Old Etonians

Whilst the Young Turks are reading Žižek, the Young Hegelian is reading an Old Etonian, Henry Hobhouse, and his wonderful book Seeds of Change: Five Plants that Transformed Mankind. A book for those who suspect that man’s material needs and the reproduction of his means of subsistence have played a not inconsiderable part in human history. Those five plants, in case you were wondering, are: quinine, sugar, tea, cotton, and the potato (spelled without an 'e', Dan).

A couple of quotes to whet your appetite:

“[Sugar] was, and is, in absolute terms, a not especially cheap source of human energy. In the eighteenth century it was much more expensive in real terms than cereals. Before the sixteenth century the whole of the European world had managed with miniscule quantities of sugar, a mere pinch per head for the whole of history. The glories of the Renaissance were created on the basis of a teaspoonful per head of sugar every year. Sugar is unnecessary to any endeavour, but it is addictive. In the years 1690-1790 Europe imported 12 million tons, which cost, in all, about the same number of lives. Today, Europe’s consumption is well over 12 million tons a year, a hundred times as much. There are no slaves except consumers.”

And of the slave ships in the sugar trade:

“Zeal was needed. Losses at sea were now higher, and ships were faster. Slavers were prizes, even in peacetime, so that every man’s hand would be against them, and the slave ships therefore avoided contact with other vessels by using tortuous routes. Disease was rampant. One slave ship was found by the Royal Navy, floating inert, its entire complement, black and white, slave and crew, blinded with opthalmia, and only able to grope about the vessel. Not unnaturally, they were starving in the midst of plenty.”

The only thing that lets down this (library) edition is an embarrassing recommendation on the back by (probably) another Old Etonian, Sir William Rees-Mogg. It would have immediately put me off if I hadn’t known the content of the book:

“Marx didn’t invent the dialectic – Freud did not invent the subconscious – Mr Hobhouse has not invented vegetable history. But he has seen its significance. Why was President Kennedy an American? Because of the potato. Why was Martin Luther King an American? Because of cotton. The vegetable kingdom is one of the great long-term causes of human history. This is the most exciting book I have read for years, and I believe it will be one of the most influential.”

Comments

[pollian]

Perfunctory plug here for a more recent book along similar lines (though with a much expanded scope): Jared Diamond's _Guns, Germs and Steel_.

[Alphonsevanworden]

In this vein I loved Wolfgang Schivellbusch _Tastes of Paradise_, and Zuckerman's Potato book is pretty good, but the best of them all is the sugar history Mintz, _Sweetness and Power_.

[Jodi]

Seems to me that the veggie praise is precisely the reason to read the book! Materialism--silly stuff! Vegatism is the only proper approach to understanding.

[Adam Kotsko]

A few years back there was a book on cod, the fish that changed the world.

A personal request: could the template change so that the font weight of links does not increase when the pointer is hovering over them? It's rather disorienting to have the text shifting around all the time. If you want something to change to indicate hovering, make it be an underline rather than a shift to boldface. That is my advice as an amateur web designer/professional blog commenter.

[bat020]

wot no coffee?

[Young Hegelian]

You're right, he later reissued the book as 'six plants', adding a chapter on coca.

[Troll of Sorrow]

My medication may wear off soon, so I warn you, you're in for a Friday full of trolling.

[Jake]

Kotsko is right: the shift to boldface is not so seemless a technogadget.

[Matt]

Are we so sure it wasn't tea that changed the world?

[Jodi]

salt--not a crop, but not nothin'

[roger]

Hey, a vote for bananas. In one of the many interesting notes in Tierney's takedown of Chagnon (Darkness in El Dorado), Tierney notes that the Yamomamo society changed completely some time in the 18th century, as bananas started penetrating into the Amazon jungle. The bananas came from the Portugese, who brought them from Africa.

Oh, and let's also not the aborted career of the Sago Palm in Ireland, celebrated in Flann O'brien's unfinished ms., Slattery's Sago Saga.

[CR]

In certain locales, New York City at least, the transition from beer as the regular breakfast drink to coffee helps set the whole PWEthic thing headed biochemically in the right direction.

(NY had particularly bad water for quite awhile, so it wasn't simply an import issue... Beer = no dysentery...)

I reenact, in reverse, this pattern of historical transformation each and every day.

