Just as the arriving fleets, lighters, and warehouses groaned with the opulence of Asia, the bounty of Europe could be seen on its way out: German rope, Russian canvas, Norwegian lumber, Iberian salt, French soap, English leather, cheese from Edam, coal from Newcastle, herring from Holland, and coins minted from New World silver.
Few things excite the envy and belligerence of other nations as much as wealth derived from commerce. This emotional undercurrent permeated Anglo-Dutch relations during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when England and Holland would engage in four full-scale armed conflicts. These were literal trade wars, not the sterile commercial and diplomatic pantomime of our era.
The signing of the Treaty of Münster in 1648, which ended the Eighty Years’ War between the Dutch and the Spanish and granted the Netherlands its independence, unleashed the full potential of Dutch trading capacity, which before then had been restrained by the threat of Spanish seizure and blockade.
Holland’s new commercial power came as a rude shock to England. With the Spanish threat gone, the English were even less of a match for Holland’s merchants. Suddenly, the Dutch were everywhere in the Baltic, in Spain, and on the Mediterranean, loading onto their flute ships timber, salt, wines, and olive oil that had previously sailed under the flag of Britain.42
The resultant slump in the English economy, as well as the high-handedness of the Dutch in the Indian Ocean and their rejection of Oliver Cromwell’s overtures at forming an anti-Catholic union after the beheading of Charles I in 1649, led to the passage of the Navigation Act in 1651. This legislation prohibited third-party trade into England—that is, although it was perfectly legal for a foreign ship to land its own nation’s goods on the wharves of London, landing the goods of another nation was outlawed. Since this law applied to most cargo on Dutch vessels, the act amounted to a declaration of war against Holland.
Cromwell’s navy and privateers began seizing hundreds of Dutch flutes, and within seven months of the act’s passage, the first of the Anglo-Dutch wars began. All together, three such conflicts broke out between 1652 and 1672. Each was closely fought, and the Dutch generally came out on top.
In the first war, which lasted until 1654, Holland’s shipping in northern Europe was devastated by the capture or sinking of more than 1,200 of its ships. Yet in the end, the Dutch carried the day through their ability to control the choke points at Gibraltar and at the strait between Sweden and Denmark. English merchants, trapped in Swedish, Italian, and German ports, and the Royal Navy, with its supplies of Scandinavian timbers threatened, pressured Parliament to sue for peace.
But only for the time being. Holland was most vulnerable at the Oresund, a strait 2.4 miles wide between what is now the Danish city of Helsingør (Hamlet’s Elsinore) and the Swedish city of Helingsborg. Vital Scandinavian and German grain, timber, and metals, which fed and supplied Holland, and the herring and manufactured products that paid for them, all flowed through this vital passage. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Danes, who could fire on any ship in the strait from forts on either side, collected tariffs—so-called “sound dues”—on all merchant traffic through it. As Dutch naval and merchant power grew, so grew the importance of stability and a reasonable tariff structure at the strait, and the weaker Denmark found itself Holland’s client state.
In 1658 Charles X of Sweden attacked Copenhagen and the strait. Since Sweden and Denmark were allied with England and Holland, respectively, this became an Anglo-Dutch proxy war. The Dutch, although bloodied and exhausted from the conflict of 1652–1654, mustered their last naval and land reserves to force the Swedes and the English, whose navy had begun patrolling Danish waters, to back down. In a dramatic series of engagements, the Dutch admirals Obdam and de Ruyter broke the Swedish siege of Copenhagen, flushed the English out of the Danish archipelago, and opened the Oresund by escorting a large merchant convoy through a withering Swedish crossfire and under the astonished eyes of Charles X, watching from Helsingør castle.
Resentment of the commercial hegemony of the Dutch was not limited to England. In 1667, France challenged Holland’s Baltic trade when Colbert, the finance minister of Louis XIV, set up the Compagnie du Nord to ship French salt and wine to Sweden and Germany, a trade dominated by the Netherlands. At the same time, Colbert imposed draconian tariffs on Dutch fabric, tobacco, and whale oil.
