Showing posts from category: Economic history
From Dead End Kids to Bowery Boys with Several Other Monikers In-Between
As a kid I developed a liking for “Our Gang” comedies, a series of American short films about a gang of poor, mainly white (but including black) children. I enjoyed the good-natured tomfoolery and minor mischief perpetrated by the juvenile gang members, particularly Spanky, Alfalfa and Buckwheat. I’m thankful that I was exposed to the “Our Gang” shorts🅐 as it pointed me towards another cinema series about the same demographic that became part of my standard viewing fodder – the Dead End Kids series of movies and its successors.
While the antics of “Our Gang” were unadulterated if sentimentalised fun, I came to prefer the more serious tone and developed storylines of the “Dead End Kids” (DEK) movies. The early movies were starkly realistic, and this was realism of the grittiest kind, rooted in the unforgiving here and now of grim slum life in America’s depression era. These kids were dirt poor, locked into a daily struggle for survival, taking every opportunity, fair or foul, to fleece or steal from anyone or anything that presented itself. At the same time their brutal experience had made them rebels with a cause – the inequities of capitalist America…impoverished slum boys who never missed a chance to decry or one-up the “better-offs” in society.
The Kids from Dead End: The DEK phenomena had its genesis in a 1935 Broadway play, Dead End🅑, by Sidney Kingsley, featuring a cadre of young actors which would go on to form the nucleus of the gang in the movie series: Billy Halop, Bobby Jordan, Gabriel Dell, Huntz Hall, Bernard Punsley🅒 and the Gorcey brothers, Leo and David. The play was successful, running for two years, Hollywood mega-mogul Samuel Goldwyn saw the show and was immediately impressed. Goldwyn bought the film rights and made Dead End as a United Artists feature film in 1937, co-starring the Kids alongside Humphrey Bogart. The film was a hit but the boys caused havoc during the production, crashing a truck into a soundstage, prompting an annoyed Goldwyn to unload them to Warner Brothers.
Warners Bros’ crime school graduates: At Warner Brothers the Dead End Kids made six features, typically in supporting roles to big stars (Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Cagney, Pat O’Brien, Anne Sheridan, John Garfield and Bogart). In They Made me a Criminal (1939) starring Garfield, the Kids don’t make an appearance until 25 minutes into the film. The Warners’ series followed the studio’s formula of serious social crime dramas with the Kids heavily involved in the plot and also lending some comedy relief (‘Dead End Kids’, www.boweryboys.bobfinnan.com). Billy Halop was acknowledged as the leader of the gang and was purportedly paid more than the other boys, leading to some bad feelings within the group. Despite the DEK success at Warners the studio was disenchanted with the group’s off-camera antics (more impromptu hell–raising) and released them from their contracts after their sixth film.
Little Tough Guys: Universal decided to get in on the act, cashing in on the DEK’s appeal with its own (B–movie) series. Billing the gang as the “Little Tough Guys”, Universal made 12 features in the late 1930s–early 40s, featuring at one time or other all of the original Kids except Leo Gorcey. Shemp Howard, one of the popular “Three Stooges”, appeared in two of the LTG movies, and was acknowledged by Huntz Hall as an influence on the slapstick style of comedy that the group later developed.
East Side Kids: The Dead End Kids morphed into a new incarnation called the “East Side Kids” in a series made by Monogram Pictures. These were 22 films made as low-budget imitations of the DEK movies, initially crime melodramas with comedic overtones, but as the series evolved, the comedy angle took greater emphasis. With Halop gone by this time, Leo Gorcey and Bobby Jordan were now the gang leaders. As the series progressed, the comedy duo of wise guy Leo Gorcey and zany but dim Huntz Hall became the focus in films like Million Dollar Kid and Spooks Run Wild (a horror comedy headlined by an ageing Bela Lugosi) (www.boweryboys.bobfinnan.com). As a variation on the usual criminals that the boys routinely cross swords with, in Let’s Get Tough (1942) they find themselves this time trying to foil Nazi and Japanese saboteurs in the US. A black former child actor of the original Our Gang movies “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison and William (“Billy”) Benedict were added to the ESK retinue of scruffy working class street kids.
Bowery Boys: Stoogesque slapstick and streetwise Abbott and Costello In 1945 the ESK series folded and was replaced by yet another name for the team of screen performers, the “Bowery Boys”🅓. Leo Gorcey this time had an enhanced stake in the enterprise, owning 40% of the production company🅔, acting as producer and contributing to the script. Gorcey also brought his father Bernard to the films’ players. Bobby Jordan left the series again and Gabriel Dell returned. The interaction of Leo Gorcey, with his malapropism-prone utterances as “Slip”, and Hunt as dim-witted sidekick “Sash”, continued to provide the central plank of the humour. The Bowery Boys series—made by Allied Artists, successor studio to Monogram—comprised 48 movies in all. The early efforts continued the standard fare of gangster melodrama, but after “Three Stooges” director Edward Bernds started directing Gorcey and Co, the films resorted more to slapstick comedy, Three Stooges-like wordplay and occasionally to fantasy themes (‘The Bowery Boys: Anything But Routine’, Ivan G. Shreve, Jr Classic Flix, 19-Sep-2013, www.classicflix.com). Abbott and Costello’s influence is also evident, there are obvious echoes of Africa Screams in the Bowery Boys’ Jungle Gents (1954) (‘Dead End Kids’ found new life as ‘Bowery Boys’, Jim Willard, Loveland Reporter-Herald, 07-July-2018, www.reporterherald.com).
By the time the final Bowery Boys film In the Money is made in 1958, the series is looking tired, stale and frayed…only Huntz Hall and David Gorcey remain of the originals (Leo’s ongoing bouts with the demon alcohol saw his forced departure in 1956, replaced by Stanley Clements), the “Kids” were now middle-aged, hardly juvenile delinquent material, and their screen work lacking the verve and punch of earlier days.
🅐 syndicated for television in the 1960s as The Little Rascals
🅑 the “Dead End” tag came from the inscription on the road sign at the river’s edge in the original, 1937 film
🅒 Punsly was the odd one out among the “young punk” band of actors, he stayed in the DEK/ESK series only till 1942 (notching up 19 films) before leaving show biz for good to become a successful physician (later chief of staff at a private hospital in LA)
🅓 the Bowery is a street and neighbourhood in Lower Manhattan, NYC
🅔 Huntz Hall held 10% himself
420 Years Ago, VOC Makes the World’s First IPO
Stock Exchange 1.0
The world’s first known stock exchange is thought to be a market established in Bruges, Belgium, around 1309. This operation was a family concern conducted in the home of textile merchant Robert Van der Burse (or Van “ter Buerse/Buerze”). This type of early market which primarily deals with the exchange of commodities, ie, various agricultural products—and in its modern connotation, also with gas, oil, coal, etc—acquired the name ‘bourse’ from its founder. A bourse (typically European in location) is “a market organised for the purpose of buying and selling securities, commodities, options and other investments” [‘Bourse’, Investopedia, www.investopedia.com]. Another early bourse was located in Antwerp<a̷>.
𝕍𝕒𝕟 𝕕𝕖𝕣 𝔹𝕦𝕣𝕤𝕖: 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕠𝕣𝕚𝕘𝕚𝕟𝕒𝕝 𝕓𝕠𝕦𝕣𝕤𝕖
The Van der Burse exchange was the first organised market, before this landmark development such transaction processes were unorganised and informal – sellers and buyers would meet up one-to-one at specific meeting places such as town squares to conduct their trade <b̷> [‘Creation of the first stock exchange’, www.citeco.fr].
The Dutch, pioneers of capitalism
For the first ‘modern’ securities market we need to look to Belgium’s neighbours, the Dutch. The Amsterdam Stock Exchange is the oldest such market, founded in 1602 with the establishment of the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC). Amsterdam was the first bourse to deal in securities <c̷>. The VOC was empowered with quasi-government and monopoly status by the States General of the Netherlands, granted a 21-year charter to conduct all Dutch trade in Asia. In so doing, financial history was made…the VOC was a world first, a public company founded by a state government. Hitherto the Dutch trading environment comprised a number of competing private companies known as voorcompagnieën or “pre-companies”. By the 1602 Charter, the government merged those small, private companies into one “nationalistic Goliath”, VOC, creating a proto-megacorporation.
𝟙𝟞𝟘𝟚 ℂ𝕙𝕒𝕣𝕥𝕖𝕣 𝕕𝕠𝕔Raising capital At VOC’s commencement of business it held an unprecedented initial public offering (IPO). The company’s directors opened up share-holding to all Dutchmen by subscription (while investing 12,000 guilders of their own money up front). The public nature of the share issue was its revolutionary feature, hitherto predecessor companies (like the Oude Compagnie) had raised capital from a small circle of private investors. Some investors balked at the opportunity offered by VOC, wary of tying up their precious savings for such a long period (ten years). Concessions made by the VOC eased these concerns – in a subsequent amendment to the charter, investors were permitted to on-sell their shares to a third party prior to ten years [‘The world’s first IPO’, Lodewijk Petram, The World’s First Stock Exchange’, 15 October 2020, www.worldsfirststockexchange.com].
𝔸𝕞𝕤𝕥𝕖𝕣𝕕𝕒𝕞 𝕊𝕥𝕠𝕔𝕜 𝔼𝕩𝕔𝕙𝕒𝕟𝕘𝕖 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕓𝕦𝕝𝕝What would NOT have seemed novel to financial market investors of the day was the ‘office’ for doing business…initially lacking a business premises the VOC—after the fashion of the Bourses’ 14th century Bruges exchange—issued an open invitation for would-be investors to come to the private home of the company co-founder Dirck van Os to do the paperwork and deposit their money. Ultimately, by the time subscriptions closed, some 1,143 individuals <d̷> had invested a total of 3,674,945 guilders in the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (including Dirck van Os’ own maid!) [Petram].
ℕ𝔸𝕊𝔻𝔸ℚ (ℙ𝕙𝕠𝕥𝕠: 𝕄𝕒𝕣𝕜𝕖𝕥𝕤𝕎𝕚𝕜𝕚)
Footnote: the VOC’s IPO had profound ramifications, fundamentally altering the nature of investing. Originally intended to facilitate the financing of risky capital-intensive ventures, it “inadvertently created an alternative for investor beyond fixed income investments, marking the beginning of retail investing in equities” [‘World’s First IPO: Dutch East India Co’, Suede Investing, www.suedeinvesting.com].
