These items were supplied through his wide trade networks. He built up a friendship with the Duke through trade and visits, and Old Calabar became his major source of palm oil.34 In the meantime, his young brother, Thomas Tobin (1775–1863), engaged in the oil trade with Bonny. This port in the Niger Delta grew and replaced Old Calabar as the leading port of the oil trade in the 1830s and 1840s. Besides, Thomas Tobin also sent ships to the coasts around the Congo River for ivory, gums and copper ore under the name of ‘Thomas Tobin and Son’. He also formed a partnership with Charles Horsfall, another major Liverpool oil trader of that time, and operated the oil trade under the name of ‘Horsfall and Tobin’, which probably dissolved when Charles Horsfall left the business in the 1830s.35 Overall, Britain’s—mostly, Liverpool’s—West African trade continued to be a family dominated business in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As for shipping Indian cotton textiles, there appeared to be a small change in networks that carried the goods from India via

174  K. KOBAYASHI

Britain to West Africa. Until the first decade of the nineteenth century, the EIC had a monopoly of trade with India, and therefore wholesale merchants in London, such as Thomas Lumley, played a role in supplying the goods to merchants, including major slave traders in Liverpool. Notwithstanding some difficult years after abolition, these merchants continued to carry out their business with West Africa and elsewhere. However, after the Charter Act of 1813 ended the EIC’s monopoly of the trade with India, individual merchants were allowed to participate in the Indian trade by which they could get access to cotton textiles produced in South Asia.

French Merchants and West Africa The French East India Company (FIC) established in 1664 monopolised the import of cotton textiles from South Asia into France. In the 1730s, the Brittany port of Lorient became the new major base of the FIC. Thereafter, it not only thrived in shipbuilding, trade and sales but also played a prominent role in the distribution of Asian goods through auctions held by the company. This pattern lasted even after the end of the FIC’s monopoly (in 1769) marking the beginning of free trade between France and Asia. This continuity was based on two facts: one, the ships had to come back to Lorient; two, the ship owners had to employ at least two officers of the Company Navy. Until 1769, the majority of the merchants, about 45 to 66 per cent, present at the auctions were those from Nantes. Many of these merchants played an important role as middlemen for other merchants in Nantes and elsewhere. Quality textiles were exchanged also for slaves, gum and other things in West Africa, while some were to clothe African captives.36 From 1701 to 1790, Nantes played a leading role in the Atlantic slave trade accounting for 44 per cent of French voyages (1346 out of 3066).37 Merchants from Nantes also engaged in the sugar trade with the French colonies in the Caribbean, becoming the second largest French port, next to Bordeaux, for sugar in the 1780s.38 Bordeaux, which had prospered through the wine trade from mediaeval times, became an important entrepôt for colonial products, such as sugar, coffee, cotton and indigo from the Caribbean, in the eighteenth century. The proportion of the Caribbean in the imports of tropical products into Bordeaux considerably increased from 32 per cent in 1723–1724 to 77 per cent in 1775–1776, and exports grew from 6 to

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62 per cent during the same period. This Atlantic port accounted for almost half of the total value of French re-exports from 1786 to 1789. On the other hand, Bordeaux was blessed with navigable water channels, such as the Garonne River and canals, that brought commodities produced in the hinterland to the port city. The regional products included flour, wine and textiles, and major markets for these were the French Antilles. On the eve of the French Revolution in 1788, one out of three vessels that carried such commodities produced by slave labour in the Americas sailed to Bordeaux.39 Before the Revolution, the expansion of the Bordelaise trade was mostly owing to the work of Protestant armateurs, such as Jean Pellet, German merchants such as Friedrich Romberg and Johann Jacob von Bethmann, and Sephardim such as the Grandis family.40 The size of the population of the city rapidly increased from 60,000 in 1747–1750 to 111,000 in 1790.41 The Atlantic port city maintained close links with the merchant bankers from Germany and Switzerland, whose significant presence was felt in capital-intensive enterprises such as the slave trade and plantation management in the Caribbean.42 Thus, family networks, geographical conditions and the Atlantic trade contributed to social and economic integration between the port city of Bordeaux and its hinterland. As a whole, the French Revolution and the subsequent wars up until the Congress of Vienna (1815) made a considerable impact on French society and its economy. A series of reforms made during the Revolution provided legal and economic infrastructure for the development of French business in the nineteenth century. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, that defined ‘free and equal in rights’ for all men, ended aristocratic privileges; the Allard Law in February 1791 that destroyed the guild system opened the door for all men to enter all occupations; and the abolition of privileges of royal manufactures and that of Marseille’s privilege in the Levant trade heralded free enterprise for French citizens, albeit not for foreigners. The reforms during this period also included a new tax system that removed an unfair regressive nature of the old system, the creation of a national market, the metric system, free use of private property and a unified law code that formed the basis of courts.43 Also, the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars interrupted French overseas trade. In addition, the insurrection by slaves in the French colony of Saint Domingue in August 1791 ultimately led to the

176  K. KOBAYASHI

independence of Haiti in 1804. During this period, the sugar production in the French colonies also declined from 102,891 tonnes in 1791 to an average of 39,279 tonnes between 1815 and 1819. France abolished the international slave trade in 1814 and the slave trade within the French territories in 1818.44 As for Bordeaux, M. L. Bachelier noted that the warfare with Britain ‘completely stopped’ its maritime trade, and indeed no vessels entered or left the port between November 1793 and September 1794.45 However, Paul Butel and Silvia Marzagalli show that American vessels under the neutral flag allowed France to continue to import Caribbean sugar and Indian textiles. Moreover, from the 1790s a number of merchant families migrated from Bordeaux to the east coast of the United States and acquired American citizenship, which enabled them to engage in trade as Americans.46 The end of the Napoleonic Wars generated a new boom for French trade. While it is difficult to come by complete statistical data for certain periods after 1815, one estimate suggests that the number of ships that departed from Bordeaux for the Indian Ocean doubled from 1816 to 1830. The method of financing shipments was still traditional, especially the bottomry bonds.47 This period witnessed the participation of a new generation of merchants. Their trading activities were in continuity with the preceding centuries. This situation lasted until the transport revolution, such as railways and steam ships, and the development of financial institutions such as large joint-stock investments and deposit banks, from around the middle of the nineteenth century. Continuity was also found in a pyramidal hierarchy of merchants that consisted of petty retailers (commerçants) at the bottom, wholesale merchants (négociants) at the middle, and grands négociants at the top of the structure. The last group, including the Rothschild and the Mallet families, organised and financed interregional and international trade in high-value commodities. During this period, French merchants continued to act as generalists in a range of fields from ‘commodities trading and merchant banking with currency speculation, government finance, industrial investment, and whatever else promised a profit’.48 As for the Franco-West African trade, the major players shifted from Nantes to Bordeaux and Marseille.49 The port on the Loire River continued to seek profits from sugar and slave trade with the French West Indies until the abolition of slavery in 1848. In the meantime, Nantes also showed interest in sugar plantations in Réunion (Bourbon) and became a major importer of sugar from this Indian Ocean island, thus

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developing trade with this new region while carrying on with the French Antilles.50 The first half of the nineteenth century saw a new generation of Bordeaux merchant families seize the commercial opportunity that emerged from the end of the monopoly granted to the Compagnie du Sénégal. Under the Bourbon Restoration, they sought an alternative commerce to the slave trade that became illegal in France in 1818. The Devès was one of the pioneering families from Bordeaux in nineteenth-century French trade with Senegal. After their bankruptcy in 1807, Justin Devès and his brother, Bruno, left Bordeaux for Philadelphia on an American ship. They came to Saint Louis of Senegal in 1810, when this island was still under British control.51 When Saint Louis was returned to France in 1817, there were only four French merchants on this island: Bruno Devès, Potin, Nicolas Duréc and Bourgerel. Almost all, except Bourgerel, who was from Marseille, were from Bordeaux and engaged in the gum trade in wartime.52 The new generation of Bordelaise merchants arrived in Senegal between 1810 and the 1830s, and the number of French merchants in Saint Louis increased from only four at the reoccupation to 30 in 1837.53 Along with the brothers Justin and Bruno Devès, Jean-LouisHubert Prom (‘Hubert Prom’) established himself in the island of Gorée in 1822. In 1830, Marc Maurel also arrived in Saint Louis, and Hilaire Maurel joined his cousin, Hubert Prom, in Gorée, and they created the Maurel and Prom Company on 1 January 1831.54 These merchants carried out trade in gum along the Senegal River valley through the trading method used before and during the wartime: the pattern that relied on Senegalese auxiliaries, including local interpreters and traders to conduct river trade with the desert merchants at the escales, where gum arabic was exchanged with guinées.55 As far as I am aware, the studies of nineteenth-century Bordeaux merchants who engaged in the West African trade concentrated on the Maurel and Prom Company. Yet, they did not address the trade in guinées.56 As for the guinée trade from India via France into Senegal, the first half of the nineteenth century witnessed competition between Bordeaux and Marseille over the gum trade along the lower Senegal River. While Colin Newbury remarked that these textiles were ‘carried and imported exclusively by merchants of Bordeaux’,57 Margaret McLane stated that Bordeaux and Marseille achieved ‘near parity at the end of the 1830s’ in the Senegal trade.58 However, neither of them provides quantitative evidence to support these statements.

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Figure 5.2 provides just such a support drawing on the entrepôt section of the French trade statistics. It charts the shipping of guinées from Bordeaux and its major rival, Marseille, into external markets in the 1830s and 1840s, indicating that Bordeaux played a leading role in the trade in guinées up until 1850. Since the export section of the French trade statistics shows a persistently high share for Senegal—between 85 per cent and almost 100 per cent in the shipping of guinées from France—it is confirmed that by far the most important outlet for guinées brought from Bordeaux in this period was Senegal, as suggested by Newbury.59 Senegal proved to be so important as a re-export market for

90% 80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10%

18

32 18 33 18 34 18 35 18 36 18 37 18 38 18 39 18 40 18 41 18 42 18 43 18 44 18 45 18 46 18 47 18 48 18 49 18 50

0%

Bordeaux

Marseille

Fig. 5.2  Proportions of Bordeaux and Marseille in the re-exports of guinées from France, 1832–1850 (Sources Direction générale des douanes, Tableau décennal de commerce de la France avec ses colonies et les puissances étrangères, 1827 à 1836 [Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1838]; Direction générale des douanes, Tableau général du commerce de la France avec ses colonies et les puissances étrangères [Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1839–1851]. See also Kazuo Kobayashi, ‘Indian Textiles and Gum Arabic in the Lower Senegal River: Global Significance of Local Trade and Consumers in the Early Nineteenth Century’, African Economic History 45/2 [2017]: 33)

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guinées that in 1843 the French government came to standardise the size and weight of guinées produced in Pondicherry for Senegal.60 Once the system of exclusif or pacte colonial was re-established, the Bordeaux merchants took advantage of a couple of ­opportunities that Senegal offered. First, Bordeaux is closer to Senegal than other major French ports. Second, the merchants had close connection to French politics. In 1821 the Baron Portal from Bordeaux was appointed Minister of the Navy and the Colonies, whose role included ­ policy making in the colony. Portal played an intermediate role between the Bordeaux merchants and the government, thus his colonisation ­project—which was soon downgraded to an ‘experiment’—in Senegal reflected the interests of Bordeaux merchants. Yet, such an attempt was abandoned in the later Restoration period due to the rise of the UltraRoyalists and change of administration.61 Bordeaux merchants, as the major players in the trade with Senegal during this period, bought gum arabic, hides, beeswax, ivory and groundnuts—the latter’s importance increased from the 1840s—from the traitants, who were a trader group of the habitants, or directly from African producers. These items were shipped on French vessels to France, and the goods in demand among Africans, such as guinées, alcohols and weapons, were shipped from France to Senegal.62 The new generation of French merchants followed the earlier trading patterns: the Bordeaux merchants established in Saint Louis and collaborated with habitants on the basis of trust in the gum trade in the Senegal River, but the Marseille merchants bypassed habitants in Saint Louis and sailed directly to the escales. The former pattern had an advantage in that the habitants as middlemen offered the links with the nomadic merchants at the escales, whereas the latter pattern gave the French merchants a pricing advantage.63 The success of the Bordeaux merchants in Senegal was partly due to the expansion of their family enterprises. Justin, Bruno and Éduard were brothers of the same Devès family. Albert Teisseire, son of Auguste Teisseire and Marianne d’Erneville, created ‘Buhan et Teisseire’ with his father-in-law. There were also mergers between families, such as ‘J. Devès, Lacoste et Cie’, which Justin Devès amalgamated into ‘P. Lacoste’ in 1850.64 Such Bordeaux family businesses became a model for métis familial enterprises, such as the Durant brothers and the Pellegrin family. Yet, unlike the French merchants, the métis firms themselves could not import guinées into Senegal due to the exclusif policy.65

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In addition to family enterprises, close associations with the habitants through marriage that were also established in the eighteenth century would lead to the success of their businesses.66 Both Hilaire Maurel and his elder brother, Jean-Louis Maurel, married daughters of Laporte, the powerful habitant mayor of the island of Gorée at that time, and the descendants of Emile, the eldest son of Hilaire Maurel, continued to run the company.67 Hilaire Maurel moved from Gorée to Saint Louis to build a commercial base for the gum trade in 1834. His commitment to this regional trade lasted until he returned to Bordeaux in 1853. In Saint Louis, from 1842, Hubert Prom served as the President of Senegal’s General Council, which was authorised to determine the budget and the revenue in the colony, and formulated recommendations that created the gum ordinance of 1842. The two cousins worked together in Senegal until Hubert Prom returned to Bordeaux in 1845.68 We now turn to the French shipping of guinées into Senegal. As we have already seen, guinées were brought into Senegal via France under the regime of the exclusif, and the trade expanded after the ‘gum fever’ in particular. Merchants imported guinées from Pondicherry into Bordeaux, and then re-exported them to Senegal. Thus, these merchants from Bordeaux could get access to a large quantity of gum arabic from the Senegal River valley. However, there were merchants from Marseille who also competed with those from Bordeaux over the gum trade. In the early 1830s, Delbruck, the son of a Bordeaux merchant in Pondicherry, thought that some precautionary measures for textiles manufactured there were needed to prevent the repercussion of the July Revolution. He proposed to the Minister of the Navy and the Colonies to export guinées directly to Senegal from India since more profits could be expected. This could be adopted with little costs to the treasury. Delbruck recognised that guinées were ‘the only object of exchange’ in the gum trade in Senegal.69 Ultimately, this request was rejected, because France and the metropolitan goods were given priority over its colonies and colonial products. In fact, the Minister expected the gum trade in Senegal to increase the commercial opportunity for the French counterfeits.70 However, as seen in Chapter 3, the nomadic merchants along the Senegal River valley could tell authentic guinées from metropolitan copies and counterfeits.71 Therefore, in France’s Senegal trade, the importance of guinées produced in Pondicherry did not diminish at all during the entire nineteenth century.

