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Immediately after the act of 1721, the EIC’s favored import had been Indian thread, but with the advent of these ingenious new machines raw cotton became the fodder of the Industrial Revolution and the trade commodity of choice. In the early 1720s, the EIC imported about 1.5 million pounds of cotton wool per year from India; this figure rose to about thirty million pounds by the late 1790s.57
Over the next seventy-five years, the English cotton industry increased demand for its inexpensive new products by inventing the multipronged consumer marketing machine so familiar today: fashion magazines, an ever-shorter style cycle, retail showrooms, and regional warehouses fed by the country’s newly privatized roads and turnpikes.58
Asia’s cotton crops were no longer sufficient to satisfy the hungry maw of the dark, satanic mills. England’s factories turned out half a million pounds of finished cloth in 1765, two million in 1775, and sixteen million in 1784. English settlers began to plant cotton in tropical South America and the West Indies, which were already well supplied with slave labor, but even these could not satisfy Lancashire’s demand for raw cotton. The supply would come not from the empire, but rather from the newly independent United States.
At the time of the first census in 1790, the young republic contained roughly seven hundred thousand slaves (about one-sixth of the total population), most of whom lived in the South. But owing to an agricultural depression, the South at that time actually exported more slaves than it imported. In 1794, this situation changed when Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin—a crude nail-and-cylinder device that efficiently separated fiber from seed. This machine converted the South’s huge arable basin into England’s cotton farm, just a few weeks’ sailing time away from Bristol and Liverpool (versus six months around the African cape from India).
By 1820, American cotton exports, primarily to England, would grow to two hundred million pounds annually, and by the eve of the Civil War that number would swell to two billion pounds.59 England, indignant over the Confederacy’s aggressive defense of slavery and disdainful of the Scotch-Irish rabble who settled the South, should by rights have sided with the Union. Such, however, was the dark influence of King Cotton that Britain remained neutral throughout the conflict.
Just as the loss of the Spice Islands to the Dutch in the seventeenth century had forced the EIC to shift its focus to Indian textiles, the loss of the highly profitable trade in finished cottons and silks in the eighteenth century once again shifted its center of gravity. This time, it would turn to China and the tea trade.
Whereas India was a fractious land divided along ethnic, religious, and political lines, and thus highly susceptible to manipulation by Europeans, China was an ethnically coherent, centralized country. It easily kept Western merchants at arm’s length and permitted them entrance only into Canton. Worse, the Chinese had little appetite for Western goods besides mechanical novelties, such as watches, clocks, and “singsongs” (the intricate European music boxes favored by the imperial household), or the exceptional strategic commodities they lacked, such as copper. This trade imbalance would explode into open warfare in the mid-nineteenth century, and that conflict yet poisons present day Sino-Western trade and politics.
The EIC’s China ships were dedicated to tea transport, crafted for speed and crammed with specially designed sealed chests to protect their precious but perishable cargo. As the Dutch had avoided the Portuguese by bypassing Malacca, so too did the English steer clear of the strait to avoid the Dutch. Outbound, the sleek China boats followed the route of the Ancient Mariner on the frigid roaring forties south of Australia before turning north. Homebound, they avoided Dutch patrols by steering southeast into the open Pacific before threading past the eastern tip of New Guinea and the shallow Torres Strait north of Australia.
Since China largely excluded Westerners, Europeans knew little more about growing tea than they did in the time of Marco Polo. The production process was far more complex than merely growing and drying the leaves. By the time tea appeared on Canton’s wharves, it had been processed, transported, and stored numerous times. At each stage it was tasted and blended with leaves from other towns and provinces, and adulterated with ingredients as exotic as scented bergamot or as dishonest as sawdust.
Coffee had a century’s head start on tea; the VOC brought the first cargoes of the dried tea leaves to Amsterdam around 1610; the first shipments reached England around 1645; and in 1657 Garroway’s Coffee House in London’s financial district began selling the beverage.60 When Portugal’s Catherine of Braganza married Charles II, she brought to the English court not only the dowry of Bombay, but also tea brewing, which had by then become well established in Lisbon. As with cotton, the road to commercial success in England ran directly through the royal chambers; it was not long before the nobility, the lesser aristocracy, and aspiring commoners soon followed. In 1685 the EIC informed its buyers in Canton:
Thea is grown to be a commodity here and we have occasion to make presents therein to our great friends at Court; we would have you send us yearly five or six canisters of the very best and freshest Thea.61
In 1700, a pound of leaves for which a Chinese peasant was paid one penny sold in European shops for about £3. By 1800, that price had plummeted 95 percent to about three shillings, making tea affordable for most citizens. In 1700, only the wealthiest drank tea; at mid-century, most members of the bourgeoisie (including, famously, Dr. Johnson) consumed it regularly; by 1800 it was swilled even in the workhouses.
