A History of Britain, Volume 2 (58 page)

By the end of the eighteenth century it was apparent that this was not how things had worked out. Instead of an empire of farmers and traders the British Empire was, overwhelmingly, an empire of soldiers and slaves. The Americans who had taken the professions of liberty most seriously had flung them back in the teeth of Britain and gone their own way. And instead of an empire based on lightly garrisoned commercial stations around the world, Britain had somehow found itself responsible for nearly a million Caribbean slaves and at least 50 million inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent. The British had gone east to make a little money on the side and ended up, somehow, as the Raj. The footnote had become the main story. Look around the streets of urban Britain today, and you see that it still is.

So just how had Britain ended up with the wrong empire?

From the beginning the British Empire was habit-forming. The genial encouragement of addiction was its speciality: a quiet smoke, a nice cup of tea, a sweet tooth (and, a bit later, a pipe of opium) – exotic rarities converted into consumer cravings, exceptional wants turned into daily needs. Where profit beckoned, distaste could be overcome. King James I may have published tracts against the filthy weed
Nicotiana tabacum
(‘good Countrey-men let us (I pray you) consider what honour or policy can move us to imitate the barbarous and beastly manners of the wild, godles and slavish Indians . . . in so vile and stinking a custom?'), but the
first settlement the Virginia Company established to grow it still bore his name. Given the chance, the Jamestown settlers would have preferred to discover the gold and silver that seemed to have fallen into the lap of the Spanish empire of the south. But there was no gold in the Chesapeake Bay and the settlers had to make do with their dependably prolific flopleaved plant. Many times, during the first half of the seventeenth century, the English tobacco colonies seemed close to obliteration: victims of disease, vicious wars with the Native Americans (in which the English, as well as the natives, slaughtered men, women and children) and their own profligate, unrealistic expectations. The climate, the insects and the unwelcome gifts they carried devoured men. Though 6000 immigrants had come between 1607 and 1625, in the latter year a census found the population of Virginia to be just 1200. Yet, as the tobacco habit became ingrained in European culture and Virginia leaf was established as the marker of quality, demand boomed, prices rose and the settlements in Lord Baltimore's Maryland and in Virginia hung on, consolidated and pushed inland. Attracted by the possibility of owning ‘manors' of hundreds of acres, the younger sons of gentry and tradesmen arrived to become tobacco barons. Supplying the labour, alongside a limited number of African slaves, were boys – median age sixteen, seldom over nineteen; boys in their tens of thousands, out from the rookeries and tenements of London and Bristol, about 70 to 80 per cent ‘indentured' (contractually committed) to work for three to five years for room and board before being freed to claim a small plot of promised land, to hire out their labour or set up shop.

This was how the colonial ‘planting' was supposed to work: an antisocial no-hope population drained from the mother country and set to work with every prospect of ‘improvement'; the land itself likewise kissed by amelioration; the mother country on the (carefully controlled) receiving end of a valuable raw commodity, busy turning out goods that it could ship back to the growing colony. And, unlike in Ireland where the obstreperous natives happened to be Christians (of a deluded, papistical sort) and could attract the support of mischievous foreign powers to make a nuisance of themselves, the American natives, who were evidently resistant to the Gospel, could now be shoved further and further up-river and into the trees and hills. Sir Francis Wyatt had spoken for the whole Anglo-American project in 1622 when he unblushingly declared that ‘our first worke is expulsion of the Savages to gaine the free range of the countrey . . . for it is infinitely better to have no heathen among us, who at best were but thornes in our sides, than to be at peace and at league with them'.

But then it all went badly wrong. Beginning in the 1680s, tobacco prices began to decline and then went into free-fall, bankrupting the smaller planters, brokers and processors. The shock was not enough to abort the Chesapeake experiment altogether. There were upwards of 50,000 settlers in Maryland and Virginia, and they managed to find a more diversified range of crops to farm – indigo and wheat in particular. The colony would survive, and the tobacco market revive in the next century, but the bonanza was, for the time being, over.

Or, rather, it was elsewhere. For another kind of craving was sweeping through Europe in the second half of the seventeenth century, one that would transform the British Empire from a niche in the world economy to its star performer. The craze for hot, powerfully caffeinated beverages began with coffee, brought from the Islamic world via the janissaries of the Ottoman Empire as they moved further west into central Europe. Vienna would resist the Turkish siege, but it was defenceless against the coffee bean. The American cocoa bean, consumed as drinking chocolate, had been passed from Central American culture to their Spanish conquerors and refined and made marketable by the Dutch, always with their eye on the creation of new market openings. Both coffee and chocolate were widely available in the London coffee-houses by the third quarter of the seventeenth century.

But for some reason, which – as yet – no amount of anthropology, much less economic history, has managed to explain satisfactorily, it was the east Asian drink brewed from the leaves of
Camellia sinensis
that, right from the beginning, was the British favourite. When Thomas Garway sold ‘China Tcha, Tay or Tee' in both leaf and brewed liquid form in his coffee-house in Exchange Alley in 1657, it was probably the choice green leaves of Hyson or Sing-lo grown in Anwei and Chekiang provinces. Anticipating some of the more miraculous claims made for green tea recently, Garway promoted it as a wonder drug: ‘wholesome, preserving perfect health until extreme old age, good for clearing the sight'; it would pacify ‘gripping of the guts, cold, dropsies and scurvies' and would ‘make the body active and lusty'. But by the turn of the eighteenth century, when Tcha was being sold in at least 500 coffee-houses, black leaf, grown around the Bohea mountains of Fukien, on the southeastern coast, had conquered the market. The best of those teas, like Souchong, needed longer drying time, but enough of it could be processed and exported by the East India Company from Canton to lower the price and thus reach a wide market. Even more significantly, in the first decades of the eighteenth century Bohea made a crucial crossover from commercial drinking establishments into the domestic world, first in the houses of
fashionable quality, but by the second decade among the trading and commercial classes and even artisans. It became,
par excellence,
the politely sociable drink, to be taken preferably at home and with its little rituals and ceremonies more often than not in the hands of women. By the 1730s close to a million pounds of tea a year were being imported from China to Britain by the East India Company, which could sell it on the London market for four times what it had paid in China.