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Compared to the Anglo-West African trade in Indian dyed cotton textiles, the Franco-West African trade in Indian guinées increased continually in the early mid-nineteenth century, and Senegal was the largest consumer of them (Fig. 2.7). This increase was partly made possible by the development of Pondicherry’s textile industry which was funded by the French government and French entrepreneurs, as we saw in the previous chapter. Figure 5.3 illustrates the trends between the guinée trade from French India (Pondicherry) to France and that of France to Senegal in the 1830s and 1840s. These trends were similar. Exports from Pondicherry quintupled between 1834 and 1839, followed by a drop due to saturation in the Senegalese markets and a recovery during the middle of the 1840s. While the Bordeaux merchants had been leading players in the gum trade in the Senegal River throughout the early nineteenth century, the boom in the trade in the 1830s and its profits encouraged small-scale French merchants also to try to enter the river trade. A fierce competition over the profit from the gum trade started.72 The major competitors were the Marseille merchants. Like Bordeaux merchants, Marseille merchants, such as Raphaël Cohen, Roch Olive, Jacques Isnard, Jérôme Borelli, and Victor and Louis Régis, also traded in gum

500,000 450,000 400,000 350,000 300,000 250,000 200,000 150,000 100,000 50,000

1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 1838 1839 1840 1841 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850

-

French India to France

France to Senegal

Fig. 5.3  Guinée trades from French India to France and from France to Senegal, 1827–1850 (pieces) (Source Kobayashi, ‘Indian Textiles’, 36)

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arabic for guinées.73 For them, the Bordeaux merchants were their rival in Senegal. To challenge Bordelaise predominance, the Marseille merchants attempted to sail directly to the escales, where they undersold the Bordeaux merchants who were helped by habitants in Saint Louis. This competition diminished the profits for the Bordeaux merchants and also the habitants in the river trade.74 The Bordeaux merchants challenged the merchants from Marseille which ultimately led to the French territorial conquest in the Senegal River regions from the mid-1850s. McLane divided their control over the gum trade into two phases. The first phase, from the late 1830s to the early 1840s, was characterised by the creation of a privileged association to exclude the Marseille merchants from the gum trade at the escales. The association, set up in 1842, marked a new regime for the trade in the lower Senegal River, which was in favour of the collaboration between Bordeaux merchants and habitants in Saint Louis. The second phase, from the late 1840s to the early 1850s, ended the regime of 1842, as the Bordeaux merchants established new trading posts, that replaced the escales, to trade without the help of the habitants. The first phase of the competition covers the years of crisis of the gum trade. Gum harvesting was unpredictable due to unstable climate conditions which affected the price. An over-supply of guinées also led to the decline of the guinée price from 1838 to 1841, which meant gum price increased marginally in Senegal.75 The fall of the value of the guinée was in favour of the Brakna and Trarza, the suppliers of gum arabic at the escales, but it also posed a challenge to the habitants who acted as the middlemen in the river trade. Saint Louis had imported an exceptionally large quantity of pieces of guinées from France over the 1830s and 1840s. This led to the rise in prices in 1838 of gum arabic per piece of guinée. It was 21 kilograms at Saint Louis and 15 to 17 kilograms at the escales.76 Édouard Bouët-Willaumez, who served as the Governor of Senegal from 1843 to 1844, estimated that the river traders accumulated a debt of 2.5 million francs at the end of 1841.77 La Sémaphore de Marseille dated 20 May 1842 published an article on the commerce of Senegal, which reported the poor harvest in 1840 and 1841 and its consequence: The trade is not propitious. The gum is in short supply, the guinées are very abundant, and the competition is very severe. The traitants have

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operated at a loss. For us it is a crisis of commerce due to the prosperity of precedent years which attracted many foreigners. Besides, the manufacturers in Pondicherry and the shippers in France have doubled their shipping of guinées. The result: a lack of harvest of the gum for two years.78

Due to this severe competition, the French merchants tried to sell their stocks of guinées fast, even if they had to dump goods at a lower price.79 In order to address this commercial crisis, merchants from Bordeaux and Marseille proposed different solutions to the colonial administration of Senegal. The former preferred to set up a privileged association that had an exclusive right to trade gum arabic at the escales, while the latter called for free trade that was open to all French merchants. The colonial administration decreed several compromis to satisfy these claims in 1837, 1839 and 1841. Yet, these institutional responses were not successful due to lack of enforcement.80 As with the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Bordeaux merchants could obtain political support for their gum trade from the French government again. The Arrêté of 16 April 1842 gave the privileged association of Saint Louis the exclusive right to trade gum arabic for five consecutive years. The aim of this association was to ensure the monopoly of the gum trade and the payment to the Trarza and Brakna with a price that was favourable for the association. The creation of the privileged association allowed Bordeaux merchants to enjoy the fruits of the gum trade while the Marseille merchants were excluded. Shortly thereafter, Marseille merchants, including those who traded in Indian cotton textiles, sent a petition to the government to object to the privileged association of Saint Louis in favour of the Bordeaux merchants.81 In order to seek a solution, a commission, whose members comprised of administrative notables and members of the Chambers of Commerce, was organised by the Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies. JeanElie Gautier, who was president of the House of Peers in France, merchant shipper in Bordeaux and deputy from the Gironde, served as the chair in the commission. Other members included Joseph Henri Galos from Bordeaux, the director of colonies, Magnier de Maisonneuve, the director of external commerce, Gréterin, the director of customs, and delegates of each Chamber of Commerce from Bordeaux, Marseille, Nantes and Le Havre. However, it was impossible to gain consensus among the delegates of the Chambers of Commerce. To circumvent this, Gautier turned to the testimonies of the gum merchants, several

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Bordeaux companies and, in particular, Victor Régis of Marseille and Durand Valentin who was one of the habitant leaders in the Senegalese community.82 Their comments shaped a committee report formulated into a Royal Order issued on 15 November 1842. The Order restricted the gum trade along the Senegal River into the escales, and confirmed the importance of the commissioned Senegalese traders as intermediaries in the trade at the escales. It dissolved the privileged association but instead created the commission syndicate, consisting of five members including Gautier, Galos, de Maisonneuve and Gréterin.83 Therefore, the conditions devised by the Order of 15 November 1842 were almost the same as those of the Bordeaux merchants and the habitants who had benefited before the crisis in the gum trade in 1840 to 1841. Such political processes partly underpinned the predominance of Bordeaux in the river trade, as shown in Fig. 5.2. The gum harvest was not abundant in 1843, but it recovered from 1844 to 1846 (see Fig. 2.4). The number of Senegalese traders increased from 53 to 88 to 121 in 1843, 1844 and 1845, respectively. This recovery and high prices for gum arabic in Saint Louis enabled almost half of the Senegalese traders to repay their debts from 1844 to 1846; and almost half of their debts were cleared. However, poor gum harvests over the following three years, which saw an increase in debt among river traders, proved that the commercial system of 1842 would not work for them.84 On the other hand, there were two major forces that saw a shift from the system of 1842 to that of free trade. One was the abolition of slavery in 1848 by which emancipated slaves who participated in the gum trade as auxiliaries of their masters were given equal rights to trade at the escales. The other was the Ordonnance of 22 January 1852 that reflected heightened calls in France for free trade in Senegal.85 Durand Valentin, who was now a deputy in Senegal, along with French merchants who sought free trade, introduced the question of the 1842 system into deliberations of the National Assembly, which decreed to form the Commission des comptoirs et du commerce des côtes d’Afrique to address the issues of the gum trade in Senegal. Unlike the committee of 1842, it was Victor Régis from Marseille who spoke for the merchants having interests in the West African trade. He gained support from the representatives from Marseille, and thereby the Ordonnance of

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22 January 1852 came to include specific provisions that reflected the concern among the French merchants who were excluded from the river trade under the system of 1842. It aimed to loosen the ties between French merchants and Senegalese river traders, and broaden the possibility for Marseille merchants to participate in the gum trade. This marked a step towards free trade at the escales, though the trading posts in the lower Senegal River were abolished and replaced by a new one on the left bank of the river at Podor. Also, Bordeaux merchants confronted by this situation transferred their trading posts upriver to Bakel, where they enjoyed their predominant position over any other European traders in gum.86 Meanwhile, several Marseille merchants sought alternative trading posts along the coast southwards from the Senegal River in the 1830s and 1840s. Those included the Régis brothers, the Rabaud brothers, Roch Olive, Jacques Isnard, Aquaronne fils, and Féraud and Honorat. During this period Charles-Auguste Verminck, who was later known as the ‘king of groundnuts’, was employed by Victor Régis and Maurel and Prom until he became independent in 1852. Marseille’s interests grew in the western coasts of Africa relative to the Senegal River in the 1840s. While the major commodities they sought in Senegal were gum arabic and groundnuts, those in other coastal areas of West Africa, in particular, Dahomey, the Ivory Coast and Guinea, were palm oil, groundnuts and cabbage palm. In the late 1840s, Marseille absorbed more than 95 per cent of all groundnuts exported from West Africa to France (see Chapter 2).87 The growing interest in these oleaginous plants among the Marseille merchants revealed the challenges of the soap-making industry, the most prominent industry in Marseille during the era of the July Monarchy. Originally, the soap industry used olive oil, harvested in the Mediterranean basin. However, during the 1820s and 1830s the industry in Marseille faced difficulty in securing olive oil due to a series of bad harvests of olives around the Mediterranean basin and increasing demand for the product for soap making in other parts of Southern Europe. These problems made making soap from olive oil in Marseille costly, leading to another problem: the products of Marseille had to compete in the British markets with cheaper soap made from flax, groundnuts and palm oil. Meanwhile, the Marseille industry found it difficult to maintain the quality of their product. They used Leblanc soda, which contained rich alkali that helped produce a greater quantity of

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soap than that from the same amount of olive oil. But the soap made from the mixture of Leblanc soda and olive oil was of a lower quality: the product was rough and more corrosive, and therefore less in demand. In order to solve these problems, Marseille soap producers had to innovate and look for alternative fatty products in West Africa.88

Conclusion This chapter has situated the British and French shipping during the age of revolutions. Western European merchants served an intermediary role in the south-south economic linkage during this period. The chapter also showed aspects of continuity and change in their businesses. The EIC was the largest supplier of Indian cotton textiles for British markets until the Charter Act of 1813 abrogated their monopoly in the trade with India. By using the records of Thomas Lumley, this chapter has provided more detailed information on the textile trade from India to West Africa via Britain. Liverpool represented the British West African trade at that time. There were several continuities in the trade despite the abolition of the slave trade: family business remained dominant in the British West African trade, though they were not in British trade with other regions; merchants who invested in the slave trade also participated in the palm oil trade after abolition of the slave trade; trade connections were maintained with the Niger Delta, especially Old Calabar and Bonny. The effects of the Napoleonic Wars such as the commercial blockade and the 1807 embargo would contribute to the continuity in the overseas trade of post-abolition Liverpool. The situation surrounding trade changed in the second half of the nineteenth century, when steam ships began to be largely used and the joint-stock companies were created. Indian cotton textiles continued to be in demand in West Africa, but their commercial routes appeared to have been changed from the eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century, because the end of the monopoly of the EIC to trade with India enabled private companies to enter the market. As for French business with West Africa, major players switched from Nantes to Bordeaux and Marseille in the early nineteenth century: Nantes continued to pursue commercial interests in the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean, whereas Bordeaux and Marseille launched new business with West Africa. As the French trade statistics show, it was particularly Bordeaux that played a leading role in the guinée trade into Senegal

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in the 1830s and 1840s. They conducted the gum trade mainly in the lower Senegal River regions with support from the Senegalese intermediaries who had navigational skill and knowledge about interior geography and local language until the territorial conquest started in the 1850s. As with Liverpool trade with West Africa at that time, family business characterised the French West African trade. Also, Britain’s African merchants influenced the local politics of Liverpool in the early nineteenth century. Almost following this period, strong ties with French politics helped the Bordelaise merchants maintain their leading position in the shipping of guinées for gum arabic around the lower Senegal River regions despite the fierce competition posed by the merchants of Marseille in the 1830s and 1840s.89 That is why Marseille merchants sought alternative markets along the coast southwards from the Senegal River, and as a result there was a division between major destinations by merchants of major French cities in the 1840s.

Notes







1. Kazuo Kobayashi, ‘The British Atlantic Slave Trade and Indian Cotton Textiles: The Case of Thomas Lumley & Co.’, in Tomoko Shiroyama, ed., Modern Global Trade and the Asian Regional Economy (Singapore: Springer, 2018), pp. 59–85. 2. For the emergence of British private trade firms in the Asian waters, see Anthony Webster, The Twining of the East India Company: The Evolution of Anglo-Asian Commerce and Politics 1790–1860 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2009); Michael Aldous, ‘Avoiding “Negligence and Profusion”: The Ownership and Organisation of Anglo-Indian Trading Firms, 1813 to 1870’ (PhD Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2015). 3. K. G. Davies, The Royal African Company (London: Longmans, 1957); David Richardson, ‘The British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1660–1807’, in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 2: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 440–64. 4. K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the English East India Company, 1660–1760 (Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 303–4. 5. London Directory (Kent’s Directory, 1801–1808). 6. The National Archives (NAUK, Kew, United Kingdom), C 114/155: Cash Book, Jan. 1801–Mar. 1803. 7. NAUK, C 114/154: Journal of Thomas Lumley & Co., 1801–1810.

