French explorers, fur traders, and missionaries moved inland from Quebec on foot and by canoe, founding forts, trading posts, and a few small missions along the coasts of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. They did not have the military superiority to demand tribute from indigenous people as the Russians did in Siberia, but traded on terms favorable to themselves for fox, lynx, marten, and especially beaver, whose inner fur was prized by European hat-makers because it was dense and had small barbs, so could be easily felted into the hats that were the height of fashion in Europe. (European beaver had been nearly hunted to extinction by this point.) As in Siberia, French fur traders—called voyageurs or coureurs de bois (“runners of the woods”)—frequently married local women as they traveled further and further west, relying on their wives and their wives’ families for many things.
Conflict over the fur trade was one factor in the Iroquois Wars of the seventeenth century—sometimes called the Beaver Wars—in which the nations of the Iroquois Confederacy of the eastern Great Lakes region expanded their area of control west and south, and fought with the French and their Huron and Algonquin allies. The Iroquois appear to have been expansionist before the fur trade gave them an added incentive for warfare, but now the stakes were higher, and the weapons more deadly, as the Dutch and later the English supplied them with guns. The Iroquois may also have been attempting to capture individuals from other tribes to replace the many in their own who had died from warfare or the diseases brought by Europeans, especially smallpox and measles. Taking captives was a common aim in Native American warfare, with the captured sometimes integrated into the tribe through adoption or marriage. Captives occasionally included Europeans taken from isolated farms or villages, some of whom were tortured, but most of whom were simply taken along and later ransomed or escaped. A few of these told their stories in captivity narratives that were published and became best-sellers, shaping colonial and European views of Native Americans.
With the second wave of North American colonization in the 1660s, the English took control of all Dutch territory, and the king granted a new company, The Company of Adventurers of England Trading into Hudson's Bay, monopoly rights to all fur from the area drained by the rivers and streams flowing into Hudson Bay, which turned out to be about 1.5 million square miles, about 15 percent of North America. French claims to this land and other parts of North America ended with a series of defeats at British hands in the eighteenth century, and the Hudson's Bay Company was the de facto government over much of this territory into the nineteenth century, issuing its own money and judicial rulings. In the early nineteenth century the British government gave it monopoly trading rights extending to the Arctic and the Pacific Oceans. Although beaver-felt hats had long gone out of style, furs were still profitable, and the company worked to keep settlers out of the Pacific Northwest through a public relations campaign portraying the area as not suitable for farming. It also banned European women from most fur trading areas until the 1820s, although marriage between English fur traders and indigenous women was less common than marriage between French traders and indigenous women had been. Along the Pacific coast, the Siberian and North American fur economies met, as Russian fur traders captured women and children from Aleut and Kodiak villages along the Alaska coast as hostages, forcing the men to hunt sea otter, which the Russians then sold to British and American merchants, who transported it around the world.
Along with skins, dead animals transported across the Atlantic included fish. Freshwater and saltwater fish were important food items everywhere in the world these were available, providing important sources of protein. In Europe, fishing came to be organized on a larger scale in the fifteenth century, and with the discovery of incredibly rich sources of fish in the Grand Banks of the North Atlantic, fishing fleets soon traveled there. (There is even speculation that Portuguese Basque fishermen landed in what is now Canada before Columbus, but kept this a secret so as not to reveal the location of their source of fish; no archaeological or textual evidence has been discovered to back this theory, but this only proves to its proponents that the Portuguese fishermen were remarkably successful at keeping a secret.) Ever larger fishing fleets, backed by capitalist investors, took several hundred thousand tons of fish annually, especially cod, which was sold fresh, pickled, salted, and smoked, and became a staple food for slaves in the Americas and workers in Europe. European whalers also hunted, killed, and processed tens of thousands of whales, primarily for their oil and bone rather than meat, which was simply discarded.
Fur trapping and hunting, ocean fishing, and whaling were all occupations in which the vast majority of the workforce was male. Like warfare, these took men away from their home towns and villages for extended periods of time into all-male communities, where tasks that were normally done by women, such as cooking and clothing repair, were done by men. These homosocial environments no doubt encouraged the development of same-sex intimate relations, although these have left little trace in the sources, as the men who engaged in these occupations were generally not literate. The absence of men also meant that gender divisions of labor in places they had left shifted, with women and children taking on responsibility for agricultural production and other tasks.
Drug foods and the commercialization of leisure
Hunting, fishing, and trapping communities of men, and villages of women and children they left behind, were not the only type of new social forms that resulted from the global connections of the Columbian Exchange. Various types of pleasurable and addictive products also spread, often consumed in new social settings of commercialized leisure. Among these products were caffeinated beverages. Cacao beans—which the Aztecs believed had been brought from paradise—went to Europe from Mesoamerica, where first the Spanish and then the French and English developed the habit of drinking cups of chocolate. Coffee, native to Ethiopia and grown commercially first in Yemen about 1400, was increasingly drunk throughout the Muslim world, primarily in coffeehouses that served as places of male sociability. Here men gathered with their friends for conversation, business dealings, and sometimes music, although moralists worried that they might be engaged in gambling and other questionable activities, religious leaders wondered whether the addictive properties of coffee might violate Muslim law, and physicians debated whether coffee was harmful to men's health.
