Consuming the Caribbean

From Arawaks to Zombies

Mimi Sheller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134516773
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

From sugar to indentured labourers, tobacco to reggae music, Europe and North America have been relentlessly consuming the Caribbean and its assets for the past five hundred years. In this fascinating book, Mimi Sheller explores this troublesome history, investigating the complex mobilities of producers and consumers, of material and cultural commodities, including:

• foodstuffs and stimulants - sugar, fruit, coffee and rum
• human bodies - slaves, indentured labourers and service workers
• cultural and knowledge products - texts, music, scientific collections and ethnology
• entire 'natures' and landscapes consumed by tourists as tropical paradise.

Consuming the Caribbean demonstrates how colonial exploitation of the Caribbean led directly to contemporary forms of consumption of the region and its products. It calls into question innocent indulgence in the pleasures of thoughtless consumption and calls for a global ethics of consumer responsibility.

Part I
Natural and material mobilities

1 The binding mobilities of consumption

The Caribbean has been repeatedly imagined and narrated as a tropical paradise in which the land, plants, resources, bodies, and cultures of its inhabitants are open to be invaded, occupied, bought, moved, used, viewed, and consumed in various ways. It is represented as a perpetual Garden of Eden in which visitors can indulge all their desires and find a haven for relaxation, rejuvenation, and sensuous abandon. Nevertheless, some of the deepest ethical dilemmas associated with capitalist modernity occurred in relation to the transatlantic commerce in slaves and in products produced by people enslaved in the Caribbean, and these debates involved an anxious introspection about the limits of human desires and pleasures. With the abolitionist boycotts of slave-grown sugar and the emergence of forms of ethical consumption in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, movements for consumer responsibility and accountability began to acknowledge the power of consumption to drive the global economy – and to bring misery to people in distant locales. Today the ethics of consumption are again becoming a major issue for social movements and protest groups, who are refocusing attention on the conditions under which consumer goods are being produced in far-away places, including the Caribbean (Enloe 1989; Deere et al. 1990; Klein 2000).

This book aims to lever the study of Western consumer culture back onto the tracks of slavery and tropical colonialism that sped it towards modernity, and to show how these relations of consumption continue to inform the inequalities of the Atlantic world today. At what point do transatlantic consuming publics take responsibility for the effects of their consuming practices – including forms of cultural consumption – on distant others? And how exactly have the imaginative and material structures that span the Atlantic–Caribbean world enabled these unequal transformations of one person’s sweat and blood into another’s sugar, one person’s provision ground into another’s playground, to continue uninterrupted for five centuries? In order to answer these questions I first want to take seriously the ‘investment’ of European and North American consumer societies in cultures of slavery, both in financial terms and in more personal embodied relations. Many have said that slavery was a long time ago, dusty history that no longer matters today. In order to understand the deep and ongoing connection between the contemporary Western world and the slave past it is necessary first to recognise the ways in which the circum-Atlantic and Caribbean regions have been linked together both in the past and in the present. Despite the significant shifts in patterns of world trade and regimes of consumption over the past five hundred years of transatlantic history, there are nevertheless significant continuities that remain unexplained, and often ignored.

The relation between Euro-American consumers and the Caribbean did not take place only through importing slave-produced commodities or benefiting from wealth made on the slave plantations. It is not only things or commodities that are consumed, but also entire natures, landscapes, cultures, visual representations, and even human bodies. That is to say, there are crucial forms of consumption ‘at a distance’ which also must be considered. During the period of colonial expansion there was an intensification of consumption within Europe and North America enabled by the wealth generated by the system of slavery. But there was also an attendant extension and proliferation of forms of consumption as Caribbean landscapes, flora and fauna, bodies and labour, images and cultural objects were all being consumed along with particular goods. It is not only ‘goods’ which circulated in the transatlantic world economy, but also people, texts, images, desires, and attachments.

