Nature's Evil

THREE

The Remains of Foreign Bodies

Anthropologists can’t agree about whether our ancient ancestors were omnivores or corpse eaters, or whether they preferred shellfish. It was later that people developed a taste for meat and for milk. Feeding an animal takes a lot of land, more than it takes to support a human being. But stock-rearing is less labour-intensive than arable farming. On the Mongolian steppe, two shepherds on horseback could look after a flock of 2,000 sheep. A Turkmen herdsman with an assistant could graze a herd of 800 bulls and cows. Hunting requires even less labour and, correspondingly, more land. In Europe, hunting remained a privilege of the aristocracy. The Austrian Hapsburgs were deeply attached to this strange pastime right up to the end; even during the First World War they numbered their hunting trophies in the thousands. If it is true that political power is defined by excess, a surfeit of the necessary, then collections of hunting trophies illustrate this thesis just as well as the harems of oriental sultans.

Meat

Animals are at the top of the food chain, and a calorie of meat was always more expensive than a calorie of plant food. In many cultures, the consumption of meat was a privilege of the elite. Meat was available for mass consumption only on rare occasions – that was the gift economy in action. Alcohol was consumed with the meat and the whole event was a feast – a communal release of physical and sexual energy.

All world religions, except for Zoroastrianism, surrounded meat eating with various prohibitions. In India, eating cows is forbidden; in the Middle East, pigs are banned; in the British Isles, dogs and horses are off the menu. Anthropologists theorise that these taboos follow the rule ‘edibility is inversely related to humanity’. 1 Some cultures consider horses to be close to humans and they aren’t eaten, while in other cultures cows have this status. Prolonged fasting – regular abstinence from meat and dairy products – was embraced by Catholicism and the Orthodox Church. Over a couple of thousand years, this practice has demonstrated that the plant-based diet is good for physical health.

Meat perishes quickly, which makes it unsuitable for long-distance trade. Drying, smoking or, alternatively, freezing meat commodified it. For centuries, the British Navy lived on salt beef and rum. This diet resulted in scurvy, which seamen thought was a severe form of seasickness. Farmers focused on hides and wool – they could be preserved and traded, and meat was eaten within the household. Once again, distance from the town was a crucial factor. Meat could be sold if a farm was close to the town, but every extra kilometre lowered the profit, especially if it had to be transported overland. Selling sausage and cheese made economic sense in places where they could be transported by water, preferably along a canal. An alternative was to drive live cattle to market, but that also entailed losses in proportion to the distance.

Haute cuisine was unknown in Europe until the fifteenth century. Asia was more advanced in this as in other matters of luxury. But Western Europe ate more meat than Eastern Europe, and much more than China. Depopulated by the plague, Europe in the Middle Ages was rich in meat. Herds of horned cattle were taken to Venice by boat from Dalmatia or driven overland to Germany from Hungary. One such herd might contain as many as 20,000 oxen. Naturally, only large towns could handle such quantities of perishable food. The upper classes ate more meat than the lower orders, and more meat was eaten in capital cities than in the provinces. In Paris in the sixteenth century, pork was considered as poor man’s food; merchants and noblemen preferred venison. By the crisis-ridden seventeenth century, meat consumption was lower but nevertheless remained at the level of an average of 20 kilograms per year. On the eve of the French Revolution, the average Parisian consumed three times as much meat as his average fellow countryman in the provinces. 2

Many states saw controlling the grain supply as their strategic aim, but it was rare for them to pay similar attention to meat. Robert Malthus considered dairy and beef herds a luxury. Land given over to cattle doesn’t produce more food but decreases supply. Following his lead, vegetarian activists calculated that the amount of food from an acre would increase tenfold if people moved from a carnivorous to a vegetarian diet; they called for pasture land to be turned over to arable farming. 3 But the sparsely populated lands of the New World offered unheard of opportunities for cattle grazing. At the end of the nineteenth century, millions of semi-wild cows and bulls roamed on the Argentinian plains. The only tradable parts were dressed hides. The gaucho ate the tongues and left the flayed corpses to the coyotes. All this changed thanks to the discoveries of Justus von Liebig.

The founder of organic chemistry, Liebig remembered the terrible year of 1816, when Europe didn’t see the sun because of the eruption of a volcano on a distant island in Asia; in Darmstadt, where he was born, people were on the verge of starvation. All his future work would be concerned with food and fertilisers. In 1847 Liebig invented a method of making a meat extract which he decanted into glass bottles; 30 kilos of meat produced a kilo of the extract, which was as thick as syrup and kept very well. 4 The first factory was built in Uruguay; the sales in Europe were healthy. Then Liebig invented the stock cube and a method of preserving meat in tins. Argentina and Uruguay underwent an unprecedented boom; European hospitals, armies and the poor got a new source of provisions. Then the Chicago slaughterhouses invented a way of freezing meat. Refrigerated units were put on rails or installed in the holds of ships. Later, smaller refrigerators for domestic kitchens were produced. Frozen meat transformed the lives of billions of people. A scarce and expensive resource, formerly available only to the elite, became an item of mass consumption. Such inventions fed the growing cities, engendered new flows of commodities, created new fortunes. It was only at this point that long-distance trade started to compete with local trade. In the 1930s two Swedish economists, Eli Heckscher and Bertil Ohlin, described this effect; the model they constructed used the old production factors of land, labour and capital and took long-distance trade into account. 5 However, the model didn’t include the costs of the new wonders of trade – the emissions from the burning of coal and the pollution from the packaging waste.

Vegetarianism

One particular part of the story of meat is abstinence from it. Jews refrained only from eating pork, but the Apostle Paul wrote to the Romans that Jesus advised against eating any meat. St Jerome thought that before the Flood people neither ate meat nor drank wine. During the Renaissance, vegetarianism was linked to the Pythagorean tradition, which promised dominance over nature and the immortality of the body. Following this, many freemasons abstained from meat. In the eighteenth century the most successful proponent of abstinence from meat-eating was the Italian doctor Antonio Cocchi, a fellow of the Royal Society and founder of the first Masonic lodge in Florence. Drawing on the experience of doctors and travellers, he was the first to show that scurvy was caused by sailors’ rations, which consisted of salted meat. The conquering of scurvy was one of the crowning achievements of the Enlightenment.

