Empire of Things

by Frank Trentmann

  Some see in fair trade a sign that we increasingly care for distant others, a kind of ethical response to globalization. Philosophers have long been divided over whether such concern is even possible. For David Hume, in the mid-eighteenth century, sympathy was limited to those near us. It was impossible to love mankind. By contrast, Friedrich Nietzsche, a century later, denounced Nächstenliebe as selfish and rotten and called for a higher love of distant others and unknown futures (Fernstenliebe) that in its highest form would stretch to things, and even spirits.14

  Clearly, it matters what we mean by ‘caring’. Buying a certified banana because it might help a small farmer on the other side of the world is not the same as looking after a child or elderly person, day in, day out. ‘Caring for’ is more demanding than ‘caring about’.15 The former requires physical contact and an understanding of the needs and abilities of the person cared for. Fair trade, by contrast, creates a more distant, fleeting relationship and one that often gives a distorted sense of the subjects of concern. Exhortations to Northern consumers have invoked images of powerless, dependent Southern producers. ‘You choose – because he has no choice,’ fair-trade adverts read in 2007, accompanied by an image of a starving African child.16 Small farmers’ skills all but disappeared from view, as well as the fact that they, too, were consumers. While bridging distance in one sense, such campaigns have also had the side-effect of creating a new sense of distance between powerful consumers in the North and powerless producers in the South.

  In reality, fair trade relies on Southern consumers as much as on Northern ones. In Brazil, it was grafted on to the movement for rural solidarity in 2002; the government helped farmers with advance payment systems. Brazilian farmers have been encouraged to produce for Brazilian consumers, not for Americans or Europeans. Africans, similarly, are consumers as well as producers: half the fair-trade goods produced in Africa stay on that continent.17

  Fair trade today manifests the contradictions of globalization. As the food chain got longer and longer, consumers came to know less and less about the people who grew their food. At the same time, the world has shrunk and people are more aware than ever of the plight of their cousins on the other side of the globe. The tension between these two forces can be traced back to the eighteenth century and before. What is new is that in our digital-media age it is all but impossible to shut out images of poverty, hunger and violence, however far away.18 Fair trade is a relatively easy way of turning such sympathy into practical action, certainly less demanding than, say, sacrificing a fifth of one’s income to famine relief or volunteering time. In reality, though, it has been all but easy. Ethical consumption in general has been troubled by a paradoxical gap between sentiment and action. In survey after survey, European and North American consumers stress their ethical credentials. In a MORI poll in 2000, every second European said they would be prepared to pay extra for ethical products. French consumers said they would pay up to 25 per cent more for clothes not made by children. And yet, in the real world of shopping, ethical products, led by fair trade, amount to a minuscule sliver of the cake. What explains this contradiction?

  That people like to think well of themselves but find it difficult to translate good intentions into practice is hardly surprising, but the gap has to do with more than hypocrisy. In part, fair trade is wrestling with a problem of scale, the gulf between a small type of local action (purchase) and a vast global problem arising from the world-trade system and inequality. People do not have to be hard-hearted to be sceptical about whether spending a few extra pennies will cure global poverty. Some simply feel overwhelmed. ‘It shouldn’t be down to the consumer,’ a British woman told a recent researcher. ‘It should be up to the governments to fair-trade with other countries, not us buying one kind of chocolate over another.’19 Others prefer to give to charity. Germans, for example, on average give over thirty times as much to humanitarian aid as they spend on fair-trade products.20 However significant shopping might be to people’s identity, it is wide of the mark to think that most ethics today are expressed at the check-out. Moreover, a variety of causes and labels are competing for attention in the ethical marketplace. For some, caring for children, animals or the planet takes precedence over caring for distant others.

  Above all, shopping involves stubborn habits. A study in Ghent, Belgium, placed consumers in a close-to-reality setting to see how much more they were prepared to pay for the fair-trade label. When it came down to it, a mere 10 per cent of the sample were willing to put their money where their mouth was and pay the Belgian 27 per cent premium. This group tended to be better educated, in their thirties and forties, and more idealistic; other studies have found women, teachers, Christians and high-income groups over-represented. For the majority, flavour, price and, especially, brand trumped the ethical label.21 In real life, people are not accustomed to making new choices daily. There is a certain irony in all this. Fair-trade campaigns have looked to choice as the high road to ethical purchases. But ethical calculations, like price calculations, are only part of what goes on when people consume. To create ethical lifestyles, ingrained habits would need to change, too.

  Fair trade exists as a social movement, and it is its political promise as much as the actual products purchased that has guaranteed it attention. Like boycotts and buycotts more generally, it has been the poster-boy of a new type of ‘life politics’, said to be typical of ‘late modernity’, where the personal is political.22 Daily life here appeared as a new arena of citizenship, where individuals deliberate and take their stand, creating a new link between the local and the global. Opinion about its impact on political life has been divided. On the one hand, political consumption has been seen to give a voice to people who did not have one before. Consumers become citizens, and in the process open up new spaces of politics, above and below the nation-state. On the other, it might suck the energy out of established institutions, as boycotts took the place of elections, and consumer networks that of parties and parliaments.