To bring into focus the full range of consumption linkages between ‘advanced’ consumer societies and the post-slavery societies of the Caribbean, it is necessary to foreground the forms of mobility which connect here and there, then and now. The thematic content of this book is balanced between the history of literal practices of consumption and incorporation, and the use of figurative metaphors of cannibalism and zombification as forms of symbolic consumption. Playing on the interlocking meanings of ‘Carib’ and ‘cannibal’ ever since Columbus’s confused arrival in the New World (see Hulme 1986; Barker et al. 1998) a typology of forms of material and symbolic consumption can be proposed. These include ingestion, invasion, incorporation, infection, appropriation, sacrifice, and exhibition, as well as various processes of possessing, destroying, using up, and wasting away. Thus I take consumption in the broadest sense, and use it as a way of understanding a broad set of relations that are at once economic, political, cultural, social, and emotional. By connecting each contemporary mode of consumption of the Caribbean with a long genealogy of progenitors, and by locating the points of friction and resistance in the flows of people, goods, and cultures, this account aims to trouble ‘innocent’ indulgence in the pleasures of thoughtless consumption.

The key gain from highlighting consuming practices as embodied material relations within mobile contexts is that it enables a position of individual and collective ethical responsibility to be framed as an intervention in the flows of capitalism. Consumers are responsible for a kind of agency, which should not be displaced to the level of the ‘world system’ as a whole as if individual choices and actions did not matter. To lay the groundwork for this exploration of transatlantic consumer culture, in this chapter I will explore the multiple meanings of consumption in relation to processes and practices of mobility and immobility. I begin with an exemplary case study of the early eighteenth-century scientist Sir Hans Sloane, whose life encapsulates many of the themes of this book. I explore the ways in which Sloane transmuted his ties to Jamaica not only into the making of his personal fortune and reputation as a scientist, but also into a physical collection that became the origin of the British Museum and a key centre of botanical knowledge and medical research. My aim is to show how the movement of objects and capital, bodies and body parts, information and texts, cultures and knowledges jointly operate in one historical instance, and to suggest that this mobilisation of plants, knowledge, and capital from colonial Jamaica continues to have effects in the world today. In the second half of the chapter I will broaden this analysis of what I call ‘the binding mobilities of consumption’ to encompass the flows of things, people, and culture in and around the contemporary transatlantic world, showing how previous patterns of exploitation continue to inform unequal relations of consumption.

Mobile making of Western knowledge centres

If, following Roland Robertson, one agrees that globalization is a cultural process which involves ‘the compression of the world and the intensification of consciousness of the world as a whole’ (Robertson 1992: 4), then the Caribbean played a crucial part in this compression and intensification of global consciousness. The discovery of the Caribbean islands and the continental Americas produced the first physical confirmation that the world could be circumnavigated. The rapid incorporation of these ‘Cannibal Isles’ into an emergent Atlantic-wide, and soon global, system of trade massively expanded Europe’s global reach and initiated the processes of ‘time-space compression’ (Harvey 1989) that still define (post)modernity. The new knowledge ‘discovered’ in these circumscribed island-worlds contributed to a dawning consciousness of the totality (and fragility) of nature in European science (Grove 1995), evident in the projects to collect, classify, and order everything. Through the prism of the life of one Englishman, Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1752), who was deeply involved in these discoveries, we can begin to trace in miniature some of the contours of the story to be told in this book. It goes well beyond the history of the ‘triangular trade’ in order to make visible other kinds of transatlantic flows – flows of natural substances, scientific knowledge, bio-power, real estate, and cultural capital – not only in the eighteenth century but having a lasting impact on our contemporary world.

Sloane was one of the foremost scientists and medical doctors of his day. He was doctor to the royal family, benefactor of the Chelsea Physic Garden, and one of the most prolific collectors of books, plants, and material objects of his age. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, foreign member of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris in 1708, President of the College of Physicians (1719–33), and President of the Royal Society (1727–40). His collections formed the core of a museum collection and library, which on his death became the foundation of the British Museum, at a cost to the public of twenty thousand pounds. His other claim to fame is that he introduced to Britain the first recipe for milk chocolate, which he had observed being used in Jamaica. Yet biographies of Sloane, histories of the Chelsea Physic Garden, and nostalgic reproductions of ‘Sir Hans Sloane Chocolate’ sold at the garden today are largely silent on the ‘creole’ connections linking together the origins of his wealth, the foundation of his scientific reputation, and the material corpus of his collections. Sloane’s relevance for this book is the central role played by his connections to Jamaica, and the extent to which the mobilisation of material things, information, and wealth from Jamaica underpinned his life’s work. His story is representative of the general silencing of slavery and distanciation of the Caribbean, which are the context for the powerful concentration of knowledge, financial capital, and cultural capital that we know as London.

