Nature's Evil

FOUR

Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice

Salt and sugar are both white and crystalline, but their flavour differs as much as their historic roles. Salt has always been part of the human diet – we can’t survive without it. Sugar is a relative newcomer. Produced by hundreds of small enterprises and mostly traded locally, salt was usually a product of private initiative. Sugar was the material basis of long-distance trade, slave plantations, colonial wars and mercantilist empires.

People consume salt up to the point of satiety. The body knows what level of salt it needs; too little or too much causes discomfort. For every population, there is a point of equilibrium which defines the optimal price of such a resource. The per capita consumption of this kind of resource is stable, and consumption increases only with the growth of the population. This is where economics, focused on the balance between demand and supply, comes into operation. But there are other sorts of resources, such as sugar. An individual or a country can consume them in unlimited quantities: the more such products are available to consumers, the more they want them. The growth in supply stimulates a still greater demand. I would call this kind of commodity ‘addictive’ or ‘narcotic’. In such cases it is not demand that dictates supply but the other way round: production stimulates consumption . Satiety, or equilibrium between demand and supply, simply doesn’t arise, or is always deferred to the future; what does arise is an increasing dependence, an unquenchable and unquenched need, an addiction. Examples are sugar, and the alcohol produced from it, but also spices, tobacco, coffee, tea, chocolate and opium. All these substances create in the consumer a narcotic dependency, which may be severe or mild and, correspondingly, inflicts more or less harm on the consumer. When economists describe the link between production and consumption, they talk about the elasticity of supply : if production of a commodity grows quickly in response to a rise in demand, then this production is elastic. In the opposite case, when consumption grows, quickly or slowly, in response to a rise in supply, we see a demand which is, to various extents, addictive and toxic; I propose to talk in these cases about toxicity of demand. From pepper to tea to sugar to tobacco to opium, and later to petroleum, different substances exhibit different levels of toxicity. Importantly, the very concept of consumption in its economic meaning originates from the debates about the taxation of ‘intoxicants’; before these mid-seventeenth-century English debates, consumption meant a wasting disease. 1 ‘Intoxicants’ were wine, tobacco and coffee; sugar did not figure in these debates – clearly, it was in a special category, together with tea and chocolate. Following the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, I call these consumables, from sugar all the way to opium, soft drugs.

Throughout the long age of empires, Europeans enjoyed these dried remains of several exotic plants from the two Indias. Gradually, soft drugs became an everyday habit for every civilised person – moreover, a habit that became the very essence of his or her civilised behaviour. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these addictive substances, from tea to opium, made up the biggest group of commodities in international trade. There is a biological component in this addiction, but it is also shaped by traditions, fashions, prices, political contexts and much else. For example, tobacco is addictive in any form – whether chewed, taken as snuff, or smoked; legal or smuggled; consumed alone or in cigar lounges. The habit is conditioned and contagious – it spreads from one person to another in the manner of an infection. If a certain form of tobacco is cheap, or if it is well advertised, it spreads faster. Taxes and high prices reduce the toxicity of a product; fashion or advertising can have the opposite effect. Administrative measures – e.g. criminalisation – have lesser impacts. The habit spreads among a population as a result of imitation and because of the social character of consumption. Addiction is individual but also societal: the consumption of such a commodity may grow even if individual doses stabilise.

Capital grows endlessly; this is essential for capitalism. Its most rapid growth occurs not when consumption leads production but, conversely, when supply boosts demand. Addictive substances are invariably connected to energy. This is the energy that sugar gives to the body and petrol gives to a driver, the energy that is expended in work, procreation and recreation, the energy that is stored in the form of fat. Concentration encourages a monopolistic development and arbitrary pricing, and addiction guarantees the unlimited growth of trade. Even technical progress does not change the pattern of addiction. In 1865 the economist William Stanley Jevons formulated a startling paradox. An increase in the efficiency of a certain resource does not reduce its consumption but, on the contrary, increases it. Precisely because efficiency produces cheaper products, they become available to more customers, demand for them grows, and more raw material is expended in making them. Collective addiction grows into fetishism – an extreme case of a mono-resource dependency. Changing fashions bring variety to this fetish and boost its consumption.

Salt

Ubiquitous in markets, salt is the only raw material available both in the sea and on dry land. It is sourced in mines and lagoons and processed in salt works. And yet there are places where there is no salt. This makes the trade in salt massive but local. Kept dry, it doesn’t rot, catch fire or become infested with vermin. The salt trade developed local markets; transporting and taxing salt helped to fill the coffers of early modern states. To collect their levies, they established customs posts at the bottlenecks of the transportation networks – at seaports, porterages and the rare bridges over rivers, and on mountain passes. Instead of sending tax collectors into peasants’ farmyards, these states switched to taxing everything that moved and did not decay. Often, this meant salt.

Although edible salt is freely available in seawater, boiling brine is an inefficient way of obtaining it. It takes a lot of firewood to produce a spoonful of salt. On the sea coast near Rome, brine was poured into shallow pans made of lead and evaporated by the sun. Venice adopted a cheaper and safer method of crystallising salt in ‘cascades’ – coastal salt works. A small bay was partitioned to create a chain of pools which were separated by dams but connected by locks. A windmill channelled seawater into the upper pool; evaporated by the sun, the solution went down a level when the lock was opened. Collected from the lowest pool, the salt had to be dried and milled, and the product was ready. The method is simple but it did not work in many other places. Venice exported huge amounts of salt to Constantinople, though there was no shortage of seawater there. In the tidal marshes of Northern France, fine sea salt – fleur de sel – forms a thin crust floating on the water; it has to be harvested by hand, a task which was traditionally done by women, but the volumes were low. The Venice-style ‘cascades’ require bays that are protected from storms and flooding but not connected to river estuaries where the water is fresh, not saline. Widespread in the Mediterranean, this method was less common in Asia. There are few places in the world with lagoons like that of Venice.

