Draft PLEASE DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION OF AUTHOR ... · Os Lusiadas by Luiz Vaz de Camões ( first printing 1572) is to be believed, Sucheta Mazumdar, Slaves, Textiles and Opium,

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AUTHOR

Slaves Textiles and Opium:

The Other Half of the Triangular Trade.

Sucheta Mazumdar

Duke University, History Department

[email protected]

Presentation prepared for Brown University, Seminar: Asia-Pacific in the

Making of the Americas, 26 Sept., 2010.

“By the third quarter of the sixteenth century, sets of four continents maps were popular as wall maps in private homes as a description of the world in four parts.” David Woodward, “Mapping the World” in Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffar eds., Encounters: The meeting of Asia and Europe, 1500-1800

These 16th century four-part world maps would have made little sense

to the 15th century explorers, navigators and cartographers. Columbus, as we

know, thought he had reached Asia in 1492, and never really gave up the idea

even at the end of his days. Amerigo Vespucci, whose name would be

immortalized as the name of the continent by German cartographer Martin

Waldseemuller in the first map of the world, agreed to undertake the voyages

Sucheta Mazumdar, Slaves, Textiles and Opium, page 2

to the boondocks only because he was promised he could go on to India

afterwards and make his fortune, which he did. Cabral, Magellan, and

everyone else associated with the voyages and the new mappings of the globe

connected Asia and the Americas and understood their own navigations as part

of a new interconnected world. But, in the later imaginaries that developed, a

fragmented map of the world emerged, and a mental map took shape,

bolstered by diverse colonial endeavors and aspirations and, in due course,

diverse colonial archives that shaped academic research. Our effort here, as

part of this year-long seminar, is to look beyond the parameters of “inherited

wisdom” and read and research laterally across regional boundaries and

academic border markings, so that the interconnections of the new global

economy that emerged in the wake of Columbus-Da Gama become more

apparent and allow us to reframe fundamental questions about the making of

the modern world. What follows is essentially a thumbnail sketch of the main

chapters of my monograph tentatively titled From the Slave Trade to the

Opium Rush, China America Trade in the Making of the Modern World. I

start by working through four core propositions that constitute the chapters:

1) That the Atlantic system built on the AfroEurasian Exchange:

That Africa as a site of consumption of Asian goods pre-


Columbian exchange and that the post 1500, European

traders built on these pre-existing patterns

2) That the Americas, as the only continent with ports on both

Atlantic and Pacific coasts, was an independent factor in the

development of trans-Pacific Asian trade going westwards,

and simultaneously going eastwards, vital in the overlapping

circuit with that of the Atlantic-Indian Ocean system.

Crucially, American silver was the essential commodity of

Asian trade, no matter via the Pacific or via the Atlantic.

3) That the Atlantic and the Asian Trading worlds were linked and

interdependent through the circulations of the Atlantic

Triangular Trade from the very inception of the slave trade,

and that the Dutch link in the history of the Americas is a

neglected part of the Anglo-American narrative of global

history.

4) That the volume of private trade has been underestimated, and the

emphasis on the trade by various East India Companies, for

which we have better records, has distorted our

understanding of the total volume of the trade that began in

the wake of 1500 onwards. Private traders, I suggest were just

as important part of the shift in the global economy. While


recognizing that the data for private trade are not of

comparable quality and quantity to that available for the

more formally recorded company trade, nevertheless I try to

integrate the two.

A footnote: “China Trade” and the “East Indies Trade” were

shorthand used in popular parlance for all of Asian trade until the Opium War

( 1839-1842) in China and the concurrent completion of British colonization of

India (1849). The 1840s marked the separation of the China trade from the

India trade as part of distinct administrative jurisdictions.

Section I: Pre-Columbian AfroEurasian Consumption-Production

Let me start with a sketch of what Asia-Africa trade looked like before

Columbus-Da Gama, for this, I suggest had already set up a pattern of

demands that the transatlantic slave-trade system would adapt to its own

needs, making the access to Asia more crucial to the Americas enterprise,

while the importance of Asian export goods increased in tandem with the

growth of the transatlantic slave trade.