•°¯`••••´¯°• •°¯`••••´¯°•
<a̷> the most famous bourse today is that of the Paris Stock Exchange
<b̷> including the square in front of the Van der Burse residence
<c̷> printed stocks and bonds, debt and other interests in companies, government and private businesses
<d̷> in addition to the six directors
1898, A Vintage Year for United States Empire Building
“God created war so that Americans would learn geography” ~ Mark Twain (attributed)✱
〥 〥 〥 〥 〥 〥 〥 〥 〥
The axiomatic nature of the above much-referenced quotation resounds most strongly in the year 1898. In that year the US expanded its offshore territorial acquisitions in different parts of the Pacific and in the Caribbean. It secured the islands of Cuba, the Philippines❂, Guam and Puerto Rico as a result of a short, opportunistic, one-sided war with a declining European power. At the same time Washington annexing the Hawaiian Islands, closed the door on four years of ‘independent’ republicanism which followed a successful coup by American businessmen against the indigenous Hawaiian monarchy.
🔺 Flag of the short-lived Hawaiian Republic
What triggered US involvement in a Cuban conflict against far-off Spain? The immediate pretext was the sinking of the American battleship Maine in Havana harbour. The explosion is generally believed to have been an accident but leading American newspapers (the Hearst press and to a lesser extent the Pulitzer publications) drove the charge of war jingoism within the country, declaring Spain culpable for the loss of life on the Maine. This and the ongoing reporting of the Cuban insurrection which deliberately exaggerated Spanish atrocities against the Cubans—examples of the “yellow journalism”◬ practiced especially by Hearst—helped to create a groundswell of popular support and agitation for war whilst boosting the newspapers’ sales.
🔺 “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!” (source: www.pri.org)
Humanitarian concern for the Cuban people? In response to the charge that the US engineered the war as a grab for territory (á la Mexico 1846), apologists for the US intervention clothed the action in the garb of a humanitarian attempt to free the Cuban people from the colonial yoke of imperial Spain [Foner, Philip S. “Why the United States Went to War with Spain in 1898.” Science & Society, vol. 32, no. 1, 1968, pp. 39–65. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/404402321. Accessed 21 July 2020]. The McKinley Administration in Washington DC also justified it as an imperative to act given the political instability in Cuba, so close to US soil, and certainly Washington as the hegemonic regional power with a self-appointed role as regional ‘policeman’ had an interest in ridding the Western Hemisphere of the remnants of an old European colonial power [‘The Spanish-American War, 1898’, Office of The Historian, www.history.state.gov/].
Contemporary criticisms of aggressive US foreign policy Washington’s rapid trajectory towards war in 1898 drew a skeptical response internationally. Keir Hardie, British labour leader, stated that he “cannot believe in the purity of the American motive”, seeing rather the hand of “trusts and Wall Street financiers intent on extending American dominance over Cuba, Latin America, and the Far East”. The French government agreed that the professed humanitarian concerns were “merely a disguise for (US) commercial desires” to conquer the Caribbean and Latin America. Non-mainstream press in the US like the socialist The People and the New York Tribune argued that the US government ’s real aim was to ”divert attention from economic evils at home” and to protect the US’s extensive interests in Cuba [Foner, Philip S. “Why the United States Went to War with Spain in 1898.” Science & Society, vol. 32, no. 1, 1968, pp. 39–65. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/404402321. Accessed 21 July 2020].
An economics-driven war In fact economics was the principal driver of America’s intervention in Spanish Cuba. First, the US was massively invested in the island in the 1890s, importing sugar (predominantly), plus tobacco and minerals from Cuba…the US’s Cuban business ventures were valued at about $50 million in 1895 [‘American Business in Cuba 1898-1959: A Brief Overview’, (Lisa Reynolds Wolfe), Havana Project, 17-Aug-2011, www.havanaproject.com]. The Maine was in Havana harbour to protect these same American interests when it met with disaster. So, rather than a humanitarian motive to aid the beleaguered Cubans, the intervention can be seen as pure economic self-interest: “halting a nationalistic revolution or social movement that threatened American interests” and the subsequent withholding of sovereignty to Cubans (and to Filipinos) [Paterson, Thomas G. “United States Intervention in Cuba, 1898: Interpretations of the Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino War.” The History Teacher, vol. 29, no. 3, 1996, pp. 341–361. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4944551 . Accessed 21 July 2020].
🔺 President McKinley
The contemporary state of the American economy was a factor in America’s timing to act. Economic depression and unemployment was plaguing the country. New markets needed to be found for US goods, this meant not only Cuba and the American ’backyard’, but even extending to the Philippines and the lucrative Chinese market (Paterson). Tom Fiddick argues that the real reason President McKinley backed by the American capitalist class opted for war—having seen Spain‘s failure to pacify the Cuban rebels—was to make certain that the insurectos did not succeed in liberating the island and thereby pose a threat to US business interests in Cuba [Fiddick, Tom. “Some Comments on Philip S. Foner’s “Why the United States Went to War with Spain”.” Science & Society 32, no. 3 (1968): 323-27. Accessed July 22, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/40401358].
🔺 Battle of Guantánamo Bay (Cuba)
US strategy thinking around imperialist objectives was evident prior to the move to war in 1898 – plans were already afoot for the establishment of naval bases in the strategically important Caribbean and in Hawaii, a precondition to expanding economically further into Latin America and into Asian markets. This “game plan” also envisioned US control of the Isthmus of Panama, an objective secured a few years after the victory over Spain (Foner).
Underpinning ideology for upping territorial expansion The hawkish US foreign policy in 1898 accords with the prevailing 19th century belief of “Manifest Destiny”, a view that settlers in the US were destined to expand inexorably across the continent of North America◙. Correspondence between key players (T Roosevelt and HC Lodge) disclose that the McKinley Administration was committed—before the outbreak of hostilities—to “intervention in Cuba as a stepping stone for expansion in the Far East through the acquisition of Spain’s Pacific possessions”. Foner notes that Cuba comprised the ‘fulcrum’ providing the opportunity for US occupancy of the Philippines as “a base at the doorway to China’s markets” for US capitalists. Also shaping this was the influence of Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis—the idea that American democracy was defined by a moving frontier line—if America’s frontier at home was closing off as was thought by some, then the most viable course may be to seek new frontiers abroad. The increasingly dominant current in international thought, social Darwinism, was also informing American thinking…the national assertiveness shown in 1898 can be seen as a quantum leap in the “deliberate, calculated pursuit of United States’ greatness” (Paterson).
🔻 Battle of Manila Bay (Phil.)
Hawaii, a foothold on the “American Lake” The groundwork for the US’s absorption of the Hawaiian islands as part of the Manifesto Destiny credo was laid five years earlier when a group of American sugar planters under Sanford B Dole✦ overthrew Queen Liliuokalani, replacing the monarchy with a provisional government with Dole as president. The coup was tacitly recognised by the US government (with US marines despatched to Hawaii to protect US citizens), although President Cleveland tried unsuccessfully to reinstate the monarchy. His successor William McKinley, recognising the strategic importance of Pearl Harbour as a naval base in the war with Spain, “rubber-stamped” the formal annexation of the islands by the US in August 1898 [‘Americans overthrow Hawaiian monarchy, History, www.history.com/].
🔺 US sailors and marines in Honolulu c.1894
Footnote: A “Spanish-American War” Thomas G Patterson notes the exclusionist nature of the name given to the 1898 conflict – the omission of reference to Cuba and Philippines in the title—in effect “air-brushing” the native populations out of the conflict—was (Paterson suggests) an attempt by the victors to obscure uncomfortable truths, the denial of full-fledged independence to Cubans and Filipinos once freed from Spanish control, and to try to avoid America’s role in the affair being labelled as ‘imperialist’ (Paterson).
🔻 1900 map (Source: Pinterest)
PostScript: The Filipino insurgency After the Spanish defeat Filipino nationalists under Emilio Aguinaldo asserted the Philippines’ independence (proclaiming the First Philippine Republic) in 1899. This action was opposed by the US and a conventional-cum-guerrilla war ensued until 1902 when US forces finally subdued Aguinaldo’s army and the Philippines were made an unincorporated territory of the US (although a number of splinter groups of local insurrectos continued to fight the US military occupation for several years) [‘The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902’, Office of The Historian, www.history.state.gov/].
🔻 Flag of the República Filipino
◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢◤◢
✱ this famous but elusive quote has also been attributed in slightly modified form to Ambrose Bierce
❂ the US government paid Spain $20 million, compensation for the loss of infrastructure in the Philippines
◬ characterised by sensationalism (eg, eye-catching headlines) typically with scant regard for accuracy
◙ US business giant Standard Oil for instance talked about its ”Manifest Destiny being in Asia” (Foner)
✦ calling themselves the “Committee of Safety”
Ewo and Taikoo: Two of the Legendary Free Market Hongs of British Hong Kong (The “Movers and Shakers”)
(Image: www.travelsfinder.com)
No organisation has left a larger footprint on Hong Kong‘s long colonial experience under the British (1841-1997) than the hongs (see Endnote). And one British hong that has been especially significant in shaping the course of British (and beyond) Hong Kong has been Jardine, Matheson. The company under the direction of Scots William Jardine and James Matheson arrived in Hong Kong on the ground floor, securing lot No. 1 on Hong Kong Island in the initial land sale by the British colonial administrators in 1841 [‘Jardine, Matheson – company history’, www.jardines.com].
Jardine’s original business premises on Causeway Bay ⍗
Jardine, Matheson Co Hong Kong replaced the firm’s previous base in Canton (Guangzhou). From Hong Kong (which soon become Jardine, Matheson’s headquarters) and from the startup of it’s Shànghâi operation a couple of years later, the company laid the foundations of it’s fortune initially from a highly profitable trade of smuggling opium (as well as tea, silk and cotton) into mainland China from South Asia. Jardine, Matheson quickly diversified into more ethical and legal enterprises, adding steamships to their portfolio from the 1850s (China Coast Steam Navigation Co, Indo-China Steam Navigation Co, Yangtśe Steam Navigation Co) which serviced the trade routes to Japan, Singapore, Calcutta, Manila and Vladivostok [‘Jardine, Matheson & Co. Steam Nav. Co / Indo-China Steam Nav. Co / Yangtse S.N. Co.’, www.theshipslist.com].