Holland’s formidable financial firepower won the day; the Compagnie could not equal the ability of the Dutch to pay French merchants in advance for their wine and salt. Colbert should have known better than to match fiscal wits with the Dutch, who, adding insult to injury, targeted the Compagnie by dumping Scandinavian wood on French markets at reduced prices, greatly lowering the value of the timber imported by the Compagnie du Nord.
The French responded with trade competition by other means and invaded Holland in 1672. Stadholder Willem III defeated the French by opening up the dikes and flooding the approaches to Amsterdam. Frustrated both in the rough-and-tumble of commerce and on the field of battle, Louis XIV and Colbert folded the Compagnie in 1675. Adding insult to injury, in 1688 Willem essentially invaded England and ascended the British throne as King William with the express purpose of establishing an anti-French alliance.
The period after 1648 marked the golden age of Holland, captured so well by Rembrandt and Vermeer. Not only did it sit astride the world’s trade routes, but its manufactures had few peers. By the late seventeenth century the Turks had grown so fond of the almost silken Leiden wool that Venetian craftsmen were unable to compete; in 1670, Venice’s senate concluded that the only way to revive its textile industry would be to import Dutch equipment. English importers sent Holland their raw sugar for refining, their raw tobacco for processing, and their raw diamonds for cutting. Continental housewives demanded Delftware, an inexpensive imitation of Chinese blue porcelain, and the soap and lamp oil obtained from Dutch whaling advanced European standards of hygiene and made the nighttime streets safe. Even paper, the traditional preserve of Italian and French manufacturers, fell to the smooth, white reams of the northern city of Zaan.43
The decisions of merchants and politicians in London, as well as the shifting tastes of Western consumers, would soon end the Dutch golden age. Ironically, Willem III’s capture of the English crown set in train events that cleared the way for England to replace Holland as the world’s economic and military superpower. The era of spices was coming to an end, and Britons, frozen out of the East Indies, turned their attention north to India and China, and west to the Caribbean and Africa, where they would prosper from the commodities of the future: cotton, tea, sugar, opium, and slaves.
10
TRANSPLANTS
Few images in American history are as familiar as that of the nation’s earliest patriots, costumed as Indians with blankets and blackened faces, dumping tea into Boston harbor on December 16, 1773, ostensibly demanding “No taxation without representation.” This stirring slogan better reflected the revolutionaries’ propaganda needs than the facts.
When Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr.—the father of the distinguished Harvard historian and aide to John F. Kennedy—addressed this topic in a 1917 essay, he entitled it “The Uprising Against the East India Company.”1 A historian writing today about the event might easily label it “the first American antiglobalization rally.”
By the late eighteenth century, Britons everywhere were addicted to tea, and the colonists in the New World were no exception. Just before the American Revolution, Governor Thomas Hutchinson of Massachusetts, who was also a merchant, estimated that Americans consumed about 6.5 million pounds of tea each year: 2.5 pounds per capita. In actuality, the only levy on tea was an import duty of about 10 percent imposed by the Townshend Act a full six years before the Boston Tea Party. Colonists easily circumvented this modest tax by smuggling the dried leaves via Holland and France. Only about 5 percent of consumption was actually declared to the crown. Why, then, were Bostonians so riled up in 1773, six years after t
he fact? Simple: they dumped the tea into the harbor because they feared that the East India Company (EIC) was dumping it on them.
In the global downturn following the Seven Years’ War—a devastating worldwide conflict between France and England lasting from 1756 to 1763—Britain found itself in fiscal difficulties and decided to repair its finances with funds from the colonies. The Stamp Act of 1765, which taxed legal documents, newspapers, pamphlets, and even playing cards in British North America, provoked widespread protest; it was repealed the next year. It was followed the year after by the more moderate Townshend Act, which also sparked cries of taxation without representation.