The Afro-Eurasian world of exchange —— the trade in spices,

cowries, and textiles and the networks of its exchange —— date back at least

to the beginning of the Christian era in the eastern Mediterranean. But with


the establishment of Muslim Spain / Al- Andalus in 711, the western

Mediterranean, with both its northern and southern shores (north Africa) came

into direct linkage with the trading worlds of the Indian Ocean and the

Pacific, a system of trading networks that linked Cordoba to Canton . Islam

arrived very early in China as well, most likely ca. 650CE, and the Arab and

other traders circulated through this vast network. The Indian Ocean and

southern China trading communities already linked to eastern coastal states of

Africa and through to Sudan and Egypt, now extended out to Al-Andalus on

the maritime routes, and these connected to the overland Silk Roads.

From the 8th century onwards there was also an expansion of trade in

northern and eastern Africa that brought more Asian goods out to west Africa.

The significance of Al-Andalus for the making of the Asian and African

trading worlds in the era prior to the 15th century has not been adequately

studied. But the archaeological evidence and new research increasingly

suggests that various commodities, and the people of this exchange: the

traders, soldiers of fortune, religious teachers, not to mention African slaves

for domestic work as well as praetorian guards, connected one continent to the

other with some regularity. The idea that the Mediterranean residents of

Iberia or northern Africa around 1350-1500 had no idea of the world that they


were to encounter in Asia is part of the mythmaking of the story of European

exceptionalism.

Skipping here for the moment what Asia got from Africa, these routes

carried goods from the Red Sea and Mediterranean ports to Timbuktu in west

Africa (Mali) to areas further south. Asian goods in Africa were widely

circulated in a intra-continental trade routes that connected the Indian ocean

to the trans-Saharan caravan routes. Archeological finds in Mali are increasing

confirming the extent of this trade with artifacts from China and India dating

from the 8-14th centuries

Moroccan Ibn Battuta, (1304-1368) intrepid traveler, journalist and

Islamic judge who travelled from his native Tangier to Canton and many other

places besides, gives us detailed information about the markets of Mali, in

west Africa. Ibn Battua records finding Asian textiles in Timbuktu, cotton

textiles perhaps of the sort that were being imported into Cairo and have been

found in many sites around old Cairo (Fustat). Ibn Battua also notes the vast

amounts of shell money when he visited the markets of Mali in western Africa.

Let us discuss the latter item first. “Shell money,” the most widely

used currency in the world was a special variety of cowries (a type of sea snail

shell, a mollusk shaped like a small oval egg, flat at the bottom). Shell money


formed the smallest denomination of exchange and was used for daily

commerce at the local market and so on, comparable, say, to the use of the

farthing ( one quarter of a penny) in use in England all the way from the 13th

century to as recently as 1960. Shell money was used in ancient and medieval

China, (i.e. the era between 500 BCE-1300 CE) when minted copper coins

became more generally available. Many of the modern characters used for

money and exchange in Chinese still retain the symbol for “shell” as their

reference to this ancient form of money.

The advantage of using shell money versus other some such other

object in areas that did not have minted coinage seems to have been that it

could not be easily counterfeited. That was how King Gezo, of Benin would

explain it to the English when questioned, and indeed that may have been one

of the reasons that rulers encouraged its import in so many economies in the

pre-industrial world. The weight of the shells also provided crucial ballast for

sailing ships. There were several varieties of shell money, but the most widely

circulated were those cultivated in the chain of islands forming the country of

Maldives Islands in the Indian Ocean. The Maldives became the most prolific

producer of this trade item for the Indian ocean world, and eventually for

African trade as well. From Arab trade records, we know that shell money


from the Indian Ocean was common brought to various ports on the eastern

sea-board of Africa from the beginning era of this trade ca. 7th century.

Maldives cowry was a cultivated deep sea product, the harvest a royal

monopoly. It is likely that it is this connection with shell money and intra-

ocean trade that brought Ibn Battuta to the Maldives after his visit to Mali. In

many places slave prices would continue to be calculated in cowries. This

would be one of the essential Asian goods of the Triangular slave trade in the

Atlantic. This was also the world of trade and exchange that Columbus and

Da Gama were entering into, a world in which African use of Indian Ocean

cowries was known, as was the use of Asian textiles.