The Company more than made up for the drop in price with the rise in volume, which over the eighteenth century rose from fifty tons per year to fifteen thousand. Even if most tea was reexported to places such as Paris and Boston, that still left one or two pounds per year for every Englishman. The EIC made perhaps a shilling per pound—not an enormous profit margin, but multiplied over thousands of tons per year, enough to inspire hatred and envy at all levels of British society. Even more venom was reserved for the crown, which levied taxes totaling as much as 100 percent of the landing price in England. As Englishmen grew addicted to tea, the crown grew addicted to duties on its import.
Smuggling inevitably followed high tariffs. England’s south coast and West Country became a paradise for landing contraband tea, while French traders favored the Channel Islands. Typically, local entrepreneurs rowed out to waiting foreign vessels to purchase the illicit cargo that eventually found its way into caves, castles, private homes, and even church crypts. Women traveling abroad equipped their petticoats with hidden pockets. As much as three-quarters of the brew consumed in England was contraband, a proportion surpassed only in the American colonies. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the conflict between tea runners and customs agents verged on open warfare. The tombstone of one smuggler reads:
A little tea, one leaf I did not steal
For guiltless bloodshed I to God appeal
Put tea on one scale, human blood in t’other
And think what ’tis to slay a harmless brother.62
Ironically, the smugglers, by dramatically bringing down the cost of tea, increased its consumption. In 1784, the government finally came to its senses and reduced the tariff from 120 percent to 12.5 percent.
The explosion in tea imports during the eighteenth century cannot, however, be credited entirely to the smugglers, let alone to the marketing genius of the EIC. Because tea was relatively cheap at its source in China, it was served there lukewarm with little aplomb in a handle-less cup. The Japanese, because of its expense, poured it with far greater ceremony, and Europeans served it hot so as to quickly dissolve the sugar used to make it palatable to the Western tongue. This custom required a new invention: the cup handle.
The handle-less Chinese cups stacked easily and could be shipped as ballast and sold for a few pence. The handles were added later, and by the mid-eighteenth century, handle makers had become a fixture in most large European cities. Gradually, the secrets of making fine porcelain were solved by European craftsmen s
uch as Josiah Wedgwood, whose technical skill was exceeded only by his marketing genius.
Tea consumption burgeoned as beverage and cup combined to change the very rhythm of daily life in England, punctuating the day with ceremonial occasions around which social activity and organized conversation flowed, from the most stylish households to the humblest of workplaces. It amazed and annoyed the aristocratic fountainheads of fashion that the great unwashed had adopted their once exclusive preserve.63 As early as 1757, one observer scoffed:
The laborer and the mechanic will ape the lord. . . . Your servants’ servants, down to the very beggars, will not be satisfied unless they consume the produce of the remote country of China.64
The histories of tea and sugar are also intertwined and their consumptions rose nearly in tandem. The sugar planters encouraged the consumption of tea, realizing that it was in their interest, and the EIC did the same for sugar, in which it otherwise had little direct trade. By the eighteenth century, it amazed few observers that these two items, considered necessities from the high to the humble, grew thousands of miles from England and on opposite sides of the world from each other.
The story of sugar cannot be grasped without an understanding of Caribbean history. Since 1492, Spain had claimed the Caribbean as its exclusive preserve, while the Dutch, English, and French sought for centuries to prise it from Spanish hands. In 1559, the French and Spanish agreed that the region was “beyond the line”—that is, exempt from whatever treaties and agreements bound them in the rest of the world. The region was up for grabs—the Wild West of the 1600s and 1700s—and exerted an irresistible pull on adventurers all over Europe.
The Caribbean was no late-medieval tropical paradise, but rather a Hobbesian maelstrom of avarice and barbarity. Europeans who sailed west flouted not only the treaty obligations of their home countries, but also the mores and boundaries of normal behavior. These deviations manifested themselves in all manner of excess: drinking, overspending, and violence toward natives, slaves, and each other. When a Frenchman could find no Dutchman, Spaniard, or Briton to kill, his own countrymen sufficed quite nicely. In the spirit of the times, the first English efforts in the region were led by pirates such as Drake and his cousin Hawkins, who traded slaves to European planters when they were not plundering the shipping of Portugal and Spain.
Traditionally, geographers have divided the Caribbean islands into the Greater Antilles—Cuba, Hispañola, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica—and the Lesser Antilles: the numerous smaller islands curving south toward Venezuela. The Spanish quickly settled the Greater Antilles, which then became a backwater, second fiddle to the far greater riches of Mexico and South America. This left only the scraps, the Lesser Antilles, to the French, Dutch, and English. Although the Spanish had little direct territorial interest in these flyspecks, they could not be ignored, since the treasure ships bearing silver from Mexico and South America had to thread the strategic, narrow passages through them on the way home.
The British began modestly in the Caribbean by acquiring the tiny island of Saint Christopher (modern-day Saint Kitts), in 1623. It would soon be lost to France, then regained by diplomatic means. (More than a century later, Alexander Hamilton was born on neighboring Nevis.) In 1627, England began planting subsistence crops on Barbados, a larger (166 square miles), uninhabited, isolated island well to the east of the main chain.