In the British Empire, vegetarianism was connected with Hinduism, which was often promoted by people returning from the colonies. John Holwell, a governor of Bengal, was a vegetarian. In retirement, he promoted vegetarianism and tried to prove that Hinduism was the root of Christianity. 6 Such vegetarianism was a manifestation of positive Orientalism, in which the centre – London and Manchester – imitated the periphery – India. In Europe, vegetarianism was considered an English fad. The first lifestyle movement, vegetarianism filtered down from the elite, captivating the middle classes and absorbing other new ideas. As one London newspaper wrote in 1878, ‘As a matter of fact, vegetarianism does seem somehow or other to be correlated to all sorts of strange “isms” … A vegetable solus eater is pretty sure to hold new and strange views on political economy, to be a member of the Society for Psychical Research, to dress in all wool clothing, to abjure the razor, or to wear soft and unsightly hats.’ 7 The Russians and Americans connected vegetarianism with the simple life, the rejection of luxury, and the love of nature. The popular sects – the Russian Khlysts, the American Shakers – didn’t eat meat. Henry Thoreau and Lev Tolstoy produced similar arguments in support of vegetarianism: meat was a symbol of luxury, lust and inequality between people. Vegetarianism was the subject of ideological battles and also a personal choice. There were notable vegetarians on both sides of the divide between good and evil – Shelley and Wagner, Gandhi and Hitler.

This debate gained another dimension in the twenty-first century. Meat and dairy products provide just 18 per cent of the global consumption of food calories, but their production creates 60 per cent of carbon emissions from agriculture. As a result, farm animals produce more emissions than come from the total of all kinds of transportation. Beef, for example, contributes only 3 per cent of the calories in the American diet, but emissions from cattle make up half of all agricultural emissions in the USA. Using up a great deal of oil and land, beef should be expensive, but agricultural subsidies halve its price in the consumer market. Governments are directly financing one of the main sources of pollution on the planet. If humanity gives up meat and milk, it will liberate three-quarters of the land currently taken up by agriculture. More water would become available as well: worldwide, cattle are responsible for a third of water consumption and more than half of water pollution. 8 The only chance of feeding the growing world population while at the same time reducing emissions is to make radical cuts (up to 40 per cent) in cattle farming in the countries of the Global North. This is a realistic goal: during the last fifty years the consumption of beef has already reduced by a third, in part thanks to the propaganda of vegetarian ‘cranks’.

Scientists don’t believe that animal protein has any advantages over plant protein, while its disadvantages are many: to produce a kilogram of protein from peas takes fifty times less land and creates twelve times fewer emissions than to produce it from cattle. If you become exclusively vegetarian, you will cut your personal contribution to the pollution of the planet more than if you give up flying or change your diesel car for an electric model. The transition to a vegan diet by all of humankind will not be cheap to achieve; but the world pays out half a trillion dollars a year in agricultural subsidies, and political will could employ this money for rebuilding agriculture. Scientists are proposing to do this gradually, by redirecting subsidies and introducing taxes on carbon emissions. Meat and milk will be treated like tobacco and alcohol, which are taxed at an especially high rate. Supermarket shelves are filled with plant alternatives to milk. Vegans are for the most part young people with university degrees, and it isn’t clear how veganism can turn into a mass movement. Getting people hooked on sugar, tea or opium was easier than getting them used to non-dairy milk and fresh vegetables (see chapter 4 ).

Fish

In 1784 the Massachusetts State House passed a resolution to install a wooden carving of a cod above the chamber, ‘as a memorial of the importance of the Cod-Fishery to the welfare of this Commonwealth’. The most important source of protein in colonial America, cod was irreplaceable as a food source for slaves on the sugar islands and Catholics during their fasts. The cod’s biology meant it could be caught in vast numbers, preserved and consumed. Each fish weighed 10 to 12 kilos or even more. Its muscular, non-oily flesh made it easy to dry, and it contained 80 per cent protein – much more than dried beef. Dried cod could be kept in a ship’s hold for years and transported anywhere in the world. Oily fish, such as herring, was not suitable for drying. It had to be smoked or pickled in brine, which meant it was heavier to transport or didn’t keep well.

The fishing technique was simple. Cod was caught using homemade tackle and bait consisting of fish guts from a previous catch. The stunned fish were split, generously salted and pegged out to dry in the sun and wind. This could be done right on deck, but large catches had to be landed and dried on the shore. Cod’s liver was dealt with separately. It produced oil that was used for greasing anchors and later for lubricating steam engines. In Italy and Spain, cod – baccala – is still considered a traditional dish. The industry flourished on account of the cod’s unusually prolific breeding cycle: the average female cod produces 3 million grains of roe. The sea belonged to everyone, but a catch of fish belonged to the fisherman concerned. In order to get paid, a fisherman would cut out the tongues of all the fish he had caught and collect them in a box on the deck.

