Nature's Evil

1   Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason , p. 175; Goody, Food and Love . 2   Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism , pp. 190–4. 3   Mayhew, New Perspectives on Malthus . 4   Pomeranz and Topik, The World that Trade Created , p. 137. 5   Feenstra, ‘The Heckscher–Ohlin model’. 6   Stuart, Bloodless Revolution . 7   Cited in Gregory, Of Victorians and Vegetarians , p. 115. 8   Poore and Nemecek, ‘Reducing food’s environmental impacts’. 9   Magra, The Fisherman’s Cause ; Grafe, Distant Tyranny . 10  The Russian Primary Chronicle , p. 184. 11  Veale, The English Fur Trade ; Etkind, Internal Colonization . 12  Fisher, The Russian Fur Trade , p. 26. 13 Zhitie Sergiia Radonezhskogo . 14  Vilkov, ‘Pushnoi promysel v Sibiri’. 15  Iadrintsev, Sibir kak koloniia . 16  Tarle, Ocherki ; Butts, Henry Hudson . 17  Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada ; Edwards, ‘The North American fur trade world system’. 18  Rich, ‘Russia and the colonial fur trade’. 19  Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada . 20  Kirchner, ‘Samuel Bentham and Siberia’; Morriss, Science, Utility and Maritime Power ; Papmehl, ‘The regimental school established in Siberia by Samuel Bentham’. 21 Matthews, Glorious Misadventures . 22 Ibid. 23 Kan, Memory Eternal . 24  Bolkhovitinov, Russian–American Relations and the Sale of Alaska . 25  Marx, Capital , Vol. 1, p. 507. 26  Shchapov, Sochineniia , pp. 280–93, 309–37; Etkind, Internal Colonization , p. 65.

FOUR

Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice

Salt and sugar are both white and crystalline, but their flavour differs as much as their historic roles. Salt has always been part of the human diet – we can’t survive without it. Sugar is a relative newcomer. Produced by hundreds of small enterprises and mostly traded locally, salt was usually a product of private initiative. Sugar was the material basis of long-distance trade, slave plantations, colonial wars and mercantilist empires.