Nature's Evil

‘In the tender annals of political economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial,’ wrote Marx, explaining the primitive accumulation of European capital by the plundering of the colonies. 25 The sources of imperial wealth are hidden in plain view. They are the raw materials extracted by slaves or natives and sold in Europe for monopolist prices – silver and fur, sugar and opium. Empires and, later, nation-states often fail to remember these humble origins of greatness. They sing the praises of the wisdom of rulers and the labour of the people. But there were also heretics. In the mid-nineteenth century, the world learnt about the Aleutian catastrophe thanks to the testimony of the missionary Innokenty Venyaminov. The bishop of Alaska and subsequently the metropolitan of Moscow, Innokenty wrote that, in 1766, Ivan Solovyev and his crew of sailors had killed nearly 3,000 Aleutians – more than half of a tribe that had risen up in rebellion. Among Russian historians, Afanasy Shchapov described the key role of the fur trade in the development of Russia. As a Siberian, he knew all about the tragedies which occurred on the frontier of imperial expansion. Shchapov’s favourite example of ‘zoological colonisation’ was the Aleutian Islands, where the Russians had forced the local population to hunt the sea otters until all the otters and all the Aleutians had disappeared. 26

But, even at the end of the nineteenth century, the fur tax, collected from the Siberian peoples, made up more than 10 per cent of the revenue of the Imperial Cabinet. This money, minted from the distant lives of fur-bearing animals and northern peoples, purchased the treasures of the Hermitage and the loyalty of the court. At the beginning of the twentieth century the fur trade in Siberia was still going strong. During his Siberian exile from 1900 to 1902, the young Leon Trotsky worked for the merchant Yakov Chernykh, who traded with the Tungus people on the Upper Lena, exchanging vodka and cotton prints for fur. The illiterate Chernykh made millions of roubles and had thousands of workers. ‘He was an absolute dictator’, Trotsky wrote. These youthful impressions defined his own horizon. *

Following Voltaire’s advice, Catherine the Great justified monarchical rule in Russia by the country’s unusually large size. In fact, these lands were seized because of fur, though the empire held onto them well after the fur trade had ended. In the nineteenth century, Siberia was used as a place of exile and hard labour. In Soviet times, military-industrial sites were built there, and then enormous reserves of oil and gas were discovered. The history and geography of resource streams are full of devilish irony: the delivery routes for oil and gas, from western Siberia to the Baltic and then to Germany, follow the ancient sledge tracks along which Siberian fur travelled to European buyers.

Trade in the fur of the sea otter was banned in 1911. Their population on the Aleutian Islands did not regenerate, but these delightful animals are a common sight off the beaches of California. The beaver was considered almost extinct, but a ban on hunting in Scandinavia, Canada and Russia helped to re-establish populations. In 2020 we learnt that Denmark is farming 17 million mink – three animals for every citizen; this population was the breeding ground for a new, potentially more lethal mutation of the COVID-19 virus. Sable is also bred on farms, and auctions of sable pelts continue. The squirrel remains one of the most widely distributed mammals; but, hopefully, nobody uses squirrel pelts or cat fur any more. The price of fur has fallen on account of alternative materials made from fossil fuel and thanks to campaigns by animal rights organisations and activists. Suddenly people have started worrying about fur allergies – oddly, this was never a problem in the past. In 2018 several fashion houses – Gucci, Versace – publicly renounced the use of real fur. In England, Austria and some other European countries, fur farming has been outlawed. It is more difficult to abstain from fish and other marine products. But fish farms produce heavy pollution, and the fishing industry is one of the most corrupt sectors of global business. The number of vegetarians in the world keeps growing, and at some point we will see meat eating as an aberration on a par with wearing fur.

Notes

Notes