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8. NAUK, C 114/1: Letter Book, 1806–1812. 9. NAUK, C 114/154: Journal of Thomas Lumley & Co., 1801–1810. 10. Kobayashi, ‘The British Atlantic Slave Trade’. 11. NAUK, C 114/154: Journal of Thomas Lumley & Co., 1801; Wilson E. Williams, ‘Africa and the Rise of Capitalism’, in The Howard University Studies in the Social Sciences (Washington, DC: Howard University, 1938), pp. 19–20. George Case was the father of the Liverpool Common Council, which was a stronghold of Tories and African traders in the early nineteenth century. Liverpool Mercury, 19 October 1832. 12. NAUK, C 114/154: Journal of Thomas Lumley & Co., 1801; Kobayashi, ‘The British Atlantic Slave Trade’, pp. 69–77, Table 3. 13. C 114/2: Letter from Charles Fairclough to Thomas Lumley, Liverpool, 7 March 1801; C 114/2: Letter from James Aspinall to Thomas Lumley, Liverpool, 23 April 1801. 14. Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (TSTD). http://www. slavevoyages.org. Accessed 23 March 2015; Paul E. Lovejoy and David Richardson, ‘“This Horrid Hole”: Royal Authority, Commerce and Credit at Bonny, 1690–1840’, Journal of African History 45/3 (2004): 363–92; Kobayashi, ‘The British Atlantic Slave Trade’, p. 78, Table 4. 15. NAUK, C 114/154: Journal of Thomas Lumley & Co., 1802–1803; TSTD. However, it should be noted that, according to TSTD, the total number of slave ships that sailed from Liverpool rebounded to 121 in 1804. This pattern of decline and revival also occurred elsewhere in Britain with the number of slave ships leaving ports other than Liverpool decreasing from 39 in 1802 to 21 in 1803 but rising again to 29 in 1804. 16. C 114/158: Invoice of Thomas Lumley & John Ramsden, London, 5 March 1803; TSTD. 17. W. E. Minchinton, ‘The Voyage of the Snow Africa’, Mariner’s Mirror 37/3 (1951): 187–88; Jacob M. Price, ‘What Did Merchants Do? Reflections on British Overseas Trade, 1660–1790’, Journal of Economic History 49/2 (1989): 267–84; Jacob M. Price, ‘The Imperial Economy, 1700–1776’, in Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, p. 93. 18. Martin Lynn, Commerce and Economic Change in West Africa: The Palm Oil Trade in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 94. 19. NAUK, C 114/158: Muster Roll of the Bedford, third voyage, Gravesend, 7 July 1806. 20. NAUK, C 114/158: Invoice of Thomas Lumley & Co., London, 1 July 1806. 21.  NAUK, C 114/158: Accounts of Thomas Lumley & Co., London, 1806–1807; TSTD.

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22. NAUK, C 114/158: Sales Records of Thomas Lumley & Co., London, 1807; C 142/24: Shipping Returns, Jamaica, 1804–1807; TSTD. 23. David M. Williams, ‘Abolition and the Re-deployment of the Slave Fleet, 1807–1811’, Journal of Transport History 2/2 (1973): 105. 24.  NAUK, C 114/3: Letter from J. C. Harries to Thomas Lumley, 17 June 1809, London; Letter from G. Harrison to Thomas Lumley, 30 November 1809, London. Meanwhile, existing sources show that after abolition Lumley, by using his extensive business networks, continued to import sugar, cocoa, coffee and cottons from the West Indies and Latin America. NAUK, C 114/158: Invoice of Thomas Lumley & Co., 20 July 1809, London; NAUK, C 114/158: Invoice of Thomas Lumley & Co. 12 November 1809, London. 25. Aspinall was a Magistrate of Liverpool at the time of May 1812, but, from his testimonies, it remains unclear about how long he had served the role until then. BPP, 1812, III (210): Minutes of evidence, taken before the Committee of the Whole House, to whom it was referred, to consider of the several petitions which have been presented to the House, in this session of Parliament, relating to the orders in council, John Bridge Aspinall, pp. 361–62. 26. Williams, ‘Abolition’, p. 107. 27. Williams, ‘Abolition’, pp. 107–8; B. K. Drake, ‘Liverpool-African Voyage c. 1790–1807: Commercial Problems’, in Roger Anstey and P. E. H. Hair, eds., Liverpool, the African Slave Trade, and Abolition: Essays to Illustrate Current Knowledge and Research (Liverpool: Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1976), pp. 126–56; B. K. Drake, ‘Continuity and Flexibility in Liverpool’s Trade with Africa and Caribbean’, Business History 18/1 (1976): 85–97. 28. Braithwaite Poole, The Commerce of Liverpool (London and Liverpool, 1854), p. 114; Lynn, Commerce, Chapter 4. 29. K. Onwuka Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta 1830–1885: An Introduction to the Economic and Political History of Nigeria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), p. 49; Martin Lynn, ‘Change and Continuity in the British Palm Oil Trade with West Africa, 1830–55’, Journal of African History 22/3 (1981): 342–47. 30. A. J. H. Latham, ‘A Trading Alliance: Sir John Tobin and Duke Ephraim’, History Today 24/12 (1974): 863; Martin Lynn, ‘Trade and Politics in 19th-Century Liverpool: The Tobin and Horsfall Families and Liverpool’s African Trade’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire 142 (1993): 103; Liverpool Record Office, R. C. Reid, Annals of the Tobin Family of Liverpool and the Isle of Man (1940), p. 25. 31. The following vessels are those John Tobin was involved with as ship captain in the 1790s. TSTD, Voyage ID 80699, Brothers (1796); 81178,

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Eliza (1795); 81603, Gipsey (1793); 82776, Molly (1797); 82777, Molly (1798); and 83892, Union (1794). 32. The following vessels are those Tobin was involved with as one of the co-owners in the 1800s. TSTD, Voyage ID 82169, Kingsmill (1803); 82371, Lord Stanley (1801); 82372, Load Stanley (1804); Will (1800); 84029, Will (1801); 84030, Will (1802); 84031, Will (1804); 84102, Young William (1800); and 84103, Young William (1802). 33. Lynn, ‘Change and Continuity’, 344. 34.  Latham, ‘A Trading Alliance’, pp. 862–7; Lynn, ‘Trade and Politics’, p. 106. 35. Lynn, ‘Trade and Politics’, pp. 106–8; Reid, Annals, pp. 31–5. 36. Paul Butel, ‘French Maritime Activities in the Indian Ocean from XVIIIth to XIXth Centuries: The Example of Bordeaux’, in K. S. Mathew, ed., Ship-Building and Navigation in the Indian Ocean Region, AD 1400– 1800 (New Delhi: Munshirem Manoharial Publishers, 1997), p. 98; Eugénie Margoline-Plot, ‘Les circuits parallèles des toiles de l’océan Indien: Lorient au XVIIIe siècle’, Histoire urbaine 30 (2011): 109; Felicia Gottmann, Global Trade, Smuggling, and the Making of the Economic Liberalism: Asian Textiles in France 1680–1760 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 39–41. 37. TSTD. 38. Michael Stephen Smith, The Emergence of Modern Business Enterprise in France, 1800–1930 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 39–40. 39. Jean Tarrade, Le commerce colonial de la France à la fin de l’Ancien Régime: L’évolution du régime de « l’Exclusif » de 1763 à 1789, Vol. 2 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), p. 755; Paul Butel, Les négociants bordelais, l’Europe et les iles au XVIIIe Siècle (Paris: AubierMontaigne, 1974), pp. 94–104; Silvia Marzagalli, ‘The French Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World: 1450–1850 (Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 246. 40.  Richard Drayton, ‘The Globalization of France: Provincial Cities and French Expansion, c. 1500–1800’, History of European Ideas 34/4 (2008): 427; Klaus Weber, ‘The Atlantic Coast of German Trade: German Rural Industry and Trade in the Atlantic, 1680–1840’, Itinerario 26/2 (2002): 111–12. 41. Jean-Pierre Poussou and Paul Butel, ‘La fierté d’une capitale provinciale’, in Robert Étienne, ed., Histoire de Bordeaux (Toulouse: Privat, 2001), p. 178. 42. Weber, ‘German Trade’, pp. 111–12; Françoise Thésée, Négociants bordelaise et colons de Saint-Domingue; liaisons d’habitations: La maison Henry



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Romberg, Bapst et Cie 1783–1793 (Paris: Société Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, 1972). 43. Smith, The Emergence, pp. 23–7. 44. Smith, The Emergence, p. 36. For the sugar production in the French colonies, see Dale W. Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique and the World Economy, 1830–1848 (London and Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. 15. 45. M. L. Bachelier, Histoire du commerce de Bordeaux dupuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’a nos jours (Bordeaux: Imprimerie de J. Delmas, 1862), pp. 228–29; Haruhiko Hattori, Furansu-kindai-boeki no seisei to tenkai [The Growth and Development of Trade in Modern France] (Kyoto: Minerva Shobo, 1992), pp. 110–13. 46.  Butel, ‘French Maritime Activities’, pp. 104–5; Silvia Marzagalli, ‘Establishing Transatlantic Trade Networks in Time of War: Bordeaux and the United States, 1793–1815’, Business History Review 79/4 (2005): 811–44. 47. Butel, ‘French Maritime Activities’, pp. 105–6. 48. Smith, The Emergence, pp. 31–4. 49. A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (London: Longman, 1973), pp. 129–30. 50. Smith, The Emergence, pp. 39–40. 51. Hilary Jones, The Métis of Senegal: Urban Life and Politics in French West Africa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013), pp. 5, 46, 191–92. 52. Margaret O. McLane, ‘Commercial Rivalries and French Policy on the Senegal River, 1831–1858’, African Economic History 15 (1986): 43, 60–1. 53. E. Bouët-Willaumes, Commerce et traite des noirs aux cotês occidentales d’Afrique (Paris, 1848), pp. 12–13. 54. Yves Péhaut, ‘A l’époque de la « traite » de l’arachide: Les « Bordelais » au Sénégal’, Revue historique de Bordeaux et du département de la Gironde 30 (1983–84): 50–1, 55–6; Arrêté relatif aux guinées non estampillées, Saint Louis, 19 February 1847, in Sénégal, Bulletin Administratif des Actes du Gouvernement depuis le 1er janvier 1847 jusqu’au 31 décembre 1848 (Paris, 1849), pp. 18–19. Among these French merchants, the Maurel and Prom Company was known as one of the largest and most powerful companies operating in Senegal by the middle of the nineteenth century. This company directly or indirectly generated capitalist organisations in the late nineteenth century, such as the Compagnie française de l’Afrique occidentale, the Société commerciale de l’Ouest africain, and the Banque du Sénégal, which later turned into the Banque d’Afrique Occidentale. Leland Conley Barrows, ‘General Faidherbe, the

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Maurel and Prom Company, and French Expansion in Senegal’ (PhD Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1974), p. 116. At present, the Maurel and Prom Company is one of the biggest French oil companies, operating in Africa (Congo, Gabon, Namibia, Mozambique and Tanzania), Latin America (Peru and Columbia), North America (Canada), Southeast Asia (Myanmar) and others. http://www.maureletprom.fr/. Accessed 29 December 2018. 55. For the commercial network between Saint Louis and the escales in the lower Senegal River, see Chapter 3, especially Figs. 3.1a to 3.1c. 56. Barrows, ‘General Faidherbe’; Leland Conley Barrows, ‘The Merchants and General Faidherbe: Aspects of French Expansion in Sénégal in the 1850’s’, Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer 61/223 (1974): 236– 83; Péhaut, ‘A l’époque’; Yves Péhaut, La doyenne des « Sénégalaises » de Bordeaux: Maurel et H. Prom de 1831 à 1919, Vols. 2 (Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2014). 57. C. W. Newbury, ‘The Protectionist Revival in French Colonial Trade: The Case of Senegal’, Economic History Review 21/2 (1968): 338. 58. McLane, ‘Commercial Rivalries’, p. 41. 59. Direction générale des douanes, Tableau décennal de commerce de la France avec ses colonies et les puissances étrangères, 1827 à 1836 (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1838); Direction générale des douanes, Tableau général du commerce de la France avec ses colonies et les puissances étrangères (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1839–1851). 60. No. 66, Ordonnance du Roi, 18 May 1843 and No. 88, Ordinnance du Roi, 1 September 1843, in Sénégal, Bulletin Administratif des Actes du Gouvernement (Paris, 1846), pp. 87–8, 125–26; Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (ANOM, Aix-en-Provence, France), Inde 494, Dossier 871, L’Arrêté signée par Gouverneur Du Camper, 23 August 1844, Pondicherry. 61.  Péhaut, ‘A l’époque’, pp. 49–50; Shepard Bancroft Clough, France: A History of National Economics 1789–1939 (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), pp. 101–2; Michael D. Marcson, ‘EuropeanAfrican Interaction in the Precolonial Period: St. Louis, Senegal, 1758– 1854’ (PhD Dissertation, Princeton University, 1976), pp. 98–113. 62. Barrows, ‘General Faidherbe’, p. 116. 63. McLane, ‘Commercial Rivalries’, pp. 43–4. 64. Péhaut, ‘A l’époque’, pp. 51–2. 65. Jones, The Métis of Senegal, p. 47. 66. On signares in Saint Louis and Gorée for the Europeans, see Chapter 3. 67. Barrows, ‘General Faidherbe’, p. 115. 68. Péhaut, ‘A l’époque’, 61; Barrows, ‘General Faidherbe’, p. 117. As for the major role of the General Council of Senegal, see Jones, The Métis of Senegal, pp. 127–28; Martin A. Klein, Islam and Imperialism in Senegal:

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Sine-Saloum, 1847–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968), pp. 117–18. 69. ANOM, Inde 494, Dossier 865: Delbruck au Ministre de la Marine et des Colonies, 30 January 1832, Paris. My translation. 70. ANOM, Inde 494, Dossier 865: Note, 12 February 1832 (?). 71. In 1833 Tourette, a diplomatic agent in Madagascar, suggested selling metropolitan guinées in Madagascar. However, Indian guinées had already secured the market there, and, like the Senegalese in West Africa, the Malagasy could easily tell the difference between the authentic Indian cloths and metropolitan imitations. Mireille Lobligeois, De la Reunion a l’Inde française: Philippe-Achille Bédier (1791–1865) Une carrière coloniale (Pondicherry: Historical Society of Pondicherry, 1993), p. 135. 72. McLane, ‘Commercial Rivalries’. 73.  Xavier Daumalin, ‘Commercial Presence, Colonial Penetration: Marseille Traders in West Africa in the Nineteenth Century’, in Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, ed., From Slave Trade to Empire: Europe and the Colonization of Black Africa 1780s–1880s (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004), p. 211. 74. McLane, ‘Commercial Rivalries’, pp. 44–5. 75. See Chapter 2. 76. É. Bouët-Willaumez, Commerce traits des noirs aux côtes occidentales d’Afrique (Paris, 1848), p. 14. 77. Bouët-Willaumez, Commerce, p. 15. 78. Cited in Xavier Daumalin, Marseille et l’Ouest africain: L’outremer des industriels (1841–1957) (Marseille: Chambre de commerce et d’industrie Marseille-Provence, 1992), p. 22. My translation. 79. Daumalin, Marseille, p. 22. 80. McLane, ‘Commercial Rivalries’, p. 46. 81. Archives Nationales du Sénégal (Dakar, Senegal), 2B20: Correspondances du Gouverneur à Ministère de la Marine et des Colonies, Nos. 197 bis and 207, 9 and 15 June 1842, Saint-Louis; Bouët-Willaumez, Commerce, p. 16; Archives départementales de la Gironde, Bordeaux, France, 8M13: Pétition a la chambre des deputes au sujet du monopole établi par le gouverneur du Sénégal pour la traite de la gomme, Marseille, April 1842. 82.  Durand Valentin was a notable habitant and an associate of Justin Devès of Bordeaux. McLane, ‘Commercial Rivalries’, pp. 47–8; BouëtWillaumez, Commerce, pp. 16–7. 83. Bouët-Willaumez, Commerce, pp. 17–8. 84. Bouët-Willaumez, Commerce, p. 23; James L. A. Webb, Jr., ‘The Trade in Gum Arabic: Prelude to French Conquest in Senegal’, Journal of African History 26/2 (1985): 167. 85. McLane, ‘Commercial Rivalries’, pp. 48–9. 86. McLane, ‘Commercial Rivalries’, pp. 49–51.

194  K. KOBAYASHI 87.  Daumalin, ‘Commercial Presence’, pp. 211–14, 228. Olivier PétréGrenouilleau, ‘Cultural Systems of Representation, Economic Interests, and French Penetration into Black Africa, 1780s–1880s’, in PétréGrenouilleau, ed., From Slave Trade, p. 175. 88. Daumalin, ‘Commercial Presence’, pp. 210–11. 89. For the influence of Britain’s African traders on local politics in Liverpool in the nineteenth century, see Lynn, ‘Trade and Politics’.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion

This book has explored the south-south economic linkage—as ­established by the West African demand for Indian cotton textiles during the age of revolutions—as a key axis to better understand the emergence of the modern global economy. West African consumers and Indian artisans were linked by European merchants, and thereby there was no direct connection between West Africa and South Asia in the period concerned. In this book I have argued that such trans-oceanic interaction was the opposite side of the same coin of early modern European commercial and imperial expansion. This concluding chapter correlates the findings from the discussion in this book with three larger historiographies while suggesting various possibilities for future investigations. As will be discussed below, the first context is nineteenth-century tropical development, a new frontier that explores multiple paths of economic development in the world. The second is Africa and the European empires in global history. While conventionally we tend to employ the framework of the convenient dichotomy of the ruler and the ruled, this book emphasises the significance of consumer agency that sheds fresh light on Africa’s global engagements. Finally, the south-south economic history presented in this book shows that there were multiple region-based globalisations, out of whose ­interactions emerged the modern global economy.

© The Author(s) 2019 K. Kobayashi, Indian Cotton Textiles in West Africa, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18675-3_6

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Economic Development in Nineteenth-Century West Africa From the perspective of modern economic history, the tropics had long served as a major source of primary products for the industrialising West. William Arthur Lewis was a pioneering economist in this area who, similar to Hla Myint, discussed the role of trade in the development of the tropics. In his works, Lewis advanced the argument that the export of primary products was the ‘engine of economic growth’ in the tropics from the 1880s up to the eve of the First World War. Specifically, during this period, the average annual growth rate was 3.6 per cent in the tropical trade, a figure larger than the sum of the growth rates of industrial production per annum in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany. Further, while the transport revolution and growing demand for tropical products in the industrialising West were regarded as preconditions, Lewis also highlighted the initiatives among the producers who effectively responded to factor endowments, such as land and natural environment characteristics like water, in their respective regions.1 While Lewis’s focus was the decades before 1913, more recently, Jeffrey Williamson suggested that the trade boom for primary products from non-West regions had already taken place between the 1780s and the 1870s, a century that saw the emergence of great divergence driven by industrialisation between the ‘rich core’ and ‘poor periphery’.2 This revisionist research encourages us to reconsider the scope of Lewis and of the relevant theories on the export of primary products.3 As we have discussed in Chapter 2, the export of primary products in nineteenth-century West Africa has been studied in the revised frameworks of Myint’s ‘vent-for-surplus’ theory. However, in the West African context, the literature has not yet fully explored Lewis’s alternative explanation for tropical development. A. G. Hopkins suggested that the growth of ‘legitimate’ commerce shifted the terms of trade in West Africa’s favour until the 1860s, ­followed by a pronounced drop that set off internal African conflicts. David Eltis and Lawrence Jennings confirmed this trend with the combined customs data recorded in Britain, France and the United States.4 Most recently, Ewout Frankema, Jefferey Williamson and Pieter Woltjer altered their views by showing that West Africa’s aggregate terms-oftrade boom peaked much later—in the mid-1880s. They propose that

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the trend was not only comparable to Latin America and Southeast Asia but also implied that the Scramble for Africa could be explained in an economic context.5 Chapter 2 showed that in the early nineteenth century, the export of cash-crops already provided an income-earning opportunity for small-scale producers in West Africa to purchase more imported goods, such as cloth and cowries. Regarding palm oil, one of the most important goods from West Africa during the nineteenth century, the annual export growth rate was 1.29 per cent in the first half of the century and 1.01 per cent in the second half. Further, the rate was also 1.2 per cent from 1801 to 1880 and 0.9 per cent from 1881 to 1899.6 Therefore, West African palm oil trade expanded more rapidly in the early nineteenth century than in the period covered by Lewis. Trends in exports of primary products largely reflected their competitiveness in the global markets, based on factors such as the relative absence of competitors and tariffs.7 This was true for West African palm oil in the United Kingdom until the 1850s, as the expansion of palm oil trade was partly made possible by the increasing demand for machinery, railway, soap and candles in the industrialising country. However, in the second half of the nineteenth century, steam ships delivered new products to Britain, such as Indian oils and fats and Australian tallow that competed with West African palm oil for market share. Additionally, the 1869 opening of the Suez Canal contributed to lowering the freight rates of these goods to the UK. Furthermore, mineral and cotton oils replaced palm oil in the lubricant market and the soap industry respectively, while the spread of electricity from the 1880s as well as coal gas and paraffin curbed the demand for candles. As such, in the late nineteenth century West African palm oil faced increasing difficulties in the United Kingdom from intense competition from products from other regions of the world.8 Thus, the transport revolution brought about a negative impact on West African palm oil exports to the United Kingdom, the largest market for the tropical product. In short, West African palm oil lost its relative competitiveness in UK markets in the latter half of the nineteenth century. While some of Lewis’s explanations need to be further studied, what is still worth noting is that he paid close attention to the agency of producers in tropical regions at a time when dependency theory and related paradigms placed analytical emphasis elsewhere. In the case of West Africa, by making use of the staple theory of economic growth, Hopkins discussed African agency represented by their choice to produce palm oil

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and groundnuts for a wider market in the nineteenth century.9 Chapter 2 showed that the decline of the Atlantic slave trade and the growing demand for primary products in the industrialising West made it possible for a number of small-scale producers to get access to imported goods along West African coasts. These producers spontaneously responded to new market opportunities created by the growth of the ‘legitimate’ commerce that accompanied the industrialisation in Western Europe and obtained an array of imported articles. This was particularly the case with the Bight of Biafra, the largest supply source of palm oil during the early nineteenth century, where slaves supplied from the Sokoto Caliphate were used in the production and transport of palm oil. The absorption of a large number of slaves into cash-crop production along the Atlantic coast was made possible due to the decline of the Atlantic slave trade. Cheap Lancashire goods found a large market even among poorer consumers on the West African coast. Likewise, the demand for cowrie shells, which travelled through the Indian Ocean via Europe, increased significantly in West Africa. Indeed, the volume of cowries imported during this period surpassed that of the previous era of the Atlantic slave trade, and these circulated in West Africa even more widely than in earlier centuries. This point can be refined by using the term ‘final demand linkage effect’ that Melville Watkins originally proposed and Kaoru Sugihara later partially applied to East Asian experiences. According to Watkins, who applied the term to Canada and Australia, the increased activity in the export sector induced investment in domestic industries to produce consumer goods for export.10 In his discussion of East Asian economic development in which intra-Asian trade played a central role, Sugihara masterfully shows that the mass exports of Asian primary products for the United States and Western Europe brought about the evolution of intra-regional trade that began in the mid-nineteenth century. For example, the growth of exports in plantation and mining products from Malaya to the West boosted the purchasing power of plantation and mine workers and increased their demand for necessities. This increasing demand was met by local and regional trade within Asia, which brought rice from Burma and Siam, sugar from Java, and cotton textiles produced in India and Japan.11 In the case of West Africa, the growth of ‘legitimate’ commerce incentivised a large number of small-scale producers, including migrant labourers from the interior, women and even slaves, to produce crops

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for export. This situation also created demand for provisions and other necessities for these producers, and thus stimulated local and regional economies at least until the mid-1850s. As such, external demand for primary products and a positive response of these producers’ choice for profitability shaped the pattern of trade-led economic growth in West Africa during this period. Moreover, the abolition of the slave trade in the West also made a large contribution to the domestic use of slaves in crop production for export. Comparing these characteristics with East Africa and other tropical regions from the late-precolonial period would enrich our understanding of the multiple paths of economic development in tropical regions of the world.12

Africa, Empire and Global History More than 60 years ago, John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson wrote a ground-breaking article on the British Empire entitled ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’ published in the Economic History Review. By rejecting the traditional approach to imperial history that had exclusively focused on the formal empire, namely colonial domination, they showed that free trade was the main vehicle for the expansion of British influence and economic interest overseas. Gallagher and Robinson described the coexistence of two styles of imperial expansion in the Victorian era (1837–1901), with often-quoted words, ‘by informal means if possible, or by formal annexations when necessary’.13 They rephrased this as follows: ‘The usual summing up of the policy of the free trade empire as “trade not rule” should read “trade with informal control” if possible; trade with rule when necessary’.14 It is argued that, from a metropolitan point of view, British informal empire significantly expanded into Africa, China, the Ottoman Empire and Latin America during this period. However, the novelty and attractiveness of their argument generated intense debate over the plausibility of applying the concept of informal empire to these regions, notably to Latin America.15 So far, historians have shown that the degree of success for the British informal empire to penetrate its influence into these respective regions was limited before the 1880s. Martin Lynn proposed that ‘relations between Britain and the wider world … need to be seen in much more pluralistic and mutually permeable fashion’.16 Following Lynn, perhaps we have too often been trapped by the conventional and convenient categories of ‘the rulers’ and ‘the ruled’ or

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those of ‘the colonists’ and ‘the colonised’. But once we turn our attention to consumers in the extra-European regions of the world, their agency will open a window to a fresh interpretation of modern imperial and global history. In that sense, Jeremy Prestholdt’s work is very enlightening. Although scholars of imperial and global history often argue how important the non-West was to the West’s economic development, they pay little attention to ‘how the interests of the “periphery” have affected distant societies’.17 One of the virtues of Prestholdt’s perspective is that while discussing what factors shaped consumer demand in East Africa, he persuasively explains how such demand affected patterns of global exchange and industrialisation in the United States and India in the nineteenth century, and even Japan in the twentieth century. What is more, he reveals that these African consumers also affected British colonial policy in East Africa. This is an exploration of consumer agency in East Africa that had global repercussions beyond imperial frameworks and was contingent on the ‘domestication’ of imported goods, a process of remanufacturing foreign goods to meet with changeable consumer taste in the region.18 Indeed, it makes an important contribution to the historiography of Africa in global history from the perspective of African consumers.19 Turning to West Africa, the example of the textile trade into the region in the early nineteenth century offers both a number of important parallels with East Africa and qualifications of our conceptualisation of West Africa’s external economic exchanges. The volume of British cotton goods skyrocketed in the trade from Britain into West Africa in the early nineteenth century, as we have seen in Fig. 2.5. In order to fully account for this growth of textile trade from West Africa’s point of view, it is crucial to explain local logics that created consumer demand for British textiles. In other words, what motivated consumers towards imported articles? This point, one too often taken for granted, is essential to understanding how British fabric found external markets. Speaking of the period covered in this book, the distinction of British textiles in overseas markets was its low price point, not its quality. This allowed British cotton textiles to find markets at the bottom of society in West Africa. As in the case of the demand for Indian textiles around the lower Senegal River, Chapter 3 has shown that the textile trade was closely intertwined with the social and ecological contexts of the region. Specifically, it demonstrated that the particular taste of local consumers played a significant role in West Africa’s global trade and procurement

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outside the region, namely South Asia. Furthermore, the powerful consumer demand for guinées around the Senegal River valley led to the development of the textile industry in nineteenth-century Pondicherry. This was a case of the ‘global survival of non-European products in the age of industrialisation’, an agenda for future research.20 By examining the interface between the Western empires and local circumstances in Africa, with particular attention to the social logic of demand, we can not only better understand the imperial expansion, but more importantly, we will also find another genealogy of globalisation that emerged from West Africa and East Africa, respectively. This finding enables us to avoid the prevailing paradigm of the teleological story of the rise of the West or that of the core-periphery model of the world system, as we will discuss in the next section. Indeed, this is the frontier to building a bridge between African, imperial and global history studies. The expansion of the Western empires, whether informal or formal, was a necessary but not sufficient condition for the emergence of the modern global economy. It is fair to note that appreciation of African agency enriches our knowledge about modern imperial and global history.