Europeans started to enjoy dried cod from the northern shores of Scandinavia as early as the thirteenth century; soon it became one of the staple products of the Hanseatic League. In Northern Europe, people preferred herrings soused in brine pickle, but in Southern Europe, and then in America too, dried cod was more popular. From the sixteenth century onwards, the Basques fished regularly near Newfoundland. They organised triangular trade by carrying Spanish wool to England, taking English woollen and manufactured goods to the American colonies and then, on the return trip, transporting salted cod to northern Spain: one such trip took a year. 9 The shipowners took the lion’s share of the profits – the biggest houses in Boston, Salem and other ports belonged to them. In the 1640s, British capital was added to the mix and a new triangle developed: English ships unloaded finished goods and salt at Boston, from there shipped cargoes of cod to Jamaica and other Atlantic islands, where they loaded up with sugar to take back to England. Cod disappeared from coastal waters – this always happens with communal resources. The Boston fishing schooners went further and further out to sea, all the way to Newfoundland. The risks grew fast, and insurance premiums increased too. This meant the fishermen became even more dependent on the merchants who gave them credit or provisions. In mid-ocean they dried the cod on board their ships. This resulted in a large quantity of inferior-quality dried cod, suitable only for the slaves on the sugar islands. As the American ships forced out the British vessels supplying the West Indies, they took industrial quantities of molasses back to Boston, where they distilled rum, in contravention of the mercantilist Navigation Acts. Worse still, the American fishermen sold their cod at Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and other French colonies and bought molasses there cheaply. In retaliation, the English fleet began seizing American vessels.

Mercantilist law primarily defended the interests of the plantation owners and sugar traders, which conflicted with the interests of the fishing industry. After the end of the Seven Years’ War, Parliament introduced stamp duty – essentially, a tax on labour. Within the American colonies, this tax had to be paid on all deals, contracts and legacies. As a measure against smuggling, London sent additional ships to the Atlantic. This triggered the protests with their famous slogan ‘no taxation without representation’. Protesters occupied commercial ships in Boston Harbour and threw chests of tea overboard. The choice was highly symbolic – tea was the only British commodity that the American colonies did not have. During the War of Independence, the New England fishing fleet supplied the revolutionary troops with gunpowder, rum and provisions from the West Indies, as well as the usual dried cod. During the peace talks, the fishing rights off Newfoundland were one of the most hotly debated subjects of negotiation. In the end, the Americans asserted their rights at the Treaty of Paris in 1783. It was only 200 years later that the Canadian government introduced a moratorium on cod fishing off Newfoundland.

Fish and meat share one paradoxical quality. In any market, fresh meat is more expensive than frozen. But it takes more capital and labour to produce frozen meat. This is also the case with fish and some other perishable goods: fresh costs more than conserved, the locally produced costs more than the product delivered from a distance. The economist will say that, when we pay for a piece of fresh meat or fish, we are, in fact, paying not only for it but also for all the bits that are thrown away. This paradox is one of the features of modern life. Only when we pay for a perishable local product do we add to the cost of catching and processing a unit, the cost of similar units that the buyer does not see or wish to hear about.

Fur

After fire and stone, fur was the third item essential to the survival of early man in the chilly climes of Europe. Even without curing, the warm pelts of wolves, bison, deer and sheep were used as bedding, blankets or parts of a shelter. Skins could be cut with an obsidian blade and sewn together with a bone needle and dried sinews to make garments and shoes. Thanks to these items, people could move deeper into the northern forests, and there they found more fur-bearing animals. Centuries passed and Roman soldiers marvelled at the fur garments of the Germanic barbarians. But the Romans also started to wear fur as they moved north. Gradually fur became a commodity – a source of revenue and a convertible currency in the northern lands.

Squirrel

In the east Slavic languages, the first word to denote a monetary unit was ‘kuna’, a marten. Founded by the Vikings, the city of Novgorod – the first organised power on the territory of contemporary Russia – used millions of squirrel pelts for clothing and trade. Local strongmen asked the peasants of their own estates to supply the pelts as a form of quit-rent. Later they colonised all of North-Eastern Europe right up to the Urals in pursuit of this squirrel. Much earlier than the French entrepreneurs who harnessed the wealth of furs in Canada, Russian furriers learnt to use the experience and technology of the northern tribes. Curiously, The Russian Primary Chronicle attributes the discovery of northern fur to Alexander of Macedonia. ‘We have encountered a divine marvel … Their language is unintelligible. They point at iron objects and make gestures as if to ask for them. If given a knife or an axe, they supply furs in return.’ 10 These people, the Yugras, were ‘unclean’, and therefore Alexander locked them up in the mountains of the northern Urals. They will be liberated on the Day of Judgement, but until that time it is their fate to trade furs for iron goods. This exchange by dumb show set the pattern for many subsequent events.

In the forests of Eurasia, the habitat of the squirrel coincided roughly with the human habitat. Dry, lightweight, and easily preserved under the right conditions, the squirrel pelts were an ideal commodity. For three centuries they were the mainstay of exports from Novgorod. The thin, light and supple skins were made into warm garments, stockings, hats and much else besides. Even taking transportation costs into account, these goods were cheap. A widely dispersed resource for mass consumption led to prosperity and relative equality. While Novgorod was trading in squirrel pelts, it enjoyed wealth, independence from a ruling prince, and something like democracy. In the winter, when their coats were thicker, squirrels were shot with blunt-tipped arrows so that the fur wasn’t damaged. Any peasant could turn his hand to this task. The pelts were scraped, washed and dried. Curing them was a time-consuming and skilled job – this was women’s work. Brought by sledge to Novgorod, the pelts were packed for export or prepared for local use. The trade in squirrel pelts was one of the main enterprises of the Hanseatic League, which included Novgorod. In the fourteenth century, a vast trading post known as the ‘German Court’ was built in the city. After buying and sorting the pelts, the Germans tied them into bundles and packed bundles of the same quality into barrels. Dozens of Germans were stationed in Novgorod to carry out this work. As the monopoly purchaser of a communal resource, the Hanseatic trading post was able to hold costs down and make excess profits. In accordance with mercantilist logic, the Germans were interested only in pelts, leaving profitable tasks such as sewing and tailoring to their partners at home. The Novgorod furriers worked only for the local market.