  There is no question that more people are active as political consumers now than a generation ago. In 1990, for example, 22 per cent of Danes had boycotted at least once. In 2004, the proportion had doubled. Still, neither of the two prognoses has been borne out by reality. In Britain, fair trade mainly recruits people who are already politically aware and engaged. Nor did it have a ‘crowding out’ effect. A study of 1,000 young adults in Brussels and Montreal found that political consumers were twice as likely to join political groups and parties as regular shoppers. While they were critical of political institutions, they at the same time had a high degree of trust in their fellow citizens. In short, new and old politics reinforced each other.23

  THE TWISTED ROAD TO FAIR TRADE

  Fair trade has attracted attention not only because of its rising turnover but because it is often greeted as a new era in global ethics. The late twentieth century, in this view, gave rise to a new moral economy. This is a deeply flawed view of past and present. Fair trade did not appear out of nowhere. To understand its appeal, its prospects and its contradictions we need to reconstruct its longer history. The labelling initiatives grew out of a longer transformation in human sympathy that urged consumers to take responsibility for the consequences of their actions for distant others. While fair trade today speaks a distinctive language of individual choice, it taps into a moral geography of care that has taken shape over the last two centuries.

  When political consumers stepped forth in the modern period, they did not march in a straight line towards global compassion. Their sense of responsibility towards producers was conditioned and constrained by empires and nations as well as liberalism. It was in the eighteenth century that the international flow of goods made people more aware of their interdependence. No other product symbolized the moral chain between consumer and producer as much as sugar. In 1791, when the British parliament threw out a bill to abolish the British slave trade, it triggered a wave of boycotts of slave-grown sugar. These boyco
tts revealed a new moral geography at work – but also its limits. Boycotters hoped to put an end to the British slave trade, not slavery in general. From a political perspective, this strategy made good sense. After all, they were trying to change British policy and save British souls. At the same time, approaching the slave trade as a question of national sin meant personal ethics stopped at imperial borders. Taste for activism diminished once Britain had abolished the slave trade (1807) and freed its slaves (1833), even though slavery continued elsewhere. The same people who had boycotted sugar from the British West Indies continued to wear slave-grown cotton and smoke tobacco from the American South. Very few abolitionists felt their responsibility as consumers extended to distant producers in general.24

  The tension between personal and national responsibility would be resolved in two opposite ways. Liberals looked to free trade. By allowing goods to enter freely, it gave all producers an equal chance to sell their wares at the best possible price, irrespective of their country of orgin. In a way, in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, free trade was the original fair-trade movement, linking consumption to an ethic of reciprocity; free traders invoked the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. While free trade made moral sentiment more global in reach, in practice, it made it far less personal. Consumers were relieved of any direct responsibility for how distant producers were treated. If other countries were foolish enough to erect trade barriers and tolerate horrible working conditions, that was their problem. The best thing Britain could do was to throw its own door wide open and lead by example. A few radicals believed that free trade would teach consumers an ‘increased regard for quality of life’ and gradually make them favour goods made under decent conditions,25 but how it would do so was left vague. For most, buying cheap was fair enough.

  The liberal moment peaked before the First World War. Afterwards, a rival, conservative strategy was in the ascendance, as popular imperialists discovered consumer power. Empire shopping weeks urged British housewives to care for their cousins in the colonies and shop with a sense of imperial duty. Paying a bit extra was the price of imperial solidarity. Of course, the philosophy of these campaigns was essentially different from that of fair trade today. It was racially motivated, seeking for the most part to help white farmers in Canada and Australia, not distant producers in general or exploited coolies in the colonies. In that sense, it was a narrower vision. In another, though, it was less lop-sided than today’s moral geography, for it recognized that distant producers were consumers, too. Buying apples from Canada was important because it would enable Canadians in turn to buy more manufactured products from Manchester and Birmingham. In its methods, the inter-war ‘Buy Empire Goods’ campaign showed remarkable similarity with fair trade today. Processions and food stalls put a human face to the food chain. There were baking and costume competitions to promote colonial products, while Kenyan coffee had its own tasting demonstration.26

  In the end, it was war, not peace and commerce, that forged a more global moral geography. Already in the 1930s, the League of Nations had concluded that it was impossible to improve nutrition among consumers in one continent without also improving the conditions of producers in another.27 Co-operatives finally established an International Trading Agency of their own in 1937. The Second World War brought home the lessons of mutual dependence with a vengeance. It also gave rise to the idea that a global body should coordinate global needs and supplies. The Cold War intervened to limit these ambitions, and the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) worked to raise living standards, not to eliminate world hunger through a world food plan. Yet the shift towards a more global ethic of care outlasted this institutional defeat. ‘Fifty years ago would anyone have thought about a WORLD food problem?’ British co-operators asked their members in the 1950s. ‘When famine struck India [in 1876], or the potato blight struck Ireland [in 1845], other people heard of India ’s or Ireland’s food problem.’ They did not see it as a ‘world food problem that the WORLD should do something about solving’.28

