Natural History of the Present, Chapt.11

Chapter 11: The Land Trip Revisited: the Capitalist Landscape in the Settlement of “New Lands”

Madeira entered European history in 1419 when it was sighted by Portuguese sailors blown out into the Atlantic, though the genetics of its mice indicate it may have been visited earlier by Scandinavians. Madeira was an uninhabited island about 350 miles off the North African coast, on the latitude of Morocco. Legend has it that the island’s woods were set alight by the discoverers, who then sailed away. For 7 years the pillar of smoke was a beacon for ships. Madeira is among the first examples of the modern capitalist settlement of “new lands,” that is, lands newly settled by Europeans. A few of these lands were uninhabited (most weren’t); some had inhabitants who were subdued by force of arms, or by arms and diplomatic pressure. (The 80,000 Guanches on the Canary Islands, another island group in the subtropical Atlantic, nearer to the North African coast, took a century to subdue.) The Americas, whose inhabitants had been isolated from the Eurasian landmass for the last 10 to 30 millennia, were emptied by European diseases that flew miles and years ahead of the Europeans themselves. Ideally, such lands were adaptable to European animals and plants. Some newly discovered lands were not really conquerable; some were not possible to settle for other reasons. Tropical Africa was difficult because its climate and its long occupation by humans made it a home for diseases and parasites to which the Europeans had no resistance. (In some colonies half the Europeans died the first year. The survival rate of colonial administrators in West Africa was calculated, so that sufficient replacements could be trained.) Asia could be dominated, but its dense population made much of it difficult to settle. Settlement of abandoned or un-used lands, and the turning of marshland into farmland through drainage schemes, were still taking place in Europe; but by 1400 Europe was already largely settled, and traditional rights and attitudes also tended to limit what could be done there. Madeira on the other hand was empty. It was a mountainous island, and so work there had to be done by hand. The island’s near-tropical location made it suitable for sugarcane, which had been introduced to Europe by the Arabs, who had got it from India. The Crusaders had adopted the crop for the areas they conquered and invented the plantation system using slave labor to grow it, but in the Mediterranean a shortage of fuelwood to refine it was a problem. Sugar was a delicacy in Europe, whose only previous sweetener was honey. Candied fruits in Renaissance Europe had been sweetened by boiling in lead vessels; the reaction of the acidic fruit with lead from the vessel sweetened the fruit with lead acetate. This is a process that dates at least to Roman times, and some writers have implicated the fondness of Romans for such sweets, and the subsequent level of lead poisoning among Roman elites, in the fall of Rome. On Madeira sugar cane was grown in narrow terraced fields, irrigated with water brought down from the top of the island in channels cut out of the rock. Its mountains gave Madeira many microclimates and its high mountaintop plateau caught a constant supply of water from rain and clouds. This made reservoirs not necessary. Most of the water in the system was stored in the channels and canals. Over time the island was more or less remade into an agricultural landscape. Some of the development was financed by outsiders (again the Genoese) and much of the work was done by African slaves. Sugar was already being grown by the Portuguese with African slave labor on the Cape Verde Islands. The Cape Verdes are located off the African coast, but are hotter and drier. They were used primarily as a staging ground for the export of slaves.

Madeira’s production of sugar showed a typical curve for the capitalist exploitation of a new resource. The beginning was slow. Production reached 640,000 pounds in 1470 (about 45 years after construction of the irrigation system began), rose to 2,560,000 pounds in 1490, 3,360,000 pounds in 1494, and peaked at 4,508,000 pounds in 1506. By 1500, the population of Madeira numbered 20,000, including several thousand slaves, and Madeira was the world’s largest producer of sugar. Madeiran sugar production had caused the price of sugar in Europe to fall by 50% and sugar had begun its journey downward through the European class structure. (Sugarcane is now the world’s largest crop and sugar from cane, beets and corn a major source of calories for the poor.) The move from use by a select few to use by the whole population, the so-called democratization of the market, is typical of modern capitalist enterprise: consider cars, electricity, computer use, internet access, or, more hopefully, the market for organic food (currently 1-2% of food production in the United States, but growing at 10-20% per year). What then happened to Madeiran sugar production was also typically capitalist: production stabilized at about 2,240,000 pounds a year after 1500; and other places began producing sugar. Madeira’s dominance of the market would be taken over by Brazil after 1570. The price of sugar kept falling as production rose, and as demand rose to meet it. Brazil, with its endless flat areas suitable for sugar production, its limitless timber resources, and its huge importation of African slaves would eventually make sugar production uneconomic on Madeira. Madeira had additional expenses compared with Brazil: the irrigation system, the difficult terrain that required more manpower per unit of production. But Madeiran yields were also falling from soil erosion, and from depredations by rats, insects, and introduced diseases of the cane plant. The tremendous yields of earlier years were probably the result of new land being brought into cultivation. Because of its different elevational micro-climates, Madeira had always grown some wheat, wine grapes and tree fruits, and had exported furniture made from the trees that had escaped the initial conflagration. (Many trees must have been left. Sawn boards 15 inches wide and double the length of those available in Europe were exported to Portugal; it is said these planks made possible the large ships the Portuguese sent around Africa to the East. Sugar production also requires a great deal of fuelwood.) Agricultural competition began to change Madeira into a wine island: vines and trees are less demanding crops, require less labor, and are better at maintaining their soils, though with the proper mycorrhizal inoculants sugar cane can be grown without fertiliser, and with the return of the composted bagasse (the crushed stalks), or their ashes, to the soil, sugar cane may not be bad at maintaining its soils either. In the rest of the world, sugar production would continue its upward trajectory for some centuries. As the price of sugar continued to fall, and it became a staple food, profits moved more and more from the tropical producers to the trading houses of Europe. In the seventeenth century, Caribbean islands under the control of the English and the Dutch (such as Barbadoes and Antigua) were cleared to grow cane (on Antigua almost no natural vegetation remains), and the Caribbean began to compete with Brazil as the center of sugar production.