In 1625 the crown awarded Barbados to two competing royal “patent holders,” William Courteen and the Earl of Carlisle. When the latter won out around 1630, he distributed the land among 764 settlers, with grants ranging from about thirty acres up to a thousand. These first immigrant farmers produced food for themselves and also planted cash crops, the most important of which were tobacco and cotton.
Each of the new landholders in turn typically attracted paid laborers and indentured servants from England with promises of small plots, generally ten acres, at the completion of their service. Early on, most of these promises were kept, but when the land ran out in the 1630s, new immigrants were faced with the unpleasant choice of leaving for other islands in search of land, remaining on Barbados, or returning empty-handed to England.
Initially, then, Barbadian society was not radically different from English society, with few, if any, slaves. Around 1640, the inhabitants noted the rapid increase in European demand for sugar and decided to band together to plant cane, which had arrived from Surinam shortly after Barbados was first settled.
Fate smiled on the island, for just at that moment small-time Dutch interlopers, seeking to carve out a sugar-carrying trade independent of the monopoly held by the Dutch West India Company (WIC), appeared in the Caribbean offering French and English settlers expertise in sugar growing and slaves. Further assistance became available between 1645 and 1654, when the Portuguese settlers drove the WIC out of Brazil, and Dutch-Portuguese Jewish growers, not eager to stay in a colony newly reconquered by Portuguese Catholics, made their services available in the Caribbean.
The Sugar Islands
Within a few decades, the first British farmers and their servants had almost completely cleared Barbados and planted it with cane. By 1660, it had more settlers than Virginia or Massachusetts, four hundred inhabitants per square mile, or four times the population density of England. It had become the world’s largest sugar producer, supplying almost two-thirds of England’s consumption.65 Just how was this tiny island able to rival its much larger competitors in Brazil and the Greater Antilles? Some of the answer can be found in the agreeable soil and availability of wind power on its leeward side, which was relatively protected from hurricanes. Credit also belongs to the capitalist mind-set of the English farmer, who owned his own land (or at least paid his own rent to the landowner), hired his own labor, and reaped his own profits. The Brazilians, by contrast, used a paternalistic sharecropping model in which small farmers sent their cane to the landowner’s mill and received in return only a fraction of the refined sugar it yielded.66 With sugar prices so high and land at such a premium in Barbados, farmers planted little acreage with subsistence crops, and the island had to import much of its food, a pattern that would be repeated later on the larger Caribbean sugar islands.
Of all the islands, Barbados held the firmest grip on the British imagination. Its fertile soil yielded cane in abundance, and its cool, rolling uplands reminded homesick settlers of England. One early settler, Richard Ligon, rapturously described his first visit:
The nearer we came, the more beautiful it appeared to our eyes. . . . There we saw the high, large, and lofty Trees, with their spreading Branches and flourishing tops . . . as to grow to that perfection of beauty and largeness. Whilst they in gratitude return their cool shade . . . The plantations appear’d to us one above the other, like several stories in stately buildings, which afforded us a large proportion of delight.67
The easterly trades provided the cane crushers with reliable power, and by 1660 the island was dotted with hundreds of picturesque windmills. But the settlement’s true appeal was a rather less aesthetic quality: it had become one of the world’s wealthiest places, and its planter aristocracy the stuff of gaudy legend.
Before the rise of the New World sugar plantations, the far-flung plantations of the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic islands usually shipped hogsheads of raw brown “muscovado” to industrial refineries in the home country for final processing into the fine white sugar craved by consumers. As Barbadian production rose, the planters acquired the sophisticated crystallization technology and bypassed the European refineries. English refiners reacted in the predictable protectionist language of national interest:
One ship of white brings the lading of three of brown. . . . Is this the way to maintain Nurseries for our Seamen? Since refining in England hath been a trade before ever we had plantations [it was absurd that] it should be lost by having them.68
They needn’t have worried, for the sugar industrialists of Barbados soon turned their efforts away from the white gold to a cane produ
ct whose very name became synonymous with the island: rum. The sweet alcoholic beverage, first fermented by Barbadian slaves from molasses, the waste product of the refining process, soon found itself in demand in Africa, where it was greatly preferred to English brandy. Before long Caribbean traders dispatched ships loaded with rum to the Gulf of Guinea to exchange for slaves. Barbadian planters directed their factories toward rum production and kept the island the richest place in the Caribbean well into the eighteenth century, even as its sugar output fell well behind that of Jamaica, Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti), and the Leewards.69
While some of the original settlers stayed on to join the new planter elite, many sold their property, which had appreciated tenfold in the 1640s alone, and retired to England. Those who took their place were nothing like the doughty yeomen who hacked farms out of the tropical forest in the 1620s and 1630s. The optimal size for a Barbadian sugar plantation seemed to be about two hundred acres, large enough to make its mill economical. After 1650, buying one of the increasingly pricey plantations required a healthy line of credit; many of the new arrivals were the poor but creditworthy younger sons of the landed aristocracy, usually fresh from the battles of the English civil war. Typical of the new breed was Thomas Modyford, who
had taken a Resolution to himself not to set his face towards England, till he had made his voyage, and imployment there, worth him a hundred thousand pounds sterling; and all by this sugar plant.70