Colonial Commerce Research Articles

From Ancient Threads to Colonial Commerce: The Evolution of West Bengals Silk Industry from Mythical Origins to Independence

Silk production, or sericulture, has a rich history that is frequently eclipsed by its modern applications. Sericulture began in ancient China approximately 3000 BC and this was a well held secret until it spread to Korea, India and eventually the West through a variety of causes, including royal intrigue and missionary endeavours. By the Han Dynasty, silk had evolved from a luxury item to a valuable economic asset, impacting trade and culture throughout Asia and Europe. India's silk industry, as documented in ancient scriptures, progressed from early wild silk production in the Himalayan foothills to sophisticated mulberry sericulture by the 2nd century BCE. The Mughal dynasty improved Indian silk traditions by incorporating several weaving techniques and nurturing a thriving business in Kashmir and Bengal. From 1612 to 1858, the East India Company capitalised on Bengal's silk potential by building trading centres and using Piedmontese reeling technology to improve quality. Despite initial hurdles, Bengal silk became a major export commodity, but colonial policies and technological shifts eventually led to its demise. Silk output fell dramatically after independence due to a variety of economic and geopolitical issues. This article investigates the growth of India's silk industry, focussing on Bengal's key role and examines the effects of colonial control, technological advancements and the sector's trajectory up to Independence.

Thick as Thieves: Mothers, Gypsies, & Criminals in Enola Holmes’ Victorian England

In her 2006 Young Adult novel, The Case of the Missing Marquess, Nancy Springer narrativises Enola Holmes as Sherlock Holmes’ intrepid and extraordinarily intelligent sister, a young woman with the ability to challenge even that great detective's iconic deductive abilities. I suggest that this overtly feminist impulse in rewriting the Victorian world of Conan Doyle is supplemented in Springer's novel with a nod toward the politics of intersectionality which attends to the ways in which gendered, class-based, and racialised identities become relational in an axiomatics of capitalist-colonialism. Particularly in conversation with Conan Doyle's 1892 short story, ‘The Adventure of the Speckled Band’, Springer's narrative takes a meta-critical neo-Victorian stance in encouraging its young audience to do three important things: first, mine the subtext of Conan Doyle's detective fiction for the broad anxieties it points to in imperial Victorian culture; second, probe the conditions of colonial commerce under which identities based in gender, race, and class differentials intersect with one another; and third, ask how to develop a decolonial praxis that in exposing such intersections, can avoid isolationist critical proclivities, and embrace instead a transnational and comparative sensibility of reading that is alive to at once specific and interrelated disempowerments.

Racial Capitalism in Voltaire’s Enlightenment

Abstract This essay argues that the concept of ‘racial capitalism’ can help us understand the connections between seemingly disparate parts of Voltaire’s extensive corpus of work. It contends that even though the Enlightenment’s racial politics abounded with contradictions and ambivalences, Voltaire stood out from his contemporaries. While the connections between his polygenism – the theory that humans of different races were created separately – and material investments in colonial commerce have long been debated by radical historians, this essay suggests that Voltaire’s views about race’s relationship to labour were transformed by France’s colonial losses during the Seven Years’ War.

Disposable World(s): Race and Commerce in Defoe's Captain Singleton

Abstract: In this essay, I examine Daniel Defoe's less well-known castaway novel, Captain Singleton (1720), in order to show how his fiction at once dramatizes and interrogates the view of colonial commerce he champions in his economic writings. I begin with the claim that Defoe presents a view of economic plenitude premised on the universal disposability of the world's resources—including persons, places, and things. According to this perspective, an object's utility derives from its capacity to be repositioned or repurposed in a new or different context. Captain Singleton translates this theory into fictional form, but in doing so it also reveals features of Defoe's thinking that were obscured in his economic writings. By juxtaposing acts of collective ingenuity and resourcefulness with acts of racialized enslavement, the novel suggests that each could be understood as operations of a commercial system that disregarded the meaning or integrity of individual lives and local sets of relations. I argue, finally, that the novel introduces a system of racialized enslavement whose function is to establish the relative worth of white humans—and their resistance to commercial disposability.