In the spring, barrels of pelts were sent down the Volkhov River, across the northern lakes to the Neva, and then on across the Baltic to Lübeck and Bremen. From there Russian fur continued its journey to London, Paris and Florence. In exchange, the Novgorod merchants received silver, arms, textiles, herring and non-ferrous metals. When there was hunger in the city they also imported grain. The fur trade guaranteed a significant amount of silver, which the trading republic needed for its mercenaries. By the end of the Novgorod Republic, fur was exported on a massive scale: 12,000 squirrel pelts travelled thousands of miles from the East so that London furriers could make one particular robe for Henry IV. But the bulk of imports were destined for mass consumption. A total of half a million squirrel pelts were exported per year. 11

As the squirrel population became depleted, the Novgorod merchants had to advance into unknown territories further east and force the local tribes to procure pelts. The trade was risky: in 1445, Yugra tribes inflicted defeat on a 3,000-strong detachment from Novgorod. And, in the fifteenth century, London imported fewer furs. The reason was that squirrel pelts could not compete with the wool textiles which England had begun to produce in increasing quantities. Although the Hansa traded in many goods, such as grain, timber and cod, it went into decline following the collapse of the fur trade. The fall in profits led to clashes among the Russian principalities. Resource-dependent states always worry about running out of raw materials. They are actually more at risk from the advent of new technologies which make their resources redundant.

Sable

The occupation of Novgorod by Muscovite troops in 1478 followed the fall in prices and the reduction of the market for fur. In the quest for fur, the Russians continually moved further east, colonising huge swathes of northern Asia and, later, northern America. In historical paintings we see the Muscovy nobility portrayed in fur coats and hats edged with sable, beaver and ermine. Monomakh’s cap was the sable-trimmed symbol of supreme power of the Russian tsars. Similarly, the Scottish crown was trimmed with ermine. A top hat made out of felted beaver fur was a status symbol of the European elite.

A luxury item, sable didn’t compete with wool and was in steady demand in Europe; sable (sobol ) is among the very few loan words that have gone from Russian into English. The route to Siberia, the home of the sable, lay through Kazan. The Muscovite troops captured Kazan in 1552 – a defining moment in the history of Russian colonisation. In 1581 Yermak Timofeyevich, with a company of 800 Cossacks, reached the Siberian Khanate. Like the Vikings long before them, the Cossacks dragged their boats, made from hollowed-out tree trunks, between great Siberian rivers and drifted down or rowed up them. After three years of trade and battles in Siberia, Yermak died, but 24,000 sable pelts, 2,000 beaver pelts, and 800 pelts from black foxes were sent to Moscow. 12

The Russians were only present in small groups and they rarely hunted themselves. They relied on the indigenous population to catch the animals, skin them and cure the pelts. The natives traditionally used fur for warm clothing and as insulation for their dwellings. However, they had no interest in the large-scale hunting of fur-bearing animals, just as they had no conception about fair prices or profit and accumulation. Fishermen and reindeer herders could be turned into trappers and hunters only by the use of force. The fur tribute was officially known as the yasak , a Turkish word, and was imposed only on non-Russian and non-Orthodox peoples. The yasak furs were taken to Tobolsk, a city in south-western Siberia that featured its own Kremlin – a fortified storehouse for furs and supplies. There pelts were graded, priced and sent to the Moscow Kremlin by winter road, in a convoy of sledges. The yasak went directly to the state, but private trade also flourished and was taxed at a tenth. When officials were returning from Siberia to Moscow, their sledges were searched carefully, and extra furs were confiscated. In Moscow, the Siberian office controlled the trade, and the best pelts remained in the Treasury. In exchange for fur, the Russians supplied Siberia with metal handicrafts, alcohol and tobacco, which rapidly became a habit for the northern tribes. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Muscovite monk Epiphany Premudry recorded the words of a shaman from the Urals: ‘You Christian people have one God, but we have many gods … so they give us squirrels, sables, martens and lynx … Aren’t your princes and boyars and grandees getting rich on what we catch? … Isn’t it our catch that you send to Orda [the Tatars], and … even to Tsargrad [Constantinopole] and to the Germans and the Lithuanians?’ 13

In 1557 every Yugra man had to hand over one sable pelt per year, but by 1609 this demand had already risen to seven. More than 7 million sables were trapped between 1621 and 1690. 14 Russian sources put the revenue from the fur trade as one-quarter of the gross revenue of the Muscovy state. For the medieval economy, with its subsistence farming, gross revenue doesn’t mean much. What mattered for the state was its disposable income, and the fur trade was a major contributor to that. When there was a shortage of silver, pelts played the role of currency for Muscovy. There were times when Kremlin officials, mercenaries and doctors were paid part of their fees in furs.

The conquerors encountered opposition from many tribes, including the Chukchi, the Kamchadals and the Koryaks. When they met with resistance, the Russians retaliated with ever more cruel methods, from public floggings to mass killings. A common method of extracting pelts from the locals was to take hostages (amanat ). * The Russians held local women and children hostage until yasak was paid by the men. If the kidnapped children lived to grow up they learnt to speak Russian; if christened, they could marry Russians and played their part in the creolisation of the local population. In 1788, for example, the Cossacks held 500 children from the Aleut tribe in the Northern Pacific as hostages. The Russian rulers, including the enlightened Catherine II, sanctioned this method; official documents described it as the right way to ‘pacify the natives’ and collect yasak . In 1882, the Siberian historian Nikolay Yadrintsev counted up the number of Siberian peoples that had already been exterminated but who had existed within living memory. The Kamchadals lost 90 per cent of their population; the Voguls, 50 per cent; and so on. 15 The sables disappeared as well. At the beginning of the seventeenth century a good trapper could get 200 sables per year, but, by the end of the century, no more than fifteen or twenty.

