Jungle
Page 24
Nevertheless, it is impossible to ignore the global wealth and status discrepancies that emerged as a product of the transatlantic slave trade. Historians, exploring records of income, trade, and demography, have powerfully argued that the capital gains made by European and northern North American plantation owners, merchants, and families directly and indirectly involved in the trade provided the key financial bases for the Industrial Revolution and the development of wealth and infrastructural imbalances that went on to underpin the modern world economy as we know it today. Technological innovations in a number of sugar colonies have, themselves, been seen as a part of the dawning of an “industrial age.” Analysis of historical nutrition has also shown that cheaper, more readily available, energy-rich plantation sugar between 1600 and 1850 increased public health across British society to such an extent that it spurred on the formation of an industrial working class. Even following the abolition of slavery in the United Kingdom in 1807 and its colonies in 1833, the British government paid out massive amounts of money to companies, landowners, and individuals with investments in the slave trade in repayment for losses of “free captive labour.” Europeans did not need to take part or invest in this trade, and there was opposition back home. Yet many individuals, such as Edward Colston, who’s legacy has left a mark on a number of institutions across the city of Bristol today, joined initiatives such as the Royal African Company and invested in the transport of enslaved individuals between continents. In Europe and northern North America, as we go about our daily routines, it can be easy to forget just how much of our streets and lives the resulting profits have touched and how many of our predecessors could so quickly take part in this flow of forced labor and capital. Capital accumulated from the transatlantic slave trade flowed into our hospitals, schools, churches, and universities through charitable donations. The people who earned wealth from and took part in the trade are honored in street and building names as well as with statues. Many innovations in insurance that characterize the financial sector of our economies today also find their disturbing origins in the transatlantic slave trade, as investors sought financial safety nets for both cash crops and human cargo. The racialized abuse of Black African bodies that was formalized in the transatlantic slave trade also undoubtedly left an ingrained legacy of inequality and discrimination that continues to influence North and South American and European societies and political conflicts into the twenty-first century.11
Back in the tropics, although some African elites and merchants made profits from the trade, the benefits of sugar and the global flow of capital did not reach African shores in the same way. As we have seen, it disrupted the demographic and political situation in much of the continent with lasting effects. From the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, subsequent, sustained conquest of different parts of West Africa also resulted in brutal warfare, the dismantling of traditional land-use and social systems, and the theft of heritage that remains locked up in European and North American museums. Profits were also not realized on the sites of many of the industrial plantations where enslaved African labor ended up. Places such as São Tomé and Príncipe and a number of Caribbean islands were left as some of the poorest countries anywhere in the world following eventual abandonment by Europeans, brutally shaved of their tropical forests. Nearly all of the plants and animals on the Caribbean island of Nevis are now introduced or invasive species, with the majority of their native counterparts now extinct as the island was nearly deforested within the first fifty years of sugar plantation establishment. While roads might have been built to help support the movement of this valuable crop, the British made no attempt to introduce critical infrastructure such as schools for education or farms for nutrition. Dr. Justin Dunnavant of Vanderbilt University is exploring how the ecology and even the shoreline of the island of Saint Croix have changed as a result of these processes and their legacies. Widespread clearance of trees began with sugar plantations, and there is clear evidence of lasting soil degradation. Meanwhile, the island’s coral shorelines have been literally and visibly mined away, not only for building materials to support the forced labor of enslaved individuals but also to clear a pathway for the tax-free smuggling of rum. The expansion in global production of this popular beverage, enjoyed straight and in cocktails, was often associated with existing or former sugar plantations in various parts of the Caribbean. More of us should take heed of the unequal global inheritances left behind as a product of flows of capital during the transatlantic slave trade as we all too often watch environmental degradation, poverty, political turmoil, discrimination, and ongoing discrepancies in pay and opportunities, both at home and in the tropics, from the comfort of our armchairs.12
SUGAR WAS, OF course, not the only high-value product at the heart of the transatlantic slave trade. Nor was it the only crop that saw the tropics increasingly caught up in a globally imbalanced exploitation of landscapes and labor between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Today, cotton quite literally puts the shirts on our backs. In the seventeenth century, however, cotton cloth from India provided a major luxury good that Europeans gave to African merchants and rulers in exchange for enslaved individuals. In turn, expanding growth in extensive plantations in the southern United States was supported by the brutally extracted labor from these people once they had been forcibly transported from their home continent. Cotton’s impact on labor and environments in the tropics did, however, reach still further than this new Atlantic economy. Between the early sixteenth and the early eighteenth centuries, the Mughal Empire, which extended across India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, was perhaps the main global center of cotton textile production. As writer Meena Menon states, “Farmers