For Export: Buildings for Colonial Commerce in the Asia Pacific

ABSTRACT A lasting legacy of 19th-century colonialism in the Pacific and Southeast Asia is the fragmented historiography of the region’s colonial architecture. Historical studies of the built environment continue to adopt geographical frameworks corresponding to nation-states that emerged from colonial empires, overlooking the region’s intricate interconnectivity in the late nineteenth century. The establishment of industrial agriculture and commercial shipping routes opened up territories facilitating movement of goods, labour, capital and ideas. Crossing colonial boundaries, networks developed by commercial entities transformed the Asia Pacific region, leaving behind traces in buildings for trade, travel and export-oriented agriculture. This paper focuses on the architectural infrastructure of the interregional operations of the Australian firm Burns Philp, particularly its engagement with large-scale agricultural production: kapok manufacture in Java, copra estates in the Pacific, and wool production in Australia. Trade operations of Burns Philp and other major shipping companies including the Dutch Koninklijke Paketvaart-Maatschappij facilitated not only industrialisation of agriculture in Asia Pacific but also the development of tourism. Drawing on two collections of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographs of the Pacific and Southeast Asia, the paper examines images of mostly anonymous commercial built forms and reflects on how their production was informed by interconnectivity and movement.

Screening, Cheating and Revenge on Stage in 1721

ABSTRACT Drama historians have treated Sir Richard Steele's return to Drury Lane as the main event of London's theatre world in 1721 but the repertory is equally worthy of attention. In addition to new comedies that present and dissect the political and economic scamming and screening that enabled Robert Walpole's ascent to power, Aaron Hill's and Edward Young's innovative tragedies “Fatal Curiosity” and “The Revenge” explore the destructive implications of an emerging economy built on colonial commerce and the slave trade.

The political economy of the early-colonial Brahmaputra valley, circa 1820–1830

ABSTRACT The Treaty of Yandabo (1826) marked the colonial conquest of the Brahmaputra valley. Following two decades witnessed calculations and speculations about the prospect of the region as a part of the British colonial empire. Discovery of tea plants and the existence of tradable commodities such as cotton, silks and salt made the region look promising for the East India Company. The early-colonial rulers introduced policy changes in the1820 s and the 1830 s. Existing historiography on wasteland rules has clarified that these regulations were aimed at making land available for tea plantations. At the same time monetization of the region with one uniform currency was undertaken. This paper argues that in the face of these developments, commerce remained an important part of the economy, as before. Creation of a land market by wasteland regulations and uniform coinage facilitated the Empire’s trade and made the region a part of the colonial commerce.

“The British and the Trans-Saharan trade”: The Colonial State Policies in Undermining the Trans-Saharan trade in Hausa Land (Northern Nigeria), 1890s–1920s

The research examines the impact of British policies in undermining the trans-Saharan trade. The paper reassesses the position of the Northern Nigerian economy in relation to the new economic order introduced by the British. Issues discussed include the re-orientation in relation to the merchants; the basic concepts of colonial economy as defined by the British in Northern Nigeria. In addition, the paper highlights the colonial economy as distorted, characterized by the over growth of certain sectors needed by the colonial state i.e., foreign trade, while sectors connected with the indigenous markets i.e., cottage based production, local, regional or the trans-Saharan trade were neglected. In a nut shell, those activities (like the trans-Saharan trade) which could compete with colonial commerce or production were discouraged and prohibited directly or indirectly. In this respect, the trans-Saharan trade between Central Sudan and North Africa was stagnated during the colonial days and apparently, it was the same with trade within the West African sub-region. The distinctive feature in this context of an imperial economic system is that the colonial state had, within limits, created the formal framework for development in Northern Nigeria. This was what happened in the relationship between the mercantile class, the peasantry and the large expatriate firms who were backed by the colonial state and gained monopoly position to trade in raw materials and achieving their goals.

Regional derailment: the saga of the East African Railways

ABSTRACTDuring the colonial period of East Africa, railways represented the pre-eminence of colonial influence, commerce and unity within the region. The railways were not just the physical link that connected territories, but also created their own social and economic structures to support them that defined regional authority. Post-colonial East African leaders attempted to capitalize on this existing structure to build on regional bonds. However, the unity that was enforced during the colonial period had become untenable, as national interests within each member state prevented the strengthening of regional ties. This was reflected within one institution: East African Railways. The joys of independence and regional unity soon ran up against the economic and political difficulties between member states of the East African Community (EAC). The latent inequalities between member states could not be overcome and regional interests gave way to nationalistic ones. Within a decade after its founding, the East African Railways had collapsed along with the broader EAC. Decades later, a new EAC has arisen, and with it plans to expand the existing East African Railway network. Will the railways now become a symbol for regional unity or once again become a chess piece in promoting member state's national interests?

Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World, by Zara Anishanslin

Using a single material object, a portrait of a woman wearing an English silk damask gown in a North American colony, Zara Anishanslin lays out four biographical narratives to illustrate a ‘kind of additional empire’ within the British Atlantic World, showing how material objects left behind are evidence of a visual sensus communis (p. 11). The portrait reveals many things: the subject’s status as a ‘colonial woman of quality’ (p. 7); the role of women as both producers and consumers in the eighteenth century; the interconnectedness of metropolitan and colonial commerce; and the interactions between politics, economics, status and emulation during this period. The book is broken up into four main biographies, with the first two detailing the lives of the gown’s silk designer and weaver, and the second two parts discussing the portrait’s artist and sitter. But the book goes beyond the four individual stories; Anishanslin uses ‘the hidden histories captured within this portrait [to] tell tales of what wove the British Empire together, how it unraveled, and how new empires—on both sides of the Atlantic—came to be’ (p. 312). Although the designer and weaver had no personal contact with the wearer and the painter, the four are used to embody the breadth of the British Empire in the eighteenth century, and the ways in which commerce was wrapped up in imperial and social politics.

The Weight of Necessity: Counterfeit Coins in the British Atlantic World, circa 1760–1800

Though ubiquitous in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world, counterfeit coins have received little scholarly attention. This article reconstructs the imperial trade in counterfeit foreign coin in the latter half of the eighteenth century, a time when British and American merchants, ship captains, and even officials strategically exported bad coin to the Caribbean, profiting from the region's heterogeneous money supply and rapidly shifting economic and political conditions. Examining the counterfeit trade from Rhode Island to Jamaica in the 1770s and then from Birmingham to the eastern Caribbean in the 1790s highlights the trade's size, persistence, complexity, and eventual expansion from a colonial commerce to a metropolitan industry. Colonial governors', the Board of Trade's, and eventually Parliament's fraught attempts to demonetize bad coin reveal how embedded counterfeits were in economic life. Caribbean residents used bad coins in ways that best suited local circumstances, sometimes in implicit and sometimes in outright violation of metropolitan policy and the king's prerogative to regulate coin. Decades before the official rejection of commodity coin, people on the fringes of empire insisted that money's value came from ease of use and widespread acceptability, rather than metallic content. Debates about counterfeits thus became important sites for questioning the limits of metropolitan authority and the very definition of money itself.

Sea Changes: Maritime Men and the Law in the Global Atlantic World

Sea Changes:Maritime Men and the Law in the Global Atlantic World Molly A. Warsh (bio) Mark G. Hanna. Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570–1740. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2015. ix + 448 pp. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, and index. $45.00. Kevin P. McDonald. Pirates, Merchants, Settlers, and Slaves: Colonial America and the Indo-Atlantic World. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015. xii + 206 pp. Illustration, maps, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $60.00. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal. Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2015. 372 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Empires, religion, spices, slaves. Disease and death. Crusaders, traders, renegades, dissenters. Hybridity, metropoles, and peripheries. These are some of the keywords of three decades of pathbreaking Atlantic World scholarship in works that have revealed how the exchanges of the period from 1500 to 1800 knit together the people, places, and practices brought into contact by these disparate actors and impulses. Historians have traced how early Iberian imperial momentum gave way to the incursions of ambitious Northern European powers. The centrality of the trade in enslaved Africans; the devastation and, in places, recovery, of America’s indigenous people; the explosive politics and revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—these are all well-established narratives in our understanding of the emergence of the Atlantic World. What remains to be discovered? The answer provided by the three books under review here can be broadly characterized as twofold: first, “illegal” activity at sea—by so-called “pirates” or by press gangs unlawfully seizing mariners—played a critical role in the elaboration of politics and economies on land. Second, these seagoing men forged global pathways and practices that broaden our understanding of the boundaries of the Atlantic World. Although these books are very different in style and approach, each embraces seafarers as political actors. As Hanna and McDonald tell it, pirates are not renegades but colonial service providers; Perl-Rosenthal’s sailors are [End Page 524] rough and tumble diplomats at the forefront of citizenship debates. Through his consideration of the legality of various types of actions at sea, each author asks us to consider how the maritime world was both distinct from, and critical to, the development of the societies along its shores. Hanna and McDonald both focus on global piracy and colonial commerce from the perspective of the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century British Atlantic. McDonald’s embrace of world history as a meaningful challenge to the Atlantic World paradigm opens the door to questions of greater scope than his brief text (130 pages plus appendices) allows him to explore. Hanna offers a lengthy study of the centrality of illicit maritime activity to the economies and politics of colonial British America, leaving little doubt that “piracy” was business as usual by another name until the imperial goals and function of the British Empire shifted in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In tracing this trajectory, neither Hanna nor McDonald departs from Roy Ritchie’s classic study of Captain Kidd and the changing politics of piracy in England in the early eighteenth century; indeed, both acknowledge their debt to him. Perl-Rosenthal also looks at maritime men on the wrong side of ineffective laws, but in his case, the drama is neither imperial tensions nor global trade rivalries, but rather nation building and citizenship claims in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His protagonists are not pirates, per se, but seafarers determined to prove their allegiance to the new American nation on the fraught waters of post-Revolutionary years. In his telling, U.S. sailors forced the elaboration of new forms of national identification amidst impressment controversies in the wake of the American Revolution. Determined to claim nationality based on personal politics rather than birth or native language, U.S. mariners helped forge an unprecedentedly broad view of citizenship on land that was expressed in maritime passports for American citizens regardless of race. McDonald’s book is the most global-minded of the three, and his explicit intellectual engagement with world history...

