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Empire of Things

Page 94

by Frank Trentmann


  9. Philip D. Curtin, Economic Change in Precolonial Africa: Senegambia in the Era of the Slave Trade (Madison, WI, 1975); Stanley B. Alpern, ‘What Africans Got for their Slaves: A Master List of European Trade Goods ’, History in Africa 22, 1995: 5–43; David Eltis, ‘Trade between Western Africa and the Atlantic World before 1870’, Research in Economic History 12, 1989: 197–239; A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (London, 1973); and Herbert S. Klein, ‘Economic Aspects of the Eighteenth-century Atlantic Slave Trade’, in: The Rise of Merchant Empires, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge 1990), 287–310. Eltis’s figures for West Africa show a smaller share for iron than Curtin’s but a similar declining trend.

  10. Johann Krapf, quoted in Jeremy Prestholdt, ‘East African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization’, PhD thesis, Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) 2003, 93. See now: Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley, CA, 2008).

  11. Quoted in Elizabeth Elbourne, Blood Ground: Colonialism, Missions and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal, 2002), 213.

  12. Robert Moffat, Missionary Labours and Scenes in Southern Africa (London, 1842), 503–7. See also: Jean Comaroff & John Comaroff, ‘Colonizing Currencies: Beasts, Banknotes and the Colour of Money in South Africa’, in: Commodification: Things, Agency and Identities (The Social Life of Things revisited), eds. Wim van Binsbergen & Peter L. Geschiere (New Brunswick, 2005).

  13. Church Missionary Traces: The Village Missionary Meeting, A Dialogue . . . (London, 1852).

  14. John Philip, Researches in South Africa (London, 1828), 72–3.

  15. T. Fowell Buxton, The African Slave Trade and Its Remedy (London, 1840), 367–73. See similar judgements by CSM missionaries about the desire for furniture and comforts among native Americans such as the Choctaws, Missionary Register 1829, 472.

  16. Samuel Crowther, Journal of an Expedition up the Niger and Tshadda Rivers. With a new introduction by J. F. Ade Ajayi (London, 1854/1970), 11.

  17. Quoted in Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender and British Slavery, 1713–1833 (Stanford, CA, 2000), 40.

  18. William Fox in 1791, quoted in Sussman, Consuming Anxieties, 115.

  19. Henry Nevinson, A Modern Slavery (London, 1906). Further, see Kevin Grant: A Civilised Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926 (New York, 2005); and Lowell J. Satre, Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics and the Ethics of Business (Athens, OH, 2005). In September 1907, the Review of Reviews pointed out that one fifth of cocoa was mixed with the blood of slaves. Ultimately, it was Cadbury and other European cocoa makers who settled the issue among themselves by agreeing not to source their cocoa from the islands.

  20. Adam Jones & Peter Sebald, An African Family Archive: The Lawsons of Little Popo/Aneho (Togo) 1841–1938 (Oxford, 2005).

  21. Quoted in K. Onwuka Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830–85 (Oxford, 1956), 113–14.

  22. Joseph Thomson, quoted in Prestholdt, ‘East African Consumerism’, 125.

  23. Christopher Fyfe, A History of Sierra Leone (Oxford, 1962), 411–68.

  24. Dike, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta, 1830–85, 207.

  25. Thomas. J. Lewin, Asante before the British: The Prempean Years, 1875–1900 (Lawrence, KS, 1978); and William Tordoff, Ashanti under the Prempehs, 1888–1935 (London, 1965). See now also: G. Austin, ‘Vent for Surplus or Productivity Breakthrough? The Ghanaian Cocoa Take-off, c.1890–1936’, in: Economic History Review, Vol. 67, issue 4, 2014: 1035–64; and E Frankema & M. van Waijenburg, ‘Structural Impediments to African Growth? New Evidence from Real Wages in British Africa, 1880–1965’, Centre for Global Economic History working paper no. 24 (2011).

  26. Jonathon Glassman, Feasts and Riot: Revelry, Rebellion and Popular Consciousness on the Swahili Coast, 1856–88 (Portsmouth, NH, 1995).

  27. Quoted in Laura Fair, Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945 (Athens, OH, 2001), 64, and see 64–109 for the above.

  28. Lynn Schler, ‘Bridewealth, Guns and Other Status Symbols: Immigration and Consumption in Colonial Douala’, Journal of African Cultural Studies 16, no. 2, 2003: 213–34.