Taipan Wm Jardine ⍗
Jardine Matheson, a ubiquitous hong Over the years Jardine, Matheson (JM Co) continued to diversify—cotton mills, property, breweries, insurance, financiers (of the first railway in China), sugar plantations, etc. All the while extending it’s trade links – Europe, Africa, Australia, America. Later JM Co got into hotels, motor vehicles, food and hygiene product wholesaling and so on. They functioned as Far East agents – for gunmakers amongst other manufacturers. JM Co even acted in a para-government capacity for consuls for foreign powers doing business in the region, as did other hongs [Jan Morris, Hong Kong: Epilogue to an Empire, (2000)].
⍗ Hong Kong Island
Butterfield and Swire This particular British hong was something of a latecomer to Hong Kong compared to the pioneering Jardine, Matheson Co. The B&S trading house arrived on the Island in 1869. But Butterfield and Swire did not waste any time in developing into one of the most powerful players in the territory. The driving force behind the company was John Samuel Swire✱. Previously, Butterfield, Swire and his brother William, had started a shipping and trading business in Shanghai. The Swire hong’s road to riches was predicated, not on the illicit drug trade like JM Co, but on a combination of shipbuilding, sugar-refining, banking, insurance, mining, railroad building and other later entrepreneurial pursuits in the Far East, such as bottling Coca-Cola for Asia’s markets. Swire’s diverse subsidiaries have included the Taikoo Sugar Refinery, Taikoo Dockyard – which built mainly steamboats for the China Navigation Co, another Swire subsidiary. Since the 20th century another star in the business stable of the Swire Group☒ is the leading Asian airline Cathay Pacific. Early on Swire’s was also an agent for the Blue Funnel cruise ship line [Morris; ‘Butterfield and Swire’, (School of Oriental and African Studies, London University), The National Archives, http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk].
Taipan JS Swire, “the Senior” ⍐ (Photo: www.industrialhistoryhk.org)
JS Swire’s leadership and business style was unequivocally ruthless and uncompromising, he was very much of the “take-no-prisoners”, old school of business. Under “The Senior” Swire, the company played a telling part in driving some of the other Hong Kong frontier merchants into eventual business oblivion – as happened with two pioneering hongs, Dent and Co and Russell and Co (Morris).
Jardine, Matheson v Swire/Ewo v Taikoo☒ Swire‘s great and enduring rival in Hong Kong (and in the East) has been JM Co. For both hongs in the formative years the main game was about buying and selling in China for the European market. As both firms added more business pursuits to their respective China Sea empires, they came more into competition with each other. Swire’s Quarry Bay Taikoo Dockyard and sugar refinery for instance was in stiff competition with Jardine’s Kowloon Whampoa dockyard and refinery [‘Taikoo Sugar Refinery’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
⍗ SS Shuntien, built at Taikoo Docks
Dynastic hongs with staying power The Jardine presence in Honk Kong and at the helm of the company continues to this day through the Keswick family, ancestors of founder William Jardine’s sister. In a similar vein, the Swire name retains a connection with the present Swire Group (current conglomerate chairman Barnaby Swire is a descendent of John Samuel Swire and there are other ‘Swires’ in the management hierarchy).
(Photo: www.hkland.com/)
1984 and beyond After several years of tortuous negotiations between the UK Thatcher government and China agreement was finally reached to hand over Hong Kong to Beijing in 1997. This left Swires and Jardines, two of the British hongs with most at stake, with the thorny issue of whether to stay in the erstwhile British colony or not under the hard-to-predict communists. Swires, who had earlier pulled its businesses out of China four year after the communist takeover (to later return), chose to keep its operational base in Hong Kong. Swires sought to work with the Chinese regime, entering into airline deals to give the PRC an interest in Cathay Pacific and secure a domestic foothold for itself. The Jardines conglomerate opted for a different strategy, choosing in 1984 to cut and run, switching its legal domicile from Hong Kong to Bermuda and delisting on the HK Stock Exchange in favour of London and Singapore. This move earned Jardines the ire of Beijing⇟. Even after the ink was dry on the hand-over decision, JM Co continue to lobby the British government hard (with Simon Keswick particularly vocal) to keep the territory out of Beijing’s clutches [Felix Patrikeeff, Mouldering Pearl: Hong Kong at the Crossroads, (1989)].
By the turn of the 21st century JM Co had regained ground from a successful drive into Southeast Asia markets and had once again firmly secured a beachhead on mainland China [‘A tale of two hongs’, The Economist, 30-Jun-2007, www.theeconomist.com ; ‘Jardine Matheson Returns to China’, The Economist, 02-Jul-2015, www.theeconomist.com].
Postscript: Tension between government and the merchant class Officially, Hong Kong was run during the British era by a succession of governors, appointed from Whitehall. However a fundamental difference in raison d’être existed between the governors and the taipans. The governors were about the Imperial interest of Britain, in practical terms they sought to raise sufficient revenue to fund the colony’s administration. The sole concern of the plutocrats, the merchants, was self-enrichment and their natural inclination was to resist all efforts of the governor to raise taxes…this made for a generally very rocky relationship between the Crown Colony’s two power blocks with antithetical interests (Morris).
Endnote: Hongs and taipans
The term ‘hong’ (major foreign trading houses based in Hong Kong to trade with China) derives apparently from the Chinese word cohong, used to describe the guilds of Chinese merchants operating Canton’s trade with the West prior to 1842 (the “Thirteen Factories” or Canton System). In British Hong Kong each hong was headed up by a taipan (or series of taipans) who was the top boss man in the trading company. The hongs employed native (Chinese) personnel, called compradors, who acted as local “go-betweens” to facilitate business for the firms.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
✱ “the Butterfield” in the partnership didn’t last long in Hong Kong with the autocratic Swire edging him into retirement within a short time
☒ both trading houses adopted Chinese business names: Ewo (JM Co) means ” State of happy harmony”; Taikoo (Swire) means “Great and ancient”
⇟ China already held a long-lingering grudge against JM Co … company principal William Jardine was one of the main advocates for Britain to take action against the Chinese Empire in retaliation for it closing down the lucrative opium trafficking trade (leading to the First Opium War)
Inter-war Shànghâi: A Cocktail of Espionage, Rapid Wealth Creation, Opulent Grandeur and Glamour—in a “United Nations“ of Competing Interests
Shànghâi by the late 1920s, and 1930s, was an exemplar of cosmopolitanism. The city’s pluralism, including a significant interracial element, made it stand out not just from the rest of a largely homogenous China, but from just about anywhere else on the globe. A key ingredient in Shànghâi‘s cosmopolitan character at this time was the trifurcation of the city. As a consequence of the city’s vicissitudes in the 19th century, Shànghâi, notwithstanding China’s retention of sovereignty over the city, was formally divided into three sections, two of which were foreign controlled.
French Concession
The smallest section was the French Concession (Fàguó zūjiè), in the puxi (west) part of the old city (roughly corresponding to the districts of Luwan and Xuhui in contemporary Shànghâi)—best known today as a prized residential location and the stylish centre of retail fashion in the city. The French, following suit from the British, extracted a concession from the territorial governors in 1849 and engaged in extra-territorial expansion over the ensuing decades. The French Concession had a consul-general appointed from Paris and maintained its own force of gendarmes.
(The SMC flag, with a motto which preached ‘togetherness’)
Shànghâi International Settlement
Originally both the British and the American Wàiguó rén (foreigners)—the Shanghailanders as they styled themselves—had their own separate concessions, but the two enclaves merged in 1863 to form the International Settlements. The international communities, in the main dominated by the British and to a lesser degree the Americans (but also comprising smaller communities of other nationalities, mainly Germans, Italians, Dutch and Danish) who had their own police and fire services. The British and American expats, when they felt that their highly lucrative interests were threatened (as was the case in the 1927 political crisis), did not hesitate to call in the British Army and the US Marines. Both the British/International and French jurisdictions relied heavily on local Chinese for the bulk of their forces [‘The Shanghai Settlements’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Chinese Greater Shànghâi
The third and largest section was the area given over to the Chinese themselves and run by the Chinese Municipality of Greater Shànghâi. Basically, this area surrounded most of the foreign concession territory (especially to it’s south and west) and comprised the parts of Shànghâi that the British et al and the French were not interested in, having already had their pick of the prime locations for themselves, close to and along the Bund [‘The Shanghai International Settlements’, Wiki].
(Cartography: Bert Brouwenstijn, VU University, Amsterdam)
A fourth concession, the “Japanese concession”
In effect, the large and increasing numbers of Japanese living in Shànghâi by this time (including armed garrisons), had resulted in the creation of an unofficial ”Japanese Concession”. This de facto concession was located in the Hongkew (now Hóngkôu) district of Shànghâi (just north of the Whangpoo’s (Huangpu’s) confluence with the Soochew (now Suzhou) Creek). Ultimately, after the Pearl Harbour attack, the Japanese extended its hold over the rest of Shànghâi except the French Concession which Nazi Germany allowed it’s Vichy French ‘puppet’ allies to retain (until 1943 when the Vichy were forced to hand it over to Imperial Japan).
Shànghâi, the fabled metropolis
By the early 1930s Shànghâi had established itself as one of the most exceptional and distinctively dazzling societies on earth. It’s population had hit three million (making it the fifth largest city in the world[𝕒]), of which somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 were foreigners. The Thirties also witnesses two huge influxes of refugees into the city—European, mainly German, Jews fleeing the murderous repression of the Third Reich and reactionary White Russians fleeing Bolshevik retribution in Stalin’s Soviet Union and republics. Both of these ’stateless’ exo-groups were the fortunate beneficiaries of Shànghâi’s status as an open door city…neither passports or visas were required to enter the city [‘Shanghai in the 1930s’, World History, http://world history.us].
