Frank J. Lechner
In 1670, one Francis Price, a former British officer, filed a patent on a piece of land in central Jamaica he named Worthy Park, which was to become a large sugar plantation that survived into the twentieth century. Fifteen years before, British troops had expelled the Spanish from the island; with the government’s encouragement, would‐be planters like Price now moved into the countryside to make the victory pay off. That proved difficult. As in other parts of the New World, the island’s native inhabitants had been decimated by European germs, leaving no indigenous labor force. In spite of modest Spanish efforts to grow sugar in the West Indies, Jamaica had no viable economy, which meant that the British had to start nearly from scratch. The island lacked the infrastructure that would make plantations immediately profitable. To purchase land, prepare it for production, and buy provisions, entrepreneurs needed capital, which they had to borrow on stiff terms from financiers back home. From the outset, they were in debt to bankers and merchants, for whom risky loans at high interest were good business. While the home country provided capital, it offered few willing or even indentured workers. Soon after, slaves solved the labor shortage: in 1670 Jamaica already had nearly 8,000 out of a total population of about 13,700, within half a century they would outnumber whites ten to one. In the 1700s some 600,000 entered Jamaica altogether, with several hundred laboring at Worthy Park itself in any one year. As sugar production there shifted into high gear after 1700, under the direction of Francis Price’s son Charles, Worthy Park became a major node in a transatlantic network.
Worthy Park kept some cattle for fertilizer, had some small vegetable plots, and set aside land for a house, offices, and slave quarters, but most of it was devoted to one thing only: growing sugar cane. In an annual cycle, slaves supervised by an overseer would tend to the fields and cut the cane, to be processed in the on‐site factory run by more skilled slaves who squeezed the juice from the cane and then boiled it to crystallize the sugar, using the by‐product for rum. All metal equipment came from Britain. Because Worthy Park did not grow its own food, that had to be imported as well: some supplies came from the American mainland colonies, salted herring for the slaves from the Dutch. Since few slave infants survived to working age, planters like the Prices constantly had to buy new arrivals from Africa. They rarely had ready cash to pay for all this and borrowed money instead, pledging part of their land or crops as collateral. Capital flowed through their hands to food suppliers and slave traders and African slave sellers – and often right back to other home‐country financiers. Sugar made the network work: as the British public developed its sweet tooth, sugar imports exceeded all other colonial crops in volume and value, reaching 100,000 “hogsheads” by 1730, most of which the British consumed themselves. Worthy Park produced several hundred of these hogsheads, earning up to about £10,000 a year.
Many parties, on all sides of the Atlantic, had a piece of the sugar action. They were actors in a globalizing market, at the crest of the first wave of globalization. In this wave, a taste for sweetened food spread in Europe, which consumed more than 240,000 tons a year by 1800. In England alone, consumption increased by more than 400 percent, from four to eighteen pounds per person, in the eighteenth century. Everyone involved in the Britain–Africa–New World triangle depended on the others, seeking riches through commerce, producing commodities for distant markets, and financially tied to a few sources of capital. Rules of production and finance were gradually worked out, turning the slave‐sugar trade into a new economic system. At the heart of it all, the sugar plantation was a “pioneer institution of capitalist development.” While the Atlantic triangle was not strictly global, many participants expanded their horizons, literally and figuratively. Jamaica itself was in a sense a product of this early globalization, a “sugar island” in the “West Indies,” defined by Europeans in terms of its function for the emerging system but also a “creole” community resulting from cultural exchange in which slaves had an important role.
The wave had started not with a desire for sugar but with a search for spices (though sugar itself was long considered a “spice”). Seeking access to the Asian spice trade by sailing west to evade Mongol blockage, circumvent Islamic lands, and outrace the Portuguese, Christopher Columbus had landed on a nearby island, thinking he had reached India. Others followed, lured not by spices but by the prospect of finding silver and gold. Besides precious metals they brought new foods home: potatoes and tomatoes entered the European diet. In the early part of the wave, far‐flung regions for the first time exchanged foods globally. When the Portuguese reached China, for example, they introduced maize, sweet potatoes, and peanuts, crops that later would help to sustain China’s population boom. They brought back sugar cane from Asia for planting on São Tomé and other islands. On his second voyage, Columbus himself took sugar cane from the Canary Islands to the New World, where in the 1500s it proved a suitable crop first on Santo Domingo, then in Brazil. From modest beginnings, it grew into a major crop. On the other side of the globe, meanwhile, Europeans gained a foothold in Asia, using their superior power to enforce positive terms of trade in spices, tea, and other goods. The fruits of global ventures in both hemispheres mixed in British cups in the form of sweetened tea, its combination of exotic ingredients eventually defined as typically British. European trade thus linked the hemispheres in an entirely new way. Aware of the connections, at least the elite began to see the world whole, a global consciousness evident in geographical treatises and in maps and globes made for European seafarers and power brokers that for the first time included most regions of the world.
