The Cloth-Wine Context

David Ricardo (1772-1823), in his musings on the benefits of free trade, used the relationship between Portugal and Britain to demonstrate the principle of comparative advantage. In the early modern era, Portugal could potentially produce enough fabric to clothe its own people, but since it could produce wine comparatively cheaply, the Portuguese would benefit more by specializing in and exporting wine, and using the proceeds to buy English cloth. More people could obtain more cloth in this way, Ricardo argued, than by relying on home production; the British, in turn, would gain access to a lake of cheap Iberian wine.

David Ricardo (I think)

 

The economist Cahal Moran recently demonstrated that Ricardo's observation was grossly incomplete and ahistorical. Cloth, a necessity, was much more valuable in the aggregate than wine (a luxury), and a nation that exclusively traded the latter for the former would eventually run a trade deficit and lose hard currency. This was, in fact, the purpose of the 1703 Treaty of Methuen, which lowered Portuguese import tariffs in return for British naval protection. Portugal had an abundance of specie to cover the deficit: in 1693 prospectors had discovered gold in the southern interior of Brazil. The ensuing gold rush eventually drew several hundred thousand peninsulares from Portugal to Brazil, and accelerated the forced transport of enslaved Africans to South America. It also offered an irresistible temptation to stronger nations - either to steal Brazilian gold through smuggling and piracy, or to extract precious metals from the Portuguese through uneven trade agreements, backed by military force.

Britain didn’t need to push Portugal that hard. The two nations were already bound by dynastic ties: the reigning British monarch’s step-aunt was Catherine of Braganza, regent of Portugal. And, in return for its colonial wealth, Portugal obtained from Old Albion much that the ruling classes wanted and that ordinary people needed. In October 1710, T. LeFevre informed the Earl of Dartmouth that the Brazilian fleet had just arrived in Lisbon, bearing gold bullion, tobacco, and sugar to the value of 1.8 million pounds sterling - about 270 million GBP (US$345 million) in today’s currency. All of this, wrote LeFevre, already belonged to British merchants who had sold on credit “all the dyed cloth” and 75 percent of the wheat consumed in the port city and its dependencies. Portugal’s elite thus obtained, admittedly at a high price, the luxuries they wanted (fine textiles and American beaver hats), and the necessities their depopulating country found harder to produce, and not least important, the British naval protection their overloaded merchant fleets required.

Some of the gold, at least, went for architecture.

British merchants, meanwhile, grew wealthier. There was usually a good market for tobacco and sugar in Britain, and there was always a market for gold. The latter often never even touched Portugal’s shores, instead sailing east with a British convoy and transshipping in Lisbon harbor to English merchantmen. There is a name for commerce built on stolen labor, channeled by armed ships, and structured to build up a surplus of gold in the dominant trading partner’s homeland, and that name is not “free trade.” What British traders and diplomats in Lisbon had instead created was a very successful example of mercantilism. What David Ricardo created a century later was a very influential example of economic propaganda. A lot of that going around, actually.

Sources: Manuscripts of the Earl of Dartmouth, 1: 298 (Eyre & Spottiswood, 1887); (CR Boxer, “Brazilian Gold and British Traders in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century,” Hispanic American Historical Review 49 (Aug. 1969): 454-72, esp. 459-60; Timothy Walker, “Lisbon as a Strategic Haven in the Atlantic World,” in Wim Klooster and Alfred Padula, eds., The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination (Prentice-Hall, 2005), 60-75.

The Yellowing-Trees Month, in Brief

 

What I’ve been reading: The True True Story of Raja the Gullible, by Rabih Alameddine. A biography of modern Lebanon, from the perspective of a gay schoolteacher and his formidable mother. As is often the case with good writing, the fictional parts of the story seem more believable than the non-fictional ones.

 

Videos and films of note: 28 Years Later (2025), which is as good as people say. Since Danny Boyle has (IMO) never made two good movies in a row, I’m relieved to learn that Nia DaCosta will be directing the sequel.

 

Noteworthy remarks by one of my offspring: Addressed by my daughter to the crescent moon: “Hello, Earth’s fingernail." 

 

Quotes that make me less worried about the potential collapse of liberal democracy in America: “Truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”

 

The title of this post borrows the Ukrainian word for October, Zhovten, the Month of Trees Turning Yellow. One of my students, on learning that some Indigenous nations (like the Senecas) named the months of the year for natural events, told me that the same was true of the Ukrainian language. That's the Cool Thing I Learned Lately. 

Footnote of the Month

 

 "Yes, one has to wonder: where did they get a monkey? I can provide no answer." So wrote John Belshaw in an endnote to his book Becoming British Columbia: A Population History (UBC Press, 2009, p. 248n1). I don't know the context of the author's question, and I think this is a case where it's better to give one's imagination free rein. Would that I could use the same citation in one of my own books.

