Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  DISPOSSESSION AND REPOSSESSION

  It is now commonplace to write about the nineteenth century in terms of the ‘great divergence’ between East and West. In industrial growth and global power, Europe raced ahead of China. The causes of this disparity remain the subject of debate.3 Imperial trade and expansion, Atlantic slavery and easily accessible domestic coal gave Britain a unique edge. What ultimately proved decisive, however, were the gains accrued from three centuries of high wages. High wages encouraged British entrepreneurs to innovate and develop labour-saving machinery and to exploit a sophisticated European network of technology. And it was serendipitous timing: after the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15), Europe enjoyed a favourable spell of peace and stability, just as China was struck by a series of natural disasters, ineffective emperors and debilitating rebellions.4 Hunger for Indian cottons and Chinese porcelain played their part in stimulating growth and innovation, as did the Atlantic colonies, which provided additional outlets for some of Britain’s most rapidly developing sectors, such as textiles. In the final analysis, however, it was engineering, iron and steel, and steamboats – producer-goods industries – that really powered Britain’s sustained growth, not cotton shirts or creamware.5

  Alongside the East/West divide, there was another development that caused a seismic shift in both the quality and scope of consumption: the end of slavery. Free labour and free trade (after 1846) were the two legs of Britain’s liberal empire.6 When Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, it set in motion a process of world-historical significance. Emancipation in 1833, the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery in Cuba and Brazil in 1886 and 1888 were followed by the end of domestic slavery in Africa in the years around 1900; Russia abolished serfdom in 1861. In truth, slavery in many places was not replaced by genuinely free labour but by indentured and coerced labour. In French West Africa, slavery actually increased in the century after Britain abolished the evil trade. Germany never did away with slavery in its colonies, and Hitler and Stalin would devise their own forms of forced labour. But however imperfect and partial, the imperial attack on slavery redefined the order of things: people were no longer possessions that could be traded like other goods.

  The slave plantations of the Americas and the Caribbean have, understandably, shaped our understanding of the trade in humans: over 11 million Africans were forced across the Atlantic passage. Yet slavery also flourished within many African societies. In 1800, to own slaves was a sign of power and prestige in many kingdoms. Economically, slavery was a rational response to the continent’s principal constraint: labour, not land. Capturing and commanding slaves was a way to harness that scarce resource. Most slaves were clients, not chattels; they were soldiers, servants and peasants, rarely plantation labour. Consumption, even luxury, was not altogether absent in slave-holding societies – royal wives and concubines were richly decorated in fine cloth and jewels. In general, though, domestic slavery depressed both the absolute volume of demand and the relative significance of goods for conferring status and power. A good deal of pre-colonial consumption in Africa consisted of tributes or gifts, distributed by elites to their clients. This was in sharp contrast to Western Europe, where serfdom had died out by the sixteenth century, although it would resurface in Central and Eastern Europe. Slavery within Britain was formally outlawed in 1772, although, in reality, some owners chose to ignore it by apprenticing their slaves. At that time, around 15,000 people of African descent were living in the British Isles – some free, some unfree – a tiny number in a country with half a million comfortable middle-class families or when compared to the half-million slaves in the West Indian colonies. We now know that, in addition to merchants and planters, many widows, clergymen and other small investors living in Britain profited from slaves in the colonies.7 Yet they did not surround themselves with a large retinue of servants at home. The number of footmen was limited and declining. Instead, the profit from the bloody trade was sunk into mahogany chairs, porcelain, elegant dresses and jewels.8 Status came to reside in the ownership of objects, not people. By 1914, the liberal European model ruled. After first spreading slavery across the world, the British empire extirpated it.

  Abolition had profound implications for value, desire and identity. Once owning people was no longer an option, wealth and power were channelled into things (or saved for future consumption). Britons entered the crusade against slavery with a baggage of Enlightenment ideas about the dominion of things and its virtues. The hunger for comforts and possessions, it was believed, would lead people from trading in humans to trading in goods. Thus the abolitionists set out to save the ‘dark continent’.