In 1687, the 27-year-old Sloane became the personal physician to Christopher Monck, the Second Duke of Albemarle, and accompanied him to Jamaica, where he was taking up the post of Governor. Having trained in natural history at some of the foremost botanical gardens and medical schools in Europe, Sloane took the opportunity to begin a comprehensive collection on the natural history of Jamaica. His method was,

to search the several Places I could think afforded Natural Productions, and immediately described them in a Journal, measuring their several Parts by my Thumb, which, with a little allowance, I reckoned an Inch. . . . After I had gather’d and describ’d the Plants, I dried as fair Samples of them as I could, to bring over with me. When I met with Fruits that could not be dried or kept, I employ’d the Reverend Mr. Moore, one of the best designers I could meet with there, to take the Figures of them, as also of the Fishes, Birds, Insects, etc. in Crayons. . . . When I returned into England, I brought with me about 800 Plants, most whereof were New.¹

Sloane remained in Jamaica for fifteen months and in 1696 published a systemic index on Jamaican plants, known as the Catalogus Plantarum. On his return to England he not only made his collection available for inspection by other learned men, but also had the plants brought to gardens, such as Sir Arthur Rawdon’s garden in Moyra, Ireland, to be grown ‘to perfection’. As Bruno Latour has argued, ‘The history of science is in large part the history of the mobilisation of anything that can be made to move and shipped back home[;] . . . expeditions, collections, probes, observatories and enquiries are only some of the many ways that allow a centre to act at a distance’ (Latour 1987: 225, 227).

Building on the impetus of other naturalists/collectors of the seventeenth century, Sloane collected ‘Nature’ on his travels and brought it back to Britain to be displayed as a curiosity, studied as natural history, and planted for research into its potentially useful medicinal properties. Less often noted are the human body parts, which also found their way into Sloane’s collection. As Michael Day notes, ‘His propensity for collecting human material began early in his career and he brought back a number of specimens of this kind from his travels in the West Indies’. This included items catalogued as the ‘foetus of a negro’ and the ‘skin of the hand of a black’ (Day 1994: 69, 71).² The classification of plants has been closely tied to the classification of humans into supposed ‘races’, and Sloane’s work suggests an early interest in this field which would be more fully developed a century later. It is significant, though, that the West Indies offered an early field for collection of both plant and human ‘materia’ (as I shall discuss in Chapter 5, the Caribbean continues to be used in distinctive ways for medical research, human testing, and pharmaceutical product development).

By his scientific method of careful observation, collection, and exhaustive recording, Sloane furthered the incorporation of the New World into the material networks of European knowledge-production. His mobilisation of nature also involved what Latour refers to as the enhancement of the ‘stability’ and ‘combinability’ of the accumulated elements (Latour 1987: 227–8), through the practices of naming, ordering, cataloguing, and publishing. In 1707 he finally published his most famous work, A Voyage to the Islands of Medera [sic], Barbados, Nieves, St. Christophers and Jamaica, with the Natural History of the herbs and trees, four-footed beasts, fi shes, birds, insects, reptiles, etc. of the last of those islands. In addition to a brief history and geography of the island of Jamaica, Volume One of this encyclopaedic work contains 156 drawings, mostly of plants, with some maps and depictions of farming methods; Volume Two, not published until 1725, covers trees, insects, sea creatures, birds, and other animals. His work was said to be ‘productive of much benefit to science, by exciting an emulation, both in Britain and on the continent’, ³ and many of the plants were propagated at gardens throughout Europe with some coming to be ‘used in Medicines every day’.⁴ Thus there was a close link between learning about the unknown natural products of Jamaica, collecting ‘materia medica’ there, and using these substances in the medical treatment of European bodies, who ingested the substances that were thereby brought to the knowledge of European medicine. In fact in collecting plants, Sloane and other European collectors depended on the local knowledge of both aboriginal peoples and African slaves who passed on information on the specific medical uses of exotic plants unknown to Europeans.