Gradually the Cossacks and the traders learnt how to bring the indigenous people ‘under the high hand of the great tsar’. The leaders of local tribes swore an oath to serve the Russian tsar under a ceremonial salute from muskets and cannons. The tribespeople were lined up as if they were members of the Russian Imperial Guard. In many respects, the Russian possessions in North Eurasia were comparable to other areas colonised by Europeans. Rule was indirect and the number of colonists was tiny. But the local tribes were exterminated on a massive scale that wasn’t possible in India. The loss of the indigenous peoples was more analogous to what happened in North America.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century a Polish observer, Bishop Jan Lasky, compared the wealth created by the Muscovy fur trade with the success of the British trade in Indian spices. But in the 1560s and 1570s the volume of the fur trade fell sharply. This time, the explanation was in the actual depletion of sable. In response, the tsar monopolised the export trade in all kinds of fur and the internal trade in sable. It did not help: when hare replaced sable in the Kremlin Treasury, the Muscovy period of Russian history drew to a close. Soon the Time of Trouble started – a civil war with foreign intervention, a major crisis of the state. The Volga merchant Kuzma Minin then saved Russia from defeat by financing the war with his profits from salt extraction. When the Time of Trouble was finally over, Russian ambitions switched from the north-east to the south-west. The cautious policy of the Muscovy state towards the southern steppe changed to an expansionist strategy. Hemp, iron and, finally, wheat replaced fur as Russian exports. Grain, the mass commodity of the future, demanded a much greater input of labour than the fur trade, and labour of a completely different quality.

Beaver

When the Breton navigator Jacques Cartier discovered Newfoundland in 1534, he was convinced that he had arrived in Asia, somewhere near China. In Newfoundland he encountered the Iroquois and took cured pelts back to France, along with two sons of their leader. The humble, easily hunted beaver turned out to be the main attraction for three rival powers, the Dutch, the French and the British. New York was founded thanks to the beaver trade; Henry Hudson, who discovered this convenient harbour in 1609, traded fur with the natives first for the Muscovy Company of England and then for the Dutch East India Company. 16 After the Swedish victory in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), tall Swedish hats became fashionable all over Europe. These wide-brimmed, unbending hats which kept their shape whatever the weather were made of felted beaver. The same material was used to make military headgear: Frederick the Great’s tricorne and Napoleon’s bicorne were made from felted beaver. Military men and civilians, Catholics and Protestants – anybody who could afford one – wore a felted beaver hat. Only the Quakers made their humble hats, which they would doff to no one, out of felted wool.

In fact, it was not so much the beaver’s fur that was of interest as the nap undercoat beneath the fur, ‘beaver wool’. Combed out and processed, it made a sturdy, waterproof felt, an excellent material that is warmer than leather and stronger than wool. In the Middle Ages there were beaver ponds all over Europe, but by the sixteenth century they were found only in Scandinavia and the Russian north. In Siberia beavers had been almost eradicated, and a beaver pelt was worth more there than a sable. 17

The beaver pelts were processed using mercury, an extremely hazardous substance. The furrier’s craft was one of the most risky jobs, on a par with mining or metallurgy, which also used mercury. The most expensive hats still contain so much mercury that they cannot be safely exhibited in museums. Hatters fell ill with neurological diseases unknown to science, went mad and died young. As the beaver became rarer in distant Canada, hatters started mixing its nap with rabbit’s fur, which was fifty times cheaper. Still, this trade consumed an enormous quantity of beaver pelts – the import to France was counted in hundreds of thousands. In Canada, the French learnt the tricky art of enticing the Native Americans into bartering goods on their terms. Having no intention of populating these vast territories, they set up trading posts where beaver pelts were exchanged for weapons, alcohol or cauldrons. The most important trading partners were from the Huron tribe. Living in clusters round trading posts and adopting firearms, the Huron turned into settled traders. Their traditional skills, such as making a canoe by covering a light frame with birch bark, also came in useful; the Europeans had no means of transportation other than these canoes.

In alliance with the Huron, France prevented the penetration of these shores by the Dutch, who were collaborating with the Iroquois. In 1670 the English founded the Hudson Bay Company, which competed with the French trading posts across the Great Lakes to the south. The traditional hostility between indigenous tribes turned into proxy wars, a typical instrument of imperial influence. Between 1675 and 1687, the annual delivery of beaver pelts to Europe doubled. But on the cusp of the eighteenth century the suppliers of fur encountered a new phenomenon: the prices for beaver were falling – silk hats came into fashion. But new markets in Germany, Poland and Russia had started using beaver pelts for making fur coats. The market became specialised and global. White beaver fur went to England, where white hats were in fashion. Dutch firms first combed out the nap to make hats for local consumption and then sent the pelts with the outer fur to Russia to make fur coats. Some beaver pelts were exported to Arkhangelsk, via Amsterdam, for specialised processing; the Russian Pomors, a northern people, had a method of combing out the underhair which wasn’t known in Western Europe. 18

The British, French and Dutch colonies in America tried to limit the supply of pelts and stop the fall in prices. In 1720 New York prohibited trade with the French colonies; in response, the Iroquois started smuggling beaver pelts to English ships, avoiding customs and lowering prices. In the Seven Years’ War France lost its territories to the English. ‘You know that these two nations are at war about a few acres of barren land in the neighbourhood of Canada, and that they have expended much greater sums in the contest than all Canada is worth,’ wrote Voltaire in Candide . As a result of her victory, England obtained a monopoly on beaver fur, but after the American Revolution England lost her trading posts on United States territory though she kept those in Canada. In 1821 the British Hudson Bay Company merged with the Canadian North West Company. Its rival, the American Fur Company, was even more successful; its owner, John Jacob Astor, diversified his business by smuggling opium to China and engaging in New York real estate. For a while he was the richest man in America, but the fur trade was in decline.