🔺 Sassoon’s ‘Cathay’ , a Bund icon but a slightly(sic) over-the-top self-comparison (Source: P Hibberd, The Bund Shanghai: China Faces West (2007))
Economics and architecture: A modern city
The early ‘30s, the Great Depression may have been ravaging the world but Shanghai was prospering…Shànghâi’s flourishing affluence meant rapidly made fortunes and a privileged lifestyle – for some at least within Shànghâi society…most notably and obviously for the advantaged foreigners. Businessmen such as Victor Sassoon (financier and hotelier) and the Renwick brothers (Jardine Matheson), profited from cheap local labour, laying the foundation for their fabulous stores of wealth[𝕓]. Brits like Tony Renwick and Anglophile American Stirling Fessenden also controlled the Shànghâi Municipal Council ensuring that local public policy in the Internationals’ concession would be favourable to Anglo business interests [‘Shanghai Municipal Council’, (International Settlement 1863-1941), www.links4seo.com/].
A further, external factor which allowed Shànghâi to prosper was that, unlike the rest of China which was divided up between different regional warlords, the city was monopolised by the foreign merchant class (World History). The warlords (and Republic of China leader Chang Kai-shek) were not able to penetrate this localised power base.
The Bund‘s modernity
And the wealth realised was certainly of the conspicuous kind, one glance down the Bund (Wàitān), the riverfront promenade, confirmed that. It was replete with grand financial and trading houses, hotels and nightclubs, many in elegant Art Deco or Neo-Classical style [𝕔]. The Bund symbolised the city’s new wealth and modernity – and contained Shànghâi’s version of ”Wall Street”. Shànghâi, even at this time, had more skyscrapers than anywhere outside of the US (World History). In nearby Nanking Road (now Nanjing Rd), was the commercial heart of Shànghâi, housing the leading retail merchants of the city such as the Sincere Company Ltd and Wing On. Fashion in Shànghâi echoed the city architecture’s modernity, the latest in-vogue styles were all the rage for the Shanghainese [‘Shanghai History’, Lonely Planet, www.lonelyplanet.com].
Nightlife and recreational pursuits
Shànghâi’s business nouveau rich, when they weren’t celebrating or listening to jazz music at one of the Bund’s many nightclubs, Ciro’s, Casanova’s, the Paramount Dance Hall or at the Canidrome Ballroom in the French Concession (originally a greyhound racing track!), could often be found at the Shànghâi Jockey Club racecourse betting along with thousands of others, Chinese and foreigners, on “the strange little Mongolian ponies” especially imported for racing (World History).
Espionage in Shànghâi: something of a free-for-all
With so many different nationalities in Shànghâi at the same time, all with competing and vested interests, it is hardly surprising that the city was a hotbed of espionage especially as the Thirties drew on inexorably towards world war. Spies and counter-spies abounded…most of the main players were actively working on the ground (or under it) in Shànghâi at this juncture – the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), as well intelligence units from Russia, Japan, France, Germany and the US [Bernard Wassermann, Secret War in Shanghai: Treachery, Subversion and Collaboration in the Second World War (2017, 2nd Ed.)].
In the next blog piece I will turn my attention to the other, seamier side of the Shànghâi story of the interwar period – the city’s association, you might say preoccupation, with sin and crime, another face of Shànghâi’s decadence in the Twenties and the Thirties.
Footnote: Shànghâi, location, location … Foreign trading powers like the British had initially preferred the port of Canton[𝕕] to Shànghâi, but by the late 19th century the latter had become the big trading nations’ principal “treaty port” in the Far East. Shànghâi‘s geographical position was fundamental to its eventual prominence: it had become by this time “the central clearinghouse of waterborne trade between the entire Yangtse River system and the rest of the world”, accounting for 50% of China’s foreign trade. It’s port comprising 35 miles of wharves could accommodate >170 ships and 500 sea-going junks at a time (Wassermann).
Canidrome Ballroom🔺(“canine track”)
⟻⟼⟻⟼⟻⟼⟻⟼⟻⟼⟻⟼⟻⟼⟻⟼⟻⟼⟻⟼⟻⟼⟻⟼⟼⟻⟼⟻⟼⟼⟻⟼⟻⟼
[𝕒] behind London, New York, Paris and Berlin
[𝕓] the wealth of the Shanghai foreign elite had its genesis in the aftermath of the Opium Wars. The European and North American powers used the springboard of the “unequal treaties” to extend their existing privileges to their countries’ merchant classes. Within the designated enclaves foreigners could carry out their business in accord with their own laws, free from Chinese taxes and with the added bonus that the Chinese courts and bureaucracy couldn’t interfere with or impede their commercial activities (Wassermann).
[𝕔] the line-up on the Bund included the Jardine Matheson Building ( early opium traders), Sassoon House, (Standard) Chartered Bank, H & S Bank (now HSBC), Union Building, APC Club, the Shànghâi Club, the Cathay Hotel, Paramount Dance Hall and the French, US, German and British consulates
[𝕕] modern day Guangzhou
The Luddites of Britain’s Industrial Revolution: Technophobes with an Excessively Destructive Bent or Practitioners of Last Resort Workplace Bargaining?
The Luddites of Britain’s Industrial Revolution: Technophobes with an Excessively Destructive Bent or Practitioners of Last Resort Workplace Bargaining?
We’ve all heard the term bandied round—anyone who is reluctant to embrace new technology or the world of computers is labelled a Luddite. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “a person who is opposed to the introduction of new working methods, especially new machines”. Many of us would also have an inkling of the term’s origins, deriving from the group of English workers in the early 19th century whose method of resisting new work technologies in Georgian factories and mills took on a very “hands-on”, destructive manner. Beginning with weavers in the textile industry in Nottinghamshire taking to the new machines with sledgehammers in protest, the movement soon spread to other parts of the Midlands and the North of England.
¤ ¤ ¤
Rampage against the machine provokes a repressive reaction The British government wasted little time in sending in an army of soldiers(𝓪 ) in defence of capital. Their assignment was to protect the factories and quell the workers’ revolts. Parliament enacted laws making the workers’ trail of destruction against the machines a capital offence, and many of the offenders were summarily and violently dealt with (shootings, hangings, transportation to New Holland for 14 years). Consequently, the Luddite movement lost energy and cohesion and petered out within a few years [‘The Original Luddites Raged Against the Machine of the Industrial Revolution’, (Christopher Klein), History, 04-Jan-2019, www.history.com].
¤ ¤ ¤
Class loyalty The ruling elite of the day viewed the actions of the workers in attacking the private property of employers as merely bloody-minded vandalism, a perspective that still held an attraction for some modern conservative historians in the 20th century… eminent historian JH Plumb for instance dismissed the Luddites’ revolts as nothing more than “pointless, frenzied industrial jacquerie”. But was that all there was to it, nihilism, the mindless, purposeless, random savagery of working class vandals?
In a ground-breaking article in the early Fifties radical historian EJ Hobsbawn took issue with the conventional “nihilistic sabotage” view of historians like Plumb. Hobsbawn places the rebellious workers’ actions in their proper context, that of the Industrial Revolution and the economic vicissitudes of the period. The machine-breaking by the weavers and other workers was a direct action form of industrial strategy initiated by labour, Hobsbawn calls it “collective bargaining by riot” [EJ Hobsbawn, ‘The Machine Breakers’, Past and Present, No 1, (Feb., 1952), pp.57-70]. EP Thompson describes Luddism as “a violent eruption of feeling against unrestrained industrial capitalism” [E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, (1966)](𝓫).
¤ ¤ ¤
The threat accompanying automation Workers such as the weavers in Nottinghamshire around 1811/12 foresaw the dire implications for them of the introduction of new inventions like the mechanical loom. The economic downturn Britain experienced during the drawn-out Napoleonic Wars resulted in loss of profits for the merchants who owned the mills and factories. But it harmed working families even more…unemployment was widespread, food became scarce and therefore more expensive. Magnifying the problem, trades like the stocking knitters and the lace workers were in decline. By using the new technology, employers could increase production allowing them to engage untrained workers at lower wages. This directly and adversely affected the weavers and other artisans who had spent years learning and honing the skills of their craft. Now the new machines were being taken over by untrained workers who produced inferior work. The job security of textile craftsmen were thus imperilled, by the use of the (new) machinery in (as they saw it) “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to circumvent standard labour practices(𝓬). The danger identified, the textile workers found themselves limited in the forms of protest available to them—they could not legally form trade unions and they could not strike(𝓭 ). Smashing knitting frames and other machines was conceivably the only effective way to protest the inevitable erosion of their economic livelihood [George Binfield, quoted in Klein; ‘What is a Luddite?’, wiseGEEK, www.wisegeek.com].
¤ ¤ ¤
Not technophobes of the Industrial Revolution Hobsbawn is at pains to stress that the protesting mill and factory workers bore no hostility to the machines per se(𝓮). Notwithstanding that the concept of trade unionism was inchoate and still barely nascent at this time, Hobsbawn describes the “wrecking (as) simply a technique of trade unions in the period before (and during) the early Industrial Revolution“. A more contemporary historian George Binfield concurs with Hobsbawn’s central thesis, stating that the derisory ‘technophobe’ tag is a mischaracterisation of the movement—the textile artisans were not against the new technology of the Industrial Revolution, but against the use of it to produce shoddy clothing and depress the wages of skilled workers (Binfield in Klein)(𝓯). Actually, far from being inept, many of the Luddites in the textile industry were highly skilled machine operators [‘What the Luddites Really Fought Against’, (Richard Conniff), Smithsonian Magazine, March 2011, www.smithsonianmag.com].
Poster notice offering a reward for information leading to the arrest of the frame-breakers who attacked George Ball’s Notts. workshop in 1812 🔻
¤ ¤ ¤
Antecedents and successors of the Luddites Luddism, as Donald MacKenzie put it, “was neither mindless, nor completely irrational, nor completely unsuccessful” [DA MacKenzie, ‘Marx and the Machine’, Technology and Culture, Vol 25, No 3, July 1984, pp.473-503]. Hobsbawn scuttles any suggestion that the Luddites’ movement was a one-off phenomena. Arguing that it’s antecedents can be traced back as far as the 17th century, he details instances of other English workers utilising the same industrial tactic as the Luddites—West of England clothing industry , 1710s-1720s; weavers in Somerset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and Devon, 1726/27(𝓰); rioting of textile workers in Melksham (Wilts), 1738; and not confined to the textiles business – coal miners employed the same wrecking tactic in the Northumberland coal-field in the 1740s (𝓱). Hobsbawn notes that the Luddites’ tactic of destroying the tools of production in a calculated fashion did not end with the movement’s swift demise. He cites the riots in Bedlington (Durham) in 1831 in which strikers wilfully wrecked the capitalists’ winding-gear.