Multiple Globalisation in the Emergence of the Modern Global Economy In the field of global economic history, globalisation is one of the key issues of investigation.21 While scholarly works on globalisation are as abundant as stars, for the purpose of historical research, the term can be defined in two fashions. For some, globalisation means a process of making global networks through trade, capital investment and/or flows of people and culture. Notably, Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giraldez stress that the year 1571—when the Spaniards built the colony of Manila as an entrepôt that connected Asia with the Americas through silver—saw the origin of globalisation.22 This pattern of economic intensification at a global level is what Jan de Vries describes as ‘soft’ globalisation.23 On the other hand, globalisation can also be defined as an outcome of the integration of different areas into a larger regional or global economy. For Jeffery Williamson and Kevin O’Rourke, for example, globalisation means an international price convergence driven by reduced transaction costs, and it occurred in the 1820s.24 Thus, Flynn-Giraldez and Williamson-O’Rourke disagree with each other owing to different

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definitions of globalisation. Yet, nineteenth-century price convergence can be seen as an outcome of a global trade network established in the sixteenth century.25 The types of globalisation and their origins and development are another major subject of research.26 It is noteworthy that some historians recognised the multiplicity of globalisation, the idea for which this book takes a stand.27 Janet Abu-Lughod has shown that regional propensity within the processes of globalisation had taken place in Eurasia and the Indian Ocean world as early as the thirteenth century.28 More recently, Joseph Inikori also discusses a regionally based globalisation process found in West Africa and the Sahara before the arrival of the Portuguese by sea in the fifteenth century. Yet, according to him, these earlier processes were ‘all aborted’ when West Africa was integrated into the larger Atlantic slave-based economy.29 This argument is in line with the position of dependency and world-system schools that regard under-development as a product of the integrated Atlantic economy.30 However, the south-south economic history presented in this book has shed fresh light on the survival of West Africa-based globalisation at least up to 1850, particularly in the post-abolition period. This trans-oceanic linkage was originally established by the Portuguese maritime enterprise in the sixteenth century, followed by other European traders in the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth century, along with the rise and development of the Atlantic economy. The core of this regional economy was the transatlantic slave trade, and the purchase of African slaves in Atlantic Africa depended to a great degree on the supply of textiles, among which Indian cotton goods played a pivotal role throughout most of the eighteenth century. Indian weavers skilfully produced cotton textiles of various colours and patterns that catered for the changeable tastes of African consumers, and thus European merchants struggled to procure these hand-woven products in South Asia. As Chapter 4 has shown, their procurement depended on a variety of local factors, particularly the performance of weavers. Cowries from the Maldives, similar to textiles, functioned as money in transactions on West African coasts. The import of these Asian goods by sea suggests that West African influence, represented by consumer demand and the mode of local transaction, extended beyond the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean world, with European middlemen during the heyday of the Atlantic slave trade. Therefore, the notion of the ‘triangular trade’ is not sufficient to explain the development of the early modern Atlantic economy.31

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Then, what became of this south-south economic linkage after the abolition of the slave trade? The prevailing account of modern economic history explains that, as a consequence of the British Industrial Revolution and subsequent diffusion of industrialisation into continental Europe and the United States, the West exported cheap manufactured goods to and imported raw materials from the non-West regions. Such a pattern of global trade led to an income gap between the rich West and the poor non-West. This kind of explanation is based on the core-periphery model of the global economy.32 However, the reality was more complex. What the south-south economic linkage presented in this book shows is that the West African consumer taste for quality textiles continued to shape a pattern of global trade and production even after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. It must be remembered that, despite the fact that the British exported increasing amounts of cheap machine-made Lancashire goods to many parts of coastal West Africa, the central role played by Indian guinées in the gum trade along the Senegal River was never replaced by European copies and counterfeits—not at least until the mid-nineteenth century. Given that gum arabic from the region was still required by the manufacturing sector in Western Europe, it was crucial for guinées to be produced in India and brought into Senegal during that period. As such, this south-south economic linkage mattered in the development of modern manufacturing in Western Europe, and thereby in the emergence of the modern global economy. The fundamental problem with the core-periphery model is that it tends to obscure agencies in the non-West regions, and thereby it ignores the ‘multi-dimensionality of global integration’ in the modern world.33 The south-south economic history discussed in this book does not simply focus on the global significance of West African consumer demand for South Asian textiles during the transitional phase into the modern period, but also reveals the breakdown of consumer agency, namely what motivated consumers to crave Indian cotton textiles. As we have seen in Chapter 3, local consumers along the Senegal River, as well as in the Sahara Desert, preferred Indian textiles in terms of quality, particularly their colour and smell, which European textiles could not match. Preference for Indian guinées had been shaped by local textile production and trade traditions in precolonial West Africa, where domestic indigo-dyed cloth had long been popular and used as money. Indigo-dyed textiles had also been valued among these consumers. The dark-blue colour of the textiles suited life in the savannah, the Sahel

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and the desert, where people were exposed to relentless sun and desert wind. Meanwhile, in the local African context, wearing dyed textiles had a social significance: it was a sign of luxury. The natural environment and the local industry also need to be considered in order to explain what conditioned the inflow of Indian guinées that served as a new currency in the regional trade in Senegal. Droughts that hit the region appeared to have hampered the regional handicraft industry, creating conditions that favoured the importation of guinées from India, as resource endowments limited the capacity for local producers to meet demand. In addition, the geographical location of Saint Louis of Senegal and the French trade institution shaped the trade route of guinées into the Senegal River. Hence, such consumer demand for Indian-produced dyed cloth—shaped not only by local textile production tradition but also by social and ecological factors—determined a part of the global trade networks that extended from West Africa through Western Europe and reached South Asia in the first half of the nineteenth century. What has become of this south-south economic history in the age of colonialism still calls for further research.34 It should be noted that Indian textiles were not the sole example of the south-south economic linkage. Cowries from the Maldives Islands were another example. As for British trade, the south-south economic linkage represented by Indian textiles appears to have weakened owing to the development of the Lancashire cotton industry. However, as we have seen above, cowries functioned as small change in precolonial West Africa, and the shell money played a big role in the participation of small-scale cash-crop producers in ‘legitimate’ commerce in the nineteenth century. Figure 2.8 shows that the import of cowries from Britain into West Africa dropped immediately after the British withdrawal from the slave trade in 1807. But it soon resumed in accord with the growth of palm oil trade and in the 1830s outnumbered the scale of the previous century. The volume of cowries in the early 1840s tripled that of the early 1780s, the peak of the British cowrie imports into West Africa during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Considering the important contribution by palm oil and groundnuts to the economy and society in industrialising Western Europe, it would be fair to say that, although the Industrial Revolution enabled British machine-made cottons to replace Indian handicraft products and thereby weakened the south-south connection of Indian textiles, the Industrial Revolution and the growth of ‘legitimate’ commerce aided the strengthening of the south-south

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economic linkage of cowries from the Indian Ocean at least until the 1850s. This continuity of cowrie trade was rooted in the trade tradition in precolonial West Africa, where cowries had long been used as one of the major currencies. In summary, a globalising, yet region-based economic activity originated from West Africa, extended into South Asia via Europe during the period of the Atlantic slave trade and survived in the following period of ‘legitimate’ commerce. The earlier processes were not necessarily ‘all aborted’ due to the slave trade, which would probably decrease productivity and human capital within West Africa. Instead, in this book I argue that external demand for African slaves and tropical products would encourage West Africa’s globalisation to reach as far as South Asia through the nineteenth century. Thus, early modern European maritime enterprise, or the Western Europe-originated globalisation, contributed to linking the globalisation of West Africa with South Asia. Such interactions between two different region-based globalising economies, based on intersecting demand for labour and foreign commodities, as evident in nineteenth-century East Africa and East Asia, created an infrastructure not only for the development of the Atlantic economy but also for the emergence of the modern global economy.

Notes





1. W. A. Lewis, Aspects of Tropical Trade 1883–1913 (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1969); W. A. Lewis, ed., Tropical Development 1880–1913: Studies in Economic Progress (Surrey: George Allen & Unwin, 1970); W. A. Lewis, The Evolution of the International Economic Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), Chapter 10. 2.  Jeffrey G. Williamson, Trade and Poverty: When the Third World Fell Behind (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2011), Chapter 3. 3. Unlike Williamson, who focused on commodity terms of trade, for example, Kohei Wakimura revisits Lewis’s discussion on factorial terms of trade, which could be a key in explaining the historical origin of divergence between the temperate and tropical regions of the world. Kohei Wakimura, ‘Exports of Primary Products and Labour Supply in Tropical Asia during the 19th Century: From the Perspective of “Factorial Terms of Trade” Thesis’, paper presented at the XVIIIth World Economic History Congress, MIT on 31 July 2018. 4. A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (London: Longman, 1973), p. 132; David Eltis and Laurence C. Jennings, ‘Trade between

206  K. KOBAYASHI











Western Africa and the Atlantic World in the Pre-colonial Era’, American Historical Review 93/4 (1988): 939–44. 5. Ewout Frankema, Jefferey Williamson, and Pieter Woltjer, ‘An Economic Rationale for the West African Scramble? The Commercial Transition and the Commodity Price Boom of 1835–1885’, Journal of Economic History 78/1 (2018): 231–67. For an influential view on the partition of Africa in a non-economic context, see Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1961). 6. Calculated from Martin Lynn, Commerce and Economic Change in West Africa: Palm Oil Trade in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 13, 113. 7. Giovanni Federico and Antonio Tena-Junguito, ‘Lewis Revisited: Tropical Polities Competing on the World Market, 1830–1938’, Economic History Review 70/4 (2017): 1244–67. 8. Lynn, Commerce, Chapter 5. 9. Hopkins, Economic History, pp. 124–35. 10. Melville H. Watkins, ‘A Staple Theory of Economic Growth’, Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 29/2 (1963): 141–58. 11. Kaoru Sugihara, Ajiakan boeki no keisei to kozo [Patterns and Development of Intra-Asian Trade] (Kyoto: Minerva Shobo, 1996); Kaoru Sugihara, ‘Japan as an Engine of the Asian International Economy, c. 1880–1936’, Japan Forum 2/1 (1990): 127–45. 12. As for the case of sub-Saharan Africa, the most recent, important work is by Gareth Austin. Gareth Austin, ‘Labour-Intensity and Manufacturing in West Africa, c. 1450–c. 2000’, in Gareth Austin and Kaoru Sugihara, eds., Labour-Intensive Industrialization in Global History (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 201–30; Gareth Austin, Ewout Frankema, and Morten Jerven, ‘Patterns of Manufacturing Growth in Sub-Saharan Africa: From Colonization to the Present’, in Kevin Hjortshøj O’Rourke and Jeffrey Gale Williamson, eds., The Spread of Modern Industry to the Periphery Since 1871 (Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 345–73. 13. John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, Economic History Review 6/1 (1953): 1–15. Citation from page 3. 14. Gallagher and Robinson, ‘Imperialism’, 13. 15. D. C. M. Platt, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade: Some Reservations’, Economic History Review 21/2 (1968): 296–306; D. C. M. Platt, ‘Further Objections to an “Imperialism of Free Trade”, 1830–60’, Economic History Review 25/1 (1973): 77–91; W. M. Mathew, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade: Peru, 1820–70’, Economic History Review 21/3 (1968): 562–79; P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism

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1688–2015 (Third Edition, London and New York: Routledge, 2016), Chapter 9. 16. Martin Lynn, ‘British Policy, Trade, and Informal Empire in the MidNineteenth Century’, in Andrew Porter, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 3: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 118–20. Citation from page 120. 17. Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008), 60. 18. Prestholdt, Domesticating the World; Jeremy Prestholdt, ‘The Fabric of the Indian Ocean World: The Reflection on the Life Cycle of Cloth’, in Pedro Machado, Sarah Fee, and Gwyn Campbell, eds., Textile Trades, Consumer Cultures and the Material Worlds of the Indian Ocean: An Ocean of Cloth (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 385–96; Jeremy Prestholdt, ‘Clothing Empires: Japanese Industry, British Colonial Policy, and East African Consumer Culture, 1920–1941’, presented at the international symposium ‘Textile Pattern Designs in the Global Entanglement: Katagami, Batik, Sarasa and “African Prints” on the Move, 1800–2000’, Ritsumeikan University on 21 October 2017. See also Pedro Machado, Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa and the Indian Ocean c. 1750–1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2014); Katharine Frederick, ‘Deindustrialization in East Africa: Textile Production in an Era of Globalization and Colonization, c. 1830–1940’ (PhD dissertation, Wageningen University, 2018), pp. 84–5. 19.  As for Africa in the global economy, see, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa (Oxford University Press, 2007); Frederick Cooper, ‘Africa and the World Economy’, African Studies Review 24/2–3 (1981): 1–86; Frederick Cooper, ‘Africa in World History’, in J. R. McNeill and Kenneth Pomeranz, eds., The Cambridge World History, Vol. VII: Production, Destruction, and Connection, 1750–Present, Part I: Structures, Spaces, and Boundary Making (Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 556–84; Joseph C. Miller, ‘Presidential Address: History and Africa/Africa and History’, American Historical Review 104/1 (1999): 1–32; Joseph E. Inikori, ‘Africa and the Globalization Process: Western Africa, 1450–1850’, Journal of Global History 2/1 (2007): 63–86; Gareth Austin, ‘The “Reversal of Fortune” Thesis and the Compression of History: Perspectives from African and Comparative Economic History’, Journal of International Development 20 (2008): 996–1027; A. G. Hopkins, ‘The New Economic History of Africa’, Journal of African History 50/2 (2009): 155–77; Gwyn Campbell, ‘Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the “Early Modern”: Historiographical Conventions and Problems’, in Toyin Falola and Emily Brownell, eds.,