The language of this trading world, regardless of religion, was Arabic and it

was possible to go from Al-Andalus to Canton using it. One of the more

touching episodes in Ibn Battua deals with his meeting a fellow countryman

from Morocco in Guangzhou (Canton) when Ibn Battuta arrived there and

went to the Muslim quarter of the city. Vasco Da Gama had Arabic

interpreters on board when he got to Malindi (Kenya) and used it to

communicate with the Gujarati traders he found there, and they were to help

him get across the Indian Ocean. Other existing connections between Al-

Andalus and the Indian Ocean clearly existed, if the Portuguese epic poem,

Os Lusiadas by Luiz Vaz de Camões ( first printing 1572) is to be believed,


where Da Gama is greeted in Calicut India by a Muslim speaking “fluent

Castillian.” We also know that there were Venetians living in India at the time

the Portuguese arrived.

It is customary at this point, in the existing scholarship on Iberian

empires, to part ways: the Portuguese go to India, the Spanish come to

America, and the two narratives bifurcate with a footnote to the Treaty of

Tordesillas (1494). But, if the two narratives are read together, a different story

begins to emerge. The significance of the voyages 1492 and 1498 were, I

argue, can only be understood in tandem, in their inauguration of a new world

economy heralded by the transatlantic slave trading system from 1494 onwards,

that was signaled by Columbus asking for slaves to be sent to Hispaniola sugar

plantations.

At the time that Columbus sets up the first plantation in the Americas,

the Portuguese were already the largest traders in West African gold and slaves

initially supplying the Christian and Islamic worlds in the fifteenth century and

transporting over 2000 slaves per annum in the 1480s and 1490s from the “Gold

Coast,” they dominated supplies in the transatlantic slave trade. The

Portuguese would retain this virtual monopoly position in the supplying of

slaves until the early 16th century. As early as 1510, they found they could not

get gold or slaves or ivory in Atlantic Africa without the Asian textiles; Indian

Ocean cowries soon replaced other local shell money. The demand for Asian


textiles and cowries would be as important also further south in slave trading

states of West Central Africa, and parts of the BaKongo kingdom, and

neighboring Luango and Ngola which would become the major source of

slaves for the Portuguese traders. My argument is, that contra Chris Bayly and

Fernand Braudel, who hold that the Atlantic world changed, while the the

Asian trading world remain “archaic” after the rounding of the Cape, I suggest

that Asian trade changed in its fundamentals in tandem with that of the

Atlantic trading world, and that the binary of Europe-Asia is inadequate for an

understanding of the global dynamic of the post-1500 world.

As the volume of the slave trade multiplied, the volume of Asian

textiles and cowries needed for the trade also multiplied along with the Dutch,

British, French Spanish, American, and Danish slave traders entering the

arena. From 1700 to 1800, over 25 million pounds of Indian Ocean cowries

were brought to West Africa by the European traders.

The African demand for Asian textiles was equally vital to the

European traders engaged in the Atlantic slave trade. Although cotton was

known and woven in many regions of West Africa, the import of cloth into

West Africa had a long history. The Portuguese and all other transatlantic slave

traders elaborated on it with their new access to Asian cloth. Expansion in the

Asian trade by European companies developed side by side with the expansion


of the slave-labor based plantation and mining economies of the Americas.

African demand shaped volume and type of purchase of Asian textiles. As

early as 1530, among the varieties of cloth traded at Benin, west Africa, we find

linen, fustian, India “Cambaia” fabrics (from Khambat Gujarat western India).

No fewer than 218 varieties of goods were stored at Elmina by the Dutch

traders in the seventeenth century. Almost 40 types of Indian textiles have

been found in the Africa trade, along with 4 varieties of Chinese and Persian

silks. African elites, as with elites elsewhere, demanded presents of silk. Even

as early as 1530, the oba of Benin was familiar enough with Asian textiles to

ask the Portuguese for cloaks of orange taffeta and white satin, shirts of blue

Indian silk, and printed Cambaia chintz. The Dutch start bringing in more

varied silk items from East Asia: Chinese and Indian silks, Chinese taffeta and

Japanese silk kimonos to the Gold Coast.

In terms of consumption history, Asian and European consumption

patterns have received the greater attention in the scholarship. I am suggesting

that the similarities in tastes crossed class and continents. Asian porcelains,

spices, silks, and cottons were consumed worldwide, and not just in Europe

about which far more has been written. These goods were consumed in other

parts of Asia, in quantities no less significant that the exports to Europe, and

in Africa and the Americas. Calico, the printed cotton fabrics named after the


port of Calicut, where Da Gama landed in southwestern India, became so

popular in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas, that it was taxed, and

production of imitation calicoes started in the 1760s in Europe and in colonial

America.

