Economic history in a tea cup

Let me offer just one little story about the way ‘The Economy’ works.

It begins in Britain when it was entering a time that became known at the “Regency” period, at the end of the “Enlightenment” and the dawning of the era of “Liberalism”: Rousseau and Edmund Burke, Wordsworth and Coleridge, grandiose extravagance, high ideals and gross brutality… bare-knuckle boxing, public executions, bull-baiting, cock fighting, gambling, dandyism and a new game called cricket. The newly independent United States of America were working out their Constitution; France was emerging from “The Terror” of the Revolution and the Napoleonic era was about to begin. The industrial revolution was afoot but the modern, machine-driven world was still very much in the making.

Britain was one of Europe’s most powerful and most rapidly prospering nations. A burgeoning middle class was enjoying the fruits of trade abroad and industrialisation at home.

“Disposable” income began giving this class a wonderful opportunity to savour exotic new delights, refine their tastes and pursue fashions.

One such fashion was the taste for Chinoiserie: glimmering, vivid Chinese silks, fine, limpid green jade, near-transparent porcelain and the sipping of tea: an ennobling pastime, at first for ladies, but later as a show of sobriety by men of discernment at a time when gin ruled as the leading agent of self-destruction among the lower classes.

Tea consumption in Britain was running at about 3,000 tonnes a year. Silks and fine porcelain commanded high prices, and there were hopes that China would become a market for Britain’s growing industrial surpluses.

The stumbling block was that the Chinese had little time for the foreign devils and no great interest in their clumsily manufactured goods. There was a lacklustre interest in China for Indian cotton; sandalwood and beche de mer (sea slug) had their buyers. The Chinese would happily accept silver but British supplies of the precious metal were running low. The Ch’ing government allowed trading to take place only at the port of Canton and only through the hands of a small guild of licensed merchants, the Cohong.

Along the way, a paying niche opened in China for furs. The Russians, trading sea-otter pelts from Siberia into northern China, were the first to spot it. From the mid 18th century, the trade included seal skins. Chinese furriers had found a way to selectively remove the long, stiff, outer guard hairs from the pelts, leaving the warm, wearable soft fur underneath. And they knew how to turn inferior furs into felt. From 1776, when they were paid well for a shipment to Canton of 13,000 fur seal skins, the Americans were into the market, and so too were the British.

It was suddenly all on: a rush to ship seal skins to Canton, fill ships’ holds with Chinoiserie and reap a handsome profit back in London. And along remote and rocky coastlines around the world, seal breeding colonies were searched out and the seals were slaughtered. A good sealer could tear the pelts from 600 seals an hour, and seals were taken by the tens of thousand and the hundreds of thousand.

Seals are shy creatures and their breeding colonies were scattered around some of the Pacific Ocean’s least hospitable shores. In many cases, indigenous communities, to whom they were a vital source of sustenance, had harvested the seal populations with careful stealth and restraint. The sealers’ violent assaults obliterated the colonies. And, with the sealers, came new diseases and rats (European ships notoriously scattered fast-breeding, disease-carrying and habitat-degrading black and brown rats — Rattus rattus and Rattus norvegicus — wherever they touched shore).

Although the real profits went to the speculative ship owners and masters, even an ordinary deckhand might hope that, with a bit of luck, he’d be able to buy the freedom and security of a small farm after a few trips. In 1796, when a London fur dealer discovered how to rid the pelts of their guard hairs, a market for seal-skins opened in Britain too. Seals had got harder to find and the long haul to China made less sense. It was simpler and more profitable to put the skins up for auction in London.

By the time the Chatham Islands in the far-off South Pacific were discovered, sealing had peaked, but activity still fluctuated along with pelt prices and the discoveries of new sealing grounds.

It was perhaps 15 years after a British naval captain charted the Chatham Islands that the first sealers stormed ashore on their beaches. Soon there were scores of them, there to rush and ravage the islanders’ carefully conserved seal colonies, killing and skinning as many seals as quickly as possible and leaving the flayed bodies, blood and entrails to rot on the rocks and sand. The sooner the ships could fill their holds, the shorter the voyage and the surer the returns.

To finish off the suddenly depleted and broken colonies, captains landed shore parties whose job included growing potatoes and pigs to provision the ships on their next visits. They used their guns to hunt shorebirds for a change of diet and often abused, beat or raped the islanders. They had been raised to use fear as way to control others and defend themselves. Their dogs, cats, pigs and rats scavenged, killing or scaring off the ducks and rail that also had long fed the islanders.