In the thirteenth century Venice established a monopoly on the salt trade. Practising mercantilism avant la lettre , the republic allowed salt trading to be conducted only through its own warehouses. Packed into sacks, salt was taken from the cascade farms onto terra firma in the countryside around Venice, to Bologna and even Tuscany. It was also exported by sea and traded all over the Adriatic. The salt monopoly became the economic foundation of the only Italian state which didn’t have a Roman heritage. The islands in the Mediterranean developed their own cascade farms; when returning from these early colonies, commercial ships brought the salt to Venice, using it as ballast. Importing salt to Venice, grading and storing it, selling it to the locals and re-exporting it became the vital tasks of the republic’s administration. Like the Navigation Acts which England would later introduce, the salt monopoly did not nationalise the commodity but controlled its movement. All sea trade in salt had to go via Venice and only Venetian ships could transport it. The fleet earned revenue and the republic received taxes, which were easy to collect on home territory. Salt producers who broke these rules were destroyed by force of arms. A whole region of Venice, Punta della Dogana, was converted into salt warehouses. Surprisingly modern, the Salt Administration was a kind of super-ministry consisting of three tiers – Collegio, Ufficio and Camera. The salt college took strategic decisions and was subordinate to the Council of Ten; the salt office managed monopoly trade, subsidies and taxes; the Camera, the salt chamber, was the bank, which issued trade credits and promissory notes guaranteed by the future production of salt. For centuries, the salt trade was the main contributor to Venice’s revenue; the salt monopoly continued until the military defeat of 1509. The profits were spent on canals, palaces, the navy and other state expenditures. But, like the canals, the salt works were prone to silting up so that the law of diminishing returns affected them as much as any other extractive industry.

Terrestrial heartlands had to find another source of salt. Riddled with mines and tunnels, the Alps produced rock salt for the areas to the north. From the seventeenth century onwards, England extracted salt from the Cheshire mines. As a result, whole areas of Cheshire subsided, turned into swamp and vanished like the Cheshire Cat’s smile. The Middle East and Persia obtained salt from salt lakes, the remains of ancient seas. Relatively cheap to produce, salt was a heavy commodity, and in large countries such as France and Russia the salt trade remained local. Nationwide salt markets did not develop there until the coming of the railways, as was also the case with grain, firewood and building materials.

Cardinal Richelieu said that the salt tax was as important for France as the silver mines were for Spain. In Brittany, where salt was obtained in coastal ponds, it was cheap; but there was no salt in the interior of the country. The kingdom divided its own territory into six regions, imposing different levels of salt tax, gabelle , in each one. This was a sad story: Paris was collecting funds to enable centralisation, but its actions led to the further fragmentation of the country. Louis XIV stationed thousands of soldiers on the Loire at the border crossing between coastal Brittany and saltless Anjou. They searched everyone going across the river. Notorious for their crudity, these gabeleurs had no choice – women carried lumps of salt under their skirts. The gabelle was the most hated of taxes; one of the key demands of the French Revolution was the abolition of the salt tax. 2 But it was reinstated by Napoleon and continued in various forms until the middle of the twentieth century. In 1930 the link between salt and revolution reappeared in British India. Mahatma Gandhi led the famous Salt March in protest against the British monopoly on the salt trade. After walking 240 miles, Gandhi collected grains of salt from a cascade salt farm, deliberately breaking the law of British India. The first independent government of India abolished the salt monopoly, but it was soon reintroduced. National governments are just as much in need of revenue as empires.

Sugar

Sugar cane grows only in the tropics and needs plenty of soil, sun and water. This tall, robust plant is a very efficient photosynthesiser. In the right conditions it produces a large biomass – 20 kilograms per square metre. But it quickly exhausts even the most fertile soil. Producing sugar on colonial plantations was all about timing. Sugar cane had to be planted at exactly the right time of the year. It grows for a year or more and can reach twice the height of a man. It had to be cut before it flowered, because when the plant matured the sap lost part of its sugar content. Then the cane had to be processed immediately to prevent the sap spoiling. One slave gang chopped the stalks with a machete or crushed them in a mill. Then another gang boiled the sap in vats heated by cane waste which had been dried in the sun. This process caused sugar to crystallise, so that yet another gang could separate the crystals from the molasses. One team cleaned and packed sugar, while another distilled molasses into rum. The whole process was very labour-intensive but endlessly repetitive, which meant the work could be carried out by slaves and later by machines. Free labour was no match for slave gangs when it came to mass-scale, tropical commodities such as sugar or cotton. The size of the plantation was also crucial: the rapid processing of the cane required many pairs of hands at once, and small farms couldn’t compete.

Originating in New Guinea, sugar cane was brought to India around 500 ce , and the method of boiling the sap was invented there. Caravans brought it to Europe by the Silk Road from Persia, together with silk and pearls. The first mention of sugar in Venice occurred in 996; before that the only form of sweetener was honey. In the Middle Ages sugarloaves were worth their weight in gold, and statuettes were carved from them as if from marble. Sugar was taken as a medicine; cookery books suggested adding a pinch of sugar to meat and fish as a precious spice.

Columbus’s father-in-law was a sugar planter from Madeira, and on his second voyage Columbus took sugar cane to the island of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti. At first, the Spaniards forced the natives to work the cane, but they died out, so from 1509 the planters started buying African slaves. The Portuguese planted sugar cane in Brazil; for a while, they produced most of the sugar for European consumption. Sugar plantations fed triangular trade: Africa supplied labour and America provided land, while Europe consumed sugar, paying for it with industrial goods.