  To know what difference empire made to African consumption, it is essential to have a pre-colonial baseline. In the late nineteenth century, when imperialism was in full swing, missionaries and critics of empire typically portrayed African colonies as a dumping ground for European gin and shoddy guns. The more industrial and modern Europeans became, the more such commentators represented Africa as ‘traditional’, untouched by inequality and materialism until brutalized by the slave trade. The African was ‘half devil and half child’, in Rudyard Kipling’s phrase. The notion of sub-Saharan Africans as untouched by commerce was, however, Western fantasy and imperial rhetoric. Africa was not frozen in some pre-commercial ice age. Trade and a passion for things had been expanding for several centuries before imperial conquest. Coastal regions in West and East Africa recorded rising imports of textiles, beads and iron. From a European perspective, these quantities might have looked tiny. West Africa took a mere 4 per cent of English exports in 1800. When viewed from the Gold Coast, the valleys of the Senegambia and Zanzibar, however, the volume of European and Indian goods was impressive. By the sixteenth century, the Portuguese were shipping half a million manilas (bracelets) to the Gold Coast a year. In Southern Central Nigeria, people started wearing Holland Linen in 1600. In the course of the eighteenth century, the value of imports in West Africa rose tenfold. Rouen and Liverpool shipped hats, glasses, smoking pipes and, especially, textiles. The value of the cargo often exceeded that of the ship and crew.

  Africans were becoming increasingly discriminating consumers with their own regional tastes and fashion cycles. Accra demanded linen, Offra block-printed chintzes, preferably in red. In the Senegambia – the sub-Sahara region closest to Europe – Indian niconees (striped calico) and tapseals (a mix of silk and cotton) were popular. European traders had to adapt to local fashions. In eighteenth-century Senegambia, people demanded not just any kind of knife but a ‘Flemish’ type, first introduced by Dutch and Portuguese merchants. British traders managed to get a foothold in the market only once they arrived with similar models. Among the most lucrative and widespread articles were beads, shipped in billions, and used for decoration, religious offerings and as currency and a symbol of wealth. Beads were immensely varied in style and quality. Glass beads were round or tubular, transparent or speckled. Some were imitation pearls and crystal from Venice and Bohemia.9 The slave trade was part of this expanding world of goods, enriching local rulers and their followers. The King of Dahomey, for example, made £250,000 from the sale of slaves in 1750.

  It is impossible to do justice here to the rich literature about different regions, but three general points can be made. First, consumption was on a long, upward curve before the scramble for Africa got under way in the 1880s. The abolition of the slave trade in 1807 accelerated this process, as West African communities started to trade ever greater amounts of palm oil, gum and other export crops. But it did not originate it. A taste revolution was already creating distinct regional styles. In other words, Africans did not need imperial masters to teach them how to become consumers. Communities had their own vocabulary of material desire. For Mombasans, desire (moyo) and possessions were considered integral to selfhood and status. European travellers in East Africa noted how ‘natives like to display all their finery by putting it up in their rooms, so that people may see their plates, co
ffee cups, trinkets, baskets and many other things.’10 The second point is about sequence. Not only was the volume of goods rising, but the direction of imports shifted well before Europeans imposed formal rule over Africa: goods no longer simply flowed from India to Europe and Africa. Britain started to wrest control from India in textiles, the biggest prize in African markets, in the early nineteenth century. In 1850, Britain sent 17 million yards of fabric to West Africa; twenty-five years earlier, it had been a mere million. Finally, the share of consumer goods was itself rising. In Senegambia in the early eighteenth century, for example, iron was still a major import, to be turned into hoes and tools by local smithies. A century later, iron was marginal, outpaced by textiles. The ‘guns and gin for slaves’ picture is largely a myth; alcohol was never a dominant import and guns arrived in large numbers only after the end of the slave trade.