The quantitative implications of how much textile was produced for

the African slave trade in India, China and elsewhere in Asia, is not possible to

estimate because the Indian Ocean trade bringing textiles to the Red Sea ports

continued in tandem with that of the Europeans. The variation in the

purchase price of slaves was also considerable that it makes calculations

difficult. But with millions of slaves exported, the impact could not but have

been enormous, regional variations notwithstanding. In the very initial stages

of the 16th century in the Congo, the purchase price besides cowries and other

brass goods, included enough cloth to cover a person, or two yards. But around

the same time in Sierra Leone it cost over 15 and a half yards of vermilion

cloth and handkerchief material plus all sorts of other goods to buy a slave.

What we can say with some confidence is that the sheer volume of the slave

trade, especially before 1750 when Asian cotton textiles on the African market

were produced primarily in Asia, created hundreds more centers of spinning,

weaving, and printing textiles in India, making those who controlled the


production and the sale of the finished goods wealthy by selling to the

Europeans.

We can get a better sense of the monies that the European traders

would have spent to acquire these textiles. By the 17th century, British ships

alone were bringing in 20 thousand British pounds worth of East India goods.

Ships of all nationalities would carry around 50 percent of their total cargo to

Africa in textiles, over 60 percent of which was from Asia. There are plenty of

desperate letters from European slave traders seeking Asian textiles, for

without enough of these on board, slave purchase transactions could not be

completed.

The question was how to pay for the purchase of all the Asian goods

needed for the African and European markets. This is where, I argue, the siver

from American mines was crucial, for it expanded and sustained the global

trade, which brings me to the second part of my presentation.

Section II: Silver Circuit:

From the Americas to Pacific-Indian Ocean and back to the Atlantic

The completion of the circuit of this new global economic system that

began with the rounding of the Cape and plantation system in the Americas

emerged in the mid century, 1550-1580, when three crucial developments


coincided and the Acapulco-Manila galleon trade completed the global circuit

of exchange.

In these pivotal decades,

1) The Portuguese finally gained a stable base in the Pacific on the

China coast in 1557 in Macau. Although the Portuguese

arrived in India in 1498, and had secured a base there on the

west coast, and in Southeast Asia within a decade, they were

frustrated in their attempts to set up a permanent base

anywhere on the China coast. The Chinese navy chased them

off in 1517 when they first arrived with their usual

belligerence in Canton. The Portuguese survived the next

few decades in the Pacific by becoming intermediaries for the

illegal Japan-China trade for southern Chinese who wanted to

participate in this trade but were prohibited from doing so by

Ming imperial fiat. But finally, in 1557, the Portuguese gained

residency in Macau, by paying the local Chinese authorities

an annual rent of 500 tael / ounces of silver (kuping tael is

1.2 oz). It is relevant to note, that Macau was not the same

type of Portuguese base as Goa was in India, where the

Portuguese had defeated the local ruler to gain control


administered the place. In China, the Portuguese were

allowed to have a senate in Macau for determining internal

social and economic matters, but did not have self-

administration until 1840. In fact, the fragmentation and

tentative nature of the Portuguese presence in Asia is crucial

to understanding the ways in which the Portuguese and the

Spanish overlapped in their connections in the Pacific-Indian

Ocean worlds for they became part of the same Spanish

empire.

2) With the demise of the Portuguese ruling House of Aviz, in 1580,

and the takeover of Portugal by Spain until 1668, the

Portuguese and Spanish nexus regarding Asia, Africa and the

Americas overlapped. The asiento (the Spanish government’s

permission agreements to let all suppliers of slaves sell to

Spanish America, knit the two trading spheres together. The

Portuguese brought the Asian goods for the slave trade, while

American silver that lubricated the trade was delivered by the

Spanish.

3) The establishment of the Acapulco-Manila galleon was essential to

the completion of the global circuit. While attempts to

establish control of the archipelago of islands claimed by


Magellan and subsequently renamed the Las Islas Filipinas

in the 1540s, in honor of the Spanish monarch, Philip II of

Spain (1527-1598), the administrative apparatus of the

Philippines and the galleon trade were established some forty

years later by Miguel López de Legazpi sailing out from

Jalisco Mexico. He brought along in a convoy of ships,

some 2,100 Mexicans and Spanish to set up the colony.