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Africa, Empire and Globalization: Essays in Honor of A. G. Hopkins (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2011), pp. 81–92; Toby Green, ‘Africa and the Price Revolution: Currency Imports and Socioeconomic Change in West and West-Central Africa during the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of African History 57/1 (2016): 1–24; Patrick Manning, ‘Africa: Slavery and the World Economy, 1700–1870’, in Stephen Broadberry and Kyoji Fukao, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of the Modern World, Vol. 1 (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 20.  I got the idea for this phrase from personal communication with the late Professor Sir Christopher Bayly at the Truckles of Pied Bull Yard in London on 10 December 2014. 21.  Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, ‘Introduction: Global Economic History, 1500–2000’, in Tirthankar Roy and Giorgio Riello, eds., Global Economic History (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 1–15. 22. Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giraldez, ‘Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity Through the Mid-Eighteenth Century’, Journal of World History 13/2 (2002): 391–427. See also Alejandra Irigoin, ‘The New World and the Global Silver Economy, 1500–1800’, in Roy and Riello, eds., Global Economic History, pp. 271–86, for the global significance of American silver. 23. Jan de Vries, ‘The Limits of Globalization in the Early Modern World’, Economic History Review 63/3 (2010): 710–33. 24. Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, ‘When Did Globalisation Begin?’ European Review of Economic History 6/1 (2002): 23–50. 25.  Inikori, ‘Africa’; Tirthankar Roy and Giorgio Riello, ‘Trade and the Emergence of a World Economy, 1500–2000’, in Roy and Riello, eds., Global Economic History, p. 145. 26.  For example, see A. G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History (London: Pimlico, 2002), especially the chapters by Hopkins and C. A. Bayly. 27. C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). 28. Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350 (Oxford University Press, 1989). 29. Inikori, ‘Africa’, 85. 30. Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London and Dares-Salaam: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications and Tanzanian Publishing House, 1973); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730– 1840s (New York: Academic Press, 1989). 31. See also Giorgio Riello, Cotton: The Fabric That Made the Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 148.

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32. Williamson, Trade and Poverty. 33. Prestholdt, Domesticating the World, p. 175. 34. One notable exception is Richard Roberts’s research. He shows that consumer demand for guinées in the upper Senegal River and the western Soudan maintained the south-south economic linkage in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. He also pointed out the direct inflow of guinées from Pondicherry into Senegal after the 1864 tariff legislation that gave merchants the right to import South Asian textiles directly into Senegal. Richard Roberts, ‘West Africa and the Pondicherry Textile Industry’, in Tirthankar Roy, ed., Cloth and Commerce: Textiles in Colonial India (New Delhi: Sage, 1996), pp. 142–74. In her recent work, Toyomu Masaki attempted to challenge Roberts with the claim that ‘there was no direct link between the colonies of Pondicherry and Senegal’ throughout the nineteenth century. However, we must admit that this assertion misrepresents history. Toyomu Masaki, ‘The Export of Indian Guinées to Senegal via France: Intra-colonial Trade in the Long Nineteenth Century’, in Tomoko Shiroyama, ed., Modern Global Trade and the Asian Regional Economy (Singapore: Springer, 2018), p. 110.

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Archival Sources France Archives Départementales de la Gironde (Bordeaux) 8M13 Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer (Aix-en-Provence) Inde 494, Dossier 865 Inde 494, Dossier 871 Inde 534, Dossier 1000 Inde 534, Dossier 1002 Inde 537, Dossier 1034 Sénégal XIII, Dossier 1 Sénégal XIII, Dossier 2 Sénégal XIII, Dossier 3c Sénégal XIII, Dossier 25 Sénégal XIII, Dossier 27a Sénégal XIII, Dossier 33a India Tamil Nadu State Archives (former Madras Record Office, Chennai) South Arcot 100/18464 South Arcot 109/18473 South Arcot 110/18474 South Arcot 113/18477 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 K. Kobayashi, Indian Cotton Textiles in West Africa, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18675-3

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Online Database The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database: Voyages (http://www.slavevoyages.org/).

Index

A Abolition of slavery; British (1833), 165; French (1848), 176, 184 of slave trade, 43, 199, 203; British (1807), 32, 37, 39, 41–43, 59, 66, 143, 154, 165, 166, 168, 171, 186, 204; French (1818), 176, 177; French (1831), 32, 46, 88 Abu-Lughod, Janet, 202 Acemoglu, Daron, 4 the Active, 169 active consumer, 5 Aden, 106 advance system, 135, 136, 139 Afghanistan, 7 Africa, 1, 199 Atlantic, 6, 9, 13, 53, 55, 58, 65, 168, 202 East, 8, 14, 65, 106, 199–201, 205 North, 33, 44, 65, 79, 94, 99, 103 South of the Sahara, 2, 12, 29 sub-Saharan, 4, 31, 106, 172

West-Central, 6, 9, 32, 37, 55, 101, 168 African economic history, 3, 4, 42, 110 renaissance of, 4 agency African, 2–4, 197, 201 consumer, 5, 195, 200, 203 Eurocentrism of, 5 European, 3 agency house, 138, 139, 147 age of revolutions, 1, 5, 165–167, 186, 195 agriculture, 15, 31, 42, 93, 110, 137, 144 Albreda, 99 alcohol, 6, 30, 100, 179 L’Alexander, 148 alkali, 185 Allard Law, 175 almami, 34, 35, 71 Alpern, Stanley, 9 aluminium, 147

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 K. Kobayashi, Indian Cotton Textiles in West Africa, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18675-3

241

242  Index America, 2, 9, 29, 31–33, 43, 104, 129, 133, 144, 165, 166, 168, 175, 201 Latin, 1, 172, 197, 199 Meso-America, 7 North, 1, 6, 8, 9 See also United States (US) American Revolution, 9, 166 Ames, David, 87, 108 Amin, Samir, 3 Andhra Coast, 132 Anglo-Mysore Wars, 138, 142 Angola, 38, 54, 73, 173 animism, 97 Annamaboe, 58 Anomabu, 173 Aquaronne fils, 185 Arabia, 44, 97 Arabs, 8 Arani, 145 Arasaratnam, Sinnappah, 141 Arbuthnot, George Clark, 149 Arcot North, 130 South, 130, 133 Arguin, 44 aridification, 35, 44, 110, 111 Armenian merchants, 7 Arrêté 16 April 1842, 183 18 December 1843, 152 19 March 1830, 149 Asante, 35, 42, 101 Asia, 1, 201 Central, 7 East, 4, 205 Southeast, 4, 8, 42, 63, 138, 145, 197 South, 7, 13, 82, 84, 201, 204. See also India Aspinall family James, 168, 172

John, 168, 172 Sarah, 172 William, 168, 173 assortment bargaining, 52, 105 Atlantic, 5–7, 31, 34, 45, 88, 107, 171, 202 Atlantic economy, 2, 4, 9, 13, 17, 29, 127, 202, 205 Atlantic slave trade, 1–6, 12, 13, 16, 29, 31, 33, 35, 41, 49, 52, 65, 66, 68, 69, 82, 100, 102, 104, 109, 127, 128, 132, 134, 137, 141, 143, 167–170, 172, 174–176, 186, 198, 202–205 auction in Jamaica, 171 in London, 168 in Lorient, 174 aumany system, 139–142, 154 Austin, Gareth, 4, 5, 31, 42, 98, 101 Australia, 198 B Bachelier, M.L., 176 Bakel, 88, 185 Bamenda plain, 43 Banjara, 131 Baramahal, 130 Barry, Boubacar, 3, 35 Barth, Heinrich, 37 basso, 50 Bathurst, 51 Battle of Plassey, 138 Bawol, 50 Bayly, C.A., 6 Bay of Bengal, 130 Beads, 6, 99, 100 the Bedford, 169–171 Beeswax, 50, 99, 179 Al-Bekri, 98 Bello, Muhammad, 36, 37

Index

Bengal, 7–9, 129, 133, 134, 137–139, 144, 147, 154, 160 Benguela, 6 Benue River, 65 Berg, Maxine, 8 Berlin Decree, 140, 171 Bianchi, Marina, 5 Bidan, 84 Bight of Benin, 38, 40, 41, 54, 55, 65, 101 Bight of Biafra, 32, 38–41, 43, 55, 65, 101, 169, 198 Binny, John, 139 birds of paradise, 8 Black Power movement, 3 Blin, 147–150, 152, 154 Board of Trade (English East India Company), 134, 137, 140 Boilat, David, 15, 84 Bologna, 168 Bolton, John, 168 Bombay, 129, 134, 137 Bonny, 39, 40, 169, 173, 186 Bordeaux, 14, 63, 106, 112, 148, 174–186 Borelli, Jérôme, 181 Bouët-Willaumez, Édouard, 182 Bourgerel, 177 Bowdich, Thomas Edward, 50 Bowen, Huw, 129 Brakna, 34, 35, 84, 89, 92, 103, 107, 111, 117, 182, 183 Brancker, P.W., 168 Brazil, 6, 32, 50 Brennig, Joseph, 131 Brereton, Thomas, 46 Bristol, 41, 167, 172 Britain, 1, 9, 13, 14, 30, 32, 38, 39, 45, 46, 50, 51, 55, 59, 62, 66, 81, 127, 128, 132, 134, 137, 138, 140, 142–144, 147, 151, 154, 155, 166, 168, 171, 174,

  243

176, 186, 188, 196, 197, 199, 200, 204 British cotton textiles, 16, 30, 31, 53, 58, 59, 81, 144, 147, 200 British manufactured goods, 2 calicoes, 54, 55, 68 chellows, 11 imports from Britain to West Africa, 54 Lancashire cotton goods, 6, 10, 106, 198, 203 muslins, 54, 55 niccanees, 11 British Empire, 199 Buhan et Teisseire, 179 Burma, 198 Butel, Paul, 176 C Calcutta, 129 Cameroons, 39 Camwood, 60 Canada, 198 Candido, Mariana, 6 candle, 29, 38, 197 Candotti, Marisa, 102 Cape Coast Castle, 54, 55, 58, 60, 67, 101, 170, 171. See also Gold Coast Cape of Good Hope, 54, 55, 60 Cape Verde Islands, 54, 97 Caravan, 65, 92, 94, 131 Caribbean, 6, 9, 46, 50, 165, 171– 176, 186 Carnatic Wars, 138, 142 Case, George, 168, 169, 173 cash-crop, 1, 44, 51, 59, 197, 198, 204 revolution, 42 Ceded Districts, 131 cereal, 33

244  Index Chambers of Commerce, 183 Chandernagore, 130 charka, 145 Charter Act of 1813, 167, 174, 186 Chaudhuri, Kirti, 7, 129 Chay root, 132 China, 1, 5, 8, 106, 138, 199 Chinese Seas, 8 Chingleput, 130, 135 circuit (for money), 105, 106, 109 cloth currency, 60, 82, 97, 103, 105–112 cloth strips, 102, 103, 105–108 coal, 1 coal gas, 197 coffee, 6, 8, 138, 171, 174 Cohen, Raphaël, 181 Coimbatore, 131, 132, 145 Comité de Bienfaisance, 146 commerçants, 176 Commercial Residents (English East India Company), 134, 137, 140, 142 Commission des comptoirs et du commerce des côtes d’Afrique, 184 Compagnie du Sénégal, 177 Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, 46, 58, 168. See also Royal African Company compression of history, 4 compromis in 1841, 90, 105 Congo, 39 Congo River, 173 Congress of Vienna, 175 conspicuous consumption, 87, 99, 102, 111 consumer demand, 11, 200, 202, 204, 209 consumers African, 2, 68, 133, 200, 202 British, 8 European, 6, 8, 9, 133, 134

West African, 2, 7, 14, 17, 155 consumption, 11, 43, 107, 141 patterns, 6 Cooper, Frederick, 5 copdar, 135, 141 copies and counterfeits, 10, 81, 84, 111, 112, 180, 203 copper, 99, 102, 103, 138 coral, 99 core, 1, 196 core-periphery model, 201, 203. See also Wallerstein, Immanuel; world-system Cornwallis, Charles, 138 Coromandel Coast, 7, 82, 128–130, 132, 135, 137, 141, 144, 150 Cotton, 35, 37, 97, 102, 147, 174 cleaning, 145 cultivation (in India), 130 gossypium herbaceum, 119 gossypium nanking, 130 gossypium punctatum, 119 nadam, 130 two distinct centres of production in West Africa, 96 in West Africa, 96, 98 cotton textiles, 9, 10, 30, 95, 134, 140, 144, 150, 151, 198 origins in West Africa, 96 produced in Kano, 99 produced in Pondicherry, 145 produced in Senegambia, 107 produced in West Africa, 99 production in Pondicherry, 149 for West Africa, 132 country cloth, 108 country trade, 138 Court of Directors (English East India Company), 134 cowrie shells, 9, 13, 16, 29–31, 37, 43, 64, 65, 68, 102, 103, 123, 197, 198, 202, 204

Index

as ballast, 8, 65 British shipping of, 66 cypraera moneta, 64 depression in imports from Britain to West Africa, 67 origin of shell money in the Central Soudan, 65 palm oil-cowrie exchange, 68 revival of imports from Britain, 67 small change, 68 credit, 89, 109, 135 Cross River, 41, 43 Cruickshank, Brodie, 67 Cuddalore, 15, 132–134, 137, 140–143, 146, 157 currency, 64, 65, 81, 102, 105, 109 Curtin, Philip, 3, 10, 104, 105, 109 D da Gama, Vasco, 8 Dagana, 36, 88 Dahomey, 35, 43, 185 Data Revolution, 4 Davis, Ralph, 13, 14 Debhol, 132 Deccan plateau, 131, 132 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, 175 Décret of 17 January 1852, 152 Decrouy, A., 148 Delbruck, 147–150, 154, 180 Delcourt, André, 45 de Maisonneuve, Magnier, 183, 184 demand, 6, 11, 14, 37, 197, 201 for African slaves, 205 for blue goods, 140 for British textiles (in West Africa), 200 for candle, 197 for cotton cloth (in West Africa), 96