The war had also hit the EIC hard, and by the early 1770s it was in dire need of assistance from the government. The Townshend Act forbade the Company from selling its goods directly to the colonists. Instead, the EIC had to auction merchandise to middlemen, who then shipped the cargoes to American wholesalers, who finally sold to local shop owners. In May 1773, Parliament, at the request of the EIC, passed the Tea Act. It imposed no new taxes, but rather allowed the Company, for the first time, to import tea directly from Asia into America. The act cut the price of tea in half and was therefore a boon to colonial consumers.2
The middlemen cut out by the act, local smugglers and tea merchants, were not as happy with the new legislation. When news of its passage arrived in Boston in September 1773, these two groups took action against the “unfair foreign competition” from the EIC. Ignoring the inconvenient fact that the act would save their countrymen a substantial amount of money, merchants and smugglers couched their arguments in the familiar protectionist language of national interest. An editorialist writing under the pen name “A Consistent Patriot” pointed out that the new legislation would cost honest, hardworking American merchants their livelihood “in order to make room for an East India factor, probably from North-Britain, to thrive upon what are now the honest gains of our own merchants.”3 Others, relying on the ignorance and partisanship of their audience, raised the shibboleths of taxation without representation and the far-fetched threat of a British takeover of all American commerce. At least one town council, however, saw things more clearly and resolved that those objecting to the act did so “because the intended Method of Sale in this Country by the East India Company probably would hurt the private Interest of many Persons who deal largely in Tea.”4
In November 1773, the East Indiamen Dartmouth, Beaver, and Eleanor entered Boston Harbor with the first loads of the EIC’s tea. The conspirators, probably led by Samuel Adams, were well prepared and highly disciplined; they cleaned the decks when they were finished and took no tea for personal use or later sale.
By the time of the American Revolution, the familiar elements of globalization were in place. International corporations shipped their products across the face of the planet and molded consumer preferences to the point that a hot drink brewed from dry leaves was considered a “necessary and common article of subsistence.” Colonial special-interest groups deployed protectionist cant against the welfare of the many and against the big companies, improbably tarred as the agents of a foreign culture.
Before 1700, global commerce revolved around armed trading that sought to preserve monopolies in fabled commodities from exotic locations. Only once, in the seventeenth century, did the Dutch actually attain this ideal when they cornered the market in fine spices from the Moluccas and Sri Lanka.
After 1700, the pattern changed completely. New commodities—coffee, sugar, tea, and cotton—which were previously little known in the West and whose production could be easily transplanted across continents, came to dominate global commerce. No longer could huge profits be earned by offloading a few tons of spices, silk, or incense onto the wharves of Antwerp, London, Lisbon, Amsterdam, or Venice. Further, the companies would have to stimulate demand for the new mass-market goods.
Figure 10-1, which plots the percentage of imports into Amsterdam by the Dutch East India Company (VOC), clearly shows the primacy of these new products. (This plot actually understates their importance in Europe, since the EIC came to control the lion’s share of textile and beverage imports, but carried very little of the spice commerce.) No one could hope to maintain a monopoly in items that were so easily grown and produced, and the nation most proficient at the new high-volume commerce, England, slowly realized that peaceful free trade served its interests best.
The story of the rise of the multinationals and mass-market commodities began with another beverage, coffee, which for more than half a millennium has been far more than just a drink. Nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, and pepper once hypnotized the high and mighty, but eventually, they fell out of fashion. By contrast, the dark liquid concocted from the roasted beans of the Coffea arabica bush still commands the attention of corporate chairmen, prime ministers, and an ever-increasing number of the world’s population. For the five centuries following its introduction into the Islamic world, this hot, flavorful beverage has stimulated social intercourse, financial transactions, and at times, revolution.
Figure 10-1. Imports to the Dutch East India Company at Amsterdam
Legend has it that around AD 700 an Ethiopian herder noticed that on reaching a certain upland pasture, his camels and goats never rested, but pranced about all night. He investigated and found his animals feeding on the red berries of a small shrub. When the herder chewed some of these berries, he too found himself invigorated.5 Although this story is almost certainly apocryphal, most authorities agree that coffee was first cultivated in Ethiopia sometime shortly after AD 1000 and then made its way across the Red Sea to Arabia Felix (modern Yemen), where members of the Sufi sect—a mystic offshoot of Islam—began consuming it regularly.
