Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (6 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

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Morgan’s raid on Gran Grenada was one of many such incursions into the Spanish Empire. In 1668 he attacked El Puerto del Principe in Cuba, Portobelo in present-day Panama, the island of Curaçao and Maracaibo in what is now Venezuela. In 1670 he captured the island of Old Providence, crossed to the mainland coast and traversed the isthmus to capture Panama itself.
3
The scale of such operations should not be exaggerated. Often the vessels involved were little more than rowing boats; the biggest ship Morgan had at his disposal in 1668 was no more than fifty feet long and had just eight guns. At most, they were disruptive to Spanish commerce. Yet they made him a rich man.
The striking point, however, is what Morgan did with his plundered pieces of eight. He might have opted for a comfortable retirement back in Monmouthshire, like the ‘gentleman’s son of good quality’ he claimed to be. Instead he invested in Jamaican real estate, acquiring 836 acres of land in the Rio Minho valley (Morgan’s Valley today). Later, he added 4,000 acres in the parish of St Elizabeth. The point about this land was that it was ideal for growing sugar cane. And this provides the key to a more general change in the nature of British overseas expansion. The Empire had begun with the stealing of gold; it progressed with the cultivation of sugar.
In the 1670s the British crown spent thousands of pounds constructing fortifications to protect the harbour at Port Royal in Jamaica. The walls still stand (though much further from the sea because an earthquake shifted the coastline). This investment was deemed necessary because Jamaica was fast becoming something much more than a buccaneer base. Already, the crown was earning substantial sums from the duties on imports of Jamaican sugar. The island had become a prime economic asset, to be defended at all costs. Significantly, the construction work at Port Royal was supervised by none other than Henry Morgan – now Sir Henry. Just a few years after his pirate raid on Gran Grenada, Morgan was now not merely a substantial planter, but also Vice-Admiral, Commandant of the Port Royal Regiment, Judge of the Admiralty Court, Justice of the Peace and even Acting Governor of Jamaica. Once a licensed pirate, the freelance was now being employed to govern a colony. Admittedly, Morgan lost all his official posts in 1681 after making ‘repeated divers extravagant expressions ... in his wine’. But his was an honourable retirement. When he died in August 1688 the ships in Port Royal harbour took turns to fire twenty-two gun salutes.
Morgan’s career perfectly illustrates the way the empire-building process worked. It was a transition from piracy to political power that would change the world forever. But it was possible only because something quite revolutionary was happening back home.
Sugar Rush
 
The son of a London merchant and author of the best-selling novels
Robinson Crusoe
and
Moll Flanders
, Daniel Defoe was also an acute observer of contemporary British life. What he saw happening in early eighteenth-century England was the birth of a new kind of economy: the world’s first mass consumer society. As Defoe noted in
The Complete English Tradesman
(1725):
England consumes within itself more goods of foreign growth, imported from the several countries where they are produced or wrought, than any other nation in the world ... This importation consists chiefly of sugars and tobacco, of which the consumption in Great Britain is scarcely to be conceived of, besides the consumption of cotton, indigo, rice, ginger, pimento or Jamaica pepper, cocoa or chocolate, rum and molasses ...
 
