Nature's Evil

Sugar, jams and sauces, chocolate and other sweet treats, together with tea, created a new ritualised set of consumables with a recognisably feminine aspect. The masculine consumption of tobacco and strong alcoholic drinks from the colonies – rum, gin and port – developed in parallel. The trade in all these tasty things grew enormously. In 1750 the volume of tobacco imported from the American colonies on British ships was six times greater than a hundred years previously, the quantity of gin twelve times greater, and the amount of tea, rum and coffee immeasurably greater. The prices for all these goods fell, regardless of inflation, which raised the price of grain and local goods. Women’s labour, paid and unpaid, played a key role in all these processes. On the eve of the eighteenth century, city life as we understand it today – cafés and tea houses, theatres, hotels and shops – began to develop in Western Europe. Local goods were sold in the town’s markets, and shops sold colonial goods. The new colonial economy interacted with older commodities such as linen (tablecloths, sheets, curtains), metal alloys (tableware, cutlery), wood (furniture) and paper (books, newspapers). Common people scaled the consumerist heights that had formerly been accessible only to the aristocracy. Now the bourgeois family routinely consumed all those things, from imitation silk to beet sugar to steam-powered travel, which were practically indistinguishable from what their grandparents had seen as royal luxuries. This ascent conveyed a dizzying sensation of progress, which the middle-class family saw not so much as increasing their consumption as climbing up the social scale.

Throughout the centuries, extraction and suffering in the poor and distant parts of the world fed ‘consumption’ – pleasure and disease – in the rich countries of the Northern Atlantic. Two forces moderated this addiction-driven exchange – governmental regulation and the power of the consumer. But a third power was arguably the most important – the word of truth. Creating the modern public, imaginative writers played leading roles in sensitising people to the life of others. Making myriads of individual decisions, both the officials and the consumers followed the texts that they trusted, if only because there was nothing else to rely on. A disenchanted Jesuit priest who refashioned himself into a central figure of the Enlightenment, Abbé Raynal, gathered a stellar team to write the History of the Two Indias ; published in 1770, this encyclopaedia of the colonies led to the public revelation of slavery as evil. Influenced by this overview of global inequality, the Russian customs officer Alexander Radishchev in 1790 published a radical response – a travelogue local, sentimental and subversive – A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow . A public revelation of serfdom as evil, this book got him sacked and exiled to Siberia. The so-called Clapham sect – a high-brow group of English scholars and priests – played a definitive role in the development of the abolitionist movement. One of its founders was Zachary Macauley, a Scottish highlander who managed a sugar plantation in Jamaica but refashioned himself into an anti-slavery activist; in 1825, he founded the Anti-Slavery Reporter , a fact-based monthly publication that continued for many decades. His eldest son, Thomas Babington Macauley, became a historian and politician who promoted the idea of progress, which he identified with extending English-language education and British institutions to India. The Dutch author Multatuli (Eduard Douwes Dekker), in his novel Max Havelaar, or, The Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (1860), described the working conditions in the coffee plantations of the Dutch East Indies. 20 Leading to mass protests in Holland, this novel initiated the fair trade movement. The power of the consumer rules supreme, but its success depends on the nature of the commodity: for coffee or bananas, fair trade works well, but for sugar or petroleum not so much. Another milestone of cultural decolonisation was Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), which portrayed the barbaric exploitation of black workers in the Belgian Congo, the symbolic source of all our ivory towers. 21 One of the best historians of slavery, Eric Williams, in his seminal book Capitalism and Slavery (1944), demonstrated that slave labour paid for the Industrial Revolution. A descendant of slaves, Williams became prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago. When he defended his thesis at Oxford right before the start of the Second World War, he defined the nineteenth-century ‘slavery crisis’ – the incomplete emancipation of the American slaves and, I would add, of the Russian serfs and the Chinese coolies as well – as the very first world war.