The Canadian sociologist Harold Innis, in his pioneering history of the fur trade (1930), showed that the modern borders of Canada coincide with the territory of the beaver. Just as Siberia in its current form was created by the sable, Canada was created by the beaver. As the fur trade flourished, the number of colonists grew, and the number of trappers grew even faster. But the beaver died out in the places populated by men. The white population developed more peaceful relations with the indigenous people in Canada than was the case in the USA or Russia: these relations were based on barter and collaboration between the races and not on competition for land. Innis states that the trade in raw materials divided North America into three zones: the northern zone that produced fur; the southern zone that produced cotton; and the central zone that depended mainly on the labour of its own population, though it also relied on local resources. In his ‘staple theory’, Innis traced how the timber industry replaced the beaver trade. When steamships replaced canoes, it turned out that agriculture was entirely viable, and the export of timber and paper also increased. The sawmills and paper factories used the same water routes as the beaver trading posts had done, and the same agricultural lands provided them with food. But every change of staple created new ecological-economic problems. Tree felling and rafting turned rivers into marshland. Felling activities and sawmills had to be situated further and further upstream. Large cities developed on the sites of the trading posts; where there had once been beaver ponds, there were now power plants. Canals and then railways were constructed to streamline the routes for transporting raw materials, which had formerly followed the bends in the rivers. The Atlantic ports, built for fishing and then for the fur trade, now exported timber, paper and grain to Europe and the USA. As Innis wrote, Canada emerged not in spite of geography but because of it. 19 This is also true of Russia and other resource-dependent countries. The vast expanses of Russia and Canada were equally formed by the fur trade.

The sea otter

In the middle of the eighteenth century, fur was still the major Russian export to China, which bought every sort – even hundreds of thousands of cat pelts a year. Catherine the Great turned the state monopoly on fur into a private one, transferring the running of the fur trade from the Siberian office to her private cabinet. But the sable was almost extinct and squirrel was out of fashion. After the Seven Years’ War, Catherine sent her best sailor, the British-trained Captain Vasily Chichagov, to map the northern extremity of Siberia. He failed to find the Northern Passage to the Pacific but heard rumours about incredible animals that would make your fortune if you could catch them. In 1774 Grigory Shelikhov, a Siberian merchant, made a voyage to the North Pacific. He founded a colony on the island of Kodiak, which had abundant animals and spruce forests. The island made an excellent base for ship repairs and for mounting new expeditions to the east. The native Aleutian population were dispersed with cannon shots; hundreds were killed, but the survivors agreed to exchange pelts for beads and vodka. The Aleutians had always used their prisoners as slave labour – now the Russians put themselves at the top of this hierarchy. In 1786 Shelikhov returned with pelts of the sea otter, or sea beaver as he called it; his cargo was valued at the astronomical sum of 300,000 roubles. To develop the colony he wished to double the sum and asked for a monopoly on all Russian trade on the American coasts. Catherine refused – she had been reading Adam Smith and believed in the free market. But she dispatched four battleships to Alaska and ordered Captain Grigory Mulovsky, another British-educated seafarer, to sail them round the world. George Forster, one of Captain Cook’s companions, agreed to join the voyage as a scientist. But yet another war broke out against Sweden, and Mulovsky was killed in battle. The ambitious expedition came to naught.

English and French ships were already plying between Kamchatka and Alaska. All of Europe was reading the memoirs of the American John Ledyard, a member of Cook’s final expedition. Cook’s sailors had traded glass beads in exchange for a few sea otter pelts, which they sold in Macao for £2,000. This unusually thick fur was especially prized in China, where the pelts were used to make imperial robes. Ledyard was so enamoured of sea otters that he tried to reach Alaska overland, travelling alone from St Petersburg across Siberia. He travelled many thousand miles by sledge but was arrested in Yakutsk in 1788. The experienced Shelikhov used other tactics. The turnover of his fur business was the equivalent of a tenth of the Russian budget, and he raised more capital after registering several companies on the St Petersburg stock market. Preparing for his new voyage, he hired British sailors. He even recruited Samuel Bentham, the brother of Jeremy Bentham. Since 1783, Samuel had been in the service of the Russian government – he supervised the mines in Olonets, inspected the Ural factories of the Demidovs (see chapter 6 ), built ships for Prince Grigory Potemkin and even established a school in Siberia. He also had a secret plan for seizing America. In 1790, he went through Siberia with his Cossacks, intending to sail across to California and win it for his boss, Prince Potemkin. This plan was cut short by the death of the prince, and Samuel returned to Europe. 20 Shelikhov fared better – he reached the Pacific coast and built a frigate in Okhotsk. But English ships were already anchored in the bays of Alaska, and in 1790 they drove off the Spanish ships. That was bad news: before Shelikhov could start skinning sea otters he would have to fight the British fleet.

In 1794 a young officer from Siberia, Nikolay Rezanov, married Shelikhov’s daughter. Rezanov was one of the most remarkable people in Russian history, but his fourteen-year-old bride didn’t have any inkling of this. She died a few years after the wedding, one of the richest heiresses in the empire. Shelikhov and Rezanov now jointly controlled a great part of the Chinese-Russian trade in fur and tea. 21 All this massive volume of trade went via Kyakhta, south of Lake Baikal. An old transit point on the Great Silk Road, this town was the only legal customs post on the Chinese-Russian border, the longest in the world. Trade was done mostly by barter; it was only in 1762 that Catherine allowed private trade in Kyakhta. More than a million chests of tea entered Siberia from China every year, as well as gunpowder, paper and silk. The Russian merchants mostly traded fur, but also hides and horses. The English were a threat to this trade: they had already taken American furs to Canton (Guangzhou).

Catherine died, and after much manoeuvring the young emperor Paul I signed a statute for the creation of the Russian-American Company. The documents were drafted by Gavriil Derzhavin, the president of the Collegium of Commerce, who is better remembered as a powerful poet. Rezanov was a student of Derzhavin’s and had served in his office. The collaboration between Derzhavin, Shelikhov and Rezanov resulted in the most ambitious global project ever known to the Russian Empire. The Russian-American Company obtained a monopoly on a huge territory to the east of Siberia and to the north of Japan, including Alaska. Rezanov’s plan encompassed the colonisation of these lands, their settlement by peasants and Cossacks, the building of ports, wharves and towns, the extraction of minerals and furs, and trade across two oceans. He intended the Russian-American Company to expand south as far as California and Sakhalin and planned a naval base at the estuary of the Amur. If his plans had been accomplished, the Pacific Ocean would have become a lake within the Russian Empire. In the meantime, Russian roads, bad as they were, ran out at Irkutsk, in the centre of Siberia. The winter route from there to the Pacific coast took seven months, and all the time in the world would not suffice to make the route possible in summer. To provision its colony in Alaska, the empire sent ships from Odessa round Africa: this journey across three oceans turned out to be quicker, cheaper and safer than the overland route through Russian territory. In 1805 a pud (16 kilograms) of flour cost 50 kopecks in Irkutsk, 10 roubles in Okhotsk, 40 roubles in Kamchatka, and even more in Alaska.