Chronology and Use of Guatemalan Maiolica: Ceramics as Reducción in the Izalcos Region of El Salvador

Maiolica (tin-enameled earthenware) was a staple of daily life for serving food and drink, as well as other household purposes, in Spain and Spanish America throughout the colonial period. Examining choices in ceramic styles is one way to examine the colonial policies of reduccion, which were to instill a regular, commonplace Christian order in everyday life. The Rio Ceniza Valley of western El Salvador, the heartland of the Nahua-speaking Pipil polity known as the Izalcos, was a center of Spanish colonial commerce in Guatemala. This research presents a typology and chronology of Guatemalan maiolica, the stylistic similarities of its maiolica types to trends in Europe, and frequencies in rural vs. urban use, based on an ample collection of 16th- to 19th-century Guatemalan maiolica from extensive survey and excavations. The relative importance of maiolica vs. maiolica attributes on indigenous-made pottery gives a view into daily life under extreme conditions of colonialism and the process of reduccion.

Gungubele and the Tambookie Location 1853–1877: End of a Colonial Experiment

This article brings a fresh perspective to colonial encounter in the north-eastern Cape frontier through the story of Gungubele, chief of a senior Thembu clan living in the southern part of the Tambookie location. Queenstown and the Tambookie location were established as twin colonial projects at the end of the seventh frontier war. While the location evolved as a prototype experiment in peasant agriculture and freehold tenure, the white town provided a locus for settler colonial commerce and magisterial control over the district that encompassed the Tambookie location. Both projects were creations of frontier conflict, and tensions simmered. Boers coveted the land granted to Africans in the district, and residents of Queenstown struggled to align their dependence on indigenous people with their desire to distance themselves from them. African inhabitants of the Tambookie location chafed at their confinement in a tiny corner of the vast territory from which they had been routed. In 1856–67, the episode known as the Great Cattle Killing shifted economic power relations and created a new dependence on the white colonists. Making use of this vulnerability in the mid 1860s, colonial authorities attempted to relocate Africans further away from Queenstown in order to free up land for further colonial settlement. When this strategy failed, they fell back on the hope of drawing Africans into settler capitalist development, and began tinkering with the system of land tenure, imposing taxes and appointing compliant headmen. Tensions exploded in 1877, when the Queenstown magistracy clashed with Gungubele, setting in motion the final tragic showdown between the colonists and the Tambookie location. The moment came to define the hardening character of settler colonialism on the north-eastern frontier and inexorably altered relations both within African society and between colonist and colonised.

The formation of a social Hispanic Atlantic space and the integration of merchant communities following the Treaties of Utrecht

Current research into Spanish commercial expansion in the Americas has recently turned to a new consideration of space as a historical category. In fact, when the interconnecting processes are analysed, one of the most striking phenomena is the actual “production of the space” in which a wide variety of exchanges took place. This production/creation of space becomes obvious in Spanish colonial commerce. This article discusses the theoretical framework for this spatial perspective, and analyses the impact that this construction of space on the organization of routes and on network formation, as well as its evolution within the institutional context following the Treaties of Utrecht.

Changes in the Genre

William Pencak, editor of Pennsylvania History , wrote in 1996: Pennsylvania’s history cannot be understood without reference to the regions around it. Pennsylvania’s role in the development of the Southern backcountry and the Ohio Valley, trade and culture in the Delaware Valley, and the contrasting rise of New York and Pennsylvania as the nation’s leading industrial and commercial states in the nineteenth century are only three obvious areas in which understanding Pennsylvania benefits from a regional perspective. Pencak was explaining to readers why the journal had decided no longer to focus narrowly on Pennsylvania history, but rather, as its new subtitle would declare, to become A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies . Pencak’s stated reasons focus explicitly on aspects of cultural, social, and economic history, but his observation that the history of Pennsylvania cannot be fully understood without reference to broader regional trends holds just as true for environmental history. Rivers and streams, winds and rain, migratory wildlife and the commercial incentives that so often drive human-environmental interactions are notoriously poor observers of political boundaries.

