In the above I have attempted to distill incredibly complex, and often contentious, processes in order to highlight a few key examples where crops and products we take for granted today were at the heart of the rise of global markets between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, with major impacts on people and environments in the tropics and economic and political echoes that still reverberate today. Even while Western imperialism and control over new worldwide flows of capital framed the all-too-often unequal outcomes, it is important to remember the huge variety of ways in which local governments, merchants, smallholders, consumers, and Indigenous populations actively negotiated and challenged the introduction and exploitation of these economically valuable products. One example serves to highlight this local agency. Oil palm is currently one of the most prominent tropical plantation crops. As we saw in Chapter 7, it was long consumed across West and Central Africa and, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, was produced to feed captives sold into the transatlantic slave trade. With the abolition of the trade in 1807 in the United Kingdom (and its colonies in 1833), however, it increasingly rose to prominence as an export crop. Nevertheless, in many parts of the continent its entire production process lay in the hands of African producers, and the palm crop was ill suited to models of plantations built on enslaved labor. Attempts to introduce mechanization repeatedly failed to boost productivity, with farmers in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, and Senegal seeing no advantages. Local ecological knowledge and the benefits of growing the crop within mixed subsistence plots meant that groups with little wealth and their own labor could easily produce for export, including a group of enslaved individuals near Lagos who ultimately raised enough to buy their freedom. A similar situation is evident in the failure of the Portuguese to establish oil palm as a commercial crop among the Atlantic coast rainforests of Bahia, Brazil. Instead, oil palm, until today, is grown here within “subspontaneous” polycultural groves, underpinned by centuries of African agroforestry, that contribute to subsistence and local economic well-being. Continued European attempts to control the palm oil trade eventually stimulated colonial conquest of many African states and also saw the crop exported to Southeast Asia on a plantation-based model. Yet, ultimately, smallholders across the tropics retained some share of profits throughout. Interestingly, today oil palm is still heralded as a solution for rural, smallholder development in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia, though, as we will see in Chapter 13, it is not without its challenges.18
IT WAS NOT just these more classically “luxury” crops that became part of a growing desire to control the plants, workforces, and environments of the tropics within increasingly unequal, globalized economic systems between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. In Europe, growing subsistence reliance on, and monoculture planting of, the potato between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would have major economic, demographic, and environmental consequences some distance from the equator. Arriving from the cool montane forests and grasslands of the Andes, this tropical tuber was initially ignored in favor of traditional reliance on grain. Yet poor harvests in the face of the Little Ice Age, price fluctuations, frequent famine, and public unrest gave the potato its moment to shine. Extolled by agricultural economists, scientists (notably Frenchman Antoine-Augustin Parmentier), and even rulers (namely the Prussian “Kartoffelkönig” Frederick the Great), from the second half of the eighteenth century it became widely planted by smallholders and large landowners alike. By the early nineteenth century, the potato was part of the rolling out of the European “Agricultural Revolution,” which involved the healthy application of fertilizer, such as seabird guano mined from its original home in Peru, and industrial ploughing methods. The result was a significantly greater and more reliable European food base—one credited with, at least in part, catalyzing population increase and even the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in England. The result was a monoculture par excellence. Unlike the original potato fields back in the Andes, this new form of food production exchanged genetic variability for uniformity, increasing vulnerability to disease, with disastrous consequences. The Great Famine of Ireland (1845–1849) saw the decimation of this nation’s new, homogenous food staple, thanks to the arrival of the potato blight from the Americas. Exacerbated by the callous negligence of the British imperial government in failing to provide alternative food sources, the resulting famine led to widespread suffering and a reduction in Ireland’s population through death and emigration. Irish emigration stimulated by the Great Famine formed a significant part of the total of 10 million people of Irish ethnicity who left the island from the start of the eighteenth century, desperately seeking new labor opportunities in the face of often significant abuse. To this day the number of people living on the island of Ireland has still not recovered to prefamine levels. This catastrophe warned of the dangers of this new form of farming—one that heralded the beginning of cycles of pesticide experimentation and application, in which most monoculture agricultural fields remain locked around the world in the twenty-first century.19
Back in the tropics, imperialist control over land use and a capital-driven demand for the more efficient growth of tropical subsistence crops also had consequences for local food security and environmental change around the equator. Taking the example of rice, historical ecologist and archeologist Professor Kathleen Morrison of the University of Pennsylvania, alongside her colleague Dr. Mark Hauser, has described the creation of imperial “rice bowls” to serve growing globalized exchange networks and capital investment. In the case of the Americas, as we saw in Chapter 10, the knowledge of how to grow rice, as well as rice itself, likely took initial hold as a product of African agency. However, during the eighteenth century the organization of its production changed significantly. Plantations in primary areas of production, such as South Carolina, Georgia, and Brazil, created by European settlers and worked by enslaved African labor, became essential to providing food for Europe and northern North America and, particularly, to sustain the valuable cotton, tobacco, and sugar plantations of the Caribbean. This created interregional relationships