The establishment of the Russian-American Company closed a large circle in which the plans of world empires were codified according to the spirit of corporate capitalism. The Muscovy Company, which had been established by Sebastian Cabot and John Dee in 1533, was one of the first joint stock companies founded for long-distance trade (hemp and timber); then came the English East India Company (tea and opium), the Dutch East India Company (tea and spices), the Hudson Bay Company (fur), and a number of Prussian, Danish and even Latvian projects. The Russian-American Company was another institution of resource-oriented expansion based on a state–private partnership. Triangular trade in the Atlantic was bringing unheard-of wealth to the merchants and state treasuries. The Russian-American Company would create an equally massive trade in the Pacific. American-manufactured goods would be traded for Alaskan fur, fur bartered for Chinese tea, and the tea sold in the Russian Empire and the Americas.

With credit from the tsar, the Russian-American Company bought two old English frigates and hired a British crew. Rezanov was appointed the expedition’s commander and the tsar’s representative in Russian America. The captain was Ivan Krusenstern, and the rivalry between these two powerful personalities started immediately. 22 When the ships reached Russian America, the expedition’s doctor, Georg Langsdorf, was horrified: ‘The Russians kill everything that moves, for the sake of an instant profit. They don’t realize that they are permanently depriving themselves of a potential source of wealth.’ Steller’s sea cow, a helpless source of meat, became extinct. Seals had no fear of people, who beat them to death with sticks. More than a million seals were killed by the company, and their rotting carcasses and skeletons littered the shoreline. The more wary, but much more valuable sea otters were killed in their thousands. In essence, this colony was a trading post which bartered fur with the Aleutians, who were able to hunt sea otters using their traditional kayaks and javelins. To motivate the Aleutians, the company banned them from their traditional fishing. They were made to buy dried fish from the company; this put them in debt, which they had to work to pay off. Russian ships very rarely took supplies on board, and only trade with American ships saved the crew from starvation. During the whole century that this Russian colony in America existed, the authorities never set up a court or built a prison. The administration used corporal punishment or exiled uncooperative natives to remote islands. Epidemics of unknown illnesses broke out among the Aleutians. Their population dwindled almost as fast as that of the sea otters: in 1805 there were ten times fewer Aleutians on Kodiak than in 1791. But monks opened a church school for the natives.

The colonists developed scurvy. The monks tried to grow watermelons and tobacco but were successful only with potatoes, radishes and barley. Living with their Aleutian wives and creole children, the colonists had no desire to return to Russia. There was no Russian currency in the colony; it was either completely banned or ersatz banknotes were printed on seal skin. There was no ownership of land; as the colony depended entirely on trading fur in exchange for provisions, land had no value. The real unit of exchange was barrels of American rum. From the naval officers to the downtrodden Aleutians, practically everyone was constantly drunk.

In 1802 skirmishes broke out between the Russian colonists and the Tlingit warrior tribe. The Tlingits traded fur with the Americans and possessed firearms: a sea otter pelt went for a musket. After two years of war the Tlingits retreated to the mountains, and the Russians captured their citadel, Sitka. 23 This now became the capital of Russian America, Novo-Arkhangelsk. The bay provided a convenient anchorage for American sailors, and they willingly exchanged provisions for fur; moreover, they could hire Aleutians and their kayaks to hunt sea otters in California. An American sea captain, John DeWolf, sold Rezanov an eight-cannon ship with a cargo of tobacco and rum; Rezanov paid with a promissory note from the Russian-American Company and 572 sea otter pelts. The bargain was kept – having sent the pelts to Canton, DeWolf crossed Siberia overland, received his money in St Petersburg, and returned to Connecticut. This Russian-speaking Yankee had an interesting nephew, the writer Herman Melville, who learnt about whales, travel and determination from him. In an official letter to the Russian-American Company, Rezanov warned that the fur trade would lead to extinction and suggested a diversification plan. From his base in Alaska, he planned to export timber, develop Sakhalin Island and oust the Spanish from California. He planned to sow wheat, which would finally solve the problem of provisioning Russian America. Following the English model, he proposed to export criminals from central Russia to Alaska and, in addition, to buy up male serfs. The women would be brought from the Aleutian population.

In 1803 President Jefferson bought Louisiana from the French at the price of 3 cents per acre; this almost doubled the territory of the United States, and Napoleon got the money for his European war. Rezanov knew that the world would be made anew, and he intended to be a part of it. In 1806 he set off for the Spanish colony of California. In San Francisco he fell in love with the daughter of the Spanish governor, and fifteen-year-old Conchita accepted his proposal. After the betrothal, his ship took on grain and the happy Rezanov started planning new projects. Russian-Spanish America would stretch from Alaska to California. Prairie farming, the timber trade and new industries would compensate for the depletion of fur. But to marry Conchita he needed to receive the blessing of the emperor and the permission of the pope.