Eventually in 1571, after making a peace pact with the local

rulers, he acquired from them land of the kingdom of

Maynilas, and built a walled city.

On the other side, Acapulco was set up as the port where the galleons

would come in. It had a sheltered bay and being slightly further south

was better connected by road to Veracruz on the Atlantic, and the royal

route to Mexico city.

The global nexus was now fully established for the silver of New Spain

to get to Asia, and the Silks, jewels, gold ornamentals, carved ivory,

Church vestments and porcelains and Spices from Asia to come to

New Spain and to be transported across the Atlantic to Spain. The

Pacific galleon trade continued between 1565 and 1815. Some Chinese

merchants also arrived in Acapulco in the early years of the galleon


trade. Until 1593, three or more ships, sometimes in convoys set sail,

but after merchants of Seville complained of the large amount of

Chinese silk and other goods coming in from Mexico to Spain and

driving them out of business, the number was limited to 2 galleon per

year, with an armed escort from Acapulco to Manila and back. But the

small number of ships is deceptive in terms of the volume of this

trade. Spanish and Portuguese long-distance ships were very large to

begin with. The imperial restrictions on how many ships could be

used on the trans-Pacific Acapulco-Manila trade made them

enormous, of 2,000 tons and able to carry 500 passengers.

The core of the galleon trade was a complementary economic nexus

of labor which explains why it would survive for as long as it did

without replacement. Only imperial Spain had access to the labor

needed for a) to the slaves miners and the silver of Potosi at one end,

and b) the Philippines hardwoods and Filipino labor at the other end.

Facilitating the exchange was the highly networked and well-

capitalized group of Fujianese merchants from the southeastern

Fujian province of China, who were the regular suppliers of the

Spanish and Portuguese outposts in the Pacific, including Manila.

Filipino labor was used to build the ships, supply crews of up to 180


men to manage the vast ships as they came over to Acapulco, and to

serve as soldiers when that became crucial for the Spanish in Asia

such as in the briefly held outposts in Taiwan and the “spice islands of

Tidore and Ternate. A number of Chinese and other Asian artisans

were also brought to Peru and Mexico to help build the many

architectural enterprises of empire.

Silver went the other way. Each year the galleon ships carried in no

less than 128 tons of American silver annually to Asia at a conservative

estimate. It was likely higher. According to John Tepaske, in 1597, 350

tons was smuggled out to Asia. This was in addition to the 150 tons of

silver that came into Asia via Europe, some of it shipped from

Veracruz. China, India, and the Southeast Asian states all producing

for the Atlantic world were awash in silver that circulated from region

to region within the Asian trading circuits.

A remarkable period of sustained prosperity began in Asia between

1650 and 1750. During this period, intra-Asian trade increased; as did

the import of European cosmopolitan goods that marked status-such

as clocks, velvet clothing, mirrors etc. New ruling houses came to

power where the monarchs opened ports for foreign trade, while

making sure that the benefits accrued to the royal coffers. In many


ways the practices of these Asian monarchs were similar to the

controls on foreign trade exercised by the Spanish and Portuguese

rulers. Efforts to extend revenue flows, however, also led to wars,

especially in South and Southeast Asia, fragmenting imperial control

of the larger states. In the Pacific, in contrast, with its rivals defeated

the Qing Manchu state in China (1644-1911) was beginning its

remarkable ascendency with the reign of the Kangxi Emperor

commencing in 1661. Although it would take another twenty years for

the Qing to fully assert their power and control over southern China

and bring the island of Taiwan under their authority, the Kangxi

emperor reversed the policies of the predecessor Ming state regarding

foreign trade. He was quite willing to expand it by letting foreign

traders come to designated ports; but with more of the profits

accruing directly the imperial household than the state treasury. In the

Indian Ocean, intensifying rivalries between Catholic and Protestant

monarchs in Europe often played out in property shifts in Asia. In one

such deal to strengthen the Catholic alliance in Europe, the

Portuguese generously gave their princess Catherine of Barganza

marrying Charles II in 1662, a nice little dowry of an island on the west

coast of India with a particularly good harbor called often called Bom

baim/ Bom bahia by them, or Bombay as the British would call it.