Antwerp was the first centre for refining sugar, but later this ‘sweet trade’ switched to Bristol and Bordeaux. When the mines that had lured the conquistadors were exhausted, sugar became the main source of colonial wealth. The planters felled forests and imported slaves, taking over vast territories in South America, from Mexico to Paraguay, to grow sugar and other exotic commodities – indigo, tobacco, cotton, cocoa. These luxury items that were previously unknown in Europe contributed to the refined, urban way of life. Conspicuous and delicious signs of progress, they depended on the invisible – for the Europeans – labour of black slaves, on the massive use of force and on mounting inequality: on political evil.

The turning point in this story was the colonisation of Barbados, a little island five times smaller than modern-day Luxembourg. On Barbados, planters made fortunes within the course of one generation; in 1666 it cost seventeen times more to buy a plantation there than it had in 1643. Specialisation secured growth, and the whole economy focused on the monoculture of sugar. In exchange, England supplied the island with slaves, food and goods. The much larger island of Jamaica and other Antillean islands followed in Barbados’s footsteps. France developed sugar production on Saint-Domingue, Martinique and Guadeloupe. By the beginning of the seventeenth century the importation of sugar had already outstripped that of tobacco: the demand for sugar grew faster. A sixteenth-century German traveller who had an audience with Elizabeth I noted her sparkling eyes and bad teeth, which, he wrote, were characteristic of all English people – they ate too much sugar. The Spanish, who had discovered sugar earlier, were astonished that the English added it to everything, even wine and meat. Transportation and security services kept pace with the trade. Convoys from the Royal Navy escorted the commercial ships in their transatlantic voyages. By 1675 a fleet of 400 ships sailed between the West Indies and the British Isles; at this point the sugar imported into England exceeded the total of all other colonial goods. In 1731 the sailors of the Royal Navy received a half-pint daily tot of rum; by the end of the century this ration had doubled. By 1750 the poorest agricultural labourers in England were drinking tea with sugar. Even in English almshouses the old men and women each received 23 lb of sugar per year. In 1775 the average Englishman consumed ten times more sugar than the average Frenchman. Sugar had turned from a rare oriental luxury into an item of mass consumption – a working man’s treat. 3

Innovation and labour have created myriad goods made from non-addictive materials such as salt. But the wealth of this world relied on narcotic commodities such as sugar. There was something sugary and addictive in the baroque forms of the European architecture of this period. Commerce is sweet, capital fruitful, money slavery – there was no time in history when these truths were so clear. For getting people hooked on non-stop consumption, only petroleum compares in toxicity to sugar and other soft drugs. By supplying the body with a great number of easily absorbed calories, sugar and its derivatives blunt the appetite and take the place of protein-rich foods. The profits from sugar, tobacco, tea, cocoa and coffee stimulated the slave trade, the annexation of colonies and the engagement in wars. They created millions of ‘ghost acres’ which were added to the limited territory of the Old World. They also encouraged rural families to abandon the ‘idiocy of rural life’ and shaped the familiar features of modernity – the division of labour, mass consumption, urbanisation and a nine-to-five culture. Grain formed the peasantry; textiles made the proletariat. The bourgeoisie was created by tea and sugar.

Islands in the ocean

The cluster of sugar-producing Caribbean islands known as the West Indies inspired fierce rivalry among the European empires. Small in size, these islands were immensely profitable. By the end of the seventeenth century, English trade produced an annual revenue of £2 million sterling, about half of which came from the West Indies. A century later, William Pitt estimated the annual revenue from plantations in the West Indies at £4 million and the revenue from all other colonies at £1 million. Dalby Thomas, a slave trader and popular author, believed that every worker, black or white, on the sugar islands of the West Indies produced as much value as 130 workers in the British Isles. Before the American Revolution the revenue of the British West Indies was twice that of British America. The revenue from these tiny islands greatly exceeded the income from the Indian subcontinent. Adam Smith wrote without surprise: ‘The profits of a sugar-plantation in any of our West Indian colonies are generally much greater than those of any other cultivation that is known either in Europe or America.’ 4

The anthropologist Sydney Mintz showed that the sugar plantation was a pre-industrial factory, which combined the field and the processing facility into a single enterprise. These large plantations, with up to 500 slaves on each, were organised differently from arable farms. They consisted of a series of specialised premises, and the product went from one to another as if on a conveyor belt. Hundreds of slaves worked in the fields while a minimum of twenty-five people, black and white, worked on the processing. While the former used only their machetes, the latter operated equipment that cost thousands of pounds. As in a factory, there was a division of labour; a worker didn’t own his tools and work was subject to a schedule. However, the work rhythm was defined by nature – by the crop’s tendency to spoil quickly and by dependence on the weather for all stages of production.

As with many factories, the economy of scale was crucially important here. The shift from tobacco to sugar entailed the enlargement of plantations and the ruin of many farmers. Small plantations were uneconomic; the need for rapid processing meant that a large workforce was needed. The production process didn’t involve deep specialisation as was the case with grain, where the farmer owned the field and the miller owned the mill. Unlike grain, the raw cane was unsuitable for transportation and needed primary processing on the spot. The natural characteristics of a raw material not only defined the biology of its cultivation and the chemistry of its processing – they also shaped the institutions that specialised in it. Europe believed that it was developing the colonial world in its own image, spreading farming skills to the Americas and the Indias. In fact, the colonies, with their commercial factorias and specialised slave labour, purged of tradition and obedient to instrumental rationality, were true ‘laboratories of modernity’.

Unlike the proto-industrial treatment of sugar and cotton, the primary processing of tobacco involved typical agricultural processes: harvesting, cleaning, drying, packing. When the first colonists grew tobacco on smallholdings in the West Indies, their workforces were not slaves but hired hands. Then tobacco growing was introduced in Virginia. Tobacco needed more care and skill than sugar, was profitable on smaller plantations, and did not need massive processing facilities close to the fields. Tobacco from different plantations had brand names, like wines from different estates. The price reflected quality, and small farms did well out of this system. Conversely, sugar from different plantations was mixed together. The sugar trade developed the hierarchical system of ‘sorts’, which was later adopted by cotton and then oil traders. In a word, tobacco is a branded commodity , while sugar is a sorted commodity .