of nutritional dependency, making local farmers and plantation communities less self-sufficient and less secure in the face of natural hazards, such as hurricanes, that could destroy lives and wipe out vital arteries of food sourcing. In South and Southeast Asia, a lively market of regional rice exchange already existed in precolonial times. However, with increasing British political and economic influence, export-driven rice production increased significantly. This was particularly the case in Burma (now Myanmar) following British annexation in 1852. The entire tropical coastal delta of the Irawaddy River was transformed and deforested into a managed landscape focused on rice growth, for local consumption but also primarily for significant export to India and Europe. As imperial structures forced a move away from local food security toward wider markets of demand, local populations became increasingly reliant on global commodity prices, imported food, and often unsympathetic governance. The result was the destruction of local biodiversity, inequality, declining flexibility for smallholder land use, and potential famine. As Kathleen puts it, in both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean cases, “the production and movement of rice around and outside of the tropics in the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries is one example of imperial imbalances of power, hunger, and risk” that have left an economic and environmental legacy in global economic relationships between the western half of Europe and northern North America and the tropical nations of the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific in the twenty-first century.20
The bananas we put in our baby food, smoothies, pies, and ice cream, or simply enjoy raw, provide a more recent example of a tropical staple food turned from a local source of calories into an agroindustrial complex at the mercy of global consumer demand in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We saw in Chapter 7 how this tropical forest tree crop was first domesticated in New Guinea, being introduced into the Americas by the Spanish in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries before spreading widely among local farmers in lowland tropical forests. In the late nineteenth century, however, it became a plantation crop. In the 1870s, US railroad promoters in Costa Rica experimented with widespread planting of bananas as a cheap, nutritious way to feed their workers. Realizing the potential for mass export of bananas to the United States of America, multinational corporations (such as the United Fruit Company, which formed in 1889) began to buy up land in nations such as Costa Rica, Panama, Honduras, Ecuador, and Colombia. In the latter case, Colombian planters had actually already developed their own export networks to New York. Nonetheless, the United Fruit Company, in buying land and railroads, forced local farmers to sell to them at low prices. Moreover, in order to spread risk in terms of the potential for diseases, soil erosion, and climatic events hitting their crops, these multinational corporations frequently bought up and cleared a vast amount of tropical land simply so that it would be ready should planting need to extend to new areas to maintain profits. The result was removal of local farmers from their smallholdings, the forcing of local farmers and planters into wage labor, and an increasing reliance on imported foodstuffs. These international corporations held such economic sway and such a tight grip on access to foreign markets that they could even make and shape the politics and economies of entire tropical nations. The “Banana Wars” saw the US government exert active imperialistic political influences on various nations in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America in order to secure access to tropical production and trade. United States troops backed up the security of the United Fruit Company’s operations in Honduras on more than one occasion, leading to long-term political instability. The seizing of Cuba and Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898 also saw the United States attempt to forcibly maintain beneficial economic flows of production and capital for itself at the expense of entire nations. Similarly, the United States intervened to support Panama in its independence from Colombia, enabling the former to secure permission to construct and control the Panama Canal (which opened in 1914) and thereafter to dominate trade in the region. Many countries became almost completely reliant on certain key crops as a result of economic and political interventions by the United States, leading to unequal distributions of agricultural land, infrastructure produced solely to meet the needs of external capitalist enterprises, immense wealth inequality and low wages, degradation of tropical forest environments at the expense of plantations, and political conflict.21
Away from crops, the increasingly intensive, capital-driven pressure on tropical landscapes between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries is perhaps most vividly seen in how tropical timber and tropical land themselves became the objects of a “rapacious capitalism.” Mahogany furniture is a common feature of stately homes and historical museums in Europe and northern North America, venerated for its elegant craftwork and exotic, workable wood. Yet the trade in this rainforest timber, driven by growing luxury Euro-American demand and profit-hungry merchants between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, involved the exploitation of enslaved African labor in “woodcutting gangs.” It also saw waves of “harvesting bonanzas” crash upon entire ecosystems, from the Caribbean island of Cuba to the Central American coast of Honduras. The “commercialization of the forest” occurred a little later in the Philippines, intensifying as US imperialism replaced Spanish colonial rule and sought to determine how much wealth it could extract from the landscape. From 1898 until the mid-twentieth century, a moving timber frontier, using railways and machines, began to cut lower-quality hardwoods indiscriminately, to meet Japanese, Chinese, North American, and European demand. Beyond being a product in its own right, timber could also be cleared to “liberate” the land below for more “profitable” uses. In Australia, from the nineteenth century onward, sheep and cattle pastoralism drove intensified expansion across many parts of the continent by European settlers, and in 2010 Australia was the third-largest dairy exporter in the world. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, farmers began to clear significant portions of the “wet frontier” of Australia as they sought to supply increased global and regional demand for animal products, particularly in Europe and other parts of Australia, exploiting British imperial connections. Expecting that fertile soils must lie under these heavily forested regions, larger landowners, as well as small-scale farmers who rented clearance contracts, undertook significant clearance of the semitropical eucalypt forests and wet rainforests of Queensland, including, notably, on the Atherton Tablelands. However, these farmers often instead reaped poor grazelands or wetlands, inevitable soil erosion, difficulty exporting dairy from isolated settings, and a perilous existence at the mercy of government controls and global prices. Moreover, the murder and forced relocation of the Indigenous Traditional Owners of these tropical forest landscapes, such as the Jirrbal, led to a suppression of ecological knowledge and traditional land management that, as we will see in Chapter 13, still plagues the threatened biomes of this region to this day. These examples simply scratch the surface of the increased deforestation and land conversion that took place across the tropics as governments, landowners, and companies sought to maximize the benefits of growing regional and global markets of production and consumption.22
New global circulations of capital and products and demands for tropical land conversion also continued to place pressures on workforces and migrants living in the tropics. The abolition of slavery did not necessarily mean that the movement of labor into and around the tropics became entirely voluntary, however. Even after formal abolition, enslaved Africans could still be forced to enter multiyear “apprenticeships” during which they worked long hours for no pay. With that practice finally stopped in 1838, landowners looked elsewhere for labor. In the early nineteenth century, many thousands of men from tropical South China and the Pacific Islands were coerced into contracts that nearly amounted to slavery as they performed frequently fatal work in the guano mines of Peru that fertilized the “Agricultural Revolution” of Europe. From the early nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, historical records demonstrate that more than 1.5 million laborers from southern India moved to plantations in British, French, and Dutch colonies in the Caribbean; South Africa; Indian Ocean islands like Réunion, Mauritius, and Sri Lanka; Myanmar; and Fiji. Although supposedly voluntary, the contracts of “indentured servitude” that formed the basis of this system exploited sectors of the Indian caste system with low social status, offered poor working conditions, and often involved significant coercion. In the case of Sri Lanka, the poor treatment of arriving Tamil-speaking labor on British tea plantations in the highlands, which local Sinhalese farmers had refused to work, may have contributed to ethnic conflicts that have since confronted this tropical island. An often forgotten part of Germany’s colonial history is the role it played in the movement of nearly 200,000 people as indentured laborers from the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, and the Banks and Torres Islands, among other regions, to plantation work or other forms of labor in Australia, Fiji, Samoa, New Caledonia, and other parts of New Guinea between 1863 and 1919. Potentially nearly one-quarter of these individuals died during their contracts. Migrating Chinese investors, landowners, and laborers were a significant force in the twentieth-century planting of rubber in parts of Southeast Asia. In the late nineteenth century, Italian laborers migrated to coffee plantations in Brazil, while in the early twentieth century the arrival of Filipino migrants as fruit pickers in Hawai’i formed the beginning of a labor export market for a tropical nation in which over 10 million members of its 85 million population live and work abroad, often facing heavy discrimination. Although this list does not come close to accounting for all of the individuals, families, and communities that moved, willingly or forcibly, as a result of growing global demands for production, capital, and consumption, it illustrates the scale on which these processes have left their mark on demographic and cultural diasporas across and beyond the tropics right up to this day.23
FROM THE SEVENTEENTH through to the twentieth century, the tropics, and their people and environments, were at the core of new, global flows of capital, demands for labor, and exploitations of land. While the varied examples I have dealt with have, given their unique temporal, social, economic, cultural, and political contexts, all been the subject of their own in-depth historical, anthropological, and archeological studies, together, they highlight how people, plants, and landscapes from the tropics experienced and also pushed back against the formation of economic systems that majorly shape the world in which we live today. Throughout the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, and indeed even before, flows of investment were based on a “taproot of imperialism.”24 This European ideal of exploiting new lands and new sources of labor to harness more profits ultimately birthed the concept of “capitalism,” its critiques, and theories of modern global economics in the nineteenth century. From the racialized transatlantic slave trade to the exploitation of indentured workers and migration of various, often stigmatized ethnicities, landowners, companies, and even individuals in quest of profitable investments sought out labor from the tropics as a cheap commodity. Meanwhile tropical landscapes were shaved so that they might be used to produce crops or resources that fueled not local or regional needs but rather global flows of wealth and demand as part of a new “world system.” Societies and existing regional politics and economies in the tropics were involved, and individuals resisted in various ways. Overall, however, European and, later, northern North American control of the direction and output of investment on a global scale left legacies of inequality, cultural and political prejudice, racism, and land use that saw certain sectors of Western society enriched and diasporic arrivals, as well as their tropical nations, impoverished. They also left a blatant mark on tropical environments. When the famous German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt explored the Spanish plantations of Lake Valencia in Venezuela in the nineteenth century, he noted, “When forests are destroyed, as they are everywhere in America by the European planters… the springs are entirely dried up.”25 In doing so, he was one of the first European observers to suggest a link between conversion of tropical land for new, profit-driven uses and a change in local and even regional climatic conditions.26
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