¤ ¤ ¤
No unmitigated failure; the preventative measures tactic Although the Luddites’ revolt ended in suppression and broken dreams, Hobsbawn makes the case that there were successes in the workers’ efforts in other episodes of machine-breaking. In some instances, the mere threat from disgruntled craftsmen to wreak havoc on factories and mills was sufficient to dissuade some employers from introducing the machinery as planned, eg, this was the case earlier with weavers in Norwich and shearmen in Wiltshire. Hobsbawn concludes that “invariably, the employer, faced with such hazards” decided to delay or not implement the new technology, cognisant of the latent threat to his property and even his own life. In several of the cases cited by the historian, the threats were a successful bargaining tool to stop employers from cuttingworkers‘ wages, and in the instance of the Northumberland coal miners, their provocative action in burning the mine’s pit-head machinery actually won themselves “a sizeable pay rise”.
🔺‘Ned Ludd’ (sometimes transcribed as Ned Lud) (Image: Granger Collection, NY)
¤ ¤ ¤
Footnote: The eponymous ‘leader’ of the movement The Luddites’ leader was supposed to be one “Ned Ludd”, sometimes referred to as ‘General‘, ‘Captain’ or even ‘King’ Ludd. Purportedly he was an apprentice in the late 1770s who was either beaten or berated by his master and took revenge by damaging the factory’s stocking frame. It seems that in all probability Ned is apocryphal in the fashion of Robin Hood, the English personification of the mythical figure invoking social justice. Ned can be viewed as a symbolic leader for the wrongly-treated to rally round in pursuit of righting (in this instance) the workplace injustices foisted upon skilled industrial craftsmen (Ludd was even said to reside in Sherwood Forest, another nod to the inspiration of the Robin Hood legend in his invention).
(𝓪) some 12,000 troops in total were despatched, more than the number under the command of Wellington in the concurrent Peninsula War, a classic, heavy-handed overkill by the British authorities
(𝓫) one writer applies the term “labor strategists” to the Luddites as a de facto vocational appellation, [Brian Merchant, ‘You’ve Got Luddites All Wrong’, (Tech By Vice), 03-Sep-2014, www.vice.com]
(𝓬) being prevented from forming trade unions left industrial workers already behind the eight-ball when IR mechanisation came along—they were unable to establish a minimum wage, establish workers’ pensions and set standard working conditions
(𝓭) the technology the Luddites railed against did not necessarily need to be new, the stocking frame for instance had been invented 200 years earlier (Conniff)
(𝓮) nor were they “heroic defenders of a pre-technological way of life” – as romantically portrayed later in some quarters (Conniff)
(𝓯) as Binfield contends, the Luddites were in fact willing to adapt to mechanisation…it was the direction that enhanced productivity was heading—enriching the merchant owners, not the workers—that was their beef. Their objective was a share of those profits, or at the very least, a decent wage
(𝓰) their attack on the property and materials of masters and blacklegs had the positive outcome of gaining them a “collective contract” of sorts
(𝓱) workers in the East Midlands hosiery trade also resorted to frame-breaking as part of the riots in 1778 to protest wage erosion…Hobsbawn calls these hose-makers “the ancestors of Ludditism”
Lisbon’s Great 1755 Earthquake, a Cataclysmic Event with Far-reaching Reverberations
When Lisbon experienced an earthquake on November 1, 1755 (sometimes called the Great Lisbon Earthquake), it was not an unique event for the city. Previous earthquakes had punctured Portugal’s capital in 1321 and 1531. The 1755 quake, measuring an estimated magnitude of 8.5-9.0 Mw, however was qualitatively worse because of the widespread nature of the damage and the ongoing repercussions.
Lisbon Pombaline Downtown street plan [Source: www.travel-in-portugal.com]
No sanctuary in the churches
The focus of the earthquake in Lisbon was on the city centre where the churches, it being All Saints Feast Day, were packed with the pious. The churches’ antiquated construction methods, leaving them incapable of withstanding violent movement of the earth, guaranteed a high death toll of the attendees. The foundations of the churches, built on soil liquefaction, only enhanced their vulnerability to violent earth movements [‘November 1, 1755: The Earthquake of Lisbon: Wrath of God or natural disaster?’, (David Bressan), Scientific American, 01-Nov-2011, www.blogs.scientificamerican.com].
Earthquake decimation of one of the city churches
Fire on the heels of five-metre wide fissures in the earth Fires were an immediate consequence of the earthquake. Some of these were firestorms triggered by the massive earth tremor, and some were a direct result of it being a day of religious significance. Scattered through the churches were lit candles in observance of the holy day, the convulsions tipped the candles over, igniting the displays of flowers and spread the fire in all directions. Buildings that managed to escape the destruction of the earthquake often were subsequently consumed by the firestorms [‘1755 Lisbon earthquake’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Tsunami triple-whammy
Because the earthquake hit the central part of the city, many Lisboeta❅ who survived the initial three-and-a-half minute-long megashock made for the docklands and the harbour. Tragically what was thought a safe move proved a fatal one for many. Just 40 minutes after the quake hit Lisbon, it was followed by a (20 foot high) tsunami which pulverised the shoreline and engulfed the Rio Tejo (Tagus River), sending the huddled crowds on the docks scurrying for their lives. The fires and the tsunami compounded the calamity of the seismic event and sent the death toll skyrocketing◘.
‘Ripples’ of the tidal wave The 1755 tsunami was a teletsunamic event with the generated tidal waves crossing the vast ocean. The mid-eastern Atlantic tsunami which hit Lisbon with such force, had amazingly far–flung ramifications. The tsunami was felt literally around the known world. Within an hour it had reached Cornwall on the south coast of England and Galway in Ireland.It was felt as far afield as Finland, North America, Barbados and Martinique in the West Indies and maybe even in Brazil.
Fallout in the region The devastation caused by the earthquake, fires and tsunami was not confined to Lisbon. Other parts of southern Portugal (the Algarve) suffered. Spain too, especially Cadiz which was hit by an even more massive tsunami (65-feet high), lost as much one-third of its population. Parts of Morocco also bore the brunt of the cataclysm with possibly up to 10,000 of its population perishing as a result [Pereira, Alvaro S. “The Opportunity of a Disaster: The Economic Impact of the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake.” The Journal of Economic History 69, no. 2 (2009): 466-99. www.jstor.org/stable/40263964].
Copper engraving, 1755
Casualty count
There have been widely diverse estimations of the human toll from the 1755 earthquake—ranging from 10,000 to anything up to 100,000. Economist AS Pereira has noted how unreliable estimates are…owing to the lack of dependable data on the Portuguese population prior to 1755 and compounded by the public authorities’ decision to swiftly bury the corpses before there was a chance of disease and plague taking root (Pereira). Pereira’s own estimate based at data from surveys in 1757 put the casualties at 30 to 40 thousand out of a possible 200,000 population at the time. Added to this is the up to 10,000 who died in Morocco from the catastrophe○.
The devastation and reconstruction It is estimated that around 85% of Lisbon’s buildings were destroyed by the earthquake and associated phenomena. Two-thirds of the city was made uninhabitable. Among the carnage, in addition to the churches already mentioned, were famous libraries and palaces. Also lost was the city’s new opera house Ópera do Tejo and many examples of distinctive 16th century Manueline architecture. The Palácio Real Ribeira was a casualty, lost were some 70,000 volumes of work including tracts on voyages of early explorers such as Vasco da Gama and art works by Titian, Corregio and Rubens, and so on.
Rua Augusta in the Baixa Pombalina [Photo: www.weheartlisbon.com]
The reconstruction was put in the hands of Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, later bestowed the title of Marques de Pompal by King José I (Joseph I). Pompal’s elevation to sole control of managing the reconstruction and his competence in carrying through the plan allowed him to wrest the political reins of Portugal away from the old aristocracy. Ordinary citizens were pressed into the immediate task of clearing the debris so that Pompal could commence the long and slow task of rebuilding the city largely from scratch. Erected were new, large squares, widened streets and rectilinear avenues. An entirely new lower town Baixa Pombalina (Downtown district) was created. The Pombaline buildings proved to be radically innovative, being among the earliest seismically protected constructions in Europe.
Embryonic signs of the science of seismology There is one important factor which separates the 1755 quake from those preceding it. In its aftermath Pompal coordinated systematic surveys in the nature and course of the earthquake. The preservation of data collected and archived at the time has allowed modern seismologists to better analyse the natural event and its genesis. Thus, in a very rudimentary but pioneering way, this has contributed to the development of what has become the science of seismology and the practice of earthquake engineering (‘Lisbon earthquake’, Wiki).
The phenomena, a boost to scientific enquiry, also caused religious rumblings at the time. Many in staunchly Catholic Portugal wondered if the degree of devastation was a manifestation of divine judgement, God’s wrath on flawed mortals. Discussions of theodicy and other philosophical questions abounded (Bressan).
The earthquake‘s effects on the Portuguese economy The catastrophic 1755 event presented Pompal with the opportunity to reform the country’s economy and to some extent reorganise society. Pereira‘s work has looked at the cost of the devastation to Lisbon. As he has pointed out, Lisbon at the time was “staggeringly rich” courtesy of the plunder of its colonies in Africa and the New World. The city was awash with huge stores of gold bullion, jewels and expensive merchandise✧. The economist estimated the direct cost of the earthquake at between 32 and 48% of Portugal’s GDP. Another consequence was prices and wages volatility, albeit this was only temporary (Pereira).
Pompal’s reforms To counter the deterioration in the country’s public finances✬, the Marques introduced several economic reforms and institutional changes. The state bureaucracy was streamlined and the treasury was reformed with the advent of a new tax system. Pompal’s mercantilist policies revamped the Portuguese economy. Pompal’s policies long-term had the effect of enhancing the centralist orientation of the economy and reduced Portugal’s dependence on its main trading partner Britain (Pereira).Seismologists have speculated as to whether the Lisbon Earthquake remotely triggered two other earthquakes—in Cape Ann (near Boston, Mass) and Meknes, Morocco—which followed it by just 17 and 26 days respectively [‘1755 Cape Ann earthquake’, Wikimili, The Free Encyclopedia, http://wikimili.com].
