Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  Governments still paid little attention to consumer issues, with the partial exception of food safety and public health. Still, there was a perceptible change in the atmosphere around the turn of the century. The concept of a decent standard of living broadened the political arena, with millions engaged in battles over tariffs and the cost of food. This was a truly global moment, with protests from Vienna to Santiago,100 and reflected the global integration of the food system. As steamships moved wheat and beef across the oceans, people became used to more and better cuts of meat and a cheaper cup of coffee. In the 1890s, this trend hit a buffer. Many producers and farmers experienced globalization as a threat to their existence. With the exception of Britain, all states raised their trade barriers, and with them prices. Trade policy thus gave the issue of the standard of living fresh political urgency.

  The space assigned to the consumer in these battles differed depending on each country’s traditions, as well as its socio-economic make-up. In Germany, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) launched a crusade against the ‘hunger tariff’. Here the language was that of class. It was workers whom tariffs robbed of their hard-earned bacon, not the consuming public. Stretching the German language to its limit, contemporaries warned against the Nurkonsumentenstandpunkt, the point of view of consumers alone.101 In a corporate tradition, where producer and professional identities prevailed, the consumer seemed a sectional interest, at best a clerk, at worst an idle rentier. In France, social hierarchies and the large number of small workshops also favoured a split identity. Henriette Brunhes’ Ligue Sociale d’Acheteurs treated artisans and shopgirls as workers, not fellow consumers.102 In the United States, the simultaneous advance of wage labour and mass manufacturing made spending more of a shared concern. Virtually every American bought their clothes with their wages. Progressives turned to consumers as a unifying force in the battle against trusts and plutocracy. It was consumers who would ‘displace our present duality of resplendent plutocracy and crude ineffective democracy with a single, broad, intelligent, socialized, and victorious democracy’, trumpeted Walter Weyl, a student of Patten’s and one of the founders of the New Republic.103

  The apotheosis of the consumer occurred in Britain. Britain, unlike high-tariff America, had been a free-trade nation since 1846. Victorian politics laid a supporting platform: the consumer as tax-payer, represented in town councils and parliament. The heated defence of free trade after 1903 raised the citizen-consumer to new heights. Initially focusing on ‘the cheap loaf’, the campaign added more and more goods to its political shopping basket. On high streets, shop windows taught lessons in the standard of living with displays of branded goods like Colman’s mustard and hats and jackets from Britain alongside more costly samples from protectionist Germany. That this was a biased comparison – Americans and Australians lived even better behind trade barriers – did not make the message any less forceful. Britain’s higher standard was advertised as evidence of the superiority of its liberal institutions and its high regard for the consumer. Industrialists rallied to the defence of ‘that most important person’, as did cooperators, trade unionists, feminists and the Treasury. The consumer was the national interest.104

  VALUE ADDED

  A concern for consumer welfare and a critique of imperialism went hand in hand for radicals like J. A. Hobson. The debate about the costs and benefits of empire has been conducted as an accounting exercise ever since: how much capital did Britain send to its colonies and what was the consequence of having an empire for investment and welfare at home? The short answer by scholars who have calculated investments in railway and securities is that it paid to invest in colonies more than at home, but that it paid even more to invest in neutral overseas markets, especially the United States and Latin America.105 Empire, in other words, attracted investment that might have gone into British schools, roads and power stations. But the scope and return from investment within the empire was dwarfed by more attractive opportunities beyond it. This was the era of finance imperialism, and whether empire was keeping capitalism going was the big question of the day. There is no reason, however, why the debate should be limited to capital investments. Empire affected the flow of goods more broadly. As cultural markers, ‘visible’ goods mattered more than the ‘invisible’ exports of pounds and securities. Just as there are terms of trade, we thus need to think about the terms of consumption, terms that change between groups, products and regions. We have already observed how empire altered status. It also redefined the value of place.

  Ironically, Hobson launched his attack on empire during the heyday of free trade, when the empire had come to matter less to Britons’ welfare than ever before. Trade liberalization – sometimes free, sometimes forced – and steamboats opened up the world for late-Victorian consumers. Victorians enjoyed beef from Argentina, sherry from Portugal and sugar from Brazil. The round of second industrial revolutions in France, Germany and the United States created new markets for finished goods which, again, lay outside the empire. Most colonies were growing, but their share in metropolitan markets was falling: in 1805, one quarter of British imports came from the West Indies; by 1855 it had dropped to 5 per cent. It was when the global economy went into free fall in the inter-war years that Britons rediscovered the value of their colonies, with empire shopping weeks, appeals to ‘Buy British’, Kenyan-coffee-roasting demonstrations and competitions for the biggest Empire Christmas pudding.106 Overall, under free trade, it was tropical colonies that were dependent on the imperial centre, not the other way around. On the eve of the First World War, Jamaica bought 44 per cent of its imports from Britain, the Gold Coast 89 per cent.

