Nature's Evil

Note

Notes

1   Withington, ‘Intoxicants and the invention of “consumption”’. 2   Chanel, ‘Taxation as a cause of the French Revolution’. 3   Mintz, Sweetness and Power . 4   Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , p. 389. 5   Breen, Tobacco Culture ; Moss and Badenoch, Chocolate ; Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures ; Grivetti and Shapiro, Chocolate ; Breen, The Age of Intoxication . 6   Mintz, Sweetness and Power , p. 156. 7   Williams, Capitalism and Slavery . 8   Mintz, Sweetness and Power , p. 67. 9   Hume, Political Essays , p. 93. 10  Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere . 11  Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History . 12  Yarrington, ‘Sucre indigène and sucre colonial ’. 13  Farooqui, Smuggling as Subversion ; Trocki, Opium, Empire, and the Global Political Economy . 14  See the Eclectic Review 7 (January–June 1840): 805. 15  Reilly, The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom . 16  Isba, Gladstone and Women . 17  Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire ; see also Sahlins et al., ‘The sadness of sweetness’; Pomeranz and Topik, The World that Trade Created . 18  Sombart, Luxury and Capitalism . 19  De Vries, The Industrious Revolution , p. 161. 20  Feenberg, ‘“Max Havelaar”: an anti-imperialist novel’; Salverda, ‘The case of the missing empire’. 21  Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost ; Etkind, Internal Colonization , chap. 11; Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch .

FIVE

Fibres

Unlike metals or fossil fuels, fibres are a product of organic life which has grown on the earth very recently. Some animals and plants produce long, sturdy filaments as part of their bodies. These can be harvested and then mechanically processed – cleaned, stretched, interwoven – to make smooth, pliable cloth. These processes don’t change the individual fibres but combine them with thousands of similar ones. So the processing of fibres – spinning, weaving, tailoring – requires the repetition of an enormous number of single, consecutive movements. This had been predominantly women’s work, but then inventors designed machines which could reproduce these small movements more quickly and precisely than human hands. From the time of the Great Silk Road and up until the era of oil and plastic, industry and capitalism consisted for the most part in the processing of fibre and the trading in goods made from fibre.

Unlike grain, which is relatively easy to process, fibre requires two different tasks – first the production of the raw material, which includes its preliminary processing, and then a very elaborate secondary processing. The cultivation of the raw material needs plenty of land, water, sunlight and unskilled labour; on the other hand, the processing requires little land and an abundance of skilled work. For this reason it isn’t practical to cultivate and process fibre in the same place. Mercantile empires would solve this problem by using the land of their distant colonies to produce the fibre and the labour of their metropolitan centres to process it. Transportation was the task of merchant and armed fleets. Fiscal-military states were fibre-producing states; more than anything else they depended on wool and cotton, but their fate was also defined by hemp, flax and silk. Until the advent of railways, the textile industry was ‘the main driving force’ of civilisations, wrote Braudel. 1