4.5 In this sixteenth-century miniature of an Ottoman coffeehouse, customers, including a few who appear to be foreign visitors, sip coffee, read, talk, and play backgammon. In the upper left, others queue outside, waiting to enter.
Europeans learned of coffee largely from the Ottomans, but it was too expensive for most people until the Dutch began growing coffee on a larger scale in the last half of the seventeenth century in their colonies in Asia and South America. They forced peasants on Java who had been growing rice to provide an annual quota of coffee, and by the early eighteenth century Java was providing much of the world's coffee, as well as a slang expression for the addictive drink. Thousands of coffeehouses opened in Venice, London, Paris, and other European cities, inspiring the French to begin growing coffee in their Caribbean colonies in the eighteenth century. From there coffee cultivation spread to Central America and Brazil, and at the very end of the nineteenth century to East Africa, not far from its place of origin. As in the Muslim world, these cafés and coffeehouses were places where (mostly) men gathered to talk about business, politics, or whatever. Rulers from Sultan Murad IV (r. 1623–40) of the Ottoman Empire to King Charles II of Britain (ruled 1660–85) attempted periodically to close them down as they worried about sedition, but such measures never worked.
In Europe and in larger European colonial cities, coffeehouses were one type of new social and cultural institution where ideas were exchanged, and there were others. Alongside the traditional intellectual centers of courts, churches, and universities, the seventeenth century saw the development of scientific and literary societies, journals and newspapers, and clubs and lodges such a
s the Society of Freemasons that one paid to join. Most of these were predominantly male, but first in Paris and then elsewhere elite women also held gatherings of men and women for formal and informal discussions of topics that they chose, holding them in the drawing rooms of their own homes—salons in French—from which they take their name. Learned societies, journals, clubs, salons, and other new institutions created what the German philosopher and historian Jürgen Habermas called the “public sphere,” and helped create what we now call “public opinion,” a force that became more powerful as the eighteenth century progressed.
Public opinion and cultural trends were shaped by the tastes of elites, but also by those of more ordinary people, who purchased specific products, subscribed to certain journals and newspapers, and visited particular cafés and coffeehouses. Gradually, broader groups of people determined which artistic and literary styles would be judged praiseworthy, and which political plans and ideas should be accepted or rejected. Scientific ideas spread beyond scientists themselves to a wider public through these new institutions, as did the self-conscious intellectual movement of the eighteenth century that emphasized the power of reason and called itself the Enlightenment. Groups discussing and advocating enlightened ideas, including lodges of Freemasons, societies devoted to “progress” or the “useful trades,” discussion clubs that met in taverns or people's homes, and clubs where people paid a small fee to hear lectures, were founded in many cities across Europe, including Paris, Edinburgh, London, Naples, Rome, and Warsaw, and across the Atlantic in the British, French, and Spanish colonies. Enlightenment ideas flowed not only east to west, but also west to east. Debates about slavery and natural rights going on in the islands of the French Caribbean shaped political discussions in Europe, as people engaged in those debates and newspapers reporting them traveled with Caribbean coffee to Europe. These new ideas were one of the background factors in the Atlantic revolutions, discussed below.
The spread of tea followed a different chronology and path than either chocolate or coffee. Tea originated in southwest China, although exactly when people began to drink it is unknown. By the sixth century CE tea was being grown on many hillsides in south China. The steppe nomads of Central Asia became addicted to tea, traded their warhorses for it, and took it on their conquests of India, Russia, and western Asia. Buddhist monks carried it to Japan and Korea along with texts and devotional objects, where it became a part of quasi-religious ceremonies, with highly ritualized methods of preparation and consumption. Europeans first encountered tea when they reached the Indian Ocean basin, but they thought it bitter and medicinal, not pleasant. Tea drinking did not take off in Europe until the eighteenth century, when sugar produced on Atlantic plantations became affordable to the masses. Tea importation into England grew from one-tenth of an ounce per person to one pound—a rise of 40,000 percent—and the caffeine and sugar combination of sweetened tea allowed for longer work hours as well as new forms of female sociability around a teapot, itself often an import or a cheaper local reproduction.
Tea was also part of less exalted social occasions than Buddhism ceremonies in Japan. During the Tokugawa shogunate teahouses along with theatres and taverns popped up in the districts of major cities set aside for entertainment, termed the ukiyo or Floating World, where bored samurai and daimyo, and other urban residents, could find amusement and spend their time. Among the possibilities were geisha, young women who had spent many years of training in singing, storytelling, dancing, and playing musical instruments. Elite men socialized in geisha teahouses and paid large sums of money for their services, which might include sexual services but were often limited to conversation and entertainment. If they preferred, men could instead arrange to spend time with the male actors who played all parts in the wildly popular kabuki theatre performances also found in the Floating World. The shoguns tolerated all this as a way to keep things calm, and the men paid for it by raising taxes and rents on peasants who lived on their lands, or by borrowing. The shoguns did attempt to prohibit peasants from drinking tea or smoking tobacco, as these “take up time and cost money,” but most peasants had little disposable income anyway.