This inheritance suddenly gave the English an independent base on

the west coast of India, unlike its rivals the French and the Dutch who

had only had port bases on the east coast of the subcontinent, which

left the Dutch in particular with some disadvantages. Anglo-Dutch

rivalry in Asia would enter a new phase in the following decades, with

the main theater of the rivalries and wars playing out in the Americas.

Section III : Private Traders and The Emergence of a British Atlantic:

the 1670s-1680s in World Perspective

The end of the English Civil War (1651), the passage of the first

Navigation Act ( 1651) that barred the Netherlands from participating

in the lucrative trade between England and its Caribbean colonies, and

the capture of Jamaica from the Spanish ( 1655) had already begun a

power shift in the Atlantic that was to have important repercussions for

the formation of private trade from the Colonies. With the capture the

fort of Jamaica, the English acquired the single largest new sugar

economy island to add to their string of Caribbean holdings. Sugar

cane cultivation with its demands for more slaves began in earnest in

the Caribbean.


Next, in 1673, the British defeated the other rival in the Atlantic, the

Dutch. In their retreat from the New Netherlands, and the surrender

of the Mid Atlantic states ( New York, New Jersey, Delaware,

Connecticut and outposts in Rhode Island and Pennsylvania) to the

British, the American equation for the English was permanently

changed. New Amsterdam, that had been the capital of New

Netherlands was renamed New York by the victorious British. These

new spoils of war, was soon distributed through royal charters the then

Duke of York, ( soon to be King James II). A successful real estate

entrepreneur, William Penn, whose father with the same name had

helped capture Jamaica for the British, was given the royal charter, and

named the new colony the “forests of the Penn” or Pennsylvania.

Philadelphia would become the center of the “China trade” for the

next century and a half, its financial and personal networks extending

throughout the New England and mid Atlantic cluster of English

colonies all the way down to the Chesapeake Bay. Importantly, from

our point of view, at the conclusion of the Anglo Dutch wars, the

British agreed to let the Dutch have Surinam as part of the same treaty

that secured New York. The Dutch base in the Caribbean, Surinam in

particular, would become a new nexus of trade with Asia for New

Yorkers and Rhode Islanders. Colonial Americans now were linked to


a direct line of sailing between the Spice Islands, Batavia, South Africa

and Suriname. They could by-pass England’s controls, at least for a

while.

It was but a step for private traders to find adventurers willing to sail a

bit further afield than the West Indies. For example, the Boston-born

Governor Elihu Yale, of Yale University fame, the English East India

Company representative in Madras for twenty years, complained

frequently about a new development: “home grown adventurers”

coming out to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Yale made a pretty

pound himself through silver and gold arbitrage trading secretly with

Madras, Manila and Canton merchants. As a EIC official, thorough

out the 1680s-1690s, Yale reported being constantly “troubled by

pirates fitted out in the West Indies;” home-grown adventurers from

South Carolina, Boston, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

Known as the “Red Sea men” for the fortunes they made robbing in

the Red Sea area of the Indian Ocean, many veered off from

adventuring to becoming stalwart citizens in the new world of the

Americas. These interlopers can be understood as the first group of

private traders from the Americas to challenge the monopolies of the

East India Company.


At the beginning of the 1700s, the power of the English in Asia, and

that of their East India Company, a hundred years after its charter was first

granted, was still quite limited. In India, British power, like that of the

French and the Dutch and Portuguese, was confined to port townships, where

the fortified enclaves were run by each of the European rivals, who colluded

and cooperated with local lords to topple their European rivals. The Mughal

court, in far away Delhi seldom bothered with these local petty matters, as long

as the Europeans brought the requisite amount of gifts. In south east Asia,

the European companies fared better in the size and variety of their colonial

holdings, specially the Dutch in Indonesia and Sri Lanka which were wealthy

holdings. In China it could only be said that the British had arrived, but were

yet to find a seat at the table.

But then, the shift in the power balance of global trade and a new

colonial empire would develop very quickly, with the “First World War”, as

Churchill called the Seven Years War, known also as the French and Indian

Wars (1757-63). This war changed the equation for private traders from the

Americas to Asia, and much else besides. The decline of the Mughal imperial

center in Delhi accelerating from the 1730s onwards, had left several local lords

contesting for power. The Asian theater of the Seven Years war drew in the

French and French supported local lords into direct conflict with the British,


and British supported local lords. The outcome was entirely in British favor,

and this began the colonization of India in 1757. The loss of one set of

colonies, the American ones, was thus off set by the acquisition of another.