Tea had been known in the West since the beginning of the seventeenth century. It was used as a medicine, and the market was small. Later, people started drinking tea with sugar – a combination that became the most successful marketing ploy in history. The Dutch imported tea from India, but in the middle of the eighteenth century the Europeans succeeded in opening up Canton for trade. British and Dutch traders competed there along with the French, the Swedes and the Danes. The price of tea fell tenfold, and the consumption of tea per capita in England increased 400 times over a century. The influx of sugar from the Western Atlantic and tea from the Pacific met and mingled on the sceptred isle. With imperial elegance, this encounter took place at the exact midpoint – in the millions of cups served by British ladies during the daily ritual of high tea, a pale imitation of the Japanese tea ceremony, just as the tea cups were an imitation of Chinese porcelain. But the tea and sugar were real, as were the cotton tablecloths, and the tobacco and port which were the male version of the ceremony.

The century of the Enlightenment enthusiastically embraced these drugs. Initially exotic and luxurious, they became affordable items of mass consumption. They increased sociability, filled the stomach, created dependency, gave rise to profit and, usually, escaped the censure of church and state. 5 While opium in England remained the preserve of libertines, tea with sugar, a pinch of tobacco, or a cup of coffee or chocolate were available to everyone. Sugar was at the core of this addictive bundle. Thomas Dalby openly advised the colonies of the American South to follow the example of the West Indies rather than New England: they just needed to produce more sugar and import more slaves. However, sugar cane didn’t thrive in the continental colonies – even in Louisiana the winters were too cold. In that sweet era, the main function of America was to keep the West Indies supplied. On the islands where black slaves produced white sugar, there was no spare land available to grow food crops. The mainland colonies supplied the sugar islands with all the salt fish they needed and most of the oats, grain and flour, lumber, horses and sheep. The planters paid the American farmers, fishermen and blacksmiths with sugar, rum and molasses. Launching unparalleled capital flows from their tiny territories, the sugar islands financed the American colonies, the English textile industry and the British Royal Navy.

While enjoying their good fortune, the West Indies planters yearned to return to England. There they bought London townhouses or country estates from the old aristocracy. Many a stately home in England and Scotland, with its classical portico, ceremonial staircase and ballroom, was built by a sugar plantation owner. Public schools such as Harrow and Eton were full of pupils from the West Indies. Later these children, some of them the descendants of pirates or convicts, married into the aristocracy. They became members of parliament, ministers, mayors. When King George III came across a carriage that was grander than his own, he said to his prime minister, ‘Sugar, sugar eh? … how are the duties, eh Pitt, how are the duties?’ 6 The wealthiest sugar producers managed their plantations in absentia: they lived in England and appointed bailiffs, sending them their written instructions by mail. One of these fortunate men was William Beckford, a grandson of a governor of Jamaica. Known as the richest subject of the British crown, Beckford was elected Lord Mayor of London twice. John Gladstone, a Scottish merchant and member of Parliament, owned a company in Liverpool which traded sugar and slaves with the West Indies, hemp with Russia, cotton with India and grain with the American colonies. The owner of several plantations in Jamaica, he continued to live in Liverpool and later returned to Scotland, where he bought a huge estate. His son became prime minister of England. As Montesquieu said, this really was ‘la commerce douce’ – sweet trade.

It was the sugar trade that engendered the policy and practice of British mercantilism. * In accordance with the Navigation Acts, all goods had to be transported on British ships; colonies could trade in raw materials with each other but could not export them; they could only buy manufactured goods produced in England; and no industry could develop in the colonies apart from the primary processing of raw materials. Thus the mercantile regime underwrote the supply of sugar to the metropole, guaranteed the markets for manufactured goods in the colonies, created profits for the merchants and supported the commercial fleet. The mercantile regime drew a sharp distinction between manufactured goods and raw materials, linking these economic categories to the political difference between the colonies and the metropole: raw materials are sourced in the colonies, goods are manufactured in the metropole, and that is how it must ever be. Members of the British parliament openly cited ‘the West India interest’ in their speeches. On the eve of the Seven Years’ War there were fifty to sixty votes representing this interest, and they supported the mercantile laws and the sugar monopoly. 7 William Pitt the elder, the Whig leader and prime minister, fought honourably for the privileges of the West Indies; William Beckford was his friend and financial sponsor.

Holland and France had their own mercantile legislation, but their trade regimes were not as consistent as that in England. The French colonies, such as Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe, were producing sugar more cheaply, using fewer slaves and less land per sack. The French legislation in the islands, based on the Code Noir established by Louis XIV, was more humane than the English. The French planters weren’t protected by a group monopoly; they had to compete among themselves, which kept prices low and focused on productivity. Selling for half the price of the English product, French sugar conquered the European markets. All this led to the Seven Years’ War, which ended in an English victory. But the outcome was paradoxical. The English seized the big sugar islands of French Guadeloupe and Spanish Cuba but did not annexe them: this would have caused sugar prices to crash. Instead, the English preferred French Canada and Spanish Florida. The control over prices was more important than an increase in sales. Nevertheless, sugar prices fell because of competition with Brazil and the record growth in the number of plantations on Jamaica. The planters were the first to learn an important lesson of capitalism: luxury items generate profit, but only mass consumption brings super-profits.

