Nature's Evil

Deprived of their revenue, the British opened up new markets for opium throughout South-East Asia. Free-trade ports trans-shipped opium on two oceans; for many years Canton had been such a port, and Singapore had similar beginnings. In the 1840s Hong Kong, now a British colony, became the main trans-shipping port. Many Asian economic tigers owe their origins to opium, and only Japan resisted it. From the outset of talks with the Europeans in 1854, Japan stipulated a ban on the opium trade as a condition for the partial opening of its markets. At the beginning of the twentieth century the very same states which had made money out of the opium trade now curtailed it. In 1906 China concluded an agreement with Great Britain, committing both sides to reducing opium production. Peking undertook several confiscations, but in 1912 the Qing dynasty fell and with it the Confucian state. In 1909 the British authorities abolished the opium trade in Singapore. But they outlawed the opium trade throughout the empire only in 1943, when practically the whole of the British Empire east of Bengal was under Japanese control. Between the two world wars, both Chinese states – the communist insurgents and the Kuomintang regime – actively traded opium. After 1950 totalitarian China removed poppies from its fields and opium from the life of its subjects. But, in Europe, public opinion didn’t react to the opium trade in the same way that it had reacted to the slave trade; preconceptions about Orientalism, closely bound up with opium, played their role. To those who believed that opium was a ‘vice of the yellow race’, it didn’t seem particularly sinful to make money out of it. In fact, the opposite causality was in action, the same that had earlier worked with slaves and would later work with oil: those who benefited from the opium trade blamed the victims in order to justify their own deeds.

Colonies and calories

The intensification of agricultural labour led to its convergence with urban labour and, therefore, to the destruction of the peasant way of life, with its notorious ‘idleness’. Dispersed among countless rural cottages, the English textile industry was so cost-effective that it led to the collapse of its more technologically advanced Italian rivals. A crucial question is what exactly led the rural households out of the equilibrium of the moral economy and diverted them onto the highway of pre-industrial capitalism.

The eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm identified one of the reasons as the appearance in rural households of colonial goods such as sugar, tobacco, coffee and tea. 17 Producing a quasi-narcotic dependency, these products motivated people to earn more than the minimum needed for survival. The more affordable they were, the bigger the role they played in family budgets. We are talking about a mass phenomenon: after the end of the Napoleonic wars, and then for decades after that, these goods made up a quarter of all British imports. Trade in addictive commodities made English merchants fabulously rich. This trade channelled Britain’s colonial appropriations into the financial expansion of its markets, banks and stocks. But the sugar dependence of the metropolitan population was even more important for the empire.

A sweet tooth quickly leads to a sugar habit, and the habit leads to growing consumption. Everyone is subject to these effects – men and women, young and old, rich and poor, although age and gender play their roles. The sociologist Werner Sombart theorised that the development of capitalism was linked to the emerging role of women in consuming oriental luxuries. Sugar was a crucial ingredient in this process; Sombart wrote that the link between women and sugar was ‘supremely important in the history of economic development’. 18 Alcohol and tobacco were masculine pleasures, coffee was equally favoured by all, and tea and scones were more appealing to women. Unloaded at the Atlantic ports, colonial groceries were unequally distributed across Europe, emanating from the North Sea and gradually reaching distant corners. 19 The inclusion of sugar, tobacco and tea in the diet of ordinary people led to the reliance of rural families on these imported commodities, which opened up subsistence farming to the circulation of goods and money. Incorporating the ‘moral economy’ into global trade shaped new mechanisms for motivating labour. If a household increased its consumption of sugar, tea or chocolate with every year that passed, it meant that the householder, his wife and children had to work harder and earn more cash with every year that passed. Defying the ‘moral economy’, the growing consumption of addictive commodities led to a shortage of money, to the necessity to work more, to look for extra work, and to bring women and children into the workforce. This seemed only fair as women and children consumed just as much sugar, tea and chocolate as men.