![Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0] - Читать Любимую Русскую Полную Книгу 👉 Read-E-Book.com](/uploads/posts/books/1/5/4/nature-s-evil-calibre-5-27-0-download.jpg)
Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]
- Автор: Эткинд Александр Маркович
- Год: 2022
- Язык: английский
- Год: Wiley
- Переводчик: Sara Jolly
- Жанр: История
Электронная книга - «Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]». Краткое содержание книги:
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.
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.
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 .