While galloping to St Petersburg, Rezanov fell off his horse, and he died in Krasnoyarsk, in the middle of Siberia, in 1807. Conchita Argüello never married. During her long life she used to tell friends about her love for her dead Russian fiancé. The Russian-American Company paid smaller and smaller dividends. Its main investor, Alexander I of Russia, died unexpectedly in 1825. This led to the uprising of liberal-minded officers and intellectuals in St Petersburg, the so-called Decembrist Revolt. It was crushed by artillery fire, and an investigation found that officials from the Russian-American Company were implicated in the revolt. The rebels had held their meetings in the company’s mansion; they were planning to create a constitution along American lines. The new tsar withdrew his investments. Despite having killed 73,000 sea otters, about 30,000 beavers and 30,000 sables, more than a million foxes and an incalculable number of seals, the Russian-American Company was insolvent. Alaska was sold to America in 1867 at 2 cents per acre. 24

‘In the tender annals of political economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial,’ wrote Marx, explaining the primitive accumulation of European capital by the plundering of the colonies. 25 The sources of imperial wealth are hidden in plain view. They are the raw materials extracted by slaves or natives and sold in Europe for monopolist prices – silver and fur, sugar and opium. Empires and, later, nation-states often fail to remember these humble origins of greatness. They sing the praises of the wisdom of rulers and the labour of the people. But there were also heretics. In the mid-nineteenth century, the world learnt about the Aleutian catastrophe thanks to the testimony of the missionary Innokenty Venyaminov. The bishop of Alaska and subsequently the metropolitan of Moscow, Innokenty wrote that, in 1766, Ivan Solovyev and his crew of sailors had killed nearly 3,000 Aleutians – more than half of a tribe that had risen up in rebellion. Among Russian historians, Afanasy Shchapov described the key role of the fur trade in the development of Russia. As a Siberian, he knew all about the tragedies which occurred on the frontier of imperial expansion. Shchapov’s favourite example of ‘zoological colonisation’ was the Aleutian Islands, where the Russians had forced the local population to hunt the sea otters until all the otters and all the Aleutians had disappeared. 26

But, even at the end of the nineteenth century, the fur tax, collected from the Siberian peoples, made up more than 10 per cent of the revenue of the Imperial Cabinet. This money, minted from the distant lives of fur-bearing animals and northern peoples, purchased the treasures of the Hermitage and the loyalty of the court. At the beginning of the twentieth century the fur trade in Siberia was still going strong. During his Siberian exile from 1900 to 1902, the young Leon Trotsky worked for the merchant Yakov Chernykh, who traded with the Tungus people on the Upper Lena, exchanging vodka and cotton prints for fur. The illiterate Chernykh made millions of roubles and had thousands of workers. ‘He was an absolute dictator’, Trotsky wrote. These youthful impressions defined his own horizon. *

Following Voltaire’s advice, Catherine the Great justified monarchical rule in Russia by the country’s unusually large size. In fact, these lands were seized because of fur, though the empire held onto them well after the fur trade had ended. In the nineteenth century, Siberia was used as a place of exile and hard labour. In Soviet times, military-industrial sites were built there, and then enormous reserves of oil and gas were discovered. The history and geography of resource streams are full of devilish irony: the delivery routes for oil and gas, from western Siberia to the Baltic and then to Germany, follow the ancient sledge tracks along which Siberian fur travelled to European buyers.

Trade in the fur of the sea otter was banned in 1911. Their population on the Aleutian Islands did not regenerate, but these delightful animals are a common sight off the beaches of California. The beaver was considered almost extinct, but a ban on hunting in Scandinavia, Canada and Russia helped to re-establish populations. In 2020 we learnt that Denmark is farming 17 million mink – three animals for every citizen; this population was the breeding ground for a new, potentially more lethal mutation of the COVID-19 virus. Sable is also bred on farms, and auctions of sable pelts continue. The squirrel remains one of the most widely distributed mammals; but, hopefully, nobody uses squirrel pelts or cat fur any more. The price of fur has fallen on account of alternative materials made from fossil fuel and thanks to campaigns by animal rights organisations and activists. Suddenly people have started worrying about fur allergies – oddly, this was never a problem in the past. In 2018 several fashion houses – Gucci, Versace – publicly renounced the use of real fur. In England, Austria and some other European countries, fur farming has been outlawed. It is more difficult to abstain from fish and other marine products. But fish farms produce heavy pollution, and the fishing industry is one of the most corrupt sectors of global business. The number of vegetarians in the world keeps growing, and at some point we will see meat eating as an aberration on a par with wearing fur.

Notes

Notes

1 Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason , p. 175; Goody, Food and Love . 2 Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism , pp. 190–4. 3 Mayhew, New Perspectives on Malthus . 4 Pomeranz and Topik, The World that Trade Created , p. 137. 5 Feenstra, ‘The Heckscher–Ohlin model’. 6 Stuart, Bloodless Revolution . 7 Cited in Gregory, Of Victorians and Vegetarians , p. 115. 8 Poore and Nemecek, ‘Reducing food’s environmental impacts’. 9 Magra, The Fisherman’s Cause ; Grafe, Distant Tyranny . 10 The Russian Primary Chronicle , p. 184. 11 Veale, The English Fur Trade ; Etkind, Internal Colonization . 12 Fisher, The Russian Fur Trade , p. 26. 13 Zhitie Sergiia Radonezhskogo . 14 Vilkov, ‘Pushnoi promysel v Sibiri’. 15 Iadrintsev, Sibir kak koloniia . 16 Tarle, Ocherki ; Butts, Henry Hudson . 17 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada ; Edwards, ‘The North American fur trade world system’. 18 Rich, ‘Russia and the colonial fur trade’. 19 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada . 20 Kirchner, ‘Samuel Bentham and Siberia’; Morriss, Science, Utility and Maritime Power ; Papmehl, ‘The regimental school established in Siberia by Samuel Bentham’. 21 Matthews, Glorious Misadventures . 22 Ibid. 23 Kan, Memory Eternal . 24 Bolkhovitinov, Russian–American Relations and the Sale of Alaska . 25 Marx, Capital , Vol. 1, p. 507. 26 Shchapov, Sochineniia , pp. 280–93, 309–37; Etkind, Internal Colonization , p. 65.