The settlement of Madeira shows the extent to which Europeans of the fifteenth century had the idea of landscape as something marketable. The idea of commodifying nature is not new in history. The Romans saw wilderness as something to be domesticated and so presumably did earlier agriculturalists. (The Greeks saw the conflict between wilderness and civilization.) In an agricultural or a capitalist world, developing a landscape greatly increases the value of the land itself. In North America relative real estate values would become prime considerations in how landscapes were used. Sugar was much more valuable than the productions of the natural landscape of Madeira, whatever they would have been, and sugar’s high value per unit volume also made it profitable to ship in the fifteenth century; timber from Madeira (one product of the natural landscape) was shipped as sawn lumber or chairs. Logs were too bulky to ship profitably. (But things change: by the late 1700s hand-squared white pine timbers 60 feet long were being loaded onto timber ships in the Port of Montreal for shipment to England, where they would be resawed into planks in English pits.) So under capitalist management the natural landscapes of Madeira (its associations of trees, herbs, insects, animals, natural watercourses) were restricted to areas too cold or steep to develop. The ecological functions of the landscape did not enter into the economic calculation. Of course capitalist development runs along a continuum, and some natural landscapes had economic value for some people. The Atlantic salmon that ran up Lake Ontario streams to spawn were considered part of the value of a farm in early nineteenth century western New York State. The salmon didn’t last long: they were overfished; clearing of the landscape for fields made the streams too warm in summer; and silt eroding from the farmland covered the river gravels in which they laid their eggs. Farm woodlots, though forced more and more into poorer, steeper, uncultivable land, were useful in the northeastern United States for a long time as sources of fencing material, logs and fuelwood. The woodlots protected the headwaters of streams and provided some natural habitat among the cultivated ground.

The search for profit helps explain why the meeting of the Huron and the French was such a collision. The material lives of a seventeenth century Abenaki in New England or a Huron in Ontario were not that different from those of a seventeenth century European farmer; and better than the material life of a landless agricultural worker. The well-off European peasant was entirely dependant on his fields for food, owned some metal tools, a table, chairs and a bed, a more or less permanent house, chickens, a cow, perhaps a plow. The North American had better clothes, of animal skins rather than cloth, a safer water supply, was less liable to chronic injury from heavy agricultural labor, suffered from fewer diseases, had a less permanent house, a less laborious daily round and a better diet. He was taller, stronger, and probably lived longer. The Abenaki’s winter wickiup of bark or skins was small, dark, warm, and smoky (the indoor air of the communal long houses of the Iroquois may have been better). European houses were larger, drafty, cold, also dark (because of the expense of window glass), and smoky (fireplaces with chimneys were just coming into use). Native bows were more accurate, more powerful and carried further than blunderbusses; and canoes were faster and more maneuverable than wooden dories. Mocassins were drier and more comfortable than European boots.