 

19th-century netsuke, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

 

Pushing the Limits

 

Geographical facts tend (I find) to lodge quite firmly in one's mind after one teaches them to students. I've taught Native American history for nearly 25 years now, and in my lectures have usually stated that the northern growing limit of maize is the latitude of southern Ontario. This supposed geographic fact, I would go on to say, gave the Wendat nation, who originated in southwestern Ontario, a considerable commercial advantage: they could produce a large surplus of corn, then trade it to northern neighbors who could not grow the crop. I probably read this in grad school, in a book or article by an early American historian, and kept it in memory for the next two decades.

Ojibwa village, Sault Ste. Marie, 1846 - via Wikimedia Commons

 

It's now pretty clear that I was wrong about that. Monographs by Cary Miller (Ogimaag, 2010) and Brenda Child (Holding Our World Together, 2012) observed that the Minnesota Ojibwas could grow maize in raised-bed fields, at a latitude above that of the Wendat homeland. I didn't understand the mechanics of this form of cultivation, and assumed it was probably conducted on a small scale. Clearly I was wrong about this. A new LIDAR study of the Sixty Islands site near Michigan's Upper Peninsula, conducted by Madeleine McLeester, has revealed that the Menominees and their predecessors were raising corn on a large scale from approximately 1000 to 1600 CE. The techniques they used to farm in this marginal environment included field drainage, intensive use of compost, and the aforementioned raised beds, which kept a temperature a few degrees higher than that of the underlying topsoil. These sophisticated horticultural practices allowed the region's farmers to raise corn on a very large scale - approximately 300 hectares, in the case of Sixty Islands.

 

In future courses I plan to share these findings (as well as the earlier work of Child and Miller) with students. I'll add that when they want to raise a valuable crop, human beings often find a way to push the apparent natural limits on its cultivation. This was true of Menominee and Ojibwa women during the Little Ice Age; it was also the case with Euro-American farmers in Vincennes in the late 1700s. I've mentioned to students, and to any other hapless person I could trap in a conversational cul-de-sac, that the northern limit of cotton cultivation in the United States is just below the latitude of Cairo, Illinois; I've seen cotton fields in the Missouri "Bootheel" and Kentucky's Jackson Purchase district, but not any further north. During the first American cotton boom, however, white settlers in southern Indiana were happy to experiment with the crop, even though it requires 180 frost-free days to grow and one cannot be assured of them north of the Ohio River. Constantin Volney observed that white farmers in Vincennes raised cotton and tobacco, and suggested that the local climate was warm enough for both crops - the Wabash River moderated local temperatures in early spring and late fall (Harlow Lindley, ed., Indiana As Seen by Early Travelers [Indianapolis, 1916], 18-19). I suspect, though, that the Vincennes habitants could not reliably raise a large crop of the desirable fiber, and it eventually became cheaper to specialize in wheat or tobacco and buy cotton textiles elsewhere.

And When There Was No Crawdad to Be Found

The annals of the poor may be short and simple, but they need not remain so. The methodologies of social history, pioneered by the French Annalistes in the mid-twentieth century, have uncovered considerable details about the lives of rural peasants, urban workers, and other people who left few formal written records. Other professional disciplines can also add to our knowledge of the marginalized. Archaeologists and genetic specialists in Milan, for example, have spent the last decade and a half studying a unique historical archive: a crypt beneath the city’s old hospital for the poor, the Ca’Grande.

From 1637 to 1697, the hospital staff deposited the corpses of those who had died in their care - tens of thousands of people - in brick vaults beneath a nearby church. The depositors hoped the human remains would decay quickly. They hoped in vain. The city sewer lines ran near the vaults, creating a cold, humid atmosphere that inhibited decomposition. The bodies liquified, saponified, or putrified, creating a smell so intense that the hospital managers finally sealed the vaults.

 

Horsetail grass. Any port in a storm.

A few centuries later, modern forensic researchers realized that the Ca’Grande patients’ remains could reveal a great deal about their personal lives, particularly their dietary and medical histories. Since 2010 they have exhumed and analyzed about one-tenth of the bones and teeth in the vaults. The patients’ skeletons reveal that many of them were afflicted with tuberculosis and syphilis. Their dental plaque, meanwhile, reveals widespread malnourishment. Most ate a diet comprised entirely of grain; some ate horsetail grass, a northern-Italian famine food. Some were apparently willing to eat potatoes, a new import from South America that many other Europeans avoided. That many potato-eaters wound up dying (of other causes) in hospital would not have recommended the crop to their neighbors.

Particular surprises came from analysis of brain tissue clinging to some of the skulls. Some of the tissue contained a variety of opioids, end products of the opium that some patients took for pain relief. In a few cases the researchers found telltale evidence of consumption of another South American import: coca leaf. Scholars had no previous evidence of coca or cocaine consumption in Europe prior to the late nineteenth century, so this was quite a find. If this mild stimulant was in use in Milan, moreover, other workmen probably consumed it in other southern European cities. Writers of historical fiction who want to create a seventeenth-century analogue of Sherlock Holmes take note: if you place your fictional detective in the right city, you don’t have to deprive him of his favorite seven percent solution.