From being a luxury, sugar became an everyday item. Without it there would be no rum, no jam, no puddings or cakes. The per capita consumption of sugar in England grew more quickly than the consumption of bread or meat. According to Sidney Mintz, 8 in the eighteenth century the annual consumption of sugar increased from 4 to 18 lbs per person. Millions of people were now working in factories, and a cup of tea with sugar replaced their customary ration of gin and beer. In poor families people derived a fifth of their energy calories from sugar. As with alcohol, people feel they can’t have too much sugar: the more you eat, the more you want. Together with oriental luxuries, which had come down in price dramatically in the eighteenth century – porcelain cups, cotton tablecloths, soft furnishings – sugar, tea and coffee played a leading role in shaping the new way of life. Its substance was social pleasures, its output the public sphere, its first locations the coffeehouse and the club. The first London coffeehouse was opened by a Turkish merchant in 1652; soon coffeehouses and tea shops spread across Europe. In eighteenth-century London, chocolate clubs became fashionable. These were pricey establishments with a closed membership, and they did not admit women. Aristocrats met there to play cards and sneer at the neighbouring coffeehouses, where anyone could enter to drink coffee, read newspapers and engage in debates. In 1777, David Hume wrote: ‘An author is little to be valued, who tells us nothing but what we can learn from every coffee-house conversation.’ 9 Two hundred years later, his fellow philosopher Jürgen Habermas linked the history of the Western public sphere with the development of coffeehouses. 10

But the most popular drink was tea, always with sugar. In 1840 the British East India Company was the biggest employer in the empire. It harvested tea from 2 million acres in India, employing a million people in this activity. Everyone drank tea, from the royal family to the poorest peasants. Obviously, the cheaper the quality of tea, the more the drink became just a hot sugar solution. Social historians believe that the quality of the English diet deteriorated at this time; there was a shortage of bread, wages had not risen in decades, and millions of people were short of protein and calories. Calories from sugar were cheaper than calories from bread, and much cheaper than calories from milk. Unable to earn their living by farming, people migrated to the towns, where their wages would allow them to drink tea with sugar.

Aftertaste

In 1791, a slave rebellion began in Saint-Domingue (Haiti). Black slaves and free mulattos joined forces in their hatred of the sugar planters. After many battles, Haiti declared independence from France in 1804. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who was born a slave, became Jacques I, emperor of Haiti. The extraordinary news about the revolution led by black slaves was a burning topic of discussion in the coffeehouses of Europe. After reading the newspaper reports from Saint-Domingue, a Prussian professor of philosophy, G. W. F. Hegel, formulated his master–slave dialectic, which sowed the seeds of the later revolutions. 11 Dessalines abolished slavery, but he could not outlaw racism. He massacred several thousand whites, but the mulattos continued to exploit the blacks. Soon a new uprising began and Dessalines was assassinated. Dividing the land into smallholdings, the former slaves destroyed the hateful plantations. The slaves became peasant farmers, but the country had to pay vast sums of compensation to France. Formerly the most profitable of the French colonies, Haiti became one of the poorest states in the world.

The reason for the ultimate fall of sugar prices was a scientific discovery that helped produce a cheap, widely available alternative to cane. Andreas Sigismund Marggraf was the son of a Berlin apothecary who studied metals in the spirit of the old alchemist tradition. In 1747, he discovered that sugar could be obtained from beetroot juice. The taste was identical, but the sugar content was low, less than 2 per cent. Hoping to fill a hole in his budget, Frederick II ordered his scientists to breed new kinds of beet, and this was duly achieved: another Berliner, the Huguenot Franz Karl Achard, bred a commercially viable beet plant. Napoleon also supported such experiments: France ran short of sugar because of the revolution in Saint-Domingue and then again during the British naval blockade. In 1811 Napoleon obliged all the departments in France to allocate land to growing sugar beet and promised subsidies for the sugar-processing factories. Selective breeding raised the sugar content of the beet to 20 per cent, equalling cane. Now sugar beet could be grown on almost any field in Europe. After 1815, two competing sugar markets arose in France, the local and the colonial. Beet and cane each had their own lobby in Parliament. The future prime minister François Guizot, an Anglophile and a Calvinist, had such sympathy for the colonies that in 1843 he proposed an outright ban on growing sugar beet. But Napoleon III spoke in favour of sugar beet and against cane. 12 There was a certain logic in these swings of policy: the more nationalistic and anti-British the leader, the greater the enthusiasm for sugar beet. Slavery was abolished in the English plantations in 1833. After the revolution of 1848, Guizot stood down and slavery was abolished on the French islands. With free trade, sugar cane was no competition for sugar beet. In England the Navigation Acts were repealed in 1849; they had remained in force for almost 200 years, pumping capital from the colonies to the British Isles.

But sugar is still with us. In fact, it is a biochemical battery that stores the sun’s energy with extraordinary efficiency. Today 1 acre of subtropical land produces 8 million calories from sugar cane; to get the same number of calories from potatoes would take 4 acres, from wheat, about 10 acres and, from beef, as much as 135 acres. The global consumption of sugar per capita continues to grow.

Opium

The milky latex that seeps out of the unripe seed capsules of the poppy contains alkaloids which work on the human nervous system. These give a feeling of well-being and create dependency. The more one uses this drug, the more one wants it. People get more pleasure out of using it in the company of other users, so opium use spreads like an epidemic. The consumption of increasingly high doses of opium leads to loss of appetite, apathy and degradation – the user loses interest in anything other than opium.

Nothing in the life cycle of either organism, the poppy or the human being, predicted their mutual dependence. Nature created the beautiful flowers of the poppy so that the bees would pollinate them, enabling poppies to reproduce and spread. Were the bees created so that they could pollinate the poppies? Philosopher Pangloss would have exclaimed at this point that all was created for the best: flowers for bees, bees for flowers, both for people – such is the divine plan. But the disillusioned Candide would have found many counter-examples. It is simply impossible to believe that the latex from unripe capsules was created so that people could derive pleasure from it, and that man was created so that he could spread the poppy around the globe. The poppy has caused so much evil in the human world that it makes it hard to believe in the benevolence of Providence; moreover, what actually happened between the poppy and people makes it hard to believe in the Creator’s wisdom. Even if a superior intelligence could have arranged the encounter between Homo sapiens and Papaver somnifer , it clearly did not predict the implications of this event. The historical prototype of Pangloss, the German philosopher Leibniz, taught that the world was predetermined by divine purpose and therefore was the best of all possible worlds. Opium refutes this theodicy as effectively as if the poppy had been created for that very purpose.

