Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  In his survey of The State of the Poor in the 1790s, Frederic Eden gave the annual budget of a typical miner and his family in Cumberland. He earned £26 a year. His wife and seven children made an additional £18.138 Of their expenses, which amounted to £44, a good £3 10 shillings went on tea and sugar. Did they ‘occasionally, wash ore’ to afford the tea and sugar, or to help with the rent (£3) and the costs of the many pregnancies and lyings-in of his wife, which added up to £20 over the years? Arguably, it was not an appetite for novelties or a desire to impress others that led his family to buy tea, sugar and candles but because these were enabling them to spin late into the night, stay warm and keep awake.

  The link between wanting more and working harder was contingent. In Britain, the initial demand for consumer goods came from the middling sort without making them more industrious: their wives stayed at home. In seventeenth-century Friesland, Dutch farmers did specialize, selling more of their produce in exchange for novelties rather than making things themselves. By contrast, Catalonia in the following century was industrializing, yet here side jobs remained high and new consumer goods were conspicuous by their absence. In prosperous Kent, meanwhile, households bought tableware and curtains but also did more of their own baking and brewing.139 Developing societies, then, did not travel on a single highway from new tastes to growth and specialization. Desire and ‘wants’ were not just there, automatically compelling people to enter the market for labour and goods, as presumed in the ‘industrious’ model. Desire itself varied, as did the scope for its expansion, which was shaped by norms and institutions. While purchasing power favoured Europe’s north-west, it was only one variable, and, on its own, it is insufficient to explain the step-change in consumption in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

  What set Europe apart from Asia was an expansionist state system which responded to competitive pressure by favouring innovation and creating future markets. Britain’s simultaneous creation of an Atlantic market and imitation of superior Indian textiles, behind the shelter of an import ban, was the most pronounced example of this. Indian textile weavers at first lacked any incentive to innovate – after all, they were better – and then, by the late eighteenth century, when they were feeling the harsh wind of British competition, lacked a strong state to respond.

  Yet the differences within Europe were at least as decisive. What set Britain and the Netherlands apart from the rest of Europe was a favourable climate of ideas and institutions that encouraged men and, especially, women to join the ranks of wage earners and consumers. As we have seen, places like Württemberg were held back not because the women there did not have material desires or the wish to be industrious and earn some money, but because they were punished if they acted on them. In 1742, for example, a knitter’s wife who had been working independently was ordered by the local village court to stop and return to her husband. Shopkeepers made sure their towns barred pedlars, and husbands beat their wives for leaving the house in search of work, with the full support of the authorities. Guilds restricted labour mobility. Together, husbands, fathers, churches and guilds exercised a social discipline unknown in England.140 Compare this to London in 1455, where the women who threw silk said they were ‘more than a thousand’, including ‘many gentlewomen’ who lived ‘honorably’ and supported their households.141

  Blessed with an early central state, England was spared the multitude of local authorities and regional powers which interfered with the flow of goods on the continent. The English state directed its force outward. The contrast with the Spanish empire is instructive. The first to import exotic chocolate and tobacco, Spain might have been expected to make the most of its head start in the race for consumption. In reality, it quickly fell behind. Its main strategy was to extract resources from its colonies, not to develop them into an additional market for its goods. At home, on the Iberian Peninsula, it suffered from a fragmentation of regional authorities, currencies and taxes as well as long distances and poor transport. Castile and Navarra had their own import and export duties and could issue their own coins. Many towns had their own fiscal powers. A heavily indebted city such as Seville used consumption taxes to stay afloat.142 Such obstacles inevitably constrained the choices and opportunities of the Spanish to make the most of new products and tastes. By the middle of the eighteenth century, for example, only one in four middle-income families owned a dish to serve hot chocolate. There were some signs of improvement, especially in the growing number and diversity of textiles. In the city of Palencia, in Spain’s north-west, the average household managed to expand their clothing from forty-two to seventy-one items in the eighty years after 1750. Still, new consumer goods arrived in a trickle, not a wave. Outside Madrid, in provincial towns such as Santander, napkins and tablecloths – crucial indicators of growing refinement – became more widespread only in the early nineteenth century. Tellingly, even in many urban areas of Spain, cotton was displacing linen only in the 1830s.143

  In Britain, the state and a more integrated market provided a more favourable environment for the diffusion of goods. This was an important factor for the advanced growth of consumption in this part of the world. But having a favourable terrain is not the same as making the most of it. It still leaves unexplained the underlying dynamic that made people turn more and more to a world of goods. As we have seen in the case of cotton, the British state gave a helping hand to British industry by protecting it against Indian calicoes. But the demand for these goods was already there – the state did not create it, it merely diverted it. To understand how goods became a more integral part of people’s lives in modern societies, we now need to attend to cultural factors that gave goods new meaning and significance.

  2

  The Enlightenment of Consumption

  The initial reaction was disgust. The Italian Girolamo Benzoni first observed the cultivation and preparation of cocoa in Nicaragua in the 1550s. Natives added water, a bit of pepper, sometimes honey, and beat the mixture into a froth. The result was a ‘beverage more suited for pigs than for humans’.1 Travelling in Turkey sixty years later, the English poet George Sandys noted how men there did not go to taverns but to ‘Coffa-houses’, where they chatted and sipped a drink made of a berry ‘as hot as they can suffer it: blacke as soote, and tasting not much unlike it’.2 Within a century, aristocratic and commercial elites alike were hooked. A quintet of exotic drug foods conquered Europe: tea from China; coffee and cane sugar from Arabia, and tobacco and cocoa from the New World. In Habsburg Spain and Austria, nobles held chocolate parties (las Chocolatadas). Across Europe, respectable burghers and learned gentlemen began to meet in coffee houses. By the mid-eighteenth century, servants and artisans, too, were enjoying a cup of tea or coffee. By 1900, the conquest was complete. Even chocolate had been transformed into a mass product, eaten by soldiers and workers as well as sipped by fine ladies. Once precious luxuries, exotic drugs had become everyday items.

  BITTERSWEET

  The introduction and popularization of new tastes is a critical feature of modern consumer culture. By following the dramatic change in fortune of these exotic beverages we can gain a clearer insight into how such new tastes emerged and the historical actors and processes responsible for them. The careers of tea, coffee and chocolate were marked by displacement and devaluation. They involved an unprecedented global transplantation of plants, peoples and tastes. In their colonies, European empires created a new tropical production zone. Under the Aztecs, cacao was grown mainly in Soconusco, along the Pacific coast of Mexico. The Dutch took it to Venezuela, Catholic missionaries to the Philippines. At the time of Sandys’ travels, coffee was grown only in Yemen and shipped from the port of Mocca. Then the Dutch started growing their own in Surinam (1718), the French in Martinique (1723), the British in Jamaica (1728). In the 1840s, the British set up colonial tea plantations in Assam and Ceylon. Sugar cane – indigenous to South-east Asia and first introduced to the Mediterranean by Arabs – was moved by Europeans from
Madeira and the Canaries to the West Indies. Contemporaries were aware of the significance of these migrations. Whether coffee and sugar were decisive for Europe’s fortune, he did not know, the French writer Bernadin de Saint-Pierre confessed in 1773. He was sure, though, that these two companions brought a great tragedy to the other two continents affected: America was depopulated because Europeans wanted land for cultivation; Africa was depopulated because they needed labour to cultivate America.3

  Each of these drug foods has had its own literature, beginning with Sidney Mintz’s pioneering study of sugar, Sweetness and Power (1985), which sparked a new genre of commodity biographies.4 The attractions of that genre are easy to see. Following the life of a food reveals the interdependence between regimes of production and consumption separated by oceans and national histories. The warm comfort of a cup of sweetened tea served in Britain is connected with the brutality of slave plantations in the Caribbean. A second insight is that goods, like people, have a ‘social life’.5 Their character and value changes along the food chain and across time. For Aztec rulers, cocoa was tribute, money and religious ritual. A chest of tea can be sold or given as a gift.

  The problem with commodity biographies is not that they explain too little but that they often explain too much, asking a single plant to bear the weight of world history. Exotic drug foods have thus produced a host of grand narratives. One recounts a civilizing process in which the new manners of the tea party and the coffee table trickled down from European courts to aspiring middle classes and then the rest.6 Another points to the coffee house as the birthplace of a new public sphere.7 Some have gone so far as to see in coffee’s edge over chocolate the triumph of sober, modern and Protestant Northern Europe over the self-indulgent, baroque Catholic South.8 In another view, British tea and sugar forged an imperial chain between colonial slavery and metropolitan factory labour.9 The problem with these individual stories is that what appears unique and essential about one beverage in one place appears more contingent when placed alongside other stimulants in other settings. Factories in Protestant Europe, for example, served workers beer and gin as well as sober coffee. The great tea-drinking nations include Russia and China, with empires and labour regimes that were radically different from Britain’s. We therefore need to look at these drug foods alongside each other. Ultimately, exotic beverages were winners because they were extraordinarily flexible, able to serve a variety of social groups, cultural meanings and economic regimes. This included colonies and small nations as well as imperial metropoles.

  From a global point of view, the European adoption of drug foods was less an ingenious act of discovery than a belated catching up.10 Drinks with the stimulant caffeine or theobromine (of which traces are also found in cocoa) had long been integral to other civilizations. Powdered green tea was widespread in Ming China, while the Manchu in inner Asia drank black tea with milk. Coffee had been drunk in the Middle East since the fifteenth century, when the Sufis devised a technique to roast the bean, spreading the new hot drink to Cairo and Mecca. In East Africa there was khat, further west, the kola nut, chewed by the well-off in the morning ‘to drive away the bitterness of sobriety’, as the Haussa said.11

  The impact of empire on taste and ritual was as profound in the New World as in the Old. In the Spanish empire, Jesuits moved cacao plantations from their original Mexican base to Caracas (Venezuela) and the Guayas Basin (Ecuador) in the late sixteenth century. Chocolate drinking swept across Central America. Many of the cocoa beans harvested in Venezuela were consumed on the spot. Colonial elites sipped it in Lima. In Guatemala and Nicaragua, chocolate was drunk by everyone. In the Philippines, too, it was the beverage of choice – prepared with unrefined sugar and sometimes with pili nuts and roasted rice mixed in – until coffee-drinking Americans took over in 1898.

  The second beverage of the consumer revolution in Latin America, and often forgotten, was maté, a Paraguayan caffeine-containing tea made from the dried leaves of the evergreen holly Ilex paraguariensis. Initially it grew wild, but Jesuit missions turned it into a plantation crop. It was sold across the subcontinent, from Chile and Peru to Montevideo. Indeed, maté was as much an exotic novelty in Buenos Aires as coffee was in London and Paris. Maté was an even more social drink than tea or coffee. Drinkers passed the gourd around and shared the bombilla, or straw. The culture of accessories associated with European tea parties was in truth a shared international phenomenon. Silver straws and gourds mounted in silver made it all the way up to the highlands of Ecuador. As in the European tea-party and Kaffeekränzchen, maté rituals marked out women as arch-consumers, simultaneously guardians of domestic sociability and potential spendthrifts. There ‘is no house, rich or poor’, one observer wrote in the 1780s, ‘where there is not always maté on the table, and it is nothing short of amazing to see the luxury spent by women on maté utensils’.12

  What lay behind the conversion of Europeans to exotic beverages? That they contained alkaloids, with their habit-forming potential, worked in their favour but was hardly sufficient. First, taste barriers had to be overcome. Nor should we exaggerate the beverages’ addictive power. Many drank a diluted, watery brew. By 1780, for example, observers noted that mountain farmers in Saxony had taken up coffee, but ‘it was so thin that it barely had the colour of the beans.’13 In Voralberg, Austria, textile workers regularly drank coffee at that time.14 But in many cases, the habit preceded the drug. In 1900, most people in continental Europe still sipped ‘substitute’ coffee, made from chicory or acorn, which contained no caffeine whatsoever; real coffee only displaced milk in rural Austria in the decades after that. That Europeans had the power to navigate the seas, conquer colonies and enslave Africans mattered, but, on the other hand, the Atlantic plantation system would have crashed had it not been for Europeans’ growing taste for sugar and coffee in the first place. The fundamental question, then, is how and why taste and habits changed. It is also one of the most difficult ones to answer.

  Unlike changes in individual taste, such as a child’s sudden liking for bitter or acidic foods, the transformation of entire national taste buds proceeded slowly. Along the way, the criteria of taste changed, as well as the groups that acted as taste-makers. In the first phase, from the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, appropriation and dissemination were an exclusive affair. In 1724, all of England made do with 660 tons of coffee. If shared equally, each inhabitant would have been able to enjoy one weak cup of coffee every three weeks – and this was an unusually good year. Tea consumption was only slightly higher.15 Cocoa was traded regularly from the 1590s, but even a century later Venezuela still only shipped 65 tons to Spain each year. Coffee and chocolate, then, were luxuries, both because few people could afford them and because they were marked out as rare goods that called for a particular disposition, knowledge and art of consumption.

  The original ambassadors of taste were missionaries, merchants and men of learning. Their interest in the exotic and their contact with distant cultures ensured that the new stimulants reached Europe accompanied by instructions about their appropriate preparation, consumption and medicinal properties, taken from observations in Arabia and New Spain. The first European chocoholics were Jesuits and Dominicans in the New World. They depended on indigenous maids, markets and know-how. Indians and mestizos showed them how to whip up and enjoy the frothy drink the local way, spiced with honey and coloured with seeds from the anchiote tree to make it a rich red; Mesoamericans preferred it hot, adding chillies and maize to the ground beans to make a soup. By the early seventeenth century, religious houses were the hub of a global drug ring, shipping cocoa from Veracruz to their brothers in Rome.16

  At the heart of empire, cocoa’s colonial provenance earned it an ambivalent welcome. On the one hand, its high status in Aztec culture endowed it with elite appeal, setting it apart from more plebeian stimulants such as maté, which failed to cross the Atlantic. On the other, sipping hot chocolate like a colonial signified a descent down the im
perial ladder from civilizer to barbarian. Back in Spain, the colonists’ chocolate habit triggered fears that Europeans were being corrupted by Indian ways. It was the nobility that sanitized the drink and ensured its European diffusion through Habsburg courts and the aristocratic family networks connecting Madrid, Paris and Vienna. The preparation broadly stayed the same but was now disguised as European, with the help of cinnamon and sugar. It was justified with reference to ideas of bodily humours that stretched back to Hippocrates (c.460–370 BCE) and the ancient Greek physician Galen (131–201 CE); drinks and diet, according to this theory, affected the healthy balance between the four substances that made up the body: blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. Chilli peppers started to disappear as a flavouring for chocolate. Cosimo III de’ Medici had his chocolate with jasmine; elites in Northern Europe mixed in eggs. Cocoa was served in fine porcelain cups, no longer in gourds, and sipped at breakfast and chocolate parties.