As well as seeing their single most precious food source laid to waste, Chatham Islanders succumbed to the newly introduced illnesses – measles, influenza, venereal diseases – which often killed them. In four years, 1828-1932, the Chatham Islands population was scythed from more than 2,000 to about 1,600 by epidemics of measles and influenza. Well might the Chatham Islanders have retaliated. In New Zealand, Maori warriors had clashed with and killed sealers. Groups of Chatham Islanders could have done away with some of the more obnoxious new arrivals and got away with it.

But they’d adopted a law that forbade killing: the Law of Nunuku. So strong was their governance, based on respect and honour, that killing ended. People of this warrior culture destroyed their weapons. For the most part, they did their utmost to avoid the sealers, getting on with their own lives in their own way. And, with their seals all but exterminated, the Chatham Islanders might have expected the depredation to end.

But, in the bloody wake of the sealers came the whalers, questing the world’s oceans for blubber to render into lamp, stove and machine oil. Whalebone to nip the waists of fashionable women, ambergris to fix the aroma of their perfumes and spermaceti for candles, ointments and lubricants were also in demand. In the Chatham Islands, the whalers found a foul-weather haven right on the edge of the Southern Ocean hunting grounds.

When the final invasion came — by Maori warriors abetted by whaling captains — nearly 1,000 Chatham Islanders, including 160 local chiefs, gathered at the sacred ground of Te Awapatiki, a low-lying point on the main island, and for three days debated the options that faced them. Younger leaders advocated setting aside of the Law of Nunuku and wiping out the Maori intruders. The Maori warriors might be more experienced and better armed but they were outnumbered and new to the islands. Some were still getting over their rough and crowded passage from Port Nicholson. It could be done. The invaders could be anihilated.

Older, highly respected chiefs, imbued with the mana of rank and ancestral wisdom, instead spoke for the traditions that made up and held together the fabric of the islanders’ universe. To break the Law of Nunuku would be to sever a vital thread in that pattern; without obedience to the ways of life that defined their universe, their world would shatter as the mana drained from it. This must not happen.

With a deliberation that is still daunting for its courage and calm spiritual resolve, the Chatham Islanders heard the arguments and decided collectively that at no cost should their mana be compromised; their mana would be defended in the only way that it could: by obedience to its sources; they would place mana above physical survival, the Law of Nunuku above expedience and above natural inclination. The measure of their warriorhood would be the courage with which they faced death.

And death is was. Maori tradition required that rights of conquest be established through the spilling of blood.

In “walking the land” to establish these rights, the Maori invaders met with no resistance. They cut down 226 Chatham Island men and women, whose names have been recorded, and a number of children whose names were not. Those who remained – their population at the time of the invasion had been something over 1,650 – were made slaves, moved deliberately from their own areas and put to work to feed and establish the Maori settlement, and to produce the surpluses needed for trade with the whaling ships.

The whaling captains soon found the Chatham Islands a handy port, close to the grounds and blessed with relatively mild winters, where plenty of fresh pork, potatoes and other provisions could now be had for cash, tobacco, cloth, rum and whisky. The ships, mostly American but also Australian, French and more rarely of other nationalities, would anchor off Waitangi half a dozen and more at a time, stowing their oil and fresh provisions while their boats were kept ready to take any whales that fortuitously strayed near the anchorage.

In 1840 - 41, the fledgling New Zealand Company settlements at Wellington depended on slave-grown potatoes from the Chatham Islands. The old culture that chose not to kill had been erased.

And the Chinese? After the Qing Dynasty toughened its opposition to the already illegal importation to China of opium (grown specifically for the purpose in British India as a monopoly of the British East India Company), the British launched the military assaults known as the “Opium Wars” that forced the Qing Dynasty not only to expose its subjects to an unfettered drugs trade but also to hand over the island of Hong Kong as a trading base.

The Chinese people found their government’s humiliation so infuriating they rose against it in 1850 and 1899 and, in 1912, the discredited Qing Dynasty fell. In many ways, this set the scene for the post-Second World War ascendancy of Mao Zedong, Chinese communism and the modern China.

And to think… it may have all begun with a cup of tea.