Sufis were seldom full-time priests; like most believers, they held day jobs. Almost uniquely among the world’s faithful, they solved this problem by performing their rituals, in which they strove for a state of detached, trancelike otherworldliness, late at night. Around the mid-fifteenth century, Sufis began drinking coffee to keep them awake, instead of the traditional Yemeni stimulant, the leaves of the qat shrub.
The fact that Sufis were not monastic hermits, but rather men of ordinary affairs, quickened coffee’s spread from the religious to the secular sphere. One of the first non-Sufis to notice its healing effects was the mufti of Aden, who, on falling ill,
took some [coffee] in the Hopes it might do him good. Not only the Mufti’s health was restor’d by the Use of it, but he soon became sensible of the other Properties of Coffee; particularly, that it dissipates the Heaviness of the Head, exhilarates the Spirits, and hinders Sleep without indisposing one.6
In the late fifteenth century, coffee assumed its dual modern roles as both as a social lubricant and an aid in performing the monotonous and tiring work of everyday life.7 One early European observer, impressed with its promotion of honest human interaction and business relationships, noted that it
qualifies Men for entering onto the Bonds of Society, and strict Engagements, more than anything else . . . and for making their Protestations so much the more sincere, as they proceed from a Mind not overcast with Fumes, and are not easily forgot, which too often happens, when they are made by Men in their Wine.8
With increased demand, organized cultivation soon sprang up in the hills north of the Yemeni port of Mocha, just inside Bab el Mandeb. Its coffee groves fed a habit that spread rapidly north via the Red Sea trade routes. Around 1500, coffee arrived in Jeddah, the transfer point between large Indian Ocean trading vessels and the shallow draft ships that plied the northern Red Sea. There, it became an instant hit and assumed a Seattle-like importance. One European observer in Jeddah noted:
They made its Use so common, that it was sold publicly in Coffee-Houses, where they flock’d together, under that Pretence to pass away the Time more agreeably; there they play at Chess, and at Mancalah, even for money. There they fling, play on Instruments and dance; Things which the more rigid Mahometans cannot endure; which did not fail to b
ring Trouble in the End.9
Wherever the coffeehouses were full and the mosques empty, trouble indeed came. In Mecca, its messenger was the Mamluk governor, Khair Beg al-Mimar, a typical killjoy bureaucrat obsessed with a fear that somewhere, somehow, people were having fun. In 1511, with the collaboration of two Persian physicians, he forbade the beverage, for both medical and moral reasons. Meccans thumbed their noses at the decision, and a formal ruling from Cairo wisely allowed home consumption. Within a few years, Khair Beg and the two physicians met terrible deaths, although this probably had more to do with the Ottoman conquest than espressos.10
The same morality play ensued as the drink spread north and east throughout the Muslim world. Small dishes of the strong, unsweetened liquid, occasionally flavored with cloves, anise, or cardamom, found their way into the harem; women considered a steady supply of the roasted beans an essential spousal obligation, and failure to provide it constituted grounds for divorce.11
In 1555, a Syrian businessman named Shams carried the beans, and the sensation, to Constantinople, where within a few decades several hundred cafés sprang up. These were “thronged night and day, the poorer classes actually begging money in the streets for the sole object of purchasing coffee.”12 Not long after, the familiar drama unfolded on the Bosphorus when the wicked and uneducated vizier Mahomet Kolpili, the power behind Sultan Murat IV, closed the coffeehouses, fearful that they might foment revolution. At nearly the same time in Persia, the wife of Emperor Abbas I proved more politically adept; she did not shutter these establishments but rather infiltrated them with agents who diverted conversation from politics to more acceptable subjects.13
By the early seventeenth century, Western visitors could not help noticing the phenomenon. One European estimated that between two thousand and three thousand coffeehouses flourished in Cairo. In Constantinople, the traveler Pietro della Valle observed that in the houses of the wealthy,
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