India would be the largest imperial asset of the British empire. But this was

not going to be a settler colony as the Americas had been; transforming its

economy for Britain’s benefit would enter a new phase with large scale

cultivation of commercial crops, the chief among them being opium.

Section IV: New Worlds: American Private Traders and Asia: 1750-1850

John Brown , (1736-1803), of Rhode Island was one the new merchants

of the post 1750s world. Merchants like him were already trading extensively

with the West Indies and beginning ventures to Surinam. When the British

colonial government introduced the Stamp Act, the Sugar Act and other

measures to raise revenues after the Seven Year’s War, dissatisfaction soon

coalesced into open rebellion, and the rest as we know is history. Asia trade,

beginning with India, was part of the new world also for American traders

hoping to make their fortunes, and a speedy entry followed independence.

The reminder that I want to bring to the narrative, is that contrary to

the idea that the Asian trade was a bold new step beyond the safe coastal

shipping of the Thirteen Colonies, is that John Brown, and many others from


Rhode Island, Philadelphia, etc. were already quite familiar with the

transatlantic routes. After all, Rhode Island traders headed the list of North

American slave traders. Of the over 300,000 slaves transported on American

ships, the vast majority were brought by Rhode Islanders while capital, family

and personal connections flowed between New York, Providence, Boston,

Philadelphia and Baltimore in this and other maritime ventures. A particularly

potent variety of rum, Newport rum was developed for the slave trade. But

like every other slave trader before them, the colonial and newly independent

Americans also had to find Asian textiles with which to trade in Africa. Some,

brought these textiles in Surinam from the Dutch bringing it in from Asia to

Surinam directly by-passing Amsterdam. Other colonial Americans involved in

the slave trade, made the purchase in the Spanish and French Caribbean

colonies. The French were beginning to produce indiennes or fake Asian

textiles in Nantes from 1759 onwards. And some from New England became

direct manufacturers. Massachusetts firms, the best documented of which are

the Jacksons and the Lee Company, of Newburyport, began to specialize in

goods for the Africa trade providing both rum and textiles to Rhode Islanders.

From the mid-18th century until the middle of the next, the Jackson and Lees

were among the most prominent of Calcutta and Madras American firms

specializing in “Guinea cloth” that they sold to Philadelphia traders. Their

letters show that they were manufacturing in Madras.


The capital and the ships from the slave trade were also a resource for

the Asia traders. While ship-building expanded in the newly independent US,

the same ships working as slavers and China trade ships, with the same

captains also show up with regularity in the West Africa trade, and the Canton

trade in the decades between 1784 to 1810. Many merchants alternated between

the slave trade and the China trade, from Robert Morris to Edward Carrington

as they moved capital from one venture to the other.

After 1784, and independence, nearly all the coastal ports of New

England and the Mid-Atlantic were involved in some aspect of the China trade

with major trading groups developing in Philadelphia, Salem, Boston, New

York, Providence and Baltimore shortly after. Even smaller towns, such as

Middletown Connecticut were linked through individuals who joined firms

elsewhere, or through shipbuilding for the China trade.

Initially, anybody who could sail a sloop or a brig tried to go Canton.

The size of the ships varied from the Empress of China at 360 tons in 1784,

and the “Experiment” a sloop the next year at 80 tons. But since the vessels at

Canton were charged a flat fee, regardless of tonnage, that was to the

advantage of the East India Company Ships which were more in the range of

1000 plus tons, it did not pay Americans to send over small sloops and brigs.


Tabulations collating English, Dutch and French sources, show that

the number of American ships coming into Canton and Macao between 1784-

1814 were almost one third more the number than had been previously thought

when the English sources alone are used. The earlier figure was 491 based on

Canton Factory Records. The new figure is 618. The India Trade, the

Southeast Asian trade and the Canton trade would converge, all labeled “China

Trade” for that attracted investors: it was a code word for the high profits to be

made.

But what to sell to China? This was a problem that affected all traders

to the China trade. The Americans fared better than the English for they still

had access to Mexican silver. But the most profitable of the trade goods, given

its high value that a small shipment sufficed to bring profits was opium. The

slave traders soon shifted to becoming opium traders, and joining them were

many new traders who were entering the global trading world for the first time.