It was the direction of such lives that was different. The colonies in Massachusetts were financed by investors who expected to be paid back. The Pilgrims, trading with the native women for their used beaver cloaks (furs 2 to 3 years old, with the guard hairs worn off, were preferred by the London hatters); gathering casks of sassafras and sumac; splitting pine logs into clapboards, or oak logs into barrel staves; filling a ship with this material, must have looked very odd to the Abenaki. The Pilgrims were soon replaced by the tall-hatted, less tolerant Puritans. What drove these people? In the 1920s, the chiefs at Taos Pueblo in New Mexico told the psychologist C.G. Jung that all white men looked mad. In the 1620s, trade was what made Europe work. The goal of all this activity for a Massachusetts Bay Puritan was a big house in town, a life free of the daily round of a farmer or a retail businessman: not the life of a shopkeeper but that of a capitalist, an investor who lived off holdings in real estate or ventures in timber or shipping. The idea was to approach the status of the nobility (always unattainable, since that was a matter of blood). For the Indian gatherer and horticulturalist the chief value of the landscape was its edibility and the daily round with its stones, trees, sweat, nuts and wild animals was life. Life existed in the physical landscape, which was encompassed in myth and in the structure of language. The thousands of petroglyphs tapped into stones below the three ancient volcanoes on the western edge of Albuquerque, New Mexico, commemorate the entrance to the underworld from which, in mythic times, the tribes came out onto the earth. Direction in the language of one Californian tribe was indicated by one’s position with respect to a sacred mountain. The Navaho homeland is delineated by the four sacred mountains. This is not to say that a landcape might not be improved, say by an annual burning, the building of buffalo jumps, the digging of pitfalls along deer trails, the clearing of fields (which lost nutrients and eroded); such matters always fall along a continuum. But the notion of a marketable landscape opened another door. A marketable landscape is no longer important in itself, or in what it can produce by itself in biological perpetuity, or in how it works together with other landscapes up or down the watershed. (These anyway are ideas of modern biology, that sometimes correspond with edible or tribal notions.) A marketable landscape’s value is in what it can produce for sale, as quickly as market demand allows (beaver skins, freshwater pearls, gold), and in its later potential for transformation into a landscape of greater value (a farm, inland waterway, factory site, house lot), with its natural productions reduced or removed.

Agricultural use moves a landscape further along the continuum towards the marketable. Most agriculturalists have some variety of property rights. They may not own the land they cultivate in our sense (that is, be able to sell it) but the right to farm it cannot be taken from them easily, they control what it yields, they can let others use it. The development of modern western ideas of private property rights can be traced back to the European commune: the walled town that managed to separate itself by economic leverage and force of arms from the countryside and the nobility that ruled it. Such towns were comparatively rich by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, especially in Italy. Merchants were financing trade in grain, silks, and spices; land reclamation schemes; public works; and (under duress) wars. In the medieval countryside, the nobility rode and hunted where they wished, and took what they wanted by force of arms; the Church also had a growing amount of land and various rights. (By the 1400s, the Church had more land than the nobility, much left it by pious parishioners.) Such things had to be regulated if a person was to invest in farmland or other development projects, such as mines. The right of unobstructed use of one’s property, the right to use it without interference, was a necessary precursor to capitalist investment. This was not always a simple matter. Some land uses were objectionable. Iron mines and foundries, for instance, were almost as unpopular among the peasantry as among the nobility. Their noise was appalling; their logging and run-off polluted rivers; and their smoke poisoned nearby farmland.

For an Inuit or a Huron, private property in our sense was more or less limited to what one held in one’s hand. Cornfields among the Iroquois descended in the female line, but were temporary, and were not sold, though they might be lent or given away. One could say (following Locke) that they were created by their user’s labor. A Chippewa matron would have the use of a particular sugar bush, also in a sense created by labor. In some California tribes, the right to the acorns from certain oaks, or groves of oaks, was passed on by families. The grapevines of the coastal New England villages remarked on by the early explorers, that were located in favored spots, trellised on trees, kept clear of shading by shrubs or other trees, may have been individually owned. Groups of families had the right to certain hunting territories but this was also a limited right, under the supervision of the tribe. (The assignment of discrete hunting territories to smaller and smaller family groups among the tribes of boreal North America was probably a product of the economic pressures of the fur trade.) All this wasn’t very different from medieval, rural Europe, with a village’s common plowland, divided into individual allotments, and common waste and woodlot, pastured and cut by communal agreement. But common lands in Europe after 1200 would slowly become private lands: freehold property, to be farmed, enclosed, mined, sold to another party, that is, developed, as the owner wished, without interference from other landowners or from a state power. Advances in agriculture, along with the constant increase in human population, made such lands valuable. The motive behind the enclosure of common lands in England from the 1600s through the 1800s was the desire of large landowners to profit from the increased value of their land’s agricultural production. The development of private property rights made the landscape marketable, and the lack of traditional restraints in the “new lands” meant capitalist land development would reach its greatest extent there.