Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

The light, the rare and the dry

Aristotle distinguished between things for use and things for exchange – between domestic economy and property that is used for trade and profit. * Hume’s theory of value bracketed all the corn, wool and silver that people consume or just keep at home: ‘As the money and commodities, in these cases, never meet, they cannot affect each other … It is only the overplus, compared to the demand, that determines the value.’ 5 In 1910 a multi-volume textbook on the economic history of Russia began with these words: ‘The experience of history shows that trade and industry can flourish only in times of peace, in densely populated countries with good communication routes; if these conditions are not met, the peasants are obliged to produce everything they need themselves.’ 6 Peaceful times were rare, convenient routes a luxury; but, without them, how could a dense population flourish? In fact, the vast majority lived by subsistence farming. They consumed what they produced and produced only as much as they could consume, because their products were perishable and difficult to transport, and there was no demand for them elsewhere. Only a few products of nature and labour were suitable for making into goods which could be traded. Three difficult conditions had to obtain – these products had to be light, rare and dry. Bulky and heavy commodities were difficult to transport. Those that were universally available met no demand. And only dry products would not spoil when they were stored or transported. The initial meaning of the word ‘drug’ was ‘dry’; in the fourteenth century it referred to all dry and valuable goods, from herbs and spices to dyes and soaps. 7

In the structural anthropology of the last century, ‘the raw’ was considered the opposite of ‘the cooked’: the former was a part of nature, the latter was a product of culture. In my historical anthropology, the opposite of the raw is the finished, completed, directly usable. In English, this opposition can be rendered as ‘raw materials vs. finished goods ’, or even ‘raw bads vs. dry goods ’. 8 In a state of nature, tea leaves, fur pelts, fish bodies, salt solution, sugar sap, cotton linters and many other sorts of raw material are wet; in this initial, perishable condition they cannot be transported and traded. Only with dehydration do they acquire an exchange value. Drying is the universal operation of primary processing which preserves commodities for transportation over long distances and prepares them for secondary processing. Grain, hay and firewood were the first commodities that needed covered storage and markets. But many kinds of goods produced by arable and cattle farmers – meat, potatoes, fruits – were difficult or impossible to transport; they became tradable only when new technologies for preservation and transport appeared, which themselves required energy and raw materials.

Empires did not send expeditions overseas to admire the noble savages. They needed tangible value that they could appropriate, transport, and sell to their own peoples, or other populations, with profit. As a rule, these were raw materials, dried into goods. Colonial stores selling dried goods (épicerie in France, Kolonialhandlung in Germany) were the first groceries. They sold tea, sugar, dried fruits, coffee, tobacco, chocolate and dried fish, and gunpowder as well. These dry goods had to be protected from the weather, so warehouses and shops were needed to store them. Conversely, local trade in fresh, wet products – meat, fish, milk, fruits and vegetables – had no need of roofs; numerous open-air markets sprang up in towns to meet the needs of local trade and sold perishable goods at competitive prices; supplying the towns and providing employment in rural areas, this capillary system of distribution did not lead to the accumulation of capital. Ports and industrial cities developed because of long-distance trade in dry goods. Market cities sprang up in the places where commodities were delivered from afar, trans-shipped or processed, and where the arterial routes of long-distance trade intersected. The best trade went by water, but the best goods were dry. Protecting commodities from humidity was the foundation of the art of commerce, but emerging capitalism depended on water as much as it dodged it.