Cape Ann Earthquake (Woodcut illustration) 
Endnote: The “first modern disaster”Endnote:The “first modern disaster” The cataclysm event in 1755, so redolent of apocalyptic imagery, prompted theologians, scientists and philosophers like Voltaire and Rousseau to conjecture—was causation natural or divine? It’s “modern-ness” lying in several innovative aspects of the phenomena: a concerted and systematic attempt at “crisis management”; among the “first provisions for urban disaster mitigation and earthquake resistant building design“; an attempt to “investigate and record the effects of the earthquake throughout the affected areas”, anticipating the science of modern seismology [‘From 1755 to Today—Reassessing Lisbon‘s Earthquake Risk’, (Drs Guillermo Franco & Bingming Shen-Tu), AIR Currents, (15-Jul-2009), www.air-worldwide.com; Bressan].
═─═─═─═─═─═─═─═─═─═─═─═─═─═─═
❅ as residents of Lisbon are sometimes called
◘ given that the earthquake’s epicentre was in the Atlantic Ocean some 350-400 km from Lisbon, it is plausible that the fires and tsunami caused the greatest havoc and devastation (Franco & Shen-Tu)
○ possibly the death toll cited for Morocco on the 1st of November has been conflated with the Meknes earthquake on 27th November 1755 which also was reported as having had 10,000 victims
✧ in India House alone the holdings in diamonds amounted to 11-12 million cruzados
✬ in the wake of the earthquake Portugal’s colonial ambitions were stalled, which would have added to the economic decline
Manchukuo: An Instrument of Imperial Expansion for the Puppet-masters of Japan
In 1931 the Manchurian component of the Japanese Imperial Army faked the sabotage of the Southern Manchurian Railroad (which was controlled by the Japanese themselves) near Mukden (present day Shenyang). The Japanese military, playing the victim, alleged it was the work of Chinese dissidents, and used the so-called Mukden Incident to launch a full-scale invasion of Manchuria✴.
Kwantung Garrison troops in Shenyang, 1931 ⇓
The military onslaught from Japan’s Kwantung Army (formerly Garrison) [関東軍, Kantogun] (AKA the Guandong Army) met with determined if largely ineffective resistance…the Chinese were under-prepared, under-equipped and not as technologically advanced militarily as the Japanese, but their defensive efforts were also undermined by Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek who ordered the local warlord Zhang Xue-liang✪ to hold back on resisting the Japanese invaders. The reason – Chang had fixed on a strategy that prioritised gaining control over the rest of the China in the civil war against Mao’s Chinese communists [‘Mukden Incident’, Encyclopaedia Britannia, (John Swift), www.britannia.com]. The Japanese military successes were followed by the creation of a Japanese “puppet state”, Manchukuoꆤ, in Manchuria in April 1932 (comprising China’s Northeast and Inner Mongolia).
Background to Manchukuo: Japanese “special interests’
Japan had pursued an aggressively interventionist policy in the region for decades before Manchukuo. Victorious wars against a diminishing Chinese empire (First Sino-Japanese War, 1894-95) and Tsarist Russia (Russo-Japanese War 1904-05) emboldened Japan’s ambitions. Japan’s spoils of war after defeating the Russians included the extension of its economic sphere of influence to southern Manchuria. Moving into ports, mines, hotels and other businesses and its takeover of Russian railroads, brought with it a big influx of Japanese settlers [‘Manchukuo’, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/].
Even prior to Manchukuo’s creation, Japan had been conceded a portion of Chinese territory in the southern Liaoning Peninsula which included Dalian (renamed Darien by the Japanese). Known as the Kwantung Leased Territory, it remained in Japanese hands until 1945.
Manchukuo’s capital was Hsinking [Xīnjīng: (literally ‘new capital’)] (today reverted to its original name, Chángchūn) in Jilin province. In 1945 at the end of WWII the capital was moved to nearby Tonghua. Hsinking had the status of a “special city” under the Manchurian state, as did Harbin.
Puppet statehood
The Manchukuo state established by the Japanese militarists was initially a republic but in 1934 it was changed to a one-party constitutional monarchy, the so-called Empire of (Greater) Manchuriaᴥ. The Japanese dredged up the former boy-emperor Pu Yi (last Chinese emperor of the Qing Dynasty) to be the titular figurehead of the ’empire’. Executive power of the Manchukuo government purportedly resided with the prime ministers (Zheng Xiaoxu 1932-35 and Zhang Jinghui 1935-45). The Manchukuo PM held authority under an authoritarian–personalist dictatorship, but this was more perception than substance as real power lay firmly with the Japanese☯️.
“Emperor of Manchukuo” ⇓ 
(Model display of puppet emperor in palace museum)
Kwantung Army, a rogue element
The Kwantung◘ Army, the arm of the Japanese Imperial Army in Manchuria, functioned as something of a rogue element, habitually acting independently of the Japanese government and the Army General Staff in Tokyo which struggled to rein it in. The Mukden Incident (see above) and the Huanggutun Incident (see below) are two such instances of their rogue activities. Service in the Kwantung Garrison, which had its headquarters in the Manchukuo capital Hsinkingᕡ, was a recognised path for promotion in the Japanese high command…instrumental chiefs of staff Seishirō Itagaki and Hideki Tōjō were both beneficiaries of this [ibid].
Hsinking: Kwantung Army HQs ⇓
Highly politicised, the Kwantung Army adopted an extra-military role for itself in Manchuria, eg, the commanding officer of the Kwantung Army was also Manchukuo ambassador to Japan and held an extraordinary power of veto – even over the Emperor of Japan! [ibid.].
‘Race’-based stratification
Japan peopled the sparsely populated parts of Manchuria with Japanese migrants who sat atop a social pyramid with other ethnic groups in the region stratified under the Japanese. Rationing of essential foodstuffs (including rice, wheat and sugar) was administered in accordance with this racial hierarchy. The Japanese-dominated colony of more than 30 million has been characterised as more “an Auschwitz state or a concentration-camp state” than merely a “puppet state” [Yamamuro Shin’ichi, quoted in Smith, Norman. “Disguising Resistance in Manchukuo: Feminism as Anti-Colonialism in the Collected Works of Zhu Ti.” The International History Review, vol. 28, no. 3, 2006, pp. 515–536. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40111222].
Japanese dominated Manchuria was indeed a police state, one of the most brutal in an (interwar) era of totalitarian excesses. The Manchukuo regime unleashed a systematic campaign of terror and intimidation against the local Russian and Chinese populations (including arrests without trial, “thought crimes”, organised riots and other forms of subjugation) [‘Manchuria’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Artillery unit of Fengtian Clique ⇓
Resistance to Japanese domination
After the establishment of Manchukuo and the ineffective performance of the Fengtian (Liaoning) Army against the Japanese war machine, various Chinese militias were formed to carry on the resistance. The main forces comprised Anti-Japanese Volunteer Armies, backed by the KMT Nationalists and led by famous general Ma Zhanshanᕤ. Other resistance to the Japanese in the Northeast came from Communist-organised guerrilla units. The anti-Japanese militias’ campaigns, which included harrying and terrorising the Kwantung Army, lasted ten years until the Japanese Army and Airforce finally pacified Manchuria in 1942.
The brunt of the early Chinese fight-back against Japan’s imperial expansion was borne by these warlord militias and volunteer armies, but after Chiang Kai-shek was talked round to a truce with the communists and a united front against Japan in 1937 (in effect postponing the civil war to the conclusion of WWII), the Republic of China (ROC) army engaged directly with the Kwantung Army (Battles of Shanhai Pass, Rehe, Beiping-Tianjin, 2nd Battle of Héběi, Chahar Campaign, etc).
ROC flag (>1928) ⇓ 中華民國 Chunghwa Minkuo
1937: Second Sino-Japanese War
After colonising Manchuria, the Japanese military used it as a base to invade the rest of China. In 1937 the eruption of fighting between Chinese and Japanese troops near Peking (Marco Polo Bridge Incident) led to full-scale war. Antony Beevor [The Second World War, (2012)] marks this episode as being effectively the start of the Second World War (some historians date it’s origins earlier, from the Mukden Incident in 1931).
Marco Polo Bridge ⇓
Siberian sideshow
Eventually the Kwantung Army, unchecked by Tokyo, overreached itself by invading Siberia, provoking the USSR into an undeclared war and several border conflicts and battles in the late 1930s. The clashes culminated in the decimation of Japanese 6th Army at the Battle of Khalkhin Gol in August 1939 [‘The Forgotten Soviet-Japanese War of 1939’, The Diplomat, (Stuart D Coleman), 28-Aug-2012, www.thediplomat.com].
1930s Tokyo ‘spin’
The Japanese came under attack in the West for establishing a harsh, totalitarian regime in Manchuria. Attempts were made to deflect the criticism by portraying the interventions in China’s northeast as a positive contribution to the restoration of regional order. Apologists for Japan, pointing to the pattern of internecine conflicts between warlords, communist insurgency and general chaotic conditions in the rest of China in the first third of the 20th century, argued that Manchuria in the same period had, courtesy of Japanese involvement, enjoyed “peace and order, progress and prosperity, (making) great strides in commercial and industrial development” [Saito, Hirosi. “A Japanese View of the Manchurian Situation.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 165 (1933): 159-66. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1018175].
Manzhouguo passport ⇓
Japanese spin imbued the Manchukuo regime with a pseudo-legitimacy that was almost mythic: “the ‘Manchus’ followed the ‘kingly way’ (王道 wangdao) of harmony, prosperity, and peace under the benevolent guidance and protection of imperial Japan” [Review of Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern, (Prasenjit Duara), by John J. Stephan, The International History Review,Vol. 26, No. 1 (Mar., 2004), pp. 181-182. Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40110486]❅.