Sloane was not only engaged in ‘pure science’, however, but was also a pragmatic entrepreneur interested in making new and wondrous substances available to European populations. He first observed a mixture of processed cocoa, milk and sugar being fed to sickly children in Jamaica (Minter 2000: 13), most likely slaves. He saw that this had potential to be marketed in Britain, and he brought back the recipe. He is said to have ‘made a considerable amount of money from the promotion of “Sir Hans Milk Chocolate”, recommended by eminent physicians as a drink “For its lightness on the Stomach and its Great use in all Consumption Cases” ’ (MacGregor 1994: 15; Minter 2000: 13). Banking on his reputation as a fashionable society doctor, his milk chocolate was extremely successful and the recipe was eventually purchased by the Cadbury brothers in 1849, to become the chocolate that we all know and love today.⁵ Furthermore, ‘on returning from Jamaica he is said to have invested “the greatest part of the Fortune he acquired there” in the bark [used in making quinine], so acquiring a valuable stock of medicine which he actively promoted by prescription (for a range of complaints beyond those hitherto treated in this way) and by writing about it in Philosophical Transactions’. Quinine is mainly used in the prevention and treatment of malaria, and its preparation and use for this purpose was learned from indigenous civilisations in Peru.⁶ Sloane was instrumental in promoting its use in Protestant Northern Europe, where its efficacy had been doubted due to Jesuit control of its distribution. Quinine would go on to be crucial not only for enabling Europeans to survive settlement in the malarial tropics, but also aiding in the huge population movements of indentured labourers around the colonial world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Hobhouse 1986).

Beyond Jamaica’s use for natural history and medical research, it also provided other resources for the production of Sloane’s fame and reputation:

[In London] on 11 May 1695 he married Elizabeth, daughter and co-heir of John Langley, a London alderman, and widow of Fulk Rose, formerly of Jamaica. The marriage was an advantageous one for Sloane, since his wife inherited not only her father’s estate but also one third of the income from her former husband’s properties in Jamaica. The newly-married couple set up house in what is now 3 Bloomsbury Place, then at the centre of a fashionable residential area. There Sloane established his immensely successful practice, his patients including many of the most prestigious figures of the day.

(MacGregor 1994: 13)

Fulk Rose was one of the original British colonists of Jamaica, and owned 3,000 acres there on his death in 1694. Each of Sloane’s biographers delicately states that these estates ‘yielded’ or ‘brought an income’ of four thousand pounds (MacGregor 1994: 37 fn. 42; Minter 2000: 13). They never mention that this income was directly produced through slave labour producing sugar on huge plantations with all of their attendant coercion, rape, and mortality of slaves. In 1709, Sloane sold his wife’s several plantations in Jamaica, which facilitated his purchase in 1712 of the Chelsea manor, which included the freehold of the Chelsea Physic Garden, whose perpetual lease to the Society of Apothecaries he guaranteed.⁷

The Chelsea Physic Garden (founded in 1673), was already one of the best botanical collections in Europe, but Sloane immensely extended it and made arrangements for plant specimens to be delivered annually to the Royal Society for research purposes. It was under Sloane’s patronage that the Garden grew to become one of the foremost in Europe. European ‘hortus botanicus’ date back to those founded in the city-states of Northern Italy in the mid-sixteenth century (Pisa, 1543; Padua and Florence, 1545), which were derived from Middle Eastern models. They then spread to schools of medicine in Bologna, Leiden, Amsterdam, Montpellier, Oxford and Edinburgh, as well as being developed by the Dutch at Cape Town by the 1670s and the French in Mauritius in the 1760s (Grove 1995). Chelsea established a crucial seed exchange with the Leiden botanic garden as early as 1683, but its networks of exchange and study were extended during the Sloane years. Numerous eighteenth-century botanical illustrators such as Jacobus von Huysum and Elizabeth Blackwell (author of The Curious Herbal ) based their drawings of tropical plants on the Chelsea Physic collection.

Sloane acquired further material from the tropical world for his collection from William Courten (1642–1702), Leonard Plukenet (1642–1706), James Petiver (c.1663–1718), Christopher Merrett (1614–95), and many other plant collectors. James Reed brought plants back from Barbados, and James Harlow contributed further specimens from the West Indies in 1692 (MacGregor 1994: 23–4). Sloane’s ‘herbarium’ was crucial to the work of the great botanist Carolus Linnaeus, who visited the Chelsea Physic Garden in the 1730s and incorporated Sloane’s catalogue of Jamaican plants into his work, which remains the basis of botanical classification today. As John Cannon observes,

It would be difficult to overstate the significance of the Sloane herbarium for the history of plant classification, as it represents by far the largest extant collection of plant specimens from the pre-Linnaean era. It is, indeed, almost certainly, the largest collection that was ever assembled during this early period. . . . Nearly all modern plant nomenclature (som...