And although the evidence for its timing is necessarily anecdotal, it seems likely that from the beginning tea, like the more aggressively bitter coffee and chocolate, was thought to need sugar to make it palatable. When the first porcelain tea sets were being made, it would have been unthinkable not to have included, along with the teapot and milk jug, a sugar bowl. In 1715 Dr Frederick Slare, admittedly so shameless a booster of the miraculous qualities of sugar that he could recommend it not only as a cure for eye ailments but also as an ideal dentifrice, announced, in effect, the arrival of the modern British breakfast. ‘Morning repasts called Break-fasts,' he wrote authoritatively, ‘consist of bread, butter, milk, water and sugar', adding that tea, coffee and chocolate as the beverages of choice all had ‘uncommon virtues'. The old early-morning meal of home-brewed small beer, bread and perhaps cheese or smoked fish was on its way out, at least in urban Britain. By the time that Hannah Glasse's
The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy,
the first cookbook directed at the middle classes, was published in 1747, its recipes assumed the wide availability and inexpensiveness of sugar. ‘To make a rich cake' called for 3 lb. of ‘double-refined sugar' to 4 lb. of flour; ‘Everlasting Syllabub' used a pound of double-refined sugar to 2.5 pints of cream, ‘Syrup of peach blossoms' (a wonderful idea) 2 pounds; and both Mrs Glasse's ‘cheap' rice-puddings (baked as well as boiled) also used sugar as a basic ingredient. The British sweet tooth, gratified by tarts and puddings, flavoured creams and cheesecakes, jams, marmalades and jellies, had arrived with a vengeance in the national diet. It was an alteration of appetite that revolutionized the history, not just of Britain but of the world.

Sugar had been widely known and consumed in medieval Europe, but its high price and exotic origin meant that it was considered as either a spice or a drug. The most common sweetener, conveniently and locally produced, was honey. So when sugar shows up in the account books of grand aristocratic households like that of Simon de Montfort, the Earl of Leicester, at Kenilworth, it is rarely in amounts of more than a pound or two. It had reached Christian Europe via the Islamic world, and it had been a crusader dynasty, the Lusignans, sometime kings of Jerusalem, who had made the first attempt to domesticate it for production on Cyprus.
But sugar cane is native to the tropical monsoon regions of southeast Asia from New Guinea to the Bay of Bengal, and to reach its mature height of 8 feet (2 metres) it needs the combination of drenching, daily rainfall and hot temperatures. It was precisely the difficulty of establishing it in the drier Mediterranean region, under optimal growing conditions, that kept yields relatively low and prices comparatively high. So for centuries sugar remained a drug or a spice, in both cases an exotic luxury rather than a daily commodity. But its Portuguese shippers and growers, abetted by Dutch and Jewish traders and refiners, were constantly moving west, out into the warmer Tropic of Cancer latitudes of the Atlantic, to Madeira and São Tomé, for example, in search of the perfect combination of heat and rain. Famously (although almost by accident when ships were blown southwards off course), they found what they were looking for in the former Portuguese colony of Brazil.

But there was something else that sugar cane needed if its golden juice was going to pay off, and that was intensive, highly concentrated, task-specific applications of manpower. For the cane was an unforgiving and volatile crop. It could not be farmed and harvested in a single growing year since it took at least fourteen months to ripen. But once it had reached maturity, the cumbersome grass needed to be harvested quickly to prevent the sugar going starchy. Once stripped and cut, the cane in its turn had to be speedily taken to the ox-powered vertical crushing rollers before the sucrose concentration of the juice self-degraded. Every subsequent stage of production – the boiling of the juice, the arrest of the boiling process at the precise moment for optimum crystallization, the partial refining in clay-stopped inverted cone moulds, the lengthy drying process – demanded the kind of strength, speed and stamina in tropical conditions that indentured white Europeans or captive Native Americans were ill equipped to provide. Both populations proved themselves hard to discipline, prone to drink and rebelliousness. They ran away a lot, and they died like flies from the stew of insect- and water-borne diseases that simmered away in the humid sunlight. But the Portuguese sugar lords and, more specifically, their Dutch and Jewish brokers knew it was worth persevering. All that the merchants of Pernambuco needed to solve in order to make a packet was the labour problem.

So, where to turn for a labour supply that was strong, disease-resistant but obedient, like the cattle that turned the crushers? Where else, of course, but where the Portuguese were already making money from the commerce in ivory, gold and humans – West and Central Africa.

It was a truly Faustian moment. And there
were
those who recognized the Mephistophelean nature of the compact. The Jesuits in Brazil
condemned as the grossest blasphemy any equation between men and animals. Other, equally honourable Fathers of the Church and jurists in the Spanish empire wrote forthrightly to Philip II on the unspeakable, unchristian, evil of enslavement. But other councillors and clerics were prepared to justify enslavement on the pious pretext that it was a way to bring the heathen Africans to the Gospel. And, besides, were they not captives from their own tribal wars? The arguments were transparently defensive and sometimes disingenuous, but imperial Spain (which had incorporated Portugal in 1580) was desperately short of funds, and it was more expedient to listen to the permissive, than the prohibitive, arguments. By 1630 there were probably over 60,000 African slaves working in the sugar estates of Brazil, and the investment was paying off hand-somely for all concerned except its traumatized, brutalized victims.