I could be wrong, but doesn't Hobsbawm have some innaresting things to say about coffee, tobacky, and tea and Social Imperialism. Or did I fantasize it?

[John Emerson]

Ginseng was exported from the American colonies to China starting in the early 1700's. Hundreds of tons a year are exported nowadays, at about $60/lb.

The trade began when a French Jesuit in Manchuria described the plant and its uses, and a French Jesuit in what is now Canada used the description to find a similar plant. The first traders were French, but the trade spread south. Daniel Boone supposedly made more money on ginseng than on furs.

http://www.telliquah.com/Ginseng/Ginseng.htm

[Troll of Sorrow]

...can't stop...the Voices...telling me...must comment!

Dear Lord,

"Oh, this amazing anthelmintic.

Just over a week's flown by, and there haven't been any bad side-effects from the toxic reaction. He's a whirlwind now—all energy and vigor—bright-eyed, bounding about here and there like quicksilver. He doesn't seem to be suffering from being indoors—perhaps because he's a natural cave-dweller.

Ever since Palomita fed him that cat food he's consented to eat it occasionally, but only the same brand and not always that. Fortunately, he's now consented to have quail's eggs in his diet, provided I hide them around the apartment—in a large Iittala glass ashtray, or four of them making a nice little four-leaf clover-shape in a sofa cushion, or on the window sills behind the curtains. Sometimes when I get carried away, I make little hiding places out of gloves, cardboard boxes, and coffee-pot tops and secrete them around the flat. He goes after the items, smells them, digs into them, and goes into unbounded rejoicing when he finds the treasure. And then he sits down to slurp the eggs, first cracking them neatly into two halves with his fingernails and then lapping up the contents without spilling a drop."

From Troll, A Love Story, by Johanna Sinisalo (2003, page 100)

[Troll of Sorrow]

"There's the rustle of a jacket in the hall. The troll's moved. Angel lifts his downcast, bloodshot, red-rimmed eyes from the table: new hope's burning in them.

'I'd better be off, in case he gets upset again,' I say. I recover my jacket from the chair back, put it on, and try to walk with the greatest possible discretion into the hallway, prudently avoiding any sudden movement, as when a large, menacing-looking dog is brought into reception.

'I have to warn you...' I say, keeping my voice low, while hearing on the parquet the brief, light scratch of a claw coming out of torpor.

'Oh, I'll be safe with him. He's terribly intelligent, he's altogether tame—'Angel snaps, but I interrupt him with a weary raise of my hand...."

(From The Troll: A Love Story, by Johanna Sinisalo, page 205)

[Troll of Sorrow]

It's really easy to get around IP bans. I do it all the time. I'm pretty well hated, but then that's the point, isn't it?

{...That's funny, I noticed the following listed in their "Terms and Conditions of Service..."

Proxify may not be used for any of the following forbidden uses:

# To engage in spamming, indiscriminate advertising, unsolicited commercial email, mass news posts, or any other kind of abuse of the net.
# To bypass blocking imposed by the owner of a bulletin board or discussion forum.
# To threaten or harass others.}

[John Emerson]

He doesn't seem to handle ginseng well. I guess it was my fault.

[Matt]

Jared Diamond has a new book out, btw, currently sitting pretty on the NYT best seller list (if such a thing is possible, amidst such company). It's called Collapse, and it promises to cure all your apocalyptic woes with ginseng and profound insight such as:

"Perhaps a crux of success or failure as a society is to know which core values to hold on to, and which ones to discard and replace with new values, when times change....The United States has retreated substantially (but hardly completely) from its former values of legalized racial discrimination, legalized homophobia, a subordinate role of women, and sexual repression...The world as a whole today faces similar decisions about its environmental problems that we shall consider in the final chapter." (page 433-4_

[Matt]

I didn't mean for that to sound half as snarky as it does to me now.

[anonymous]

http://savageminds.org/2005/07/26/guns-germs-and-steel-links/

In which Brad DeLong is infuriated to the point of using potty language, yet again, at how difficult it seems to be to sell the Clintonian, Friedmanesque WORLDVIEW soundbites to a more intelligent blogosphere than he deserves. Or maybe he's just infuriated at being called on his "pot shots", who knows. Either way, his unleashed fury a blog-event doth make.

[chasquis]

A book on plants on at least a par with H H ; Fencing Paradise by Richard Mabey of East Anglia