ASE Address 2011: An Ethnohistory of Things: Or, How to Treat California's Canastromania

Canastromania was a word coined by Smithsonian curator Otis Tufton Mason to capture the early twentieth-century fascination with American Indian basketry. Presented as the American Society for Ethnohistory presidential address at the epicenter of this collecting craze—Pasadena, California—this essay high-lights the basket business of a Pasadena dealer named Grace Nicholson. The study of material things has long been a vital part of ethnohistory, especially for understanding the influence of colonial commerce on indigenous societies. When applied to the movement of baskets and other objects from Indian communities a century ago—into private and public collections, for aesthetic and scientific purposes—an ethnohistorical approach finds intersections of exchange within Nicholson's extensive correspondence that reveal a complex web of relationships among buyers and sellers.

Private Credit in Eighteenth-Century New York City: The Mayor’s Court Papers, 1681-1776

This article considers eighteenth-century urban credit and its relationship to social context and commerce from the perspective offered by two thousand private credit agreements preserved in complaints filed to initiate suits in the New York City Mayor’s Court from the late seventeenth century to the eve of the American Revolution. The complaints cover the gamut of urban colonial commerce, from mundane local exchanges to ambitious and high-value ventures aimed at overseas markets. Some of the complaints run to as many as seventeen pages, but many are cast in formulaic terms over two or three manuscript sheets. The loss of most of the city’s eighteenth-century tax records make it difficult to produce a comprehensive assessment of the litigants’ social and economic status. But the patterns that do emerge from the aggregate glimpses of everyday practice give some sense of the city’s distinctive credit market. Previous studies of neighbouring colonies have noted the increasing use of paper instruments and a shift to restrictive common law pleading in debt which, it is argued, provided creditors with greater commercial certainty and confidence and thereby nurtured the expansion of trade. However, in New York the complaints indicate that city traders retained a preference for dealing on account and presented their suits in the more flexible common law form of assumpsit, casting the city’s economic and legal change in a different light. What we can glimpse of the practices and procedures associated with different forms of borrowing, indicate a local market that depended on inter-related household exchange and a commercial rationale that balanced considerations of profit with wider but cautiously-reckoned social obligations. For example, comparing the usual repayment terms available in the city with those offered wealthier borrowers, and the credit agreed between two upriver fur dealers and their Native American partners, reveals the city’s credit market as a relatively conservative provider of support for residents and the able-bodied, thereby ensuring minimal public out-relief, which offered limited opportunities for investment and social mobility, even for those from within local circles.

Mercados y comercio informal en el Chile de la transición de colonia a república

The present study focuses on the analysis of the informal business (popular business) that existed in Chile in the transition between the colonial to the republican period. This means observing the foundations of the colonial commerce not only in terms of the flow of products, but also in connection to those small merchants that carried out their activities occasionally or permanently, and in connection to the “consumers”. Still, this form of business cannot be understood in isolation from the formal business sphere or having just one set of features throughout the colonial territory. Santiago, as the capital, as well as cities, intermediates villages, and rural towns had their own dynamics and behaviors, and there was a frequent intermingle between the presence and interests of bureaucrats, merchants, land owners, and the ordinary people. Altogether, the informal business was a market that, although precarious, functioned with its own dynamics within the colonial system and that in many ways continued to exist with the republican era.

Regulation, rent‐seeking, and the Glorious Revolution in the English Atlantic economy

The rapid rise of England's colonial commerce in the late seventeenth century expanded the nation's resource base, stimulated efficiency improvements across the economy, and was important for long‐term growth. However, close examination of the interests at play in England's Atlantic world does not support the Whiggish view that the Glorious Revolution played a benign role in this story. In the decades after the Restoration, the cases of the Royal African Company and the Spanish slave trade in Jamaica are used to show that the competition between Crown and Parliament for control of regulation constrained interest groups on either side in their efforts to capture the profits of empire. Stuart ‘tyranny’ was not able to damage growth and relatively competitive (and peaceful) conditions underpinned very rapid increases in colonial output and trade. The resolution of the rules of the Atlantic game in 1689 allowed a consolidated state better to manipulate and manage the imperial economy in its own interests. More secure rent‐seeking enterprises and expensive wars damaged growth and European rivals began a process of catch‐up. The Glorious Revolution was not sufficient to permanently halt economic development but it was sufficient to slow progress towards industrial revolution.