The opium poppy grows in many areas of the world – in Southern Europe, Africa and Asia. This undemanding plant easily reverts to its wild state, keeping its beauty and narcotic qualities intact. When dried, poppy latex keeps for a long time, so it can be transported and sold. People did this on such a scale that the volume of global trade in opium in the nineteenth century was worth more than the volume of any other goods and commodities. But the history of the opium trade is full of mysteries. It is not clear why India supplied opium to China at great expense, although poppy could just as well have been cultivated there, which did eventually happen. It is also not clear why the Chinese were more susceptible to opium dependency than Indians. It was only in China that opium use became epidemic, destroying tens of millions of people and bringing down the whole machinery of the state. What is clear is that the opium trade between the two countries was based on geographical inequality – the usual source of economic growth and political evil; and that it was a third power, the British Empire, that owned this trade. When long sea voyages connect unlimited demand with unlimited supply, the beneficiaries are the merchant-carriers, and they continue their trade against all the odds.

The Dutch started this business, but the British East India Company displaced them in the 1760s. Its new monopoly on the opium trade in India resulted from a series of military victories in the Seven Years’ War and then in Bengal. Having requisitioned the ports and warehouses, the company forced the Indians to deliver opium at fixed prices. Edmund Burke accused it of depriving the natives ‘of their natural right of dealing with many competitors’. The head of the company, Warren Hastings, rejected the accusations. Later he was convicted of corruption, so Burke was probably right, but the opium monopoly continued. At the beginning of the nineteenth century opium was India’s largest export item and China’s largest import. It was also the second largest source of imperial revenue for British India after the land tax. 13

In Victorian England, opium was a common remedy. Taken with alcohol, it was believed to relieve pain, fever and melancholy. Containing 10 per cent opium, the mixture was called laudanum – an ancient alchemic word. Right up until the twentieth century British pharmacies sold laudanum over the counter. The smoking of opium was considered a Chinese speciality; in other cultures it was used differently – either boiled and inhaled or eaten in various mixtures. In nineteenth-century Europe opium smoking quickly caught on. Still, people considered it an oriental extravagance. Addicts were accused of lack of character and moral decadence. Europeans were also susceptible to addiction, but an epidemic on the scale of the Chinese one never happened elsewhere.

The British East India Company purchased opium as a standing crop, paying for it a year in advance. The business was on a gigantic scale: half a million Indian peasants grew poppy over an area of half a million hectares. The company did not allow the peasants to convert fields from poppy, even in years of hunger, allegedly for moral reasons. ‘It is not our mission to encourage the consumption of opium, but rather to lessen its use, or more properly speaking, the abuse of the drug, and for this end, as well as for the purpose of the revenue , to make the price to the public as high as possible,’ the directors of the company explained to the governor general of India in 1817. 14 But, in China, the company was facing threats from competitors. American ships transported opium from Turkey, but the company directors were even more concerned about the domestic production in China. The Chinese addiction to opium was strategically important for the balance of trade – the cherished value of the mercantile era. For centuries, Europe’s trade balance with Asia had remained negative. China did not need British wool or colonial goods such as sugar and tobacco. The deficit was covered by Spanish silver from the American colonies – up to half of this silver ended up in China. The rapid growth of tea imported from China changed this equilibrium; if the trade gap wasn’t covered, gold and silver would leave European treasuries. Opium from British India filled this gap.

Opium consumption in China spread rapidly, catching on in ports and mining towns. The Chinese authorities tried to protect the country by forbidding the use of opium. In 1799 Peking published the first decree that proclaimed opium a global evil and committed the bureaucracy to fight against it. This had little effect; the civil servants could hardly cope with their own addiction. During the nineteenth century the number of opium addicts in China reached 10 million; some estimates put the figure much higher – up to 10 per cent of the population, or 40 million people. The cities were filled with opium dens. Like the coffeehouses of the Enlightenment or the chocolate clubs of the Restoration, they became hubs of local culture where people shared news, did deals and made contacts. The informal and hedonistic character of these dens and clubs placed them in direct opposition to the Confucian state. This was the Chinese version of civil society. Living off their staple rice diet, peasant coolies could not buy opium. It was for people with money to spend – craftsmen, miners, gardeners and civil servants. As its use spread among the wealthy, opium dragged people down, creating a new poverty. It also spawned new crimes, unknown to traditional society, and new fortunes. This was a vicious circle, the nature of evil: toxicity exacerbates inequality, which provokes a greater anomie, which increases the demand for drugs.

Though the British controlled the trade by importing opium on their ships, they relied on Chinese middlemen, who rapidly made their fortunes. Silver flowed out of China, and a currency crisis began, which increased the role of opium as a means of payment. For the Confucian state, based on rationalism and a kind of meritocracy, opium was evil incarnate. Patriots saw it as a hostile invasion, a retribution of the highest order: people perished, the state was undermined, traditional institutions disappeared. Drug addiction was associated with literacy. In 1839 the Chinese emperor ordered the destruction of opium in the ports and warehouses; on that occasion more than 1,000 tonnes were found and burnt. Outraged by this interference in free trade, the British Empire declared war. Using their first military steamships, British troops forced China to pay compensation. The British obtained Hong Kong and five more ports for duty-free trade. The price of opium fell sharply, and people lower down the social scale began using it, just as had happened with sugar in Europe. Only then did the production of Chinese opium increase. It was considered poor quality and its price was half that of Indian opium, but it saturated the market. As it got cheaper, opium was available to ever increasing numbers of ever poorer people. In reply, the Taiping Rebellion (1850–64) started in the coastal areas of China: the rebels were Christian reformers battling the forces of evil. The leader of this peasant war, Hong Xiuquan, called himself Christ’s younger brother – he was an unsuccessful civil servant who had failed his examinations four times. Practising asceticism, the Taiping movement forbade opium, alcohol and prostitution. But it had few weapons and no revenue, and the rebellion was put down in bloody battles. The Western powers supplied the Chinese army with artillery and military officers. Together with a parallel uprising of the Muslim Dungans in north-west China, the Taiping Rebellion constituted a civil war, engulfing most of the state. Many millions died from hunger or in battle. Millions more emigrated and settled in South-East Asia. 15