  Outside coastal towns, European contact with Africans in the early nineteenth century was largely limited to missionaries. Missions were divided about the best strategy for conversion. For many early missionaries, going native was an opportunity to lead a life of voluntary poverty as servants of Christ. Western comforts were an obstacle to salvation. Poor pay and poor transport left them isolated, adding to the pull of indigenous life. Among the Bethelsdorp mission in the Cape Colony, Mr I. G. Hooper learnt to live in a straw hut, sleep on a board and be ‘as pleased with a fare chiefly of dry bread as with the best provisions when in my native land’.11 Such missionaries dropped their shirts and neckties, forsook tea and coffee, and often took a Khoekhoe wife. Champions of indigenization never disappeared altogether, but abolition shifted the focus to westernizing Africans. The battle against slavery and sin would not be won until Africans embraced ‘legitimate trade’ as a profitable alternative. Africans had to learn from Europeans, not the other way around. Mission stations became islands of Western lifestyle, with houses that had windows, tables, beds and candles. On baptism, a convert received a white shirt and a blanket. The path to salvation was paved with goods.

  Spiritual rebirth would inspire new habits, comforts and desires. ‘The same Gospel which had taught them they were spiritually miserable, blind, and naked,’ Robert Moffat, a veteran of the London Missionary Society (LMS) in Africa wrote in 1842, ‘discovered to them also that they needed reform externally, and thus prepared their minds to adopt those modes of comfort, cleanliness and convenience which they had been accustomed to view only as the peculiarities of a strange people.’ Body smearing was ‘very disgusting’. Animal hides needed to be swapped for shirts and gowns. Saving souls and winning customers now went hand in hand. New clothes, Moffat wrote, would ‘sweep away the filth and customs of former generations, and . . . open up numberless channels for British commerce, which, but for the Gospel, might have remained for ever closed’.12 Commerce and conversion propelled each other forward in missionary propaganda. ‘God has clearly chosen England to be the great Missionary nation,’ the Church Missionary Society explained in one of its many tracts, since why else would He have put her at the centre of world trade?: ‘just see how every thing around us comes from Heathen or foreign countries. Our coats are dyed with indigo bought from Bengal; . . . we have our tea from China; our coffee from Arabia . . . even our railway cars have palm-oil from Guinea for oiling the wheels’. British factories would have to shut their doors were it not for the Heathens’ demand for British goods. ‘Thus we are bound, by close ties of common interest, to multitudes of nations who are ignorant of God and of His Christ.’ It was sinful to think that, with this interdependence, God had not given Britons a particular duty to carry salvation to the heathen.13

  Consumption, too, would work away on the African mind. John Philip of the LMS spelt it out for the governor of the Cape: ‘Tribes in a savage state are generally without houses, gardens and fixed property: by locating them on a particular place, getting them to build houses . . . cultivate corn land, accumulate property, and by increasing their artificial wants, you increase their dependence on the colony, and multiply the bonds of union.’14 A man with an address and possessions did not steal cattle. Abolitionists and champions of African expeditions like Thomas Fowell Buxton saw a natural affinity between the slave trade and African laziness on the one hand, and peaceful trade and industriousness on the other. The ultimate remedy for the slave trade lay in Africa, not in Europe. Western things would initiate a virtuous circle of greater wants, work, property and peace.

  Optimism about raising Africans to Western levels of comfort and commerce reached its peak in the 1830s. It is well illustrated by a letter from Mr Ferguson, the head of the medical department in Sierra Leone, the British colony founded for freed slaves, and was publicized at length by Buxton, the leading campaigner against the international slave trade. The ‘grade’ of liberated Africans was directly visible in their houses and interiors, Ferguson wrote. The highest grade lived in comfortable two-storey stone houses built from their earnings. Here they enjoyed ‘mahogany chairs, tables, sofas and four-post bedsteads, pier glasses, floor cloths and other articles indicative of domestic comfort and accumulating wealth’. Liberated Africans had a ‘great love of money’, Ferguson wrote. But this was not a vice. Unlike the ‘sordid’ miser, they devoted their income to ‘the increase of their domestic comforts and the improvement of their outward appearance of respectability’. It is difficult to imagine higher praise from a British observer. There ‘is not a more quiet, inoffensive, and good-humoured population on the face of the earth’.15 In other words, these were model consumers close to the kind imagined by Adam Smith. They put their energy into peaceful industry and possessions, not into dominating their fellow men.