  29. Marion Johnson, ‘Cotton Imperialism in West Africa’, African Affairs 73, no. 291, 1974: 178–87.

  30. D. Bavendamm, 1894, cited in Birgit Meyer, ‘Christian Mind and Worldly Matters: Religion and Materiality in the Nineteenth-century Gold Coast’, in: Richard Fardon, Wim van Binsbergen & Rijk van Dijk, eds., Modernity on a Shoestring: Dimensions of Globalization, Consumption and Development in Africa and Beyond (Leiden, 1999), 167–9.

  31. Quoted in H. Maynard Smith, Frank: Bishop of Zanzibar: Life of Frank, Weston, D.D. 1871–1924 (London, 1926), 187.

  32. Klaus J. Bade, Friedrich Fabri und der Imperialismus in der Bismarckzeit (Freiburg, 1975); and Horst Gründer, Christliche Mission und deutscher Imperialismus, 1884–1914 (Paderborn, 1982).

  33. Friedrich Michael Zahn in: Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift: Monatshefte für geschichtliche und theoretische Missionskunde, Vol. XIV (1887), 46, my translation.

  34. For the changing spectrum, see A. N. Porter, Religion Versus Empire? British Protestant Missionaries and Overseas Expansion, 1700–1914 (Manchester, 2004); and Roland Oliver, The Missionary Factor in East Africa (London, 1952).

  35. Bruno Gutmann, ‘The African Standpoint’, Africa 8, no. 1, 1935: 1–19, quoted at 7.

  36. Chika Onyeani, Capitalist Nigger: The Road to Success (Timbuktu, 2000).

  37. For example, the otherwise excellent James Walvin, Fruits of Empire: Exotic Produce and British Taste, 1660–1800 (London, 1997) concludes with metaphors of contagion, infection and affliction, 174–83.

  38. W. H. Ingrams quoted in Fair, Pastimes and Politics, 76. See also: Richard Austin Freeman, Travels and Life in Ashanti and Jaman (London, 1898/1967), 380.

  39. Godfrey Wilson, An Essay on the Economics of Detribalization in Northern Rhodesia, Rhodes–Livingstone papers, nos. 5, 6 (Livingstone, Northern Rhodesia 1941), 20.

  40. ‘Flexible racism’ in the words of Mona Domosh, American Commodities in an Age of Empire (New York, 2006). Compare de Grazia, Irresistible Empire.

  41. Abdul Halim Sharar, Lucknow: The Last Phase of an Oriental Culture (Oxford, 1975 edn), 73, 121–5.

  42. Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture and Conquest in the East 1750–1850 (New York, 2005), esp. ch. 2.

  43. Quoted in Robin D. Jones, Interiors of Empire: Objects, Space and Identity within the Indian Subcontinent, c.1800–1947 (Manchester, 2007), 95.

  44. C. A. Bayly, ‘ “Archaic” and “Modern” Globalization in the Eurasian and African Arena, c.1750–1850’, in: Globalization in World History, ed. A. G. Hopkins (London, 2002), 45–72, quoted at 52.

  45. Russell W. Belk, Collecting in a Consumer Society (London and New York, 2001).

  46. Hosagrahar Jyoti, ‘City as Durbar’, in: Forms of Dominance: On the Architecture and Urbanism of the Colonial Enterprise, ed. Nezar Al Sayyad (Aldershot, 1992), 85–103.

  47. Christopher Alan Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge, 1983).

  48. Douglas Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City, 1852–1928 (Berkeley, CA, 1991).

  49. John Crawfurd, A Sketch of the Commercial Resources and Monetary and Mercantile System of British India, 1837, repr. in The Economic Development of India under the East India Company, 1814–58: A Selection of Contemporary Writings, ed. K. N Chaudhuri (Cambridge, 1971), quoted at 233, 241.

  50. See Tirthankar Roy, The Economic History of India, 1857–1947 (Oxford, 2006). Compare B. R. Tomlinson, The New Cambridge History of India, 3: The Economy of Modern India, 1860–1970 (Cambridge, 1993).

  51. David Cannadine, Ornamentalism (London, 2001); and The Great Delhi Durbar of 1911 (L
ondon, 1911). This does not mean, of course, that gifts stopped to play other social functions; see Margot C. Finn, ‘Colonial Gifts: Family Politics and the Exchange of Goods in British India’, in: Modern Asian Studies 40, no. 1, 2006: 203–31. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes (Oxford, 1919/1951), 14.

  54. Veena Talwar Oldenburg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856–1877 (Princeton, NJ, 1984).

  55. Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India.