Myth-busting Manchukuo
Reconnecting with this, Japanese historians in the postwar period, tried to justify the horrors committed by the occupying Japanese army, characterising the incursion in Manchuria and Inner Mongolia as an act of ‘liberation’, prompted by motives which were ‘enlightened’. Recent research by Shin’ichi Yamamuro leads the Japanese academic to posit a view of the Manchukuo occupation that challenges the mainstream Japanese one. Yamamuro debunks the theory that right-wing Japanese military and civilian authorities were supposedly imbued with the idealism of wanting to construct a “paradise in earth” in China’s three northern provinces [Manchuria Under Japanese Dominion, (Shin’ichi Yamamuro, translated by Joshua A. Fogel), 2006; Bill Sewell. “Review of Yamamuro Shin’ichi. Manchuria under Japanese Dominion. Translated by Joshua A. Fogel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006,” H-US-Japan Reviews, March, 2007. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=265211196449094].
Scope of the membership of the Greater EACP Sphere ⇓ 
“Greater Co-operation” – code for Japanese expansion and economic domination
In 1940 Japan incorporated its Manchurian client-state into the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (GEACS). The purported aim of GEACS was that it would be an economically self-sufficient “bloc of Asian nations led by Japan and free of Western powers”. In reality, this veneer of Pan-Asian idealism (regime motto: “five races under one union”) was a front for the Japanese militarists and nationalists to expand south and west and advance its domination of Asia [‘Manchukuo’, Wiki, loc.cit.].
A prized economic asset
Manchukuo (and the Inner Mongolia territory) was incorporated into both the Japanese war machine and the national economy. Rich in natural resources (especially coal and iron), under the Japanese Manchuria became an industrial powerhouse. Japanese citizens, who had been hard hit by the Great Depression, were enthusiastic in their support for the army’s intervention in Manchurian territory right through the period of Japanese occupancy [ibid.].
August 1945: D-day for the Japanese puppet states
August 9, 1945, the day after the second atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, the Soviet Red Army and the Mongolian Army invaded Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, which was to be the final campaign of the Second World War. In a swift operation (Manchzhurskaya Strategicheskaya Nastupatelnaya Operatsiya), Manchukuo, Mengjiang and Japanese (northern) Korea were all liberated, thus culminating in the break-up of the Japanese empire. Manchuria and Inner Mongolia were returned to China, and the Soviets set about orchestrating a communist takeover of North Korea…meanwhile Korea south of the 38th Parallel was occupied by US forces [‘Soviet invasion of Manchuria’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Victorious Soviet soldiers in Harbin ⇓
Photo: https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/
Footnote: ‘Manchuria’ as a geographic descriptor was first used by the Japanese in the 1600s and later adopted by Westerners in China…the Chinese themselves these days are less inclined to use the term ‘Manchuria’, preferring to describe this part of China simply as Dongbei (东北), the Northeast).
Manchurian malfeasance – for the record: these days the once imperial “puppet palace” of Manchukuo is a history museum – a reminder to Chinese and the very occasional 外国人 (foreign) visitor alike of the aberrant and abhorrent regime imposed on North-East China during the interwar period of the 20th century.
Manchukuo (State of Manchuria) comprising northeastern China and part of Inner Mongolia Area: approx 1.19 million km Pop (est) 1940: 30-35 million Ethnic Mix: Han Chinese (majority), Manchus, Mongols, Huis, Koreans, Japanese, Belorussians (minorities)
⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰⥰
✴ in 1932 an independent inquiry with US participation, the Lytton Commission (Ritton Hōkokusho), found that both parties were at fault for the incident. In its Report which led to exposure of the Japanese duplicity, it condemned Japan for its aggression (albeit conceding it had “special interests” in the region), while also criticising China for inflaming anti-Japanese sentiments…the League of Nations subsequently demanded that Japan vacate Manchuria, Japan’s response was to give notice to withdraw unilaterally from the League (effective 1935) [‘Lytton Report’, (United States History), www.u-s-history.com]
✪ Zhang’s father, Marshal Zhang Zuolin, also a Manchurian warlord, had been assassinated by the Japanese Kwantung military in 1928, in an episode in Shenyang known as the Huanggutun incident. Zhang senior was one of the most powerful warlords in the Warlord Era, which saw local military cliques carve out territorial strongholds in different parts of China
ꆤ Manzhouguo in Chinese
ᴥ the Chinese expression for Manchukuo is 虚假帝国 (the “false empire”)
☯️ Zheng, a royalist and close collaborator of Pu Yi, had hoped that Manchukuo would become a springboard for the restoration of Qing rule in China, aims not shared by the Japanese who pressured him to resign in 1935 [‘Zheng Xiaoxu’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. His successor Zhang Jinghui was even more of a powerless figurehead, content to allow advisors from the Kwantung Army run the state, earning Zhang the unflattering sobriquet of the “Tofu prime minister” [‘Zhang Jinghui’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
◘ Kwantung means “east of Shanhaiguan”, ie, Manchuria
ᕡ the Kwantung military also maintained a peninsula naval base at Ryojun (Port Arthur)
ᕤ the charismatic general started fighting against the Japanese, was then induced to swap over to the Japanese side and finally switched back to the cause of Chinese resistance
❅ Stephan summarises Manchukuo as “a producer of beans, bandits and bunk” with the ‘kingly way’ grandiloquence falling under the third of these attributes
💮ᕕ💮ᕕ💮ᕕ💮ᕕ💮ᕕ💮ᕕ💮
The West Indies Federation: A Failed Attempt at Forging a Dominion Within the British Commonwealth (Part 1)
The 1950s was a fashionable period for forming international federations in different parts of the globe. Nineteen Fifty-Eight saw the creation of two competing federations of national groupings in the Middle East (both short-lived unions), see my previous blog post (March 2019), Competing Strands of Arab Unity During the Cold War: UAR and the Arab Federation. The British West Indies Federation (BWIF), also coming into being in 1958, was another ephemeral, unsuccessful but very different effort at a regional confederation.
An idea with a long shelf-life
The germ of the idea of a federation of Caribbean islands is far from being a recent development, even in historical terms. Proposals and discussions about Britain’s Caribbean territories coming under collective control goes back as least as far as 1671 [Glassner, Martin Ira. “CARICOM AND THE FUTURE OF THE CARIBBEAN.” Publication Series (Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers), vol. 6, 1977, pp. 111–117. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25765588].
In the 19th century there were various attempts at “governor-sharing” of different British West Indian possessions, eg, the Windward and Leeward Islands had a sort of federated arrangement from the 1870s to the 1950s✲. The Crown also appointed a governor to take joint control of Jamaica and British Honduras…the same thing happened at one point with Barbados and the Windwards. These constructed entities did not necessarily have satisfactory or happy outcomes, the last of these imposed ‘unions’ was followed by the Confederation Riots of 1876 in Barbados (a protest by local black labour against the sub-par wages paid by the white planter class) [Kwame Nantambu, ‘W. I. Federation: Failure From the Start’, (art. updated 26-Oct-2014), www.tricenter.com].
In the early 1930s a conference containing “liberal and radical politicians” from Trinidad, Barbados and the Leewards and the Windwards, meeting in Dominica, resolved that federation was the best way forward. Their proposals to the West Indies Closer Union Commissions were however rejected on the grounds that “public opinion was not yet ripe for federation” [Hughes, C. (1958). ‘Experiments Towards Closer Union in the British West Indies’. The Journal of Negro History, 43(2), 85-104. doi:10.2307/2715591; Nantambu, loc.cit.].
Photo: Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (bitujamaica.org)
Agrarian class conflict: Quasi-slavery and organised labour militancy
In the 1930s a wave of grass-roots disturbances, riots and strikes, emanating from a burgeoning and increasingly militant labour movement, resonated throughout the Caribbean colonies. Britain, all-too-aware of the dangers of growing antipathy to its colonial rule, a scenario also playing out dramatically in British India at the time, put out ‘feelers’ to the West Indian political elites for their interest in a federation. A 1947 conference indicated that all of the colonies (with the exceptions of the Bahamas and the Virgin Islands) were in favour of a ‘loose’ association. The British government’s stated aim at this point was “the development of a federation which would help the colonies to achieve economic self-sufficiency, as well as international status as individual states” [ibid.].
Framework of the WI Federation
The UK parliament passed the British Caribbean Federation Act in 1956 (with the Federation to come into existence beginning of ’58). The framework of the West Indian Federation (originally named the Caribbean Federation) was to have an executive comprising a (British appointed) governor-general (Lord Hailes), a prime minister and cabinet. The parliament was a bi-cameral one and the federal constitution was based principally on the Australian model, allowing for a “very large measure of internal self-government” [Statement by the Earl of Perth (UK minister of state for colonial affairs), 29-Jul-1957 (WI Federation: Order in Council 1957), Hansard 1803-2005, www.api.parliament.uk].
Flag of the West Indies Federation
1958 Member states of BWIF:
Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Montserrat, St Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, St Lucia, St Vincent, Trinidad and Tobago✥. The ten constituent territories signing on to the Federation comprised a total geographical area of 20,239 km and a population of around 3.2 million.
A good theoretical idea?
On paper there was a lot to be gained from a confederation of regional islands in the Caribbean Sea✪ – seemingly for both the coloniser and the decolonised. From Britain’s position, there was the cost and efficiency angle. Federation of the parts supposed that Britain and Whitehall would deal with ONE political entity (the whole), rather than having to cope with eight to ten territories, thus also reducing costs for the parent government. A single central federation of many parts eliminated the need for duplication of services, thus it would result in more efficient economic and social planning [GANZERT, F. (1953). ‘British West Indian Federation’. World Affairs, 116(4), 112-114. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/20668810].
For the BWIF government, more advantageous economies of scale could secure better prices for its peoples’ commodities. Enhanced prosperity of the country would serve to head-off social unrest within the island societies. Lastly, a single political entity could foster and facilitate the desired objective of democracy more smoothly [ibid.].