  245

for cowrie shells (in West Africa), 80, 198 for groundnuts (in Europe), 51 for guinées (in Senegal), 82, 84, 87, 103, 111, 112, 125, 201, 209 for gum arabic (in Europe), 49 for Indian cotton goods (for slave trade), 132 for Indian cotton textiles (for the West African trade), 143 for Indian cotton textiles (in Senegal), 81 for Indian cotton textiles (in West Africa), 10, 16, 59, 129, 140, 143, 186, 195 for Indian goods (in the West Indies), 143 for Indian textiles, 2, 142 for Indian textiles (in Senegal), 29, 200 for Indian textiles (in the Atlantic world), 137 for Indian textiles (in West Africa), 12, 13, 17, 134, 166 for indigo-dyed textiles (in Senegambia), 110 for indigo-dyed textiles (in West Africa), 153 for labour, 205 for labour (in Senegal), 49 for labour (in the Americas), 31 for labour (in West Africa), 37 for labourers (in the Americas), 6 for olive oil (in Southern Europe), 185 for palm oil (in Britain), 38, 41, 68 for primary products (in the West), 198 for provisions and other necessities (in West Africa), 199 for slave labour (in West Africa), 43

246  Index for slaves in the palm oil production, 37 for South Asian fabrics (in West Africa), 12 for South Asian textiles (in West Africa), 203 for the Atlantic trade, 34 for tropical products, 196, 205 from the European East India Companies, 133 De Mélay, 149 Denyanke, 35 dependency theory, 3, 4, 197, 202 d’Erneville, Marianne, 179 Desbassayns de Richemont, Eugéne, 146, 147, 154 Désiré-Vuillemin, Geneviève, 92 Devangas, 145 Devès family Bruno, 177, 179 Éduard, 179 Justin, 177, 179 de Vries, Jan, 201 dextrin, 15, 47 dhow, 8 Dike, Kenneth Onwuka, 3 Dindigul, 130 drought in Senegambia, 124 in South India, 131 in West Africa, 35, 39, 48, 110, 204 Duboy, Edouard, 148 Duchon-Doris Jr., J.-P., 63, 64, 86, 148 Durant brothers, 179 Duranton, 105 Duréc, Nicolas, 177 Dutch Republic. See Netherlands dyeing, 85, 142, 147, 148, 151 in Kano, 37, 102 in Pondicherry, 147, 150 modernisation in Pondicherry, 146 Dyulas, 97–99

E Eastern Ghats, 130 East India Company Dutch, 133, 158 English, 15, 16, 86, 127, 129, 130, 133–144, 146, 154, 161, 166–169, 186 French, 145, 174 economic development, 2, 37, 65, 195, 196, 199 capital-intensive, 1 economic growth, 4, 8, 197, 199 The Economist, 4 Efik, 41, 101 electricity, 197 Elem Kalabari, 39 Eltis, David, 31, 196 endowment, 31, 39, 97, 110, 196, 204 England, 9 Ephraim, Duke, 173 escale des Darmancours, 92 escale du Coq, 92 escale du Désert, 92 escales, 88–94, 105, 107, 117, 177, 179, 182–185 Eurasia, 202 Eurocentrism, 5 Europe Central, 24 continental, 1, 140, 168 Northern, 171 North-western, 8, 10 Southern, 185 Western, 2, 3, 13, 16, 39, 46, 51, 82, 84, 87, 111, 127, 204 F Fallofield, Ernest William, 137 famine in India, 142 in Madras, 137

Index

in Senegambia, 124 in West Africa, 35, 44, 110 Fanon, Franz, 3 Al-Fatack, 93 Féraud and Honorat, 185 final demand linkage effect, 198 findo, 50 firearms, 90, 138 First World War, 196 flour, 175 Flynn, Dennis, 201 Forbes, Frederick, 52, 68 formalists, 103 Fort St. George, 86, 133, 134, 140, 143. See also Board of Trade Fort William, 134 Foster and Smith, 50 four Asian tigers, 5 France, 9, 13–15, 30, 32, 45–47, 51, 53, 62–64, 84, 86, 88, 89, 92, 107, 109, 111, 128, 145, 146, 150, 151, 154, 155, 171, 174, 176, 177, 179–185, 196 Frank, Andre Gunder, 3 Frankema, Ewout, 196 French Antilles, 175, 177 French Revolution, 16, 165, 175 French Revolutionary Wars, 140, 141 Fulbe/Fulfulbe, 36 fustians, 9, 54, 55 Fuuta Bundu, 34–36 Fuuta Jalon, 34–36 Fuuta Toro, 34–36, 49, 50, 84, 87 G Gajaaga, 49 Gallagher, John, 199 Gallinas, 52 Galos, Joseph Henri, 183, 184 Gambia, 13, 15, 38, 46, 50–52, 54, 55, 58, 87

  247

Gambia River, 30, 50–52, 96 Ganjam, 130 Garonne River, 175 Gautier, Jean-Elie, 183, 184 General Council (in Senegal), 180 Germany, 26, 170, 175, 196 Ghana Empire, 65 ghost money, 105 Giraldez, Arturo, 201 Glasgow, 168 global economic history, 17, 201 global economy, 1, 2, 7, 12, 13, 17, 195, 201, 203, 205 global history, 1–5, 195, 199–201 globalisation, 12, 17, 29, 201, 202, 205 Goa, 132 Gobir, 37 Godavari Delta, 130, 131 Godavari River, 130, 135 Godefroy, Thomas, 146 Golberry, S.M.X., 44, 84, 86 Golconda, 133 gold, 8, 50, 88, 102, 103, 105, 123, 171 Gold Coast, 39, 40, 42, 54, 58, 84, 171, 173 Gollapudi, 132 Gonfreville, Michael, 146 Gorée, 45, 46, 89, 177, 180 gourmets, 90 Grandis family, 175 grands négociants, 176 Gray, John, 51 great divergence, 1, 196 Green, Toby, 5 Gregson family, 173 Gréterin, 183, 184 groundnuts, 16, 29–31, 50, 52, 60, 68, 179, 185, 198, 204 in the United States, 51 in Western Europe, 51

248  Index migrant labourers; strange farmers, 51 used to produce soap, 51 Guinea, 82, 185 Guinea-Bissau, 35 Guinea-Conakry, 35 guinées, 10, 15, 16, 30, 63, 79, 81, 82, 84, 86–90, 92–95, 103–113, 127, 129, 145, 150–153, 155, 159, 166, 177–183, 186, 187, 193, 203, 204 akhal, 94, 103 baysa, 94 conjons, 82 consumption patterns of, 84 exchange medium in the gum trade, 10, 15, 81, 86, 103, 107 filature, 82 indigo blue dye used for, 84 loose clothing of desert nomads, 84 major consumers in Senegal, 83 of uniform size, 86 opéapaléons, 82 over-supply of, 63, 182 pièce de guinée, 82 preference for the quality of, 84 price of, 63, 91 salem, 82 samples of, 15 smell of, 84–86 trade, 14 trade from France to Senegal, 178, 181 trade from Pondicherry to France, 150, 181 unit of account in the gum trade, 15 use-value, 84 Gujarat, 7, 8, 129 Gujarati merchants, 8 Gulf of Guinea, 52 gum arabic, 10, 15, 16, 29–31, 44, 52, 63, 68, 75, 81, 84, 87–89,

91, 93, 103–105, 107, 127, 145, 174, 179, 180, 185, 203 dyeing textiles in Western Europe, 13 export from Saint Louis, 46–48, 88, 91 export from Senegambia, 46 for papermaking, 30, 45 for printing of textiles, 45 grande traite, 90 gum fever, 46, 152, 180 gum trade, 45, 46, 49, 63, 136, 159, 177, 180, 181, 183, 184, 187 gum wars, 45 in dyeing textiles as a stiffener, 30 petite traite, 90 poor harvest, 92 price, 182 production of, 48 suppliers of, 81 gumastahs, 139 Guyer, Jane, 103 Gwandu, 37 H habitants, 49, 88–90, 93, 107, 179, 180, 182, 184 Haiti, 165, 176 Hardy, Georges, 45 harmattan, 48, 90, 93 hassani, 34, 92 Hassaniya, 34 Hausa, 37 Hausaland, 36, 97, 98 Hel-Hiebar, 93 hides, 50, 99, 179 Hinde, Thomas, 168 Hogendorn, Jan, 30, 66 Holland, Edward, 136, 140, 142 Holman, James, 150

Index

Hopkins, A.G., 3, 4, 31, 42, 44, 52, 98, 100, 196, 197 horse, 50, 96, 108 Horsfall and Tobin, 173 Horsfall family, 172 Charles, 173 I Ibibio, 41, 101 Idaw al-Hajj, 92 Igbo, 41, 43 Igboland, 38 imitation. See copies and counterfeits incentive, 8, 16, 117, 128, 141, 153, 154, 161 India, 1, 3, 7, 8, 13–16, 59, 63, 84, 86, 87, 103, 106, 109–111, 127– 129, 132–134, 137–139, 142, 146–148, 150–153, 166–168, 173, 177, 180, 181, 186, 198, 200, 203, 204 Northern, 7 South, 15, 16, 82, 86, 119, 128–137, 139, 140, 143–145, 153, 154, 158 Western, 8, 113, 132, 137, 158, 160 Indian cotton textiles, 4, 6–8, 11–14, 16, 26, 29–31, 53, 55, 58–60, 64, 68, 81, 85, 127, 128, 133, 136, 142–144, 153, 154, 166, 169, 173, 176, 186, 202–204 bafts, 9, 53, 132 bejutapaux, 170 blue cloths, 132, 136, 144 blue goods, 132–134, 140, 142– 144, 154 calicoes, 9, 11, 144 chellows, 9, 170 chintz, 9, 53, 170 consumption, 7, 81

  249

core production regions for foreign and overseas markets, 7 decline in the shipping from Britain to West Africa, 143 Guinea stuff, 170 handkerchiefs, 140 imports from Britain to West Africa, 59, 60, 161 imports into Senegal, 62 long cloth, 9, 133 muslins, 138 nicanees, 9, 170 painting, 7 pencilling, 7 plain, 138 price in London, 144 printing, 7 procurement of, 129, 137, 154 romals, 53, 143, 170 sallampores, 133, 140, 142, 145 shipping from Britain to West Africa, 166 Indian Ocean, 5, 7–9, 12, 16, 64, 68, 79, 129, 130, 176, 186, 198, 202, 205 Indian oils and fats, 197 Indian textile trade, 165 indigo, 6, 35, 37, 85, 86, 102, 124, 131, 137–139, 146, 147, 151, 171, 174 industrialisation, 1, 13, 51, 53, 68, 111, 127, 128, 196, 198, 200, 203 Industrial Revolution, 1, 2, 7, 12, 14, 69, 165, 204 informal empire, 199 Inikori, Joseph, 2, 10, 14, 30, 53, 54, 62, 100, 102, 202 institution, 4, 111, 176, 204 interface currency. See currency intra-African trade, 99 intra-Asian trade, 8, 138, 198

250  Index Ireland, 9, 26, 170 iron, 30, 58, 102, 105, 123 iron bar, 103–105, 109 Islam, 35, 97, 108, 117 Isnard, Jacques, 181, 185 Italy, 170 ivory, 8, 50, 99, 104, 145, 170, 171, 173, 179 Ivory Coast, 185 J Jalonke, 34 Jamaica, 170, 171 Japan, 8, 20, 138, 198, 200 Java, 198 J. Devès, Lacoste et Cie, 179 Jeng, Alieu, 51 Jenne, 96 Jennings, Lawrence, 196 jihad, 29–31, 33–37, 68, 71, 101, 165 John Palmer and Company, 167 Johnson, Marion, 12, 14, 30, 66, 98, 100, 104–106, 108 Jolof, 34 July Monarchy, 185 July Revolution, 180 K Kaarta, 105 Kaikkolars, 145 Kajoor, 34–36, 49, 50, 84, 87, 90 Kan, Abdul Kader, 35 Kanchipuram, 145 Kano, 37, 42, 98, 99, 101 Karamkho Alfa, 34 Kaveri River, 130 Kentworthy, John, 137, 140 Kinchant, Richard, 140, 141 Kingston (Jamaica), 168, 171 kola, 108

Kriger, Colleen, 96, 100, 102 Krishna River, 130 Kuroda, Akinobu, 105, 106, 109 L Labour division of labour by gender (in West Africa), 43 household division of labour (in West Africa), 97 low productivity (in West Africa), 31 opportunity cost (in West Africa), 98 Lake Chad, 36, 96 La Laure, 148 Lamb, P.H., 58 Lampbar, 36 Lancashire, 2, 6, 53, 58, 144, 154 land-abundance, 31, 110 Langue de Barbarie, 45, 88, 107 laptots, 90 Latham, A.J.H., 30, 101 Law, Robin, 67 Leblanc soda, 185, 186 ‘legitimate’ commerce, 1, 6, 15, 29, 37, 38, 43, 44, 52, 53, 58, 59, 65, 68, 69, 127, 166, 167, 172, 196, 198, 204, 205 Le Havre, 183 Lemire, Beverly, 11 Lewis, William Arthur, 196, 197 linens, 9 Lisbon, 168 Little Popo, 101 Liverpool, 39, 41, 167–169, 172, 173, 186, 187 Livorno, 168 Loango, 100, 123, 173 Lobligeois, Mireille, 86, 129, 150 logwood, 171 Loire River, 176