  56. C. A. Bayly, The New Cambridge History of India: Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1988).

  57. Rita Smith Kipp, ‘Emancipating Each Other: Dutch Colonial Missionaries’ Encounter with Karo Women in Sumatra, 1900–1942’, in: Domesticating the Empire: Race, Gender and Family Life in French and Dutch Colonialism, eds. Julia Clancy-Smith & Frances Gouda (Charlottesville, VA, 1998), ch. 11.

  58. Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ, 1996), 106–62; and Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (London, 1996).

  59. Abigail McGowan, ‘Consuming Families’, in: Douglas Haynes et al., eds., Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia (Oxford, 2010), 155–84.

  60. Shib Chunder Bose, The Hindoos as They Are (London, 1881), 191–208.

  61. G. F. Shirras, Report on an Enquiry into Working-class Budgets in Bombay (Bombay, 1923).

  62. Bose, The Hindoos as They Are, 195.

  63. Haruka Yanagisawa ‘Growth of Small-scale Industries and Changes in Consumption Patterns in South India, 1910s–50s’, in: Haynes et al., eds., Towards a History of Consumption in South Asia, 51–75.

  64. Kate Platt, The Home and Health in India and the Tropical Colonies (London, 1923), 16. See further: Elizabeth Buettner, Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (Oxford, 2004).

  65. This and the following draws on Jones, Interiors of Empire, quoted at 1.

  66. Selections from the Calcutta Gazettes, 1784–88 (Calcutta, 1864), 47, 50–4, 60.

  67. Jones, Interiors of Empire, 105.

  68. Platt, Home and Health in India and the Tropical Colonies, 64.

  69. Edward Braddon, Life in India, 1872, cited in Jones, Interiors of Empire, 85.

  70. Jones, Interiors of Empire, 137.

  71. Arnold Wright, Twentieth-century Impressions of Ceylon (London, 1907), 709–11, and 487, 692, 697, 720 for additional examples.

  72. Charles Feinstein, ‘Changes in Nominal Wages, the Cost of Living and Real Wages in the United Kingdom over the Two Centuries, 1780–1990,’ in: Labor’s Reward: Real Wages and Economic Change in 19th- and 20th-century Europe, eds. P. Scholliers & V. Zamagni (Aldershot, 1995).

  73. Ernst Engel, ‘Die Productionsund Consumtionsverhältnisse des Königreichs Sachsen’, in: Zeitschrift des statistischen Büreaus des K. Sächsischen Ministerium des Innern, 22 Nov. 1857. For contemporary misinterpretations, see Carle C. Zimmerman, ‘Ernst Engel’s Law of Expenditures for Food’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 47/1 (Nov. 1932), 78–101. For Engel’s impact, see Erik Grimmer-Solem, The Rise of Historical Economics and Social Reform in Germany, 1864–1894 (Oxford, 2003).

  74. Lawrence B. Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca, NY, 1997).

  75. William C. Beyer, Rebekah P. Davis & Myra Thwing, Workingmen’s Standard of Living in Philadelphia: A Report by the Bureau of Municipal Research of Philadelphia (New York City, 1919). For wages at the time, see Lindley Daniel Clark, Minimum-wage Laws of the United States: Construction and Operation (Washington, DC, 1921).

  76. Shirras, Report on an Enquiry into Working-class Budgets in Bombay, 14. For a critique of the Western yardstick, see Radhakamal Mukerjee, The Foundations of Indian Economics (London, 1916).

  77. J. S. Mill, Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (London, 1844), 132.

  78. William Stanley Jevons, The Theory of Political Economy (London, 1871/1888), ch. 3, 43.

  79. 1863, quoted in Donald Winch, Wealth and Life (Cambridge, 2009), 155.

  80. R. M. Robertson, ‘Jevons and His Precursors’, Econometrica, Vol. XIX, 1951: 229–49; R. C. D. Black, Economic Theory and Policy in Context (Aldershot, 1995).

  81. W. Stanley Jevons, The State in Relation to Labour (London, 1882/1887), 41.

  82. Lionel Robbins, ‘The Place of Jevons in the History of Economic Thought’, Manchester School of Economics and Social Studies, VII (1936), 1.

  83. Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics (London, 1890/1920), 72, 74–5.

  84. Marshall, Principles of Economics, 113.

  85. Karl Oldenberg, ‘Die Konsumtion’, in Grundriss der Sozialökonomie, II, eds. Fr. Von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld et al. (Tübingen, 1914), 103–64. The Irish Cliffe Leslie had similarly argued that ‘without habits of considerable superfluous expenditure a nation would be reduced to destitution’ in his Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy (1879), 223.

