From the Archives: Asia’s Inland Trade, or How the Spice Trade Worked
While writing my most recent newsletter(opens in new tab), I had reason to spend some time thinking about my historical roots, and looking for an old blog post about the organization of the Dutch and British East India Companies. I evidently never wrote that post, but I found a couple of related posts from 2016 and 2017 that I think hold up.
The official trading area of the Dutch East India Company
The way we learn the story in elementary school in the United States, European trading companies sailed East in search of spices and other luxury goods. What those merchants took with them to trade is generally left unmentioned–perhaps because it makes it clear that Europe was a backwater in the global marketplace until well into the eighteenth century.
The truth is that in the early centuries of the Asian trade most European-made merchandise was a dud in the Asian marketplace. Some products, like mechanical clocks and toys, were too expensive for any but the wealthiest to purchase. Others, like heavy woolen cloth, were simply not useful or appealing. The only thing Europeans had that Asian were interested in was precious metal from the mines in Latin America.
The Portuguese, who controlled the trade routes from Europe to Asia for almost a hundred years, were content to pay silver for the luxury goods that reached their Indian stronghold at Goa. When the Dutch entered the spice trade in 1595 , they didn’t have the luxury of paying for everything with hard currency. It was too expensive to simply trade with the Indies. Instead they learned to trade within the Indies: carrying goods from one Asian market to another as part of what they called the “inland trade”.
The Dutch didn’t invent the inland land. Merchants from all over Asia bought and sold goods at busy seaports along the Red Sea, on the coast of India, throughout the Indonesian archipelago, and in China and Japan. Islamic merchants in the Persian Gulf shipped raw cotton, coffee, dried fruits and nuts, and attar of roses across the Indian Ocean. Chinese merchants sold silks, tea, porcelain and zinc. India produced printed cotton textiles that were popular throughout Asia. South East Asia was the source for pepper, sandalwood, spices, and ivory.
Asia ships seldom sailed all the way from the Persian Gulf to China. Instead, an Arab ship would sail from Mokha to Surat and back. An Indian merchant would travel between Surat and Java. Chinese junks controlled the trade between Canton and Bantam. A chest of tea or a load of pepper would be bought and sold several times , and transported from port to port in several different ships.
Instead of concentrating on trade between two ports, the way most Asian merchants did, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) traded throughout the entire system, trading one type of goods for another, which was then used to buy a third. From one end of the chain to the other, Dutch traders handled more than one hundred Asian products, including raw silk, sandalwood, saltpeter, tin, opium, and cowry shells. Each item was bought for a low price in the place where it was made and then sold for a higher price in another part of Asia in which it was in demand.
In order to make the most of this complicated series of trades, the VOC set up a network of permanent trading stations along the major trade routes in Asia–a process that often involved violence against local rulers and other European merchants. By 1785, the company had roughly 20,000 employees in twenty settlements spread across Asia, including company-owned spice plantations in Indonesia and walled warehouses in port cities in China, Japan, and India.
The spice trade–more than just pepper.
Eliza Lucas Pinckney Gets the (Indigo) Blues
Let’s get this out of the way up front: Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722-1793) owned enslaved people, and it was her exploitation of their labor that made her achievements as an agricultural innovator possible.
Thanks to the Charleston Country Public Library
Eliza Lucas was born on Antigua, which was then part of the British Leeward Islands, where she grew up on one of three sugar cane plantations owned by her father, George Lucas, who was a lieutenant colonel in the British Army.[1] When she was ten, she was sent to school in London to learn the accomplishments believed to be necessary for a young woman in society.[2] The school seems to have been an unusual one: the curriculum included bookkeeping in addition to the usual skills of needlework, French, and music. She wrote to her father that her favorite subject was botany, perhaps a foreshadowing of her future life as farmer on a large scale.
In 1738, the Lucas family moved from Antigua to South Carolina, where Colonel Lucas had inherited a plantation from his father. He soon bought two more. The following year, as tensions between England and Spain increased , George Lucas, now a major, was called back to his post in Antigua When those tensions exploded into the War of the Austrian Succession[3] in 1740, he was named lieutenant governor.
Major Lucas left sixteen-year-old Eliza in charge of the Carolina plantations, which he had mortgaged to pay for his last military promotion[4], and of a household that included a sickly mother, a younger sister, and a number of enslaved people. Eager to make the plantations pay, and perhaps to reduce the debt, she began experimenting with new crops that could replace or complement their production of rice. She planted a large stand of oaks, in anticipation of future income. She tried ginger, cotton,[5] alfalfa, flax, and hemp. Each of them failed. Finally, in 1739, she planted indigo, which was being grown and processed in the West Indies in response to a demand in the British textile industry.
By 1744, Eliza had grown a large enough indigo crop to attempt the complex process of producing dye, working with two indigo processing experts from the West Indies, a French grower named Montserrat and an enslaved dye maker from the French West Indies named “Quash”. She sent a sample to Britain, calling it “Carolina Indigo,” which was favorably received.
Eliza married Chief Justice Charles Pinckney that same year. She raised a family, including two sons who played important roles in the new American republic. After Pinckney’s death, she managed his plantations as well as her own. Throughout her life, she continued to grow and process large amounts of indigo for the British market. Later she also experimented with producing silk.