Back in England, the opium war was the subject of parliamentary debate. The prime minister, Henry Palmerston, supported intervention. Richard Cobden, the leader of the Manchester liberals, and William Gladstone, the future prime minister, spoke against it. Gladstone’s sister Helen was an opium addict. 16 Her way of life threatened Gladstone’s political career; he spent many years trying to get her addiction cured and understood the nature of the disease better than others. Responding to the war in China, the British authorities in India increased the production of tea, seeing it as an alternative to opium. From 1854 they gave away large plots of land (up to 3,000 hectares) to any European farmer who wanted to grow tea for export. When the railways reached the foothills of the Himalayas, Indian tea exports to Europe approached those of China. Eventually it should have restored the balance of trade, but in 1856 the Second Opium War began. French and English troops joined forces to occupy Chinese ports and warehouses, liberating them for the opium trade. Undermined by opium and the Taiping, the Chinese lost one battle after another. After seizing Peking, the Western powers signed a peace treaty with China through the mediation of the Russian ambassador, Count Nikolay Ignatieff. China made opium use legal and ceded new ports for free trade. A declaration on the freedom of worship did not prevent a crackdown on the Taiping.

The irony was that Chinese entrepreneurs were now ousting India from the opium market. The British could not resist this development. Opium was grown mainly in the interior provinces of China, but the British controlled only the coastal territories. Opium opened up the interior provinces for domestic trade: more opium was shipped throughout China than salt or rice, which were consumed locally. Prices fell, demand grew, and internal production grew too. Opium and tea supplanted cereals; later, this became one of the causes of mass famine. By the end of the nineteenth century China was already producing nine times more opium than India. But, unlike India, China grew poppy entirely for domestic consumption. At the beginning of the twentieth century, opium became China’s internal affair: the country consumed 95 per cent of the global production of opium, and it was nearly all home-grown. This was the Chinese version of the Great Transformation: the peasants worked in the fields, growing opium for wages paid in opium, which was consumed on the spot. Sugar opened markets for global trade; opium closed them.

Deprived of their revenue, the British opened up new markets for opium throughout South-East Asia. Free-trade ports trans-shipped opium on two oceans; for many years Canton had been such a port, and Singapore had similar beginnings. In the 1840s Hong Kong, now a British colony, became the main trans-shipping port. Many Asian economic tigers owe their origins to opium, and only Japan resisted it. From the outset of talks with the Europeans in 1854, Japan stipulated a ban on the opium trade as a condition for the partial opening of its markets. At the beginning of the twentieth century the very same states which had made money out of the opium trade now curtailed it. In 1906 China concluded an agreement with Great Britain, committing both sides to reducing opium production. Peking undertook several confiscations, but in 1912 the Qing dynasty fell and with it the Confucian state. In 1909 the British authorities abolished the opium trade in Singapore. But they outlawed the opium trade throughout the empire only in 1943, when practically the whole of the British Empire east of Bengal was under Japanese control. Between the two world wars, both Chinese states – the communist insurgents and the Kuomintang regime – actively traded opium. After 1950 totalitarian China removed poppies from its fields and opium from the life of its subjects. But, in Europe, public opinion didn’t react to the opium trade in the same way that it had reacted to the slave trade; preconceptions about Orientalism, closely bound up with opium, played their role. To those who believed that opium was a ‘vice of the yellow race’, it didn’t seem particularly sinful to make money out of it. In fact, the opposite causality was in action, the same that had earlier worked with slaves and would later work with oil: those who benefited from the opium trade blamed the victims in order to justify their own deeds.

Colonies and calories

The intensification of agricultural labour led to its convergence with urban labour and, therefore, to the destruction of the peasant way of life, with its notorious ‘idleness’. Dispersed among countless rural cottages, the English textile industry was so cost-effective that it led to the collapse of its more technologically advanced Italian rivals. A crucial question is what exactly led the rural households out of the equilibrium of the moral economy and diverted them onto the highway of pre-industrial capitalism.

The eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm identified one of the reasons as the appearance in rural households of colonial goods such as sugar, tobacco, coffee and tea. 17 Producing a quasi-narcotic dependency, these products motivated people to earn more than the minimum needed for survival. The more affordable they were, the bigger the role they played in family budgets. We are talking about a mass phenomenon: after the end of the Napoleonic wars, and then for decades after that, these goods made up a quarter of all British imports. Trade in addictive commodities made English merchants fabulously rich. This trade channelled Britain’s colonial appropriations into the financial expansion of its markets, banks and stocks. But the sugar dependence of the metropolitan population was even more important for the empire.

A sweet tooth quickly leads to a sugar habit, and the habit leads to growing consumption. Everyone is subject to these effects – men and women, young and old, rich and poor, although age and gender play their roles. The sociologist Werner Sombart theorised that the development of capitalism was linked to the emerging role of women in consuming oriental luxuries. Sugar was a crucial ingredient in this process; Sombart wrote that the link between women and sugar was ‘supremely important in the history of economic development’. 18 Alcohol and tobacco were masculine pleasures, coffee was equally favoured by all, and tea and scones were more appealing to women. Unloaded at the Atlantic ports, colonial groceries were unequally distributed across Europe, emanating from the North Sea and gradually reaching distant corners. 19 The inclusion of sugar, tobacco and tea in the diet of ordinary people led to the reliance of rural families on these imported commodities, which opened up subsistence farming to the circulation of goods and money. Incorporating the ‘moral economy’ into global trade shaped new mechanisms for motivating labour. If a household increased its consumption of sugar, tea or chocolate with every year that passed, it meant that the householder, his wife and children had to work harder and earn more cash with every year that passed. Defying the ‘moral economy’, the growing consumption of addictive commodities led to a shortage of money, to the necessity to work more, to look for extra work, and to bring women and children into the workforce. This seemed only fair as women and children consumed just as much sugar, tea and chocolate as men.