across the Indian subcontinent grew many different varieties of cotton as part of mixed plots alongside food for subsistence.” These farmers were part of an intimate system with ginners, spinners, and weavers that produced high-quality cotton textiles sought after as far afield as West Africa and Japan. This relationship was broken by eighteenth-century British imperialism and the dramatic change to the growth of cotton as a cash crop for global export. Although the Dutch had already been importing Bengali textiles, the consolidation of the British East India Company in South Asia greatly increased the availability of these products in Europe in the eighteenth century, allowing cotton to replace wool as the wardrobe maker of choice. Following conquest of Bengal in 1757, British agents used their political and economic power to transform the international cotton markets. The investment of India’s existing cotton wealth in English domestic development and technological advances that outstripped Indian hand-spun cotton, and the restriction of Indian cotton imports to Europe, catapulted British factories to the top of the global textile market during the Industrial Revolution. Attempting to make up for a loss of reliable raw cotton from North America following the War of Independence, the British set up experimental farms in India to grow American cotton varieties that were suited to the British textile mills. Demand from these textile mills led to British encouragement of cotton monoculture instead of more sustainable mixed cropping, taking valuable productive land away from food production, forcing huge numbers of Indian cotton spinners and weavers to seek alternative incomes, and sending the diverse indigenous short staple cotton varieties into decline. This resulted in a major food crisis during famine years. Diminished local production and competition from European exports also saw Indian consumers buying finished cotton textiles and even yarn back from Britain, sometimes made using the very cotton exported from India with a significant price markup! India is today the second-largest exporter of raw cotton anywhere on the planet and the largest cultivator of cotton. It remains renowned for the creation of muslin and for printed and dyed traditional textiles, but its handloom industry has been marginalized. The case of cotton is a further example of how unequal global flows of capital and economic infrastructural developments between Europe and the tropics imposed themselves on both landscapes and labor. Strikes within the Indian textil
e industry as part of the independence movement of the early twentieth century further illustrate the role of this crop in the manifestation of colonial power dynamics and economic inequalities.13
Figure 11.2. Hand ginning of cotton in India by a Ponduru woman. Meena Menon
Tea is a go-to feel-good drink across much of Europe, Asia, and North America today. It is also another crop that had a big impact on tropical Asian forests and their inhabitants between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Originating somewhere at the intersection between South, Southeast, and East Asia, extensive tea cultivation began in China around the eighth century AD. It reached Europe only in the seventeenth century, courtesy of Dutch and Portuguese ships. Here, the ruling classes quickly gained a predilection for the drink, particularly in England and, later, North America, and it became the preeminent import from China. In South Asia, the Singpho people of Assam and Myanmar had, however, also already been growing their own varieties of tea. The expansion of British capital into India, following conquests and political negotiation with local rulers throughout the nineteenth century, drew on this local knowledge and planted tea widely across the state of Assam and, later, other states, including Bengal and Orissa (now Odisha). Widespread production and easy access through imperial connections soon made tea cheaper and more easily available to all social classes in England, at the same time as it was impacting tropical landscapes and farmers in South Asia. Tea became a major plantation crop in Sri Lanka, for example. Between 1883 and 1897 tea plantations covered an estimated additional 20,000 acres every year in the Sri Lankan Highlands. Rural villagers lost vast swathes of agricultural land, and their traditional, mobile swidden approaches to farming among the lowland and misty montane tropical rainforest in the region were vastly curtailed, as were the extents of these forests and their ecosystems. Similar changes occurred back in India, where workers on tea plantations had few rights and received poor treatment within the social systems of racial stigma under the British Raj. The Indian and Sri Lankan tea industries remain strong international and domestic sources of income for those nations today, with much of Indian- and Sri Lankan–produced tea now consumed by those countries’ own citizens and with production increasingly in the hands of smallholders. Nevertheless, the degree to which foreign interests have impacted the wealth, forests, and lives of local farmers, past and present, should not be forgotten.14
The coffee that wakes us up in the morning and keeps us going through days of constant Zoom meetings has no happier history. Originally native to Ethiopia, cultivated coffee arrived in Europe, via the Middle East, during the seventeenth century—warming lawyers, politicians, and philosophers in London, the nobility of Germany, and the financial sector of Amsterdam. The Dutch, recognizing that coffee plants thrived in the tropics, from 1699 cleared rainforests to make way for their cultivation in Java—a region where coffee is still grown commercially to this day. Coffee was soon exported for growth in the Caribbean. Supported by enslaved labor, the tiny French colony of Saint-Dominigue (today’s Haiti) came to dominate the global coffee market in the eighteenth century. However, by the time the Haitian Revolution of 1796 to 1804 saw self-liberated enslaved people create their own independent nation, no one would have known it. Thanks to tropical deforestation and soil erosion, the French left it one of the poorest nations and most degraded landscapes anywhere in the world. Although coffee continued to be produced on the tropical Caribbean islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica, by the middle of the nineteenth century Brazil dominated coffee production. Again, supported by a trade in enslaved individuals that continued until the late nineteenth century, Brazil was able to produce coffee in massive quantities and at a low cost. Plantations also expanded across Dutch-held Sumatra, Bali, Sulawesi, and Timor in the late nineteenth century. Soon coffee, previously the preserve of the wealthy, was being drunk regularly among the working classes of northern North American and European society. Heavy debate surrounds the local benefits of growing coffee. On the one hand, profits aided Brazil’s emergence as a large, independent economy. On the other hand, long-term continued use of slavery, the exploitative use of cheap labor, including children and marginalized Indigenous groups, inequality, poverty, the buying up of smallholdings by larger international companies, and deforestation have offered few sustainable benefits to coffee-growing regions in the tropics and presented problems for tropical environments extending into the twenty-first century—something to think about next time you take a sip.15
Rubber is one of the most important tropical products around the world today. From balloons to airplane tires, from condoms to waterproof shoes, from rubber balls to supermarket conveyor belts, from diving gear to hospital tubing—you can barely go anywhere or do anything today without coming across this remarkable material. Natural rubber is made from latex, which oozes from certain plants when they are wounded. The only commercially viable sources, however, are the tropical forest plants of Hevea brasiliensis, a tree that grows wild in the Amazon Basin, and Landolphia owariensis, a wild vine that grows in West and Central Africa. Indigenous populations used the former across the Neotropics to produce clothing, boots, balls, storage carriers, and toys long before any Europeans got there. In fact, Europeans did not realize the benefits of the material until the late eighteenth century, before economic production of rubber products began in the nineteenth century following the patenting of the vulcanization process. The rise of automobiles and other rubber-reliant inventions drove the subsequent “rubber boom,” which, between 1879 and 1912, spurred on an expansion of profit-making enterprises across the Amazon Basin of Brazil and Bolivia to feed growing global markets, particularly in Europe and northern North America. In the Upper Amazon, the resulting wealth galvanized the development of cities such as Manaus, where per capita income became the highest in Brazil. It had the first electric streetlights anywhere in the country. Native pests meant that attempts to grow rubber on plantations in Latin America repeatedly failed, leading to a scramble of entrepreneurs seeking to make profits in an industry reliant on the tapping of dispersed wild trees in the Amazon Basin. Indigenous groups often became caught up in the race for profit. Some, such as the Mundurukú, actively engaged with the boom, moving in search of wages and European products. Others, however, were forced into labor agreements that effectively amounted to slavery and were abused and killed by so-called rubber barons. A study of living gigantic Amazon nut (Brazil nut) trees in the vicinity of the city of Manaus by Victor Caetano Andrade, whom we met right at the beginning of this book, has even shown that these trees grew more poorly as Indigenous populations and their traditional management effectively disappeared in the face of the pressures of rubber extraction in the nearby rainforests.16
European and North American hands went on to shape the expansion of rubber into the commercial product we know it as today, as well as its impacts on labor and environments in the tropics. In 1876 Sir Henry Wickham oversaw the transport of 70,000 seeds of H. brasiliensis to Kew Botanical Gardens in the United Kingdom. From there, the British Malayan and Dutch Sumatran rubber cartels promoted the planting of rubber in Malayan tea plantations in Southeast Asia, eventually securing their own direct access to the resulting rubber and profits in the early twentieth century. Away from native Amazonian pests, the trees excelled, and plantations were rapidly expanded. Although the addition of rubber into smaller plots could benefit local smallholders and entrepreneurs, intensification of plantation land use and growing pressures from European and northern North American companies (particularly those with interests in the rapidly expanding automobile industry, such as Michelin) resulted in a widespread loss of local biodiversity and, frequently, the exploitation of Indigenous and indentured migrant labor under conditions that were little better than enslavement. Today, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, India, and China are the top-five leading global producers of rubber, using a tree from the other side of the tropical world and far surpassing Brazil. Though the economic benefits are clear, monoculture g
rowth of rubber has undoubtedly left its scars on the Southeast Asian landscape. A more horrific European intervention in the global rubber market occurred when Leopold II of Belgium, seeking his own colonial empire, established the “Congo Free State” in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Seeking high returns to rival other European entities during the rubber boom, Leopold’s state forced local populations living in the rainforest into service, killing them, razing their villages, and cutting off their hands if they refused, in order to exploit the local latex-producing vine of the region. The atrocities observed and documented by appalled European observers almost certainly contributed to the collapse of the local population in just a few decades. Based on records of rubber production and the mortality rate, an estimated one person in the Democratic Republic of the Congo died for every ten kilograms exported between the 1880s and 1923. With the advent of electricity and two world wars, Western nations and business interests continued to grapple for access to rubber throughout the twentieth century, with little regard for local working conditions. Not for nothing has historian Professor John Tully of Victoria University called rubber “the devil’s milk.”17