Commerce and Christian fervor, the lust for money and the urge to save souls, channeled the first wave. But states were deeply involved from the beginning, starting with Iberian monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella sponsoring Columbus’s journey. Sugar, too, reflected state power. After all, British force claimed Caribbean islands for British planters. Sugar production there resulted from a power struggle with Spain. Having seized control of Jamaica, the British government stimulated sugar production via land grants. It controlled the trade by requiring planters to sell in the home market while at the same time protecting them against foreign competition – a hallmark of the “mercantile” system. As an interest group, the plantocracy gained influence in Parliament, which passed favorable laws. In Jamaica itself, they dominated the Assembly, using public power to serve their interests. British naval forces patrolled shipping lanes and British power long backed the slave trade as well. By charging duties, the Crown more than made up for its expenses. If the colonial trade worked to the disadvantage of the British public, since freer trade might have lowered prices and stimulated innovation, both special interest groups and the government itself profited handsomely. In part due to sugar’s appeal, the Caribbean became one focus in the struggle for global dominance between Britain and France. Immediately after Britain prevailed in 1763, depressing French production, Jamaican sugar experienced its golden age. Throughout the first wave, the process of making and selling sugar thus unfolded “under the wing of the state.” Not just the sugar trade flourished. With “the full weight of the state behind them,” English traders did well in many parts of the world, as Britain turned from plain old conquest to building a commercial empire.
In the first wave of globalization, more people became more globally connected in more ways than ever before. They could taste the links in the tea drunk in Britain, the tobacco smoked in France, the peanuts in Chinese dishes, or the herring given to Jamaican slaves. Global connections thus changed the daily lives of millions. The links grew along with new crops in new places – potatoes in the Netherlands, maize in China, sugar in the Caribbean. Globalization thus also changed the world in a very physical sense, especially through New World crops in China and India. The new links benefited some and harmed many others. British planters and traders were among the winners, Native Americans and African slaves among the losers. Early globalization thus began to create a global hierarchy. The links were mostly the work of Europeans, with Britain gaining a leading role. British power served as a driving force in and was much enhanced by globalization. Though there were still few “international rules of engagement,” Britain began to make some. The case of Jamaica illustrates the legacy of the first wave, when in more parts of the globe economic activity focused on producing commodities for the world market, whites came to view themselves as superior to other races, and English began to serve as the lingua franca.
Caught up in several long‐distance flows of people, money, and goods, Worthy Park was part and parcel of this globalization. But we cannot make too much of the example. Though over time more Europeans used more sugar, it remained a luxury product through the 1600s and even by 1800 was still a small part of their overall diet. Most people got most of their food from places nearby, and foreign trade overall comprised only a few percent of the British economy. For all the brutal drama of the slave trade, only a small minority of Africans moved across the ocean; relatively few white Europeans made similar treks as migrants or sailors. Information and goods moved slowly – it took a Jamaican shipment of sugar several weeks to reach London, and by modern standards the speed did not increase greatly for centuries – effectively separating regions and societies in spite of the growing links. Britain came to dominate the “Euro‐American world system” that included Jamaica but in the 1700s it had yet to make its mark on the very different “China‐centered East Asian world system.”
The continents were connected, to be sure, partly because Europeans used New World resources to gain advantage in Asia, which has tempted some to argue that the start of direct shipments of silver from South America to the Philippines makes 1571 the year globalization was “born.” But the link was still fairly loose, and since European powers had further carved up the world into imperial zones, the world market was weakly integrated at best. So was world culture: “Western” religion and practices took hold in the New World, but the encounters of civilizations in Asia left regional cultures there mostly intact. Westerners learned much about others but many others did not reciprocate this interest: “[o]utside Europe, interest in foreign lands remained relatively small.” In spite of the new maps and globes available to a Western reading public, this was still “a world that did not understand itself” – the maps and globes themselves contained many blank spots. Its web of connection was still small, thin, and fragile.
