But, even at the end of the nineteenth century, the fur tax, collected from the Siberian peoples, made up more than 10 per cent of the revenue of the Imperial Cabinet. This money, minted from the distant lives of fur-bearing animals and northern peoples, purchased the treasures of the Hermitage and the loyalty of the court. At the beginning of the twentieth century the fur trade in Siberia was still going strong. During his Siberian exile from 1900 to 1902, the young Leon Trotsky worked for the merchant Yakov Chernykh, who traded with the Tungus people on the Upper Lena, exchanging vodka and cotton prints for fur. The illiterate Chernykh made millions of roubles and had thousands of workers. ‘He was an absolute dictator’, Trotsky wrote. These youthful impressions defined his own horizon. *
Following Voltaire’s advice, Catherine the Great justified monarchical rule in Russia by the country’s unusually large size. In fact, these lands were seized because of fur, though the empire held onto them well after the fur trade had ended. In the nineteenth century, Siberia was used as a place of exile and hard labour. In Soviet times, military-industrial sites were built there, and then enormous reserves of oil and gas were discovered. The history and geography of resource streams are full of devilish irony: the delivery routes for oil and gas, from western Siberia to the Baltic and then to Germany, follow the ancient sledge tracks along which Siberian fur travelled to European buyers.
Trade in the fur of the sea otter was banned in 1911. Their population on the Aleutian Islands did not regenerate, but these delightful animals are a common sight off the beaches of California. The beaver was considered almost extinct, but a ban on hunting in Scandinavia, Canada and Russia helped to re-establish populations. In 2020 we learnt that Denmark is farming 17 million mink – three animals for every citizen; this population was the breeding ground for a new, potentially more lethal mutation of the COVID-19 virus. Sable is also bred on farms, and auctions of sable pelts continue. The squirrel remains one of the most widely distributed mammals; but, hopefully, nobody uses squirrel pelts or cat fur any more. The price of fur has fallen on account of alternative materials made from fossil fuel and thanks to campaigns by animal rights organisations and activists. Suddenly people have started worrying about fur allergies – oddly, this was never a problem in the past. In 2018 several fashion houses – Gucci, Versace – publicly renounced the use of real fur. In England, Austria and some other European countries, fur farming has been outlawed. It is more difficult to abstain from fish and other marine products. But fish farms produce heavy pollution, and the fishing industry is one of the most corrupt sectors of global business. The number of vegetarians in the world keeps growing, and at some point we will see meat eating as an aberration on a par with wearing fur.
Notes
Notes
1 Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason , p. 175; Goody, Food and Love . 2 Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material Civilization and Capitalism , pp. 190–4. 3 Mayhew, New Perspectives on Malthus . 4 Pomeranz and Topik, The World that Trade Created , p. 137. 5 Feenstra, ‘The Heckscher–Ohlin model’. 6 Stuart, Bloodless Revolution . 7 Cited in Gregory, Of Victorians and Vegetarians , p. 115. 8 Poore and Nemecek, ‘Reducing food’s environmental impacts’. 9 Magra, The Fisherman’s Cause ; Grafe, Distant Tyranny . 10 The Russian Primary Chronicle , p. 184. 11 Veale, The English Fur Trade ; Etkind, Internal Colonization . 12 Fisher, The Russian Fur Trade , p. 26. 13 Zhitie Sergiia Radonezhskogo . 14 Vilkov, ‘Pushnoi promysel v Sibiri’. 15 Iadrintsev, Sibir kak koloniia . 16 Tarle, Ocherki ; Butts, Henry Hudson . 17 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada ; Edwards, ‘The North American fur trade world system’. 18 Rich, ‘Russia and the colonial fur trade’. 19 Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada . 20 Kirchner, ‘Samuel Bentham and Siberia’; Morriss, Science, Utility and Maritime Power ; Papmehl, ‘The regimental school established in Siberia by Samuel Bentham’. 21 Matthews, Glorious Misadventures . 22 Ibid. 23 Kan, Memory Eternal . 24 Bolkhovitinov, Russian–American Relations and the Sale of Alaska . 25 Marx, Capital , Vol. 1, p. 507. 26 Shchapov, Sochineniia , pp. 280–93, 309–37; Etkind, Internal Colonization , p. 65.
FOUR
Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice
Salt and sugar are both white and crystalline, but their flavour differs as much as their historic roles. Salt has always been part of the human diet – we can’t survive without it. Sugar is a relative newcomer. Produced by hundreds of small enterprises and mostly traded locally, salt was usually a product of private initiative. Sugar was the material basis of long-distance trade, slave plantations, colonial wars and mercantilist empires.
People consume salt up to the point of satiety. The body knows what level of salt it needs; too little or too much causes discomfort. For every population, there is a point of equilibrium which defines the optimal price of such a resource. The per capita consumption of this kind of resource is stable, and consumption increases only with the growth of the population. This is where economics, focused on the balance between demand and supply, comes into operation. But there are other sorts of resources, such as sugar. An individual or a country can consume them in unlimited quantities: the more such products are available to consumers, the more they want them. The growth in supply stimulates a still greater demand. I would call this kind of commodity ‘addictive’ or ‘narcotic’. In such cases it is not demand that dictates supply but the other way round: production stimulates consumption . Satiety, or equilibrium between demand and supply, simply doesn’t arise, or is always deferred to the future; what does arise is an increasing dependence, an unquenchable and unquenched need, an addiction. Examples are sugar, and the alcohol produced from it, but also spices, tobacco, coffee, tea, chocolate and opium. All these substances create in the consumer a narcotic dependency, which may be severe or mild and, correspondingly, inflicts more or less harm on the consumer. When economists describe the link between production and consumption, they talk about the elasticity of supply : if production of a commodity grows quickly in response to a rise in demand, then this production is elastic. In the opposite case, when consumption grows, quickly or slowly, in response to a rise in supply, we see a demand which is, to various extents, addictive and toxic; I propose to talk in these cases about toxicity of demand. From pepper to tea to sugar to tobacco to opium, and later to petroleum, different substances exhibit different levels of toxicity. Importantly, the very concept of consumption in its economic meaning originates from the debates about the taxation of ‘intoxicants’; before these mid-seventeenth-century English debates, consumption meant a wasting disease. 1 ‘Intoxicants’ were wine, tobacco and coffee; sugar did not figure in these debates – clearly, it was in a special category, together with tea and chocolate. Following the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, I call these consumables, from sugar all the way to opium, soft drugs.