The rise of the British Empire, it might be said, had less to do with the Protestant work ethic or English individualism than with the British sweet tooth. Annual imports of sugar doubled in Defoe’s lifetime, and this was only the biggest part of an enormous consumer boom. As time went on, articles that had once been the preserve of the wealthy elite became staples of daily life. Sugar remained Britain’s largest single import from the 1750s, when it overtook foreign linen, until the 1820s, when it was surpassed by raw cotton. By the end of the eighteenth century, per capita sugar consumption was ten times what it was in France (20 lbs. per head per year compared with just two). More than anyone else in Europe, the English developed an insatiable appetite for imported commodities.
In particular, what the English consumer liked was to mix his sugar with an orally administered and highly addictive drug, caffeine, supplemented with an inhaled but equally addictive substance, nicotine. In Defoe’s time, tea, coffee, tobacco and sugar were the new, new things. And all of them had to be imported.
The first recorded English request for a pot of tea is in a letter dated 27 June 1615 from Mr R. Wickham, agent of the East India Company on the Japanese island of Hirado, to his colleague Mr Eaton at Macao, asking him to send on only ‘the best sort of chaw’. However, it was not until 1658 that the first advertisement appeared in England for what was to become the national drink. It was published in the officially subsidized weekly,
Mercurius Politicus
, for the week ending 30 September and offered: ‘That Excellent, and by all Physicians approved,
China
Drink, called by the
Chineans, Tcha
, by other Nations
Tay alias Tee
... sold at the
Sultaness-head, 2 Copheehouse
in
Sweetings
Rents by the Royal Exchange,
London
’. At around the same time, the coffee house owner Thomas Garraway published a broadsheet entitled ‘An Exact Description of the Growth, Quality and Vertues of the Leaf TEA’, in which he claimed that it could cure ‘Headache, Stone, Gravel, Dropsy, Liptitude Distillations, Scurvy, Sleepiness, Loss of Memory, Looseness or Griping of the Guts, Heavy Dreams and Collick proceeding from Wind’. ‘Taken with Virgin’s Honey instead of Sugar’, he assured potential consumers, ‘tea cleanses the Kidneys and Ureters, & with Milk and water it prevents Consumption. If you are of corpulent body it ensures good appetite, & if you have a surfeit it is just the thing to give you a gentle Vomit’. For whatever reason, Charles II’s Portuguese Queen was also a tea-drinker: Edmund Waller’s poem dedicated to her on her birthday praised ‘The Muses’s friend, tea [which] does our fancy aid, / Repress those vapours which the head invade, / And keep the palace of the soul serene’. On 25 September 1660 Samuel Pepys drank his first ‘cup of tee (a China drink)’.
However, it was only in the early eighteenth century that tea began to be imported in sufficient quantities – and at sufficiently low prices – to create a mass market. In 1703 the
Kent
arrived in London with a cargo of 65,000 lbs. of tea, not far off the entire annual importation in previous years. The real breakthrough came in 1745, when the figure for tea ‘retained for home consumption’ leapt from an average of under 800,000 lbs. in the early 1740s to over 2.5 million lbs. between 1746 and 1750. By 1756 the habit was far enough spread to prompt a denunciation in Hanway’s
Essay on Tea
: ‘The very chambermaids have lost their bloom by drinking tea’. (Samuel Johnson retorted with an ambivalent review, written – as he put it – by a ‘hardened and shameless tea-drinker’.)
Even more controversial was tobacco, introduced by Walter Ralegh and one of the few enduring legacies of the abortive Roanoke settlement in Virginia (see Chapter 2). As with tea, the purveyors of tobacco insisted on its medicinal properties. In 1587 Ralegh’s servant Thomas Heriot reported that the ‘herbe’, when dried and smoked, ‘purgeth superfluous fleame and other grosse humours, and openeth all the pores and passages of the body: by which means the use thereof not onely preserveth the body from obstructions, but also ... in short time breake them: whereby their bodies are notably preserved in health, and know not many grievous diseases, wherewithall we in England are often times afflicted’. One early advertisement proclaimed tobacco’s ability ‘Health to preserve, or to deceive our Pein, / Regale thy Sense, & aid the Lab’ring Brain’. Not everyone was persuaded. To JamesI – aman ahead of his times in many other respects too – the burning weed was ‘loathesome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain [and] dangerous to the lungs’. But as the cultivation of tobacco exploded in Virginia and Maryland, there was a dramatic slide in prices (from between 4 and 36 pence per pound in the 1620s and 1630s to around 1 penny per pound from the 1660s onwards) and a corresponding shift towards mass consumption. While in the 1620s only gentlemen had taken tobacco, by the 1690s it was ‘a custom, the fashion, all the mode – so that every plow-man had his pipe’. In 1624 James put aside his scruples and established a royal monopoly: the revenue to be gained as imports soared was clearly worth the ‘hateful’ fumes, though the monopoly proved as unenforceable as a blanket ban.
The new imports transformed not just the economy but the national lifestyle. As Defoe observed in his
Complete English Tradesman
: ‘The teatable among the ladies and the coffee house among the men seem to be the places of new invention ...’ What people liked most about these new drugs was that they offered a very different kind of stimulus from the traditional European drug, alcohol. Alcohol is, technically, a depressant. Glucose, caffeine and nicotine, by contrast, were the eighteenth-century equivalent of uppers. Taken together, the new drugs gave English society an almighty hit; the Empire, it might be said, was built on a huge sugar, caffeine and nicotine rush – a rush nearly everyone could experience.
At the same time, England, and especially London, became Europe’s emporium for these new stimulants. By the 1770s about 85 per cent of British tobacco imports were in fact re-exported and almost 94 per cent of imported coffee was re-exported, mainly to northern Europe. This was partly a reflection of differential tariffs: heavy import duties restricted domestic coffee consumption to the benefit of the burgeoning tea industry. Like so many national characteristics, the English preference for tea over coffee had its origins in the realm of fiscal policy.
By selling a portion of their imports from the West and East Indies to continental markets, the British were making enough money to satisfy another long-dormant appetite, for a crucial component of the new consumerism was a sartorial revolution. Writing in 1595, Peter Stubbs remarked that ‘no people in the world are so curious in new fangles as they of England be’. He had in mind the growing appetite of English consumers for new styles of textile, an appetite which by the early 1600s had swept aside a whole genre of legislation: the sumptuary laws that had traditionally regulated what Englishmen and women could wear according to their social rank. Once again Defoe spotted the trend, in his
Everybody’s Business is Nobody’s Business
:
... plain country Joan is now turned into a fine London madam, can drink tea, take snuff, and carry herself as high as the best. She must have a hoop too, as well as her mistress; and her poor scanty linsey-woolsey petticoat is changed into a good silk one, four or five yards wide at the least.
 