  86. Simon N. Patten, The Consumption of Wealth (Philadelphia, 1889), vi.

  87. Simon N. Patten, The New Basis of Civilization (New York, 1907), 143. Further: Daniel M. Fox, The Discovery of Abundance: Simon N. Patten and the Transformation of Social Theory (Ithaca, NY, 1967).

  88. Current Opinion, 54 (1913), 51–2.

  89. T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1950).

  90. Charles Gide, La Cooperation: Conférences de propaganda (Paris, 1900), 227, my translation.

  91. Ellen Furlough, Consumer Cooperation in France: The Politics of Consumption, 1834–1930 (Ithaca, NY, 1991), 80–97.

  92. Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work (New Haven, CT, 1995).

  93. Elisabeth von Knebel-Doeberitz, ‘Die Aufgabe und Pflicht der Frau als Konsument’, in: Hefte der Freien Kirchlich-Sozialen Konferenz, 40 (Berlin, 1907), 39, my translation.

  94. Alain Chatriot, Marie-Emmanuelle Chessel & Matthew Hilton, eds., Au nom du consommateur: Consommation et politique en Europe et aux États-Unis au XX siècle (Paris, 2004); Louis L. Athey, ‘From Social Conscience to Social Action: The Consumers’ Leagues in Europe, 1900–1914’, Social Service Review 52, no. 3, 1978: 362–82; and Matthew Hilton, Consumerism in Twentieth-century Britain (Cambridge, 2003).

  95. La Liberté: Journal politique, religieux, social, 26 Sept. 1908, 1, my translation.

  96. Women’s Co-operative Guild, 28th Annual Report, 1910–11. Gillian Scott, Feminism and the Politics of Working Women: The Women’s Co-operative Guild, 1880s to the Second World War (London, 1998).

  97. Teresa Billington Greig, The Consumer in Revolt (London, 1912), quoted at 4, 52.

  98. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London, 1902), 86.

  99. J. A. Hobson, Evolution of Modern Capitalism (London, 1897), 368–77; Work and Wealth (London, 1914).

  100. See references in the following notes, and Benjamin S. Orlove, ‘Meat and Strength: The Moral Economy of a Chilean Food Riot,’ Cultural Anthropology 12, no. 2, 1997: 234–68.

  101. Christoph Nonn, Verbraucherprotest und Parteiensystem im wilhelminischen Deutschland (Düsseldorf, 1996), 78.

  102. Marie-Emmanuelle Chessel, Consommateurs engagés à la Belle Époque: La Ligue sociale d’acheteurs (Paris, 2012); and Marie-Emmanuelle Chessel, ‘Women and the Ethics of Consumption in France at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, in: The Making of the Consumer: Knowledge, Power and Identity in the Modern World, ed. Frank Trentmann, (Oxford, 2006), 81–98.

  103. Walter E. Weyl, The New Democracy (New York, 1912), 254.

  104. The quote is from Alfred Mond, the chemical industrialist. See Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford, 2008).

  105. Michael Edelstein, Overseas Investment in the Age of High Imperialism (New York, 1982); Lance E. Davis & Robert A. Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire (Cambridge, 1986); Avner Offer, ‘Costs and Benefits, Prosperity and Security, 1870–1914’, in: The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford, 1999), 6
90–711.

  106. Stephen Constantine, ‘“Bringing the Empire Alive”: The Empire Marketing Board and Imperial Propaganda, 1926–33’, in: Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. John M. MacKenzie (Manchester, 1986), 192–231; and Trentmann, Free Trade Nation.

  107. Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Jamaica, 2004).

  108. Joanna de Groot, ‘Metropolitan Desires and Colonial Connections’, in: Catherine Hall & Sonya Rose, eds., At Home with the Empire (Cambridge, 2006), 186.

  109. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 157.

  110. From 731,000lbs in 1745 to 2,359,000lbs the following year; Ashworth, Customs and Excise: Trade, Production and Consumption in England. 1640–1845, 178.

  111. Kwass, Contraband.

  112. Clarence-Smith, Cocoa and Chocolate, 1765–1914; W. G. Clarence-Smith & Steven Topik, The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia and Latin America, 1500-1989 (Cambridge, 2003).

  113. Ernst Neumann, Der Kaffee: Seine geographische Verbreitung, Gesamtproduktion und Konsumtion (Berlin, 1930), 141–3; the French figure is for 1927.

 

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