When she died in 1793, George Washington served as a pallbearer at her funeral at his own request—perhaps a symbol of how important her work had been.
Eliza’s success (and that of her enslaved mentor) transformed agriculture in colonial South Carolina. Other planters followed her example. The crop fit into the established slave plantation economy of the region. It could be grown on land that was not suitable for growing rice, which was the primary cash crop in the southern colonies at the time. By the beginning of the American Revolution, indigo made up one-third of the colony’s export trade.
[1] I believe in sharing mother’s names where I can. Eliza’s mother was Ann (probably Meldrum) Lucas. That “probably” tells us how little we know about her.
[2] In other words, the accomplishments that would lead to a good marriage.
[3] One of several European wars that spilled over into Europe’s colonial colonies in the eighteenth century.
[4] While an occasional field promotion occurred promotion by purchase, rather than by merit, was standard operating procedure in the British army at the time.
[5] Cotton was grown in the United States as early as the mid-16th century, primarily for domestic use. It did not become a cash crop in the American south until the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, at much the same time as cotton was overtaking wool in Britain’s textile mills.
Fanny Palmer: The Norman Rockwell of the Nineteenth Century?
If you grew up in the United States, you probably are familiar with the work of artist Frances Flora (Fanny) Bond Palmer (1812-1876), even though I suspect you’ve never heard of her.
Fanny Palmer, ca 1876.
Fanny Palmer was born in Leicester, England, where she received her first training in art, specifically drawing, perspective and watercolor, at Mary Linwood’s academy for girls[1]. She ran a drawing school in Leicester for several years in the 1830s. Later, Fanny and her husband, Edmund Seymour Palmer, decided to get into the lithography business as well. Fanny trained as a lithographer with Louis Haghe, one of the founders of what was considered the best British lithographic firm of the time; meanwhile, her husband became as a professional printer.
The Palmers opened a lithography business in Leicester in 1842. In 1844, they immigrated to New York, where they opened a shop under the name F & S Palmer, Lithographers.[2] During this time, she produced a large and diverse body of work—including sheet music, cartoons and war illustrations as well as the better known prints for home decoration—and demonstrated a sophisticated use of the medium. When the business failed several years later, the Palmers sold it to the owner of another printmaking business, one Nathaniel Currier, the founder of what became the famous Currier and Ives firm, the most successful and prolific printmaking company in the United States.[3] (You see where this is going, right?)
Closing the business opened new opportunities for Fanny, who soon had a full-time position as an artist with Currier and Ives.[4] She was the only woman illustrator on the staff and one of the most skilled and prolific artist in the Currier and Ives stable: one of the small number of their artists whose works they issued with a signature. In print after print she gave form to the romanticized vision of American life that was part of the Currier and Ives brand.
She created some two hundred [signed] lithographs for the firm, including two prints that became iconic representations of the United States’ westward expansion:Across the Continent. “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way “(1868) and The Rocky Mountains. Emigrants Crossing the Plains (1866).[5] She is also known to have worked on many more that were released without a signature, including a large number of the firm’s still life prints.
In addition to holding a full time staff position with Currier and Ives, it appears that Palmer also ran a lithographic workshop in her home, where she trained several apprentices, several of whom went on to become innovative lithographic artists and found important lithographic studios of their own. In other words, she created a legacy in addition to producing a substantial body of work.
Palmer was not the only woman involved in the business of lithographic prints. Some were hired to transfer drawings to polished lithographic stones. Others were employed to hand-color printed lithographs. By mid-century, a few who had been trained at the Philadelphia School for Women[6], even found work as lithographers. But Palmer was the most successful and well-known. Her works were enormously popular. In fact, Currier and Ives expert. Ewell L. Newman claims “It is likely that during the later half of the nineteenth century more pictures by Mrs. Fanny Palmer decorated the homes of ordinary Americans than those of any other artist, dead or alive.” Wow!
[1] Mary Linwood (1755-1845) was a celebrated artist in the early 1800s, known for her full-scale embroidered versions of famous paintings. It appears that her work was in high demand in the royal courts of Europe (!) and she maintained a permanent exhibition of her work in London. Rabbit hole, here I come.
[2] I am intrigued by the fact that Fanny (F) got first billing.
[3] Currier and Ives billed itself as a “Publisher of Cheap and Popular Prints.” Truth in advertising.
[4] Her husband became a tavern keeper.
[5] It is interesting that Fanny, who grew up in England and was probably exposed to the rhetoric of British imperialism, uses the word “empire” to describe the push west.
Together, the two works can be seen as visual representations of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Across the Continent is an allegorical depiction of expansion, organized along a dramatic diagonal created by a train track. On one side of the tracks is a bustling American frontier town, with a small train of covered wagons departing into the background. On the other side is an image of a remarkably tame wilderness, occupied by a few Native Americans, two on horseback and two in canoes in the distance. The Rocky Mountains shows the next step in expansion: a wagon train winding its way toward the viewer with the mountains looming in the distance. Native Americans, again on horseback, watch the wagon train from a low ridge in the foreground, not quite as distant as before.
[6] Which we have seen several times before. The school is unavoidable if you are thinking about women artists in nineteenth century America.