  The Revd Samuel Crowther, who had been a slave boy in Yoruba country in 1821 before taking the voyage to Freetown and freedom, returned to the Niger in 1854 and noted the ‘striking change in the habits of the people’ since his earlier expedition in 1841. Soon after reaching the village of Angiama, a few miles inland, he was greeted by Brass people in canoes, there to buy palm-oil. In 1841, ‘very few’ of the people he encountered ‘were to be found with any decent articles of clothing’. Now, ‘among a group of about forty people on shore, fifteen who I could distinctly see had English shirts on.’ For Crowther, who was on his way to become the first black bishop of the Church Missionary Society, it was ‘an evident mark of the advantage of legal trade over that in men’.16

  Evangelicalism, the animating spirit behind the crusade against the slave trade, placed a heavy burden on individuals to atone for their sins and bring their world closer to God’s design. British consumers, as well as Africans, had to reform their ways. After all, they were the ones enjoying slave-grown sugar. The colonial food chain tied European consumers to the fate of African slaves. ‘The consumer of the West India produce may be considered as the Master-Spring that gives motion and effect to the whole Machine of Cruelties,’ one abolitionist pamphlet put it in 1792.17 Consumers had a moral duty to abstain from slave-grown sugar. It was bloodstained, polluting, even cannibalistic. In ‘every pound of sugar used . . . we may be considered as consuming two ounces of human flesh’.18 The boycott of slave-grown sugar grew into a transatlantic mass movement. Women were at the forefront, capitalizing on their control of the purse, ideas of domestic virtue and their much-cited ability to sympathize. Ethical consumerism was born (see Plate 15).

  It has been tempting to see this episode as a radiant light in the dark history of colonialism, pointing forward to human rights and more responsible shoppers. In fact, abolition in 1833 prompted a moral retreat. At first, the anti-slave movement continued with national petitions. At its London conference in 1854, it called on its members to abstain from buying slave-grown cotton, rice and tobacco, but after that, it is the silence of European consumers that is resounding. Imperial consumers did not rally to boycott the growing mountains of cheap sugar, coffee and cocoa produced by indentured labourers or slaves in other countries. By 1900, Europeans reserved their ethical buying power to target sweats
hop conditions and help local matchstick girls. When the media turned its spotlight on Cadbury’s use of slaves in São Tomé and Príncipe, the Portuguese islands in the Gulf of Guinea, in 1904–9, British consumers went on sipping their cocoa regardless.19 Campaigners and industrialists agreed that it was for firms, not private consumers, to tackle labour abuses. Quaker calls for a consumer boycott came to nothing. As a political weapon, the boycott was now turned inside out. Instead of an instrument of the affluent few in the imperial metropole eager to lift up colonial producers, consumer boycotts on the eve of the First World War were used by the weak against their imperial overlords, by Poles in Eastern Prussia against German shopkeepers, and Indians opposing Britain’s partition of Bengal. The Chinese diaspora used boycotts across Asia to protest against the United States’ detention and deportation of Chinese immigrants.

  Imperialism left consumer society with a split identity. While establishing themselves as colonial masters, Europeans also seized control as master consumers, relegating the rest to the role of coolies or peasants. The European discovery of the consumer in economics and the emergence of the Western concept of the ‘standard of living’ were one part of this story, to which we shall need to return. Here, we must follow the colonial story a little further, to see how the African consumer was squeezed out of the imperial imagination.