  Such structural understandings of the uneven distribution of food were reinforced by diagnoses of the unfair terms of trade between primary producers and industrial nations. Hans Singer and Raúl Prebisch, two economists at the UN, wrote in 1949 about how the developed North was feeding off the underdeveloped South.29 Proposals to help primary producers ranged from tariffs at the national level to international commodity agreements which sought to iron out the disastrous boom-and-bust cycles of the inter-war years with the help of buffer stocks and quotas; these ranged from wheat (1949–70) to coffee (1958–89). This structural view of global trade was troubling for consumers as well as economists: what if their cheap breakfast table was built on the poverty of Southern farmers? To tackle global poverty, individual acts of charity were no longer enough. A new repertoire of consumer activism was taking shape among Christian missions, youth groups and Third World movements. It resonated with a wider soul-searching about affluence.

  One beginning was the charity gift shop. In 1947, five years after its birth, the Quaker-led Famine Relief Committee Oxford (Oxfam) opened their first gift shop on 17 Broad Street – it helped first Greek, then German refugees. Clothes drives and the sale of cards and gifts for famine victims had already been under way in the late-Victorian period, but these had been episodic affairs. What was new about Oxfam was that it turned buying for charity into a self-sustaining business model. Income was ploughed back into additional shops and aggressive marketing introduced. By 1966, there were fifty stores, seven years on, over five hundred. Initially, the roles were the reverse of fair trade today. In its first decade, Oxfam sent British goods to needy foreigners and refugees, not exotic goods to British consumers. In the United States, Mennonites had begun selling embroidered textiles from Puerto Rico in 1946. In Britain, a first sign of change came in 1959, when Pastor Ludwig Stumpf of the Lutheran World Service arrived in Oxford with a suitcase full of pin cushions and embroidered boxes made by Chinese refugees in Hong Kong. They were sold in the Huddersfield Oxfam shop. Two years later, the Christmas sale featured African and Chinese handicrafts. The African beads and ornaments had been sourced by Tristram Betts from Bechuanaland, a retired colonial officer with progressive leanings. By the 1970s, handicrafts from India and Bangladesh were everywhere.

  Ethical consumerism drew on a Christian–colonial nexus. In Oxfam shops in Britain, embroidered wall-hangings from Gujarat were made by widows and the disabled in workshops sponsored by missionaries. In the Netherlands, the founding fathers of the first fair-trade label were a missionary from Oaxaca and an economist from Solidaridad, an ecumenical development body. Third-world products were responsible for half the sales of Oxfam trading, set up in 1975. Oxfam illustrates how the means and ends of helping by buying shifted in this period. At first, selling exotic handicrafts was all about raising money for Oxfam and its relief work – to give the artisans a fair deal had not crossed anyone’s mind. Fair trade was an afterthought. By the late 1960s, some members were accusing Oxfam of hypocrisy, buying cheap and selling dear. It was only in the 1970s that a new model won out (‘the Bridge’) which marketed purchases as a way to help artisans in what was then called the Third World.

  The two groups that were more than any other behind the transition from charity to trade justice were Christian youth and students. Their role was especially pronounced in the Netherlands and Germany, where world shops took off in the 1970s. The first one opened its doors in Breukelen, outside Utrecht, in April 1969. Two years earlier, a group of youths in the Catholic aid charity SOS (Steun voor Onderontwikkelde Streken/Support for Under-developed Regions) had started importing wood-carvings from the slums of Port-au-Prince and bamboo ashtrays and other handicrafts from the Philippines. World shops responded to the call for ‘trade not aid’ at the time. In the Netherlands, some activists had taken to the streets to sell Caribbean cane sugar in plastic bags.30 In the early 1970s, world shops were opening in Germany, in
itially as Dritte Welt or Third World shops before abandoning the hierarchical label for the more inclusive Weltladen. The church-hall and missionary exhibitions were vital conduits. Churches held services on the Third World. Afterwards, the congregation had an opportunity to buy woven baskets brought back by missionaries from Papua New Guinea. Coffee from co-operative farmers arrived via missionaries in Tanzania; in Italy, world shops received crafts from Italian missionaries in Brazil. For the ethical career of fair trade, the churches were crucial: in their hands, the products appeared morally clean, untainted by the blood and suffering of the global commodity trade.

  University towns such as Göttingen and Freiburg were often the first to open a fair-trade shop in a region, but the movement reached more widely into small towns and secondary schools. In sleepy Schorndorf, outside Stuttgart, young Christians of the YMCA had held special promotions to support Nigeria during the town festival in 1972. On the second Sunday of Advent that year, pupils from the local secondary school exhibited texts and handicrafts to illustrate the link between the rich world and the poor. Was it not high time that Schorndorf adopted a partner town from the developing world? a poster asked. In Hildesheim, Catholic and Protestant youth were selling peanuts in 1969. Three years later, the first world depot opened in a cowshed, shortly followed by a proper Latin American market in a former fishmonger’s; this would be among the first to join the El Puente foundation, which imported fair-trade handicrafts. By the early 1980s, there were over three hundred such world shops across Germany, with more than 2,000 support groups (Aktionsgruppen).31