  Radicals characteristically worried about the effect of imperialism on social equality. Again, we need to take a long view. All empires affect status and income, but some do so more than others. The mercantilist empire had been one long gravy train for aristocrats, planters and monopoly traders. True, it created some positive spillovers for regional economies tied into imperial trade, such as the wool trade in the West Riding of Yorkshire or workers producing glassware and copper in Liverpool. Overall, however, the transaction was one-sided. Consumers paid for the navy; the elite reaped the profits. The eighteenth-century empire magnified social inequality in Britain, but even more sharply in the colonies. Jamaican planters accumulated vast riches. By 1800, the average white man in Jamaica was over fifty times as wealthy as a free white person in the United States. Consuming united the white master class. Colonial planters were famed for their lavish entertainment and hospitality, dances and tea parties, French brandy and pickled crabs.107 Riches and poverty did not disappear with the end of slavery and tariffs, but after 1846 the cost of empire was more fairly shared than before, as the imperial state lifted a large tax burden off the shoulders of British consumers.

  The increasingly open, global trading system after 1850 transformed the imperial architecture of consumption. The British taste for sweetened tea has served as a shorthand for the link between empire and consumption. As a vessel for sugar, the teacup tied consumers in London and the Scottish Highlands to slave plantations in Jamaica and Barbados. After the 1840s, the British shifted the cultivation of tea from China to their Indian empire. Tea was an essential part of British life, from domestic rituals to the tea shops that began to crop up in the 1880s, all the way to Widow Twankey, the pantomime dame in Aladdin – a play on ‘twankay’, a green tea past its prime. Tea, and other such exotic products, ‘embedded colonial meanings as well as colonial trade in ordinary lives’, in the words of one historian108 Sugar, according to Sidney Mintz, reflected ‘the growing strength and solidity of the empire and of the classes that dictated its policies’.109 This is all true for the eighteenth century, but for the nineteenth century the opposite can be argued. The British empire became more powerful as the fruits of its tropical colonies became ever less important to its metropolitan consumers.

  In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, empires had opened crucial pathways f
or exotic tastes, but at a price. The taxman encouraged the smuggler. When duties on tea were lowered in 1745, the legal sale of tea in Britain suddenly tripled.110 In France, too, smuggling softened a little the impact a regime of taxes and restrictions had on consumption. To circumvent the ‘French Farm’, which had the monopoly on collecting the taxes on imported tobacco, traffickers brought Virginia tobacco into France via Dutch ports and Alsace, where they then blended it with home-grown weeds.111 Still, such contraband trade only satisfied so much demand. Other empires also had liberal moments that boosted consumption, but these tended to be temporary and short-lived, for example when Spain lowered duties in Guayaquil, in Ecuador, and introduced a colonial customs zone in the 1770s. In the longer perspective, however, the break-up of the Spanish empire after the Napoleonic wars turned out to be a step backwards, as Venezuela and other newly independent states raised their own barriers and export taxes to finance themselves. The conclusion is clear: in the long run, mercantilism was not fit for mass consumption. That was the historic achievement of free trade from the 1840s.

  The phenomenal spread of tropical goods in the second half of the nineteenth century was driven by two forces: trade liberalization and a massive increase in cash-crop production. Unlike sugar, cocoa resisted industrial-style cultivation. It thrived in shade and needed surrounding plants to protect it from wind and disease. Economies of scale were few. Slavery was not absent – the Portuguese used it on São Tomé and Príncipe, their cocoa islands off West Africa, while the Germans tried ‘scientific’ planting and coerced labour in Cameroon, without much success. In general, cocoa favoured smallholders or, at least, a mix of day-labourers working alongside slaves at harvest time. Cocoa was a direct beneficiary of the end of slavery, which swelled the number of smallholders in search of a plot of land. In the Amazon, in Brazil, mixed-race and Amerindian small farmers gained ground over large planters after the Cabanagem Rebellion of 1835–40. In Colombia, the abolition of slavery was followed in 1851 by land grants to freed slaves. Coffee, by contrast, thrived on slave plantations. Virgin forests, long-distance railway and slave labour (until emancipation in 1888) made Brazil the world’s premier producer. In 1914, the world consumed fifty times as much coffee as a century earlier. Colonies now provided only a small fraction of this.112

  Mercantile empires were never entirely sealed off from outside trade. A good portion of Britain’s colonial sugar and coffee was re-exported down the Rhine and Danube to landlocked central Europeans. Still, Britain’s free-trade empire provided the lubricant for the global (rather than colonial) flow of goods. What mattered now was cheapness, not origin. By the 1880s, a Briton’s spoonful of sugar contained no more than a few colonial grains. The bulk came from Brazilian cane and East European beet sugar. From a global point of view, the British link between tea, empire and mass consumption was the exception, not the rule. The other big European tea consumer, after all, was Russia. By 1914, Europeans got virtually all their coffee from Brazil. The coffee harvests in German colonies were minute, and even the French West Indies only filled 3 per cent of cups in Parisian cafés.113 Chocolate, similarly, came less and less from the colonies. It was a dramatic reversal of fortune.