None of this detracts from the significance of the first wave. Its legacy set the stage for the next one, in which industrializing Western countries dramatically diverged from others. Early globalization concentrated greater power and resources in the hands of Europeans, helping to create the conditions for further advances. “[T]he remarkable innovations of the Industrial Revolution would not have had the deep and sustained consequences that they did if British industry had not operated within the [previously developed] global framework of sources of raw materials and markets for finished products.” To embellish the point slightly, “[g]lobalization made the Industrial Revolution,” not least by giving British textile makers a powerful incentive to compete with more efficient Indian exporters. The prime, though unintended, British creation of the first wave, the newly independent United States, would also come to play a global role.
In 1875, the Amenia and Sharon Land Company, a group of American investors, bought 28,000 acres from the Northern Pacific Railroad in Cass County, North Dakota. In return for the right to sell large tracts along new lines – 25,600 acres for each mile of railroad – the company had built track from Minnesota into the Dakota Territory in the early 1870s, crossing the Red River of the North in 1872 and reaching Bismarck by June 1873. Where the railroad went, settlers quickly followed: in 1870, the Dakota side of the river valley counted only 2,405 residents, by 1890 the population of the new state of North Dakota had grown to over 190,000. They came not only from more crowded states to the east but also from Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia, where the railroad company advertised its good land. As an agent for the railroad company put it, the settlers “rapidly converted the raw prairie into a great field of waving grain.” Wheat proved a hardy and bountiful crop in the relatively arid and flat North Central region. By the end of the century, the area produced over 440 million bushels or about two‐thirds of America’s wheat crop. In North Dakota alone, over 4 million acres were devoted to wheat, increasing to over 8 million by 1910. When the railroad company ran into financial difficulty, investors like those who made up the Amenia and Sharon exchanged their bonds for portions of its land grants, joining the Great Dakota Boom and eventually accumulating some 58,000 acres. The boom was really a global one, just one instance of how new means of transportation and communication helped new people settle distant places in ways that would link them far more tightly to the world at large.
Rather than divide its holdings into traditional family farms – a tenant system did develop in the 1890s – the Amenia and Sharon created a new kind of business, the large‐scale, professionally managed, for‐profit “bonanza” farm. Most of the absentee owners in Connecticut knew and cared little about farming but one of the company directors, E. W. Chaffee, went west to make a go of farming the land it had acquired. Though instructed simply to prepare the property for profitable sale, Chaffee was seized by a vision of the land’s potential. He hired a professional sod buster to get started. He built lodging for the workers he hired as needed, season by season. To make optimal use of the workers and increase the return on capital, he bought new machinery – ploughs, binders, and threshers, some steam‐powered. Given the scale of the operation, with dozens of horses and more than a hundred men in the fields during busy periods, he had to institute clear procedures. Strict accounting by a full‐time bookkeeper was essential to keep track of costs and revenues; any activity that was not profitable would have to be changed. Chaffee branched out into elevators, creating an agricultural company that encompassed many phases of food production. In the 1890s, his son added an experimental plot designed to test new varieties of grain to be supplied to tenants. In everything they did, the Chaffees aimed for optimal efficiency, applying the latest techniques. They thus built one of the first “factory farms,” demonstrating the benefits of agriculture run as a rational business.
The bonanza farms did not last in their original form, partly due to their sheer scale, but they show how the second wave of globalization rolled across the American prairies in the late nineteenth century. Even before the arrival of railroads, still hampered by distance, American farmers had already ventured into the “Great West,” but trains that “broke much more radically with geography” helped them conquer that huge space. They could bring their produce to market more cheaply, save time by avoiding muddy roads, and obtain supplies more reliably. Going from New York City to the Fargo area might have taken about three weeks as late as 1857, two decades later it would take less than a week. Information also moved more quickly: telegraph and later telephone lines were built along with the railroad tracks, enabling people like the Chaffees to communicate across their far‐flung holdings, keep in touch with company directors, and stay abreast of wheat prices. News from New York, or from London or Argentina for that matter, could reach Fargo in mere minutes.
The Amenia and Sharon operation was unusually large, but even smaller ones required much capital. Individual settlers from Europe might have enough to start on their own but, like their predecessors in Jamaica, many needed credit. Laying track cost even more, requiring huge infusions of capital from domestic and foreign lenders. The Dakota Boom was also a Capitalist Boom, connecting lenders, companies, farmers, and all sorts of middlemen across America and across the Atlantic. Most Dakota grain went to Chicago, the key node in the network where from the 1850s onward revolutionary new ways to store, move, and sell grain were invented. Though family‐run farms by no means disappeared, the Amenia and Sharon pointed to a new form of enterprise, relying on wage labor rather than household or slave labor. On an even larger scale than the bonanza farms, the railroads ran their business in a new way, using very precise accounting to set rates and manage costs, if only to hold bankruptcy at bay. This wave of globalization involved millions of people moving millions of miles. Many were native‐born, but in America immigrants helped to settle the prairies, build the railroads, and enlarge the cities. They followed the tracks of trains and capital.