The importance of opium and its demand lay in its multiple uses, both

necessity medicine cabinet item and a recreational drug that could become

addictive. Every ship’s medicine cabinet had to contain opium for its

properties as a pain killer and anti-diarrheal. Widely used as an anesthetic, it

was essential on the battlefield, and on plantations, should a slave arm or hand

be caught in the cane-grinding machines. Mixed with brandy, it was used as


laudanum to soothe nerves, coughs and dozens of other uses. But expanding

its cultivation into a major export commodity, a monopoly of the company

much in the way the English had expanded tobacco cultivation in the early

days of colonial Virginia, was a different scale of production. The logic of the

market dominated here to expand the recreational drug use among as many as

possible.

Charles Cornwallis, who after losing at Yorktown, and a brief sojourn

in Ireland had become Governor General of India had implemented the EIC’s

monopoly on Indian opium cultivation, soon the major English export

commodity to China. This trade was conducted with full knowledge of the

EIC, but carried on “country-ships” as the intra-Asian trade coastal trade was

called to avoid questions back in the British Parliament. The opium traders

were primarily English, Indians and Americans and their Chinese counterparts

who acquired the opium as payment for the goods such as tea and silk that the

foreign traders wanted. American traders, used to coastal smuggling and

privateering, with skills sharpened during the Revolutionary War, easily

adapted to opium smuggling along the China coast. Buying opium from

Turkey and the Indian regions not under British control, while creating new

partnerships with Asian traders, the Americans soon rivaled the British. But

what made the China opium trade more profitable than the other areas of its


sale, was that as a smuggled item, its prices were volatile, and high profits

made because the state did not tax it and unable to stem its import.

In these early days after Independence, Anglo- American rivalries in

the trading ports of Asia made trading with the American attractive for many

Chinese and Indian merchants. The Forbes family of Boston for example

would do very well through their friendship and personal service to Howqua,

or Wu Bingjian, the wealthiest of the imperially authorized Chinese merchants

at Canton and one of the richest men in the world.

Americans brought silver, but also bills of exchange drawn on London

banks to Asia to pay for the tea and other China goods. The trade in bills, a

staple of the Atlantic slave-trading networks became by the 1820s, the chief

American import into China and India. Chinese merchants, on friendly terms

with the Americans, used these bills to transfer money from China to invest in

America, one of the highest-return markets in the world. Both Americans and

their Chinese friends started side-stepping the monopoly controls affecting

profits of the East India Company. Wu transferred $500,000 to the U.S. in a

single investment in 1837 through friend and amanuensis John Murray Forbes,

railroad entrepreneur. These were invested in the Michigan Central Railroad

and Wu’s family would get annual profits sent to them for the rest of the

century.


Wu treated his American friends well. Here is the menu from the feast

for Warren Delano, FDR’s grandfather who made his fortune not once, but

twice over in the China opium trade

20 January, 1842. Canton. “…15 courses – bird’s nest soup—sharkfins—pigeons eggs—quail &c—

sturgeon’s lip etc. We were 13 hours getting thro’…. It is many years since Houqua has given a Chinese dinner at his own house ….” Warren Delano farewell dinner at Wu Bingjian’s (Houqua)

(1 Delano Family Papers, Edward Delano, Diaries (1842) Warren Delano was FDR’s grandfather)

For an entire generation of American traders, the opium trade became

the shortest route to acquiring a “competency” that is a $100,000 profit. It took

only 18 months for Robert Bennet Forbes to get his capital together for

investments in Americas. Profits from the Opium trade were translated into

capital for banks, railroads, textile mills, and canal construction in the new

high-return economy of the US.

The transatlantic slave trade and the China trade would come full circle

with the emancipation of slaves in the British and Spanish colonies in the

Caribbean. The ships used for the slave trade to the Caribbean were refitted

for transporting almost a million Asian indentured labor, primarily from China

and India to the Americas. The first generation of Asian labor would enter the

plantations and mines of the Americas in conditions that were not yet removed


from slavery. The nexus between slave trading, textiles and opium trading had

come full circle.

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Documents

Draft PLEASE DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION OF AUTHOR ... · Os Lusiadas by Luiz Vaz de Camões ( first printing 1572) is to be believed, Sucheta Mazumdar, Slaves, Textiles and Opium,