Sugar, jams and sauces, chocolate and other sweet treats, together with tea, created a new ritualised set of consumables with a recognisably feminine aspect. The masculine consumption of tobacco and strong alcoholic drinks from the colonies – rum, gin and port – developed in parallel. The trade in all these tasty things grew enormously. In 1750 the volume of tobacco imported from the American colonies on British ships was six times greater than a hundred years previously, the quantity of gin twelve times greater, and the amount of tea, rum and coffee immeasurably greater. The prices for all these goods fell, regardless of inflation, which raised the price of grain and local goods. Women’s labour, paid and unpaid, played a key role in all these processes. On the eve of the eighteenth century, city life as we understand it today – cafés and tea houses, theatres, hotels and shops – began to develop in Western Europe. Local goods were sold in the town’s markets, and shops sold colonial goods. The new colonial economy interacted with older commodities such as linen (tablecloths, sheets, curtains), metal alloys (tableware, cutlery), wood (furniture) and paper (books, newspapers). Common people scaled the consumerist heights that had formerly been accessible only to the aristocracy. Now the bourgeois family routinely consumed all those things, from imitation silk to beet sugar to steam-powered travel, which were practically indistinguishable from what their grandparents had seen as royal luxuries. This ascent conveyed a dizzying sensation of progress, which the middle-class family saw not so much as increasing their consumption as climbing up the social scale.

Throughout the centuries, extraction and suffering in the poor and distant parts of the world fed ‘consumption’ – pleasure and disease – in the rich countries of the Northern Atlantic. Two forces moderated this addiction-driven exchange – governmental regulation and the power of the consumer. But a third power was arguably the most important – the word of truth. Creating the modern public, imaginative writers played leading roles in sensitising people to the life of others. Making myriads of individual decisions, both the officials and the consumers followed the texts that they trusted, if only because there was nothing else to rely on. A disenchanted Jesuit priest who refashioned himself into a central figure of the Enlightenment, Abbé Raynal, gathered a stellar team to write the History of the Two Indias ; published in 1770, this encyclopaedia of the colonies led to the public revelation of slavery as evil. Influenced by this overview of global inequality, the Russian customs officer Alexander Radishchev in 1790 published a radical response – a travelogue local, sentimental and subversive – A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow . A public revelation of serfdom as evil, this book got him sacked and exiled to Siberia. The so-called Clapham sect – a high-brow group of English scholars and priests – played a definitive role in the development of the abolitionist movement. One of its founders was Zachary Macauley, a Scottish highlander who managed a sugar plantation in Jamaica but refashioned himself into an anti-slavery activist; in 1825, he founded the Anti-Slavery Reporter , a fact-based monthly publication that continued for many decades. His eldest son, Thomas Babington Macauley, became a historian and politician who promoted the idea of progress, which he identified with extending English-language education and British institutions to India. The Dutch author Multatuli (Eduard Douwes Dekker), in his novel Max Havelaar, or, The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (1860), described the working conditions in the coffee plantations of the Dutch East Indies. 20 Leading to mass protests in Holland, this novel initiated the fair trade movement. The power of the consumer rules supreme, but its success depends on the nature of the commodity: for coffee or bananas, fair trade works well, but for sugar or petroleum not so much. Another milestone of cultural decolonisation was Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), which portrayed the barbaric exploitation of black workers in the Belgian Congo, the symbolic source of all our ivory towers. 21 One of the best historians of slavery, Eric Williams, in his seminal book Capitalism and Slavery (1944), demonstrated that slave labour paid for the Industrial Revolution. A descendant of slaves, Williams became prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago. When he defended his thesis at Oxford right before the start of the Second World War, he defined the nineteenth-century ‘slavery crisis’ – the incomplete emancipation of the American slaves and, I would add, of the Russian serfs and the Chinese coolies as well – as the very first world war.

Note

Notes

1 Withington, ‘Intoxicants and the invention of “consumption”’. 2 Chanel, ‘Taxation as a cause of the French Revolution’. 3 Mintz, Sweetness and Power . 4 Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , p. 389. 5 Breen, Tobacco Culture ; Moss and Badenoch, Chocolate ; Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures ; Grivetti and Shapiro, Chocolate ; Breen, The Age of Intoxication . 6 Mintz, Sweetness and Power , p. 156. 7 Williams, Capitalism and Slavery . 8 Mintz, Sweetness and Power , p. 67. 9 Hume, Political Essays , p. 93. 10 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere . 11 Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History . 12 Yarrington, ‘Sucre indigène and sucre colonial ’. 13 Farooqui, Smuggling as Subversion ; Trocki, Opium, Empire, and the Global Political Economy . 14 See the Eclectic Review 7 (January–June 1840): 805. 15 Reilly, The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom . 16 Isba, Gladstone and Women . 17 Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire ; see also Sahlins et al., ‘The sadness of sweetness’; Pomeranz and Topik, The World that Trade Created . 18 Sombart, Luxury and Capitalism . 19 De Vries, The Industrious Revolution , p. 161. 20 Feenberg, ‘“Max Havelaar”: an anti-imperialist novel’; Salverda, ‘The case of the missing empire’. 21 Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost ; Etkind, Internal Colonization , chap. 11; Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch .