Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  By 1914, sugar, coffee and chocolate had conquered those parts they had previously found difficult to reach. National food cultures and eating and drinking habits were becoming more integrated. In contrast to the early luxury phase, led by Jesuits, merchants and scholars, the driving forces behind this later mass phase were business, state and nutritional science. Exotic beverages were pushed as essential foods for strong industrial nations, no longer the discerning choice of the refined few. Industrial firms rationalized the work schedule to boost workers’ energy and concentration. Instead of a long pause in the middle of the day, firms introduced shorter meals and coffee breaks. Some handed out free coffee in place of drinking water. An additional push came from the state and science. German prisons and hospitals put coffee on their list of staple foods in the 1870s.120 A new alliance emerged, made up of the army, nutritional experts and national beet-sugar interests. Sugar’s calorific energy, they preached, made it vital for national strength. In 1876, the French army included sugar and coffee in a soldier’s daily ration. Around this time, the Dutch technology of extracting the butter from cocoa unlocked chocolate’s potential as a mass consumer good. Cocoa powder and chocolate bars were born. Unlike tea or coffee, chocolate had nutritional value. It now shook off its association with leisured ladies and idle priests and was repackaged as a ‘flesh-forming’ and ‘heat-giving’ energy drink for North Pole explorers, athletes, workers and busy housewives. In Cadbury advertisements, Professor Cavill swore its cocoa was ‘the most sustaining beverage he could take during his swim across the Straits of Dover’.121 Rebranded as a ‘motor for health’, with testimonials from doctors and the medical journal the Lancet, cocoa entered infant food. Children’s palates would never be the same.

  By 1900, nationalism was at least as vital a prop for this mass consumer culture as imperialism. Many small states without colonies introduced ordinary folk to chocolate through their armies. In Switzerland, Suchard started sending ‘military chocolate’ to barracks in the 1870s and sold chocolate in the shape of bullets (Schokoladenpatronen). The first soldiers to try it spat it out, but it soon became a standard ration. Some recruits ate the dry powder pure.122 Once the ‘food of the gods’ for the Aztecs, cocoa had evolved into a mass-produced national commodity: the food of the people.

  Things travelled further and further, stretching commodity chains to unprecedented lengths by 1900. Already in the late seventeenth century, almost 150,000 metric tons of grain crossed the Baltic Sea each year, largely ending up in the bellies of Dutch burghers.123 In the second half of the nineteenth century, liberal policies, faster steamships and cooling technologies lowered prices and stretched the food chain to new extremes. In the 1830s, a Londoner’s wheat and flour came from 2,430 miles away. By the 1870s, it was almost double that. It was now that many foodstuffs became international travellers. A Londoner’s butter, cheese and eggs used to come from a few hundred miles away. By the 1870s, they took a journey of over 1,300 miles.124

  Together, liberal empire and mass consumption changed the visibility and value attached to the place of origin. Some goods suffered geographic displacement. Coffee in the late nineteenth century was like air travel in the late twentieth. Once everyone could go there, exotic places lost their charm. Distance became affordable and, consequently, devalued. To ordinary consumers in 1900, it mattered that coffee had a kick and was cheap, not where it came from, as it had for earlier connoisseurs. A few places preserved an interest in the Orient, for example smoking salons in Berlin with Moorish interiors but, in general, the more goods entered the mass market, the more the exotic was left behind. Blending beans and processing foods meant that value was added in Europe. Coffee might not have been home grown but the appearance, packaging and taste was European. In the early 1900s, most Britons drank a concoction made of beans from Mysore (for body), Kenya (for acidity) and Mokka (for aroma).

  For drug foods in general, the age of mass consumption was strikingly conservative in character. Fin-de-siècle Europeans drank more coffee and tea than ever before, but they pretty much lost the curiosity about new, untried foreign substances that had driven their forebears to experiment with coffee, tobacco and cocoa in the earlier age of luxury and exploration. European tastebuds dulled. Once caffeinated drinks had taken hold, it was difficult for new stimulating rivals to dislodge them. No khat houses opened in Vienna or Paris in 1900, and no popular taste for chewing betel nut developed. There were some practical and aesthetic reasons for this – the khat leaf, which contains cathinone, loses its stimulant force during shipping, while chewing betel produces red saliva and wears down the teeth’s calcium; chewing khat can also lead to constipation.125 Still, black teeth and smoke had not stopped tobacco in earlier centuries. What was decisive was culture and ideological bias; after all, since the 1950s, khat could have been easily shipped by air fresh from East Africa, but, instead, most Western countries have banned it. Tea and coffee promoted a culture of politeness that discriminated against spitting, except in the baseball dugout. Chewing khat is very slow and relaxing, and quite the opposite of the purposeful atmosphere of an eighteenth-century coffee house. And tropical articles such as khat had the added weight of new-found European supremacy against them. Unlike Arabian coffee or Chinese tea in the seventeenth century, Europeans in 1900 associated khat with racially inferior people in East African colonies; some continue to do so today. Chewing khat appeared a barbarian habit, not a civilized practice to be emulated. In the West, khat became stigmatized as a dangerous drug.126 Where exotic extracts made it, as kola did, their origin was disguised, blended into a soft drink and packaged as all-American. When it came to exotic drugs, therefore, the era of free trade was paradoxically less open and vibrant than mercantilism had been.

  Value followed power. From around 1850, exotic goods came to bear the stamp of a new racism and nationalism. Empires and nations started to authenticate goods for their subjects, highlighting certain places of origin and erasing others. Victorians branded Chinese tea as ‘slow poison’ from untrustworthy ‘heathen[s]’, no match for the new Assam leaves from colonial plantations safely in British hands. Imperial origin became a sign of racial quality control. Experts doubted whether the colouring in green tea caused serious harm, but the adverts and testimonials were relentless, from stories of toenails found in Chinese tea to claims that it was ‘mixture of tea-dust with dirt and sand, agglutinated into a mass with a gummy matter, most probably manufactured from rice-flour . . . lastly, dried and coloured . . . either with black lead, if for black tea, or with Prussian blue, gypsum, or turmeric, if intended for green’.127 In 1884, a health exhibition, with over 4 million visitors, displayed the superiority of Indian plantations managed by ‘skilled Englishmen’.128 Two years later, the Colonial and Indian Exhibition featured a tea court which served 300,000 cups of Indian tea. A decade later, and Indian tea had overtaken its Chinese rival. Origin and the food chain mattered, where it served an imperial purpose.129

  This was a movement in which local actors manipulated the centre as well as the other way around. The Indian tea syndicate, made up of the Assam Tea Company and similar firms, used the exhibitions to market their colonial goods directly to consumers, circumventing metropolitan merchants. Similarly, in France, it was the peasant vine growers and négociants (merchant-manufacturers) of the Marne who successfully led the campaign to have their sparkling wine recognized as the only authentic Champagne in the world.130 Nationalism’s belief in the unique personality of the soil was converted into the idea of terroir, which offered a flavour of the nation to consumers who should learn to appreciate the distinctiveness of their own grapes and cheeses. Champagne’s appellation d’origine in 1908 signalled the coming of a new era of a local–national politics of origin, which brought us Chianti Classico, Lübecker Marzipan and Melton Mowbray Pork Pies. Local authentication was part of the explosion of brands in the pre-war years, which itself was a response to the growing mass market for manufactured foods with its many unknown new prod
ucts and fears of adulteration; in Germany alone, 75,000 brands of food, drinks and tobacco were registered between 1894 and 1914.131

  If the creation of value moved into the hands of advanced Western consumer societies, it also had a boomerang effect. Once wine and coffee were associated with superior European culture, overseas elites adopted them, too. The earlier spatial logic of luxury was now reversed. How far goods had travelled mattered less to consumers in Boston, Paris and London but ever more to local elites in Santiago and Buenos Aires, who ordered direct from London or the Bon Marché department store in Paris. Chile and Argentina used to be thought of as marginal for British exports but, in fact, they grew into a fast-expanding market for British cottons. By 1880, inhabitants in the Southern Cone received ten times as much cotton as they had in 1815. But Latin American consumers were never passive sheep. ‘Did you really suppose,’ one Bahia merchant wrote to a British textile trader in 1814, ‘because you shipped them, the Portuguese were obliged to buy them? The fact is that your goods could not be sold at any price . . . We could not compel people to buy goods they did not want.’132 Locals wanted handkerchiefs in the newest styles and patterns, and British merchants were busy assembling fashionable samples.

  Already in the 1820s, travellers noted how the craze for British goods was cutting its way into the Colombian interior. ‘The ale which came from England was considered a great luxury’ by local officials. In Popayán, in the Valle del Cauca, a merchant had a Broadwood piano brought all the way from England; on the last stretch from Buenaventura, porters had to carry it on their backs across the mountains. When John Potter Hamilton, Britain’s First Commissioner to the new state of Colombia, reached the secluded valley, he was stunned to find his assigned bedroom and curtains ‘completely in the French style’, with eau de Cologne, Windsor soap and brushes on a side table.133 A good deal of the English goods were smuggled into Colombia via Jamaica. In Chile, maté imports from nearby Argentina declined, as the elite turned to coffee and tea from far-away India. Local fermented chichas was uncouth. People of distinction served French-style wine in French-style houses behind French windows. From the 1850s, Chile cultivated its own Medoc.134

  Empire made origin matter more than ever before at the periphery. For settlers in Canada and Australia and other parts of the Anglo-world, a can of Bristol tripe and a bottle of Worcester sauce contained a sense of ‘home’.135 This extended beyond white-settler elites. In British Honduras (now Belize), the imperial experience left behind tastebuds that favoured smoked tongue, brandy and lemon cordial over local foods. For slaves and their descendants, eating English food was a way of claiming respect and equality, not unlike the emancipated slaves who sported Western clothes in Zanzibar. Such longing for long-distance luxury goods reinforced a developmental model based on the export of minerals and raw materials – nitrate in the case of Chile, mahogany in that of British Honduras – in exchange for processed foods and manufactured goods. British Honduras even imported its tapioca from the metropole. This gave commodities a rather unpredictable spin in the game of imperial power and resistance. On the one hand, the taste for imported Scottish whiskey, Horlicks malted milk and Oxford sausages asserted the supremacy of the imperial palate. On the other, this transfer made colonial consumers more stubborn and less responsive to the designs of the imperial centre. British Honduras’s trade deficit was a direct result of its hunger for British goods, and a heavy drain on Westminster. Once imperial tastes had formed, people were unlikely to respond to pleas to ‘buy local’, as the Colonial Office learnt the hard way in the inter-war years.136

  In the era of the ‘new imperialism’ in the 1880s–’90s, imperial symbols and slogans gained ground in advertising. The craze for African explorer H. M. Stanley (‘Dr Livingstone, I presume’) was an advertiser’s dream. Stanley appeared in ads for soap and Bovril, and sipped tea with the Emin Pasha in his tent at Kavalli, on the southern shore of Lake Albert. ‘Stanley: “Well, Emin, old fellow, this Cup of the United Kingdom Tea Company’s Tea makes us forget all our troubles.” Emin: “So it does, my boy.”’ What else was the Emin to say? In a pioneering study, the literary scholar Thomas Richards argued that these imperial adverts showed the ‘homogenizing power of the commodity’.137 Ads for Bovril and Pear’s soap used African settings and placed indigenous people all over the world in the same subservient position: as grateful recipients of civilizing goods. The nineteenth century, Anne McClintock has argued in an influential study of race and gender, saw a shift from scientific racism to ‘commodity racism’. Exhibitions, advertisements and branded goods meant that ‘as domestic space became racialized, colonial space became domesticated.’138 The Pear’s Soap advert of a white boy scrubbing a black boy to white purity and progress is a classic example.

  Yet, looking through adverts and newspapers of the period, what is noteworthy is not that racial images appear but that they do so far less often than we might expect. The picture of a grinning ‘sambo’ serving up cocoa was exceptionally rare. On the contrary, the representation of goods was increasingly national. In 1881, Cadbury’s adverts still showed the entire food chain of its cocoa, from African workers collecting the pods to the roasting process, the cooling cellar and the packing machines in its Bournville headquarters outside Birmingham.139 By the 1900s, Africa and Africans had all but disappeared. Cadbury now advertised its cocoa as ‘nature’s best gift to mankind’ but was silent about its origins. Cadbury’s cocoa was ‘the standard English article’, ‘the good Old English Cocoa’, ‘the typical cocoa of English manufacture’.140 Where people appeared, they were white English scientists in testing rooms and white women workers in Bournville. It was they who guaranteed Cadbury’s ‘authentic’ quality, what made it a ‘perfect food’, free of ‘foreign substances’. The ‘fresh air, wholesome exercise and bright surroundings’, one advert explained, made for healthy workers, which in turn ensured the ‘keenness on the part of every employee to assist in maintaining the rigid standard of purity that is required in everything bearing the name and mark of Cadbury Bournville’.141 A British shopper would have been forgiven for thinking that Cadbury’s cocoa grew in Bournville.

  Cadbury was no peculiarity. The creation of milk chocolate added to the European makeover of exotic goods. Tobler turned chocolate into a ‘Swiss’ article, with a bear on an alpine rock, while Milka advertised happy milkmaids amidst alpine cows. Colonial and oriental associations never entirely disappeared: Karl Hofer’s 1900 poster for Kaffee-Messmer showed a Moor drinking Turkish coffee, as did some coffee shops in Berlin and Vienna. In France, advertisements for the Café du Comptoir de Colonies showed a black couple in loincloth and parasol leaning on coffee bags from Martinique and Guadeloupe (French colonies) as well as from Java (Dutch East Indies) (see Plate 17). Arguably, such ongoing representations benefited from a particular situation in France, where the Third Republic fixed colonial preferences for coffee, cocoa and a whole host of spices. Colonial goods were more visible here, partly because they were treated as such by the taxman: coffee from the French colonies paid 78 francs per 100kg instead of the 156 francs levied on foreign beans. Minstrel shows and African street sellers of chocolate did their bit to keep racial associations in the public eye.142 In the 1930s, Hava advertised its authentic ‘café du Bresil’, showing its passage from the plantation to Le Havre. Racial images were most prominent in advertisements for Banania, a drink made of chocolate and banana flour. Even here, though, the true origin and producers were eventually driven out of the picture. The original recipe hailed from Nicaragua and was sourced in the French Antilles. In the First World War, Banania adverts replaced Antilles women with Senegalese soldiers. In Germany, people were more likely to see images of the Rhine on their package of coffee than palm trees. Black people appeared in only 3 per cent of all German coffee adverts. One company floated a brand made of purely colonial beans to please the Kaiser, but this was the exception.

  What sold was the familiar – regional pride and national belonging �
�� not the exotic. Locals bought ‘Rheinland Kaffee’, or ‘Arminius Kaffee’, named after the German warlord who annihilated the Roman army in the Teutoburg Forest in CE 9. At the 1893 world fair in Chicago, the candy manufacturer Stollwerck moulded 30,000 pounds of chocolate into a temple of Germania standing 38 feet tall; the French had ‘Jeanne d’Arc’ chocolate bars.143 In the United States, coffee was advertised as ‘New Orleans’, marking the national point of entry rather than the place of origin. The global expansion of ‘Italian’ coffee since the 1950s would be the culmination of this new spatial reordering made possible by the European command of goods, processing and marketing.144

  By 1900, Europeans and their cousins across the seas held the global reins of consumer culture more firmly in their hands than ever before. Industry and income lifted European demand to unrivalled heights. The rise of the mass market, however, was much more than a separate Western story. It was complemented by imperialism, which constructed a new material hierarchy between Europe and the rest of the world, between consumers and coolies. It was in the more liberal atmosphere of the nineteenth century that Europeans truly took command of global consumption. Power extended from commodities to knowledge, branding and value. It was the West that embraced ‘the consumer’. That colonial rulers developed an increasingly visceral dislike of natives apparently mimicking their lifestyle did not, of course, extinguish their subjects’ appetite for goods. What it did do was to justify paying Africans low wages or no wages – or, to use economic language, to depress their purchasing power. The promotion of the consumer in the West and their demotion in Africa were two sides in the widening geopolitical divide of economic fortunes. Empire wrote out the colonial producer from the world of goods as it was displayed, marketed and enjoyed. It was this that was, perhaps, the clearest demonstration of the power of empire to change the terms of consumption.