In the seventeenth century, however, there was only one outlet the discerning English shopper would buy her clothes from. For sheer quality, Indian fabrics, designs, workmanship and technology were in a league of their own. When English merchants began to buy Indian silks and calicoes and bring them back home, the result was nothing less than a national makeover. In 1663 Pepys took his wife Elizabeth shopping in Cornhill, one of the most fashionable shopping districts of London, where, ‘after many tryalls bought my wife a Chinke [chintz]; that is, a paynted Indian Callico for to line her new Study, which is very pretty’. When Pepys himself sat for the artist John Hayls he went to the trouble of hiring a fashionable Indian silk morning gown, or
banyan
. In 1664 over a quarter of a million pieces of calico were imported into England. There was almost as big a demand for Bengal silk, silk cloth taffeta and plain white cotton muslins. As Defoe recalled in the
Weekly Review
of 31 January 1708: ‘It crept into our houses, our closets, our bedchambers; curtains, cushion, chairs, and at last beds themselves were nothing but Callicoes or Indian stuffs’.
The beauty of imported textiles was that the market for them was practically inexhaustible. Ultimately, there is only so much tea or sugar a human being can consume. But people’s appetite for new clothes had, and has, no such natural limit. Indian textiles – which even a servant like Defoe’s ‘plain country Joan’ could afford – meant that the tea-swilling English not only felt better; they looked better too.
The economics of this early import trade were relatively simple. Seventeenth-century English merchants had little they could offer Indians that the Indians did not already make themselves. They therefore paid for their purchases in cash, using bullion earned from trade elsewhere rather than exchanging English goods for Indian. Today we call the spread of this process globalization, by which we mean the integration of the world as a single market. But in one important respect seventeenth-century globalization was different. Getting the bullion out to India and the goods home again, even the transmission of orders to buy and sell, meant round trips of some twelve thousand miles, every mile hazardous with the chance of storms, shipwrecks and pirates.

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