Just as Jamaica was shaped by its special role in the first wave of globalization, the Dakotas, and the whole North‐Central US, developed thanks to their role in the second wave. Domestic investors, settlers, and consumers provided the key impetus, to be sure, but foreign money, immigrants, and markets pushed the second wave as well. North Dakota became bread basket to the world. Still on the very periphery of world affairs in 1850, it was fully involved by 1900. The same goes for large swaths of Canada, Argentina, and Australia: places linked by new technology, occupied by people from afar, and brought into cultivation to become a source of food and profit; by 1913 they produced more wheat than all of Europe and held more people than all of France. In a truly global market, each country could specialize. In fact, they had to specialize: whatever the exact form of their operations, farms turned into businesses competing in the global market. By practicing monoculture, as on the Dakota farms, they also altered the land. The waving grain that marked this wave of globalization physically changed the world.
The story of America’s western expansion involves more than hardy pioneers, greedy speculators, and innovative businessmen, all looking for the main chance in a growing market opened up by new technology. As British power did in Jamaica, the American state played a key role behind the scenes, at times much more overtly. By granting land to railroads and selling public land cheaply to settlers, most notably with the Homestead Act of 1862, the federal government encouraged the expansion. In various ways, the state used its military power of persuasion to clear lands that were inconveniently occupied by Native Americans, losers in this round of globalizing ventures as slaves had been previously. Property rights guaranteed by the state, enforceable in court, provided the incentive for development, whether by farmers or railroads. Expansion happened in part because Congress wanted it to happen. Conquering people, space, and nature itself was a matter of deliberate effort. Bringing new people, new practices, and new principles, backed by new power, to new lands created an empire of sorts. Though not exactly comparable, this had much in common with the scramble for empire by the European powers in Africa and Asia. The “developmental states” of this phase of globalization, America included, were committed both to industrialization and to territorial control in a global quest for wealth and power. At a critical time in globalization, when new kinds of connections quickly sprouted, America had advantages of scale and structure that helped it sow the seeds of future dominance.
The entry of the Amenia and Sharon Company into Dakota Territory in 1875 was but one small step in the very large process of unifying the world that had already unfolded by that time, the “drawing together of all parts of the globe into a single world.” In the preceding 35 years, British trade with the other continents had increased sixfold, and in the 1870s the leading nations annually exchanged some 88 million tons of seaborne goods, by comparison with 20 million in 1840. Thanks to the work of explorers, most blank spots on the maps of 1848 had been filled in, so that in 1875 educated people knew their world much better. In 1848 a journey around the world would have taken 11 months – the American prairies were one obstacle – but by 1872, with the benefit of steamships and railroads nearly everywhere, Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg might indeed have done it in 80 days.
The very food people ate, perhaps the most tangible object of diffusion, illustrates most plainly the drawing together. At least in the industrializing countries, globalization meant more food for more people and, in spite of tariffs, at lower prices. A global food system emerged, tying all participants into a network of interdependence. Specialized farms and regions, using the latest machines and fertilizers, fed their products into an elaborate system for processing and distribution, creating a “social division of labor [that] has taken on a truly global dimension.” Its new “market geography” depended less on local soils and climate, more on “prices and information flows of the economy as a whole.” Global economic integration “reinforced itself” – as more countries developed more ties, more wanted to join in more ways. Judged by the convergence of prices for global staples such as wheat, this integration or “big bang” of globalization had unfolded only since the 1820s. The network operated according to some common rules, or at least Britain tried to impose some, with support from others – for example, that trade ought to be free and currencies backed by gold. Its infrastructure, too, needed common rules, developed by organizations like the International Telegraph Union (1865). To coordinate their services, railroads in the US (1883) and elsewhere set their clocks to the same time in the same zones, standards that would soon be extended to the world as a whole. By the late nineteenth century, then, the web of connectivity had become stronger, wider, and more intricate. Exposed to news from abroad, aware of those who left for distant parts, enjoying new foods from new places, more people knew they were connected in a single global space where the rhythm of daily life depended on globally set times.
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