  To look for direct influences of colonial produce on metropolitan sensibility, therefore, is to miss the forest for the trees. The liberal empire of consumption was not a one-way street. It involved reverse flows in the colonial world as well as lateral exits and flyovers via which goods reached societies without colonies. The power of the free-trade empire was precisely to make all producers, including tropical colonies, look to global demand. Colonial products became more diffused and invisible. Sometimes they were completely detached from the imperial core. By the 1880s, the biggest consumers of sugar from British Jamaica sat in Chicago and Boston, not London and Liverpool. The Dutch had Java, but cocoa manufacturers like van Houten did not like the insipid taste of its beans. Most Javanese cocoa was consequently sold on to the United States. The German Kolonialwarenladen (colonial-goods shop) effectively made a business out of their neighbours’ more successful empires. In a mercantilist world, colonies had been a necessary ticket to consumption. In a liberal world economy, mass consumption no longer cared about the colour of the flag. Take the world’s premier league of coffee drinkers on the eve of the First World War. The Dutch still drank more coffee than anyone – now largely from Brazil – but hard on their heels were Norwegians, Danes, Swedes and the Swiss. Consumption was not centred on imperial metropoles. Cubans drank more coffee (from Costa Rica) than did the French and the Germans; the average Chilean twice as much as a Spaniard or Italian.114 The ‘South’, it is all too often forgotten, were not only producers. They were consumers, too.

  National policies and class cultures shaped who drank what where. After Independence, Britain shut out the United States from its West Indian colonies and prohibited American ships from carrying colonial goods. It was a blow to the United States’ re-export trade. Thomas Jefferson’s response was to switch to France and its Caribbean colonies. Trade in and consumption of coffee became a patriotic act. After the 1820s, the United States reached further south, to Brazil. By 1880, Americans consumed almost half a billion pounds of coffee a year.115 Care must be taken, however, not to produce nationalist caricatures. Nations were not monocultures. American revolutionaries had boycotted British tea, but in the nineteenth century tea was almost as popular as coffee. The Japanese customarily drank tea, but migrants returning from Brazil also created a taste for coffee; the first Brazilian café opened in Tokyo in 1908. Britons were a nation of tea drinkers, but never exclusively so. By 1900, they drank as much chocolate as the Spanish, belying the idea of a fault line between a sober, rational Protestant North and a debauched Catholic South.

  Commodity biographies can have a triumphant, Whiggish flavour, with one exotic food conquering all before it. History written by the winner tends to miss the remarkable resilience of many local and class-based tastes. Social emulation could be counteracted by an equally strong sense that each class should stick to its own food. Such norms acted as a buffer against national homogenization as well as global fusion. Averages hide large disparities between classes and regions. In France, for example, sugar consumption increased, but most of it ended up in bourgeois mouths. According to one estimate in 1873, a Parisian labourer made do with a total of 10 grams of sugar a day – two spoonfuls – a fraction of the British sweet tooth. In the rest of the country, workers, miners and farmers largely abstained from sugar altogether. If at all, sugar was used as a condiment (like pepper or salt), or for medication, administered to the sick. A 1906 survey by a Paris hospital found that the majority of labourers disliked sweet things: sugar spoiled one’s appetite and weakened one’s vigour. Sweets and pastries were something for leisured elites, not workers, who turned to red meat, cheese and wine for physical strength. It is, therefore, dubious to see a pre-existing taste for sugar as a European gateway for tropical foods. Coffee, too, had some difficulty winning over workers. In Paris, sans-culottes had already acquired a taste for coffee at the time of the French Revolution, and it appeared in working-class cafés. Outside Paris, though, the uptake was more modest. One canteen in Lyons served a good thousand meals a day in 1896 but merely thirty-seven cups of coffee.116

  Tea and sugar were more widespread in the first industrial nation, Britain, but to see cause and effect here is misleading. Industrialization did not need sucrose or caffeine. It proceeded just as well with beer and wine. Belgium, France and Germany all industrialized while their factory labourers still tasted very little sugar. In fact, the people with the biggest sweet tooth at the end of the nineteenth century lived down under, in agrarian Queensland – consuming around 60kg per person a year. Coffee’s popular success as a sober and industrious drink was more a consequence of industrialization than its stimulant.

  In continental Europe, the real take-off came in the 1870s–’80s, as Brazil cut deeper and deeper into its forests and prices fell. An insp
ector in Düsseldorf, Germany, noted how ‘the working classes now routinely drink coffee three times a day’.117 Industrial firms and social reformers opened canteens and coffee huts. It is easy, however, to exaggerate the intake of caffeine. In 1909, after twenty years of activity, the Union of People’s Coffee-Halls served Hamburg workers 75,000 cups of coffee but 2 million cups of caffeine-free substitute coffee. At home, many families diluted coffee beans with the cheaper chicory.118 Temperance groups championed coffee as the energizing antidote to alcohol. Whether it worked is another question. Port cities such as Hamburg were never sober. In fact, the Union of Coffee-Halls served alcoholic drinks as well. In France, male workers took their coffee with brandy, in the Netherlands and Germany with rum or schnapps. If the rise of industrial society meant more coffee, it also involved more liquor. Krupp, the big German steel-and-arms manufacturer, served its workers seventy times as much beer as coffee.119