As did those in Japan, cities elsewhere in the early modern world also offered an increasingly broad range of places for commercialized leisure. In the larger cities of China and western Europe, people watched plays, operas, and concerts in permanent theatres, and jugglers, acrobats, and storytellers on temporary stages. A resident of Guangzhou or Yangzhou would have found much about London or Paris quite familiar, and vice versa. Among the similarities were brothels—often near the theatre district—that ranged from cheap and rough to sumptuous and very expensive, sometimes licensed and taxed by the city or regional government.
Both work and leisure were accompanied by alcoholic beverages, as every staple crop of the Columbian Exchange was transformed into alcohol somewhere. Grain crops became various types of beers or other drinks made from fermented rice, barley, and wheat, while grapes and fruit were made into wine and hard ciders and drunk at banquets, taverns, festivals, theatre performances, and many other places. People also drank beer, hard cider, and cheap wine as part of their ordinary day, to augment calories provided by other foodstuffs, relieve pain, and partake of alcohol's other effects. Workers in the silver mines of Potosí purchased maize beer (chicha) along with potatoes to sustain themselves, and they also bought and chewed coca leaves—which had been used by the Incas in religious rituals and medicinally—to deaden hunger and gain a bit of energy for their grueling work. Coca chewing did not spread beyond the Andes, however; the boom in this drug would come later, after a German scientist discovered how to extract its active ingredient, which he named cocaine.
People sought to create stronger forms of alcohol through freezing off some of the liquid or multiple fermentations. Strong alcohol is produced most easily through distilling, a process that appears to have been invented at least twice—in both China and Italy in the twelfth century—and probably in other places as well. By the sixteenth century every wine-producing area began to distill brandy and sweet liqueurs, while rum poured in from the West Indies and brandy made from fruits such as apples, pears, plums, and cherries was produced and sold locally. Improvements in the distillation of grains helped distilled liquors compete with brandy in terms of price, and whisky, gin, and vodka became more common beverages, especially for poorer people. In England, the government decided that distilling gin was a way to use up poor-quality grain, so let anyone distill and sell it; by 1740, the production of gin was six times that of beer, with thousands of gin-shops in London alone. Gin-drinking was seen as the root of bankruptcy, prostitution, neglect of children and many other social problems, however, and in 1751 the government limited the sale to licensed dealers, although illegal production and sales continued.
Coffeehouses, clubs, taverns, and other centers of commercialized leisure were also places where another new addictive substance was enjoyed—tobacco. Native Americans grew and smoked tobacco long before Columbus, who took some tobacco seeds back to Spain with him, where farmers began to grow it for use as a medicine that helped people relax. The French ambassador at Lisbon, Jean Nicot (1530–1600)—whose name is the origin of the term nicotine and of the botanical name for tobacco, Nicotiana—introduced the use of tobacco in France, originally in the form of snuff. In the eighteenth century, using snuff became a marker of sophistication and class status for European men, who carried silver or ivory snuffboxes full of powdered tobacco to snort, which sent the nicotine right into their bloodstreams as they sneezed into lace handkerchiefs. Lesser folk smoked tobacco in pipes, which also became increasingly elaborate for anyone who could afford this. English merchants brought tobacco to the Ottoman Empire, and everywhere coffeehouses became filled with pipe smoke. As with coffee, officials and clerics in the Muslim world debated whether tobacco was discouraged or perhaps even prohibited by Islamic law, and whether it was harmful or beneficial. Sultan Murad IV banned smoking when he
shut down the coffeehouses, backing this up with severe punishments, but as the Ottoman official Katib Chelebi commented shortly afterward, soldiers “found an opportunity to smoke even during the executions” of other soldiers for smoking, the next sultan lifted the ban, and “smoking is at present practiced all over the habitable globe.” Tobacco was sometimes cut with opium, which had been used medicinally since ancient times, and opium was also smoked on its own, or eaten. In the eighteenth century, the British East India Company began transporting large quantities of opium grown in its Indian colony to China, to pay for Chinese products sent west.
Most tobacco consumed in Europe was grown in the Americas, and during the seventeenth century the Virginia tidewater area around Chesapeake Bay became known for producing the highest-quality tobacco. Tobacco planters contracted their crop to merchants in London—and later in Glasgow in Scotland—who loaned them money to expand their plantations, buy new land and consumer goods, and hire or acquire workers. In the seventeenth century, workers on tobacco plantations included indentured servants from Europe and enslaved persons from Africa, but in the eighteenth century a dwindling number of indentured servants and the push for ever-lower prices led to increased use of slaves, and the slave population of the Chesapeake increased dramatically. Most plantations in this area were small compared to those of the Deep South, although those of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were relatively large. Tobacco was used as a currency of exchange in the Chesapeake area, and also along the coast of western Africa, where it purchased slaves.
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