Index

London, 41, 50, 129, 134, 136, 137, 140, 144, 167–172, 174 Lorient, 145, 174 Lovejoy, Paul, 33, 36, 43, 65, 100, 102 Lugard, Frederick, 65 Lumley, Thomas, 166, 168–170, 172, 174, 186 luxury, 8, 87, 204 Lydon, Ghislaine, 84 Lynn, Martin, 30, 39, 170, 199 M mabo, 98 MacDonnell, Richard Graves, 52 machinery, 29, 197 Madras, 86, 129, 130, 133, 134, 137, 139, 140, 143, 144, 149 Madras Presidency, 135, 136, 141, 143, 144, 154 Madurai, 131, 145 maître de langue, 90 maize, 50 Malabar Coast, 130 Malaya, 198 Malay Archipelago, 8 Maldives, 31, 64, 65, 202, 204. See also cowrie shells Mali (Republic of Mali), 96 Mali Empire, 65 Malik Si, 34 Mallet family, 176 Mandinka, 51, 99 Manila, 201 Manning, Patrick, 14, 31 marabouts, 33, 34, 87 Marcson, Michael, 93 Maria Theresa dollar, 106 Marseille, 44, 51, 175–187 Martin, Phyllis, 99 Martin, Susan, 42, 43

  251

Marzagalli, Silvia, 176 Masulipatnam, 143 material culture, 6–8, 11 Maurel and Prom Company, 112, 177, 185, 191 Maurel family Emile, 180 Hilaire, 177, 180 Jean-Louis, 180 Marc, 177 Maures. See Bidan Mauritania, 34, 44, 45, 88 McLane, Margaret, 177, 182 Médine, 112 Mediterranean, 51, 185 medium of exchange, 52, 65, 81, 104, 109 the Méduse, 46 Merinaghen, 36 métis, 49, 88–90, 179 migrant labourers, 51, 198. See also groundnuts; Mandinka; Soninke; strange farmers Milan Decree, 171 millet, 34, 35, 50, 90, 91, 94, 98, 105 Minister of Agriculture and Commerce, 47 Minister of the Navy and the Colonies, 63, 146–148, 152, 179, 180 Mollan, William, 59 money complementarity, 105 general-purpose. See formalists special-purpose. See substantivists monsoon, 8, 130, 131 Moors. See Bidan Moreau, Jacob Nicholas, 11 morinda, 132 Mozambique, 37 mudarat, 92 Munro, J. Forbes, 3 Muslim, 29, 33, 35, 36, 48, 96, 98

252  Index Myint, Hla, 41, 42, 196 Mysore, 132 N Nagore, 15, 86, 133, 142, 143 Nagulvancha, 132 Nantes, 145, 174, 176, 183, 186 Napoleonic Wars, 16, 45, 46, 176, 186 narrow loom, 97, 98, 101, 108 horizontal, 97 vertical, 97 Nasir al-Din, 34 National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts, 147 natural disasters, 130, 142, 154 naval campaign, 37, 165 Navigation Acts, 46, 51 négociants, 176 Nellore, 132 Nembe, 38 Netherlands, 9 neutral flag, 171, 176 Newbury, Colin, 177, 178 Newson, Linda, 108 New York, 168 Ngwa, 42 Niger Delta, 172, 173, 186 Nigeria, 3 Niger River, 37, 38, 65, 96 nomadic emirates, 34, 48, 81, 84, 89, 94. See also Brakna; Trarza nomads, 33, 87, 92, 107. See also Bidan Northern Circars, 131 Nunn, Nathan, 4 O Oil palm (elaeis guineensis), 38 Old Calabar, 39–41, 101, 173, 186

olive, 51, 185 Olive, Roch, 181, 185 Olukoju, Ayodeji, 3 Opobo, 39 Order in Council of 1 November (1765), 46 O’Rourke, Kevin, 201 Ottoman Empire, 7, 199 Oyo Empire, 37 P pacte coloniale, 45, 47, 106 modified in 1832, 47 pagne, 98, 108 chigguya, 98 Palaur River, 130 palm kernel, 43 palm oil, 16, 29, 31, 37–39, 51, 52, 55, 58, 60, 67, 68, 172, 173, 185, 186, 197 fine Lagos, 39 free fatty acid (FFA), 38 hard, 38, 39 price, 40 producers, 43 production, 37, 43 soft, 38, 39 trade, 30, 41, 55, 65–69, 166, 197, 204 traders, 172 used as a lubricant, 29 Palvancha, 132 panos, 108 paraffin (Kerosene), 197 Paris, 63, 148 Parry, Thomas, 139 Parthasarathi, Prasannan, 130, 132, 133 Pasquier, Roger, 10 peasant, 130, 131 Pellegrin, 179

Index

Pellet, Jean, 175 Pennair Delta, 130 Pennair River, 130 peons, 139, 141 pepper, 8, 145 Perceval, Spencer, 172 periphery, 1, 2, 196, 200 Persia, 7 Persian Gulf, 8 Philadelphia, 177 P. Lacoste, 179 Plagne, Bernard, 147 plantation, 2, 9, 31, 37, 53, 175, 198 Podor, 36, 185 Polanyi, Karl, 103, 104 Pomeranz, Kenneth, 5 Pondicherry, 15, 16, 82, 86, 87, 106, 112, 127–130, 136, 141, 144–148, 150–154, 179–181, 183, 201, 209 porcelain, 8 Portal, Baron, 179 Portendick, 44 Portugal, 32 Portuguese, 8, 10, 13, 32, 44, 50, 65, 97, 99, 144, 202 Potin, 177 Poulain, Charlemagne, 148 Prakash, Om, 133 Prestholdt, Jeremy, 11, 200 Le Prince et Poulain, 148–150, 154 private traders, 138, 140, 142 Prom, Hubert (Jean-Louis-Hubert Prom), 177, 180 Prussian, 44 Punjab, 7, 129 putting out system, 135 Q Quernel, Germain, 49

  253

R raabu, 98 Rabaud brothers, 185 Rabeseyr, 109 Raichur Doab, 132 railway, 29, 38, 176, 197 rainfall, 39, 48, 130 raphia, 96, 101, 123 Ratcliff, Jonathan, 168 reciprocal comparison, 5 Red Sea, 8, 106 Régis brothers, 185 Louis, 181 Victor, 181, 184, 185 Réunion, 176 reversal of fortune thesis, 4 Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 141, 165, 175 rice, 6, 34, 35, 50, 136, 170, 198 Richardson, David, 6, 43, 59 Richardson, George, 58 Ridgway, Archibald, 68 Riello, Giorgio, 7 Roberts, Richard, 10, 129 Robinson, David, 36 Robinson, Ronald, 199 Rodney, Walter, 3, 100 Romberg, Friedrich, 175 Rönnbäck, Klas, 31 Ross, Gilbert, 136 Rothschild family, 176 Rotterdam, 136, 158 Rouen, 86, 146 Royal African Company, 46, 102, 168 Royal Manufacture of Goblins, 146 Royal Order (Ordonnance du Roi) 1 September 1843, 86, 152 15 November 1842, 184 18 May 1843, 86, 152 22 January 1852, 184 rum, 173

254  Index S Sahara Desert, 48, 65, 87, 88, 90, 94–96, 103, 107, 109–111, 203 Saint Domingue, 165, 175 Saint Hilaire, 149 Saint Louis, 33, 35, 44–46, 48, 49, 63, 88–90, 92–94, 106, 107, 111, 115, 177, 179, 180, 182–184, 204 geography around, 88 population, 49 Salem, 15, 82, 130, 132, 133, 142, 145 Saliyars, 145 salt, 90, 94, 99, 123 Savana Mills, 112 Schmaltz, Julien, 46 Schumpeter, Elizabeth, 13 Scotland, 9, 26, 139, 170 Scramble for Africa, 197 Searing, James, 45, 48, 49 La Sémaphore de Marseille, 182 Senegal, 10, 13–16, 29, 30, 44, 45, 47, 49, 50, 54, 62–64, 68, 81–84, 86–88, 90, 92, 106, 107, 127, 129, 152, 155, 177–179, 181, 182, 184–186, 203, 204 Sénégal et Dépendance, 36 Senegal River, 11, 13, 15, 16, 33, 34, 36, 44, 45, 48, 49, 63, 68, 81–84, 86, 87, 89–91, 93, 96, 103, 107, 110, 111, 127, 177, 180, 182, 184, 185, 187, 201, 203, 204 Senegambia, 3, 15, 31, 32, 34–36, 42, 44–46, 65, 97–99, 104, 107, 109, 110, 112, 136 Seniyars, 145 Senoudebou, 36 Seshan, Radhika, 133 Seven Years’ War, 45, 134 Shea, Phillip, 102

Siam, 198 Sierra Leone, 30, 32, 34, 35, 39, 51, 52, 54, 55, 58, 60, 144 signares, 89 silk, 8, 147 Silli, 98 silver, 8, 52, 102, 105, 106, 201 Sind, 7 Sine-Saloum, 50 slave, 31, 32, 34, 36, 37, 42–45, 52, 53, 67, 88–90, 93, 97, 99, 104, 108, 145, 170, 171, 174, 175, 184, 198 price, 43 slavery, 42, 49, 176, 184 slave traders, 41, 174 small change, 64, 105, 108, 173, 204 smell, 86, 203. See also guinées Smith, Adam, 41, 138 soap, 29, 38, 51, 185, 197. See also groundnuts, palm oil La Société Poulain, Duboy et Cie, 112, 149 Sohel, 93 Sokoto, 37 Sokoto Caliphate, 37, 43, 98, 101, 102, 198 Solimana, 34, 35 Songhay Empire, 37, 65 Soninke, 51 sorghum, 98 Sori, Ibrahima, 34, 35 soro, 108, 109 Soudan Central, 37, 64, 65, 68 Eastern, 97 Western, 87, 103, 112 south-south economic history, 2, 12, 16, 17, 165, 195, 202–204 south-south economic linkage, 10, 13, 16, 29, 68, 153, 186, 195, 203, 204

Index

Spain, 32 Spaniards, 201 spice, 8, 131, 145 spindle, 145 spinning in India, 145 in West Africa, 97 spinning mill (in Pondicherry), 148 staple theory, 197 steam machine, 150, 154 Steward, Henry, 101 store of value, 104, 107 strange farmers, 51–53. See also groundnuts; Mandinka; migrant labourers; Soninke substantivists, 103 Suez Canal, 197 sugar, 6, 9, 92, 138, 139, 173, 174, 176, 198 Sugihara, Kaoru, 198 Sulayman Baal, 35 Sunda Islands, 63 Sundström, Lars, 105 Superior Council, 145 Surat, 137, 145 Swarnalatha, Potkuchi, 141 Sweden, 170 Swindell, Kenneth, 51 Switzerland, 175 T tama, 108 Tanjore, 130 tariff in French Senegal in 1864, 209 in the United States in 1842, 51 in the United States in the late 1810s, 9 taste, 2, 5, 7, 8, 13, 16, 59, 99, 109, 111, 200, 202, 203 tea, 8, 92

  255

Teisseire family Albert, 179 Auguste, 179 textile production, 7 division of labour (in West Africa), 97 English investment in India, 140, 142–144 in India, 128, 133 in Pondicherry, 106, 146, 150, 154 in Senegal, 111 in South India, 130, 134, 154 in West Africa, 96, 109, 110, 203 organisation in South India, 135 spread in West Africa, 97, 108 technology (in West Africa), 96, 97 textiles, 6, 8, 9, 15, 95, 98, 99, 138 Theodoridis, Dimitrios, 31 Thioub, Ibrahima, 89 Thomas Tobin and Son, 173 Thornton, John, 4, 99 timber, 60, 144 Timbuktu, 96 tin, 8 Tinduf, 34 Tinnevelly, 131, 132 Tiruchirappalli, 145 tobacco, 6, 9, 30, 99, 100 Tobin family, 172 John, 41, 172 Patrick, 172 Thomas, 173 Torodbe, 34, 35 Tosh, John, 42 Trade Ounce, 104 traitants, 179, 182 transport revolution, 176, 196, 197 trans-Saharan trade, 99, 102 Trarza, 34, 36, 45, 49, 84, 89, 92, 103, 107, 111, 117, 182, 183 treaty of Paris (1763), 46 treaty of Paris (1783), 46

256  Index triangular trade, 202 Trichinopoly, 130 Tripoli, 99 tropical development, 195, 196 tropical trade, 196 Tuareg, 37, 99 Tukulor, 98 U ummah, 97 United States (US), 9, 50, 51, 170, 171, 176, 196, 198, 200, 203 unit of account, 66, 103–109 Upper Guinea, 60, 108, 109. See also Gambia; Senegambia; Sierra Leone Uruguay, 32 Uthman dan Fodio, 36, 37, 101 V Valentin, Durand, 184 vent-for-surplus theory, 42, 52, 196. See also Myint, Hla Verminck, Charles-Auguste, 185 Victorian era, 199 Vizagapatnam, 130, 141 Volta River, 54, 55, 60 von Bethmann, Johann Jacob, 175 W Waalo, 34, 36, 45, 46, 49, 84, 87, 90, 109, 96, 99, 101 Waalo-Waalo, 49 Wad Nun, 34 Walajapet, 132 Wales, 139, 170 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 3

warfare, 37, 48, 49, 176 Warri, 38 Watkins, Melville, 198 weavers African, 96, 99, 101 Indian, 2, 53, 202 in Pondicherry, 150 South Asian, 6 weaving in India, 131 in West Africa, 97, 98 modernisation in Pondicherry, 146 weaving machine, 148 weaving villages (in India), 15, 132, 134, 135, 139, 141 Webb, James, 10, 30, 48, 63, 107, 110 Weber, Jacques, 129 Wenman, Gilbert, 170, 171 Western Borno, 37 Western Ghats, 130 Williams, Eric, 2 Williamson, Jeffrey, 196, 201 Windward Coast, 32, 54 wine, 174, 175 Wolof, 87, 98, 108, 109 Woltjer, Pieter, 196 woollens, 9, 138 world-system, 3, 201, 202. See also Wallerstein, Immanuel Y Yoruba, 43 Z Zaria School, 3 zwaya, 92, 93