Approaching Federation: Confrontational rather than consensual
Unfortunately for the prospects of the Federation venture, multiple problems quickly surfaced, not least the difficulty of finding common areas of agreement among the member states, these factors beset BWIF even before the Federation came into existence. Deciding where to locate the new Federation capital itself proved problematic. Early on there was a move to make it Grenada (St George’s Town), but Jamaica and Barbados objected to awarding it to one of the smaller islands. Jamaica and Barbados also objected to Trinidad as the site but the island was chosen in preference to either of them. Even after that was determined, there was issues…the federal capital was intended to be Chaguaramas (Trinidad) but the snag here was its availability, part of Chaguaramas housed a US naval base. Ultimately, due to this complication, the Trinidad capital Port of Spain became the de facto BWIF capital [‘West Indies Federation’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Red arrow = de jure federal capital || White arrow = de facto federal capital
Things didn’t improve after the Federation came into effect for a host of reasons – I will explore these factors in some detail in the second part of this blog topic: The West Indies Federation: A Failed Attempt at Forging a Dominion Within the British Commonwealth (Part 2).
Footnote: The Canada/BWIF relationship From the early, nascent rumblings of a desire for self-government in the Caribbean, the Canadian Confederation was a model examined by pro-federation West Indians. Individual islands in the Caribbean had even speculated at different times on the merits of joining Canada as a province. At least twice during the 20th century the Canadian parliament considered legally annexing the Turks and Caicos Islands however this never eventuated [‘Turks and Caicos Islands’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Aside from this particular colony, federation within Canada doesn’t seem to have been a serious proposition for either side …though relations between the Federation and Canada remained close [ibid.]. 🇨🇦
◥▅◢▅◣◥◤◢▅◣◥▅◤◢▅◣◥▅◤◥▅◤◥◤▅◤
✲ described by Hugh Springer as “weak and ineffectual” attempts at unifying the group of islands [Springer, H. (1962). Federation in the Caribbean: An Attempt that Failed. International Organization, 16(4), 758-775. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2705214]
✥ the UK mainland territories of British Guiana and British Honduras declined to join the Federation ✪ for a start the various scattered island entities shared a number of commonalities – a colonial history, the English language, a familiarity with British institutions, etc.
Belterra and the Demise of Henry Ford’s Brazilian Rubber Empire
By the 1930s it was apparent to all concerned that Fordlândia, Henry Ford‘s rubber plantation in the Amazon, had been a costly, massive underachiever. Ford however, to the unending frustration of his family, doggedly refused to pull the plug and walk away from the Amazon fiasco counting his losses. In 1934, instead of ditching the failing Fordlândia operation altogether, he retained it and at the same time poured a fresh pile of money and resources into a second Amazonian rubber plantation site.
Learning from failure The new rubber plantation, at Belterra, was better positioned geographically in relation to the main regional city of Santarém (just 40 km south of it). The plantation site selected this time was a more judicious choice, unlike the uneven ground of Fordlândia, the site comprised a flat topography, much better terrain for moving equipment around and for planting✱. The more favourable physical conditions at Belterra meant that Ford’s agrarian labourers were over a period of several years able to cultivate some 19 square miles of land for the planting of rubber trees (not a gigantic quantity by any reckoning, but a significant advance on the pitiful returns from Fordlândia) [‘Belterra, Pará’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
Improvements in local agronomy
The horticulturalists at Belterra were conscious of the need not to replicate the monoculture prevailing at Fordlândia – which had made the rubber plants vulnerable to infection. By planting hardwoods this time and employing new breeding methods which used local varieties, the planters were able to avoid the scourge of Fordlândia – the Amazon leaf disease. The downside of this method however was that it was very labour-intensive and expensive [ibid.].
Infrastructure, variety and man-management One of the clear lessons of Fordlândia was that living conditions for migrant workers in the camp were not conducive to creating a happy workforce. Again, as at Fordlândia, the migrant employees (based on the precedent of Ford’s American plant workers) were paid much higher than the going rate elsewhere in Brazil…but the company had learnt from the Fordlândia plantation that this was not enough of itself to get the desired worker performance. This time Ford’s managers delivered an enhanced town infrastructure…the drawing board for Belterra included three well-staffed hospitals (a critical area of shortage at Fordlândia) and three major (and two minor) schools◊. The sanitation system was much improved on the earlier settlement (arguably it was better than anywhere else in rural Brazil at that time). The street layouts were better planned and more uniform (straighter streets, more systematic street grid and more effort put into ‘greening’ the environment). The Belterra management gave workers more options for their leisure time – construction of football fields⍟ and playground equipment, movie and dance nights (exclusively folk dancing, another obsession of Henry Ford!). The upshot was to give the plantation town something akin to a suburban feel [‘Dearborn in the Jungle: Why Belterra Flourished Where Fordlandia Failed’, Past Forward: Activating the Henry Ford Archive of Innovation, (blog), www.thehenryford.com].
Whereas Fordlândia had catered exclusively for single men in its Brazilian work force, the Ford managers (eventually) adopted a more realistic, far-sighted policy, recruiting an increasing number of migrant families to the plantation…showing that Ford (or his management team) were serious about addressing the staff problem that had plagued Fordlândia, a high rate of turnover of the work force [ibid.].
Some relaxation of Ford’s tight reins Other efforts were made to appease the plantation’s migrant work force to make them more compliant with company target objectives. The imposition of American food on Brazilian work force, which had been the bane of (a large slice of) the dissension in Fordlândia, was lifted. The Brazilian tappers and labourers were allowed to retain their traditional, local eating habits. In addition, in a further relaxation of conditions, musical instruments (an integral part of the Brazilian lifestyle) were allowed in the camp [ibid.].
Ford’s American ‘civilising’ mission for the “undeveloped world” Despite a relaxing of some of the rules governing the running of Ford’s new industrial town in the Amazon, there were certain things Henry would not compromise on. Ford was always big on “moral education”…part of his rationale for getting into the Brazilian jungle was to fulfill a mission to realise a peculiarly idiosyncratic idea of his concerning “racial progress’. As Elizabeth Esch describes it, driving Ford was a patronising impulse to “proletarianise and civilise” the uneducated rubber tappers of Amazonia, to make them into “something better”※. In the carmaker’s eyes, melding the workforce into an more efficient unit went hand-in-hand with educating them.
Belterra school girls and boys in Ford’s uniforms, ca.1940 | THF56937 | by the Henry Ford (Flickr) 🔽
Midwest “old school” values School was compulsory at Belterra – for all! Adult workers had to attend night school classes. Schoolchildren were strictly schooled and imbued with discipline along American lines of education…all workers’ children were issued with uniforms (which made the boys look like boy scouts or cadets). Every school day started with the ceremonial raising of the US flag. Some observers have noted how Ford’s installing of rigid educational and moral discipline at Belterra mirrored his own value system…to whit, tantamount to a kind of sociological experiment to “Americanise Belterra youth” along the lines of a “Mid-western small town model” [‘Dearborn in the Jungle’, loc.cit.].
Global war, disruption and end-game Ford established a tyre manufacturing plant in Dearborn in 1937 which by 1940 had the capacity to build 5,000 tyres, unfortunately for Ford NOT ANY of the raw rubber was sourced by that time from the company’s Brazilian plants [Ford Richardson Bryan, Beyond the Model T: The Other Ventures of Henry Ford, (1997)].
🔽 Henry Ford tinkering (Photo source: The Ford UK Co)
The Amazonian rubber venture by 1941 nevertheless did seem to be making some headway, there was in excess of three-and-a-half million rubber tree planted (mostly at Belterra), which by the following year had yielded 750 tons of latex [ibid.]. The Ford Company was optimistic enough to announce that it expected to produce 30 to 40 million pounds of high quality rubber from the Amazon by 1950 [Esch, op.cit.]. One thing in its favour, as a consequence of the world war extending to the Pacific, was that British, Dutch and French Far Eastern rubber plantations were now in the hands of enemy Japan and no longer commercial entities.
Ultimately though the war rebounded on the Ford Company as on commerce generally with an increasing drain on the US economy for the war effort. The motor company’s finances were not in great shape during the war years…incredibly the increasingly ‘flaky’ Ford Senior had axed the global company’s Accounting Department! [G Grandin, Fordlândia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, (2010)]) . The domestic situation in Brazil was not helping Ford’s rubber plants…although powerful Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas had given approving nods in the public eye to the company’s presence in Brazil, labour law reforms in the country were not advantageous to Ford. The Brazilian government also restricted the export of lumber during the war. To exacerbate matters even more, the rubber plantations were hit with a return bout of the dreaded leaf blight infestation [Bryan, op.cit.].
Synthetic rubber – the future!
Ford’s son Edsel✜ and grandson Henry II had for several years been badgering the bewilderingly stubborn and by now ailing and declining industrialist to bring the wasteful Amazon fiasco to an end. What possibly clinched it in the end was a technological breakthrough, by 1945 synthetic rubber production was a superior and more economical method of getting latex than natural rubber. Moreover, with WWII now over, Britain and the other European powers had regained control of their lucrative Far Eastern rubber estates, and would once again provide the Ford rubber plants with very stiff competition [ibid.]. In December 1945 Ford finally sold the Fordlândia and Belterra plantations back to the Brazilian government, losing over US$20 million in the deal [‘Belterra, Pará’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. The dragged-out, ill-fated Amazon venture of Ford, which perpetually “had teetered between failure and farce” was over [Esch, op.cit.].
PostScript: Fordlândia and Belterra redux Belterra today is in much better nick than Fordlândia, this is largely because the Brazilian government has kept the Belterra plant operational, although it has never been particularly profitable. Fordlândia on the other hand bears many of the characteristic scars of a ghost town. When Companhia Ford Industrial Do Brasil ceased operations in 1945, the Americans cut and ran, leaving things pretty much as they were…pieces of equipment and machinery abandoned, left lying idle, to rot or to be stolen or to be vandalised (contemporary Fordlândia has been described as a “looters’ paradise”◘), furniture, door knobs and other fittings, whatever that was movable, was taken. Most of the original buildings though have survived✥, as well as the plantation sawmill, the generator and such industrial relics, left rusting in the jungle for the past 73 years.
The most striking physical industrial remnant at Fordlândia today is the Torre de água – the 50m-high Water Tower…it still stands, like a symbol of the lost town, and like most of the fixtures at Fordlândia, built in Ford’s Michigan and shipped to the Amazon. Greg Grandin describes its still erect form as a reminder of what it once personified, “a utilitarian beacon of modernity for Ford’s ‘civilising’ project” [Grandin, op.cit.].
✱ botantist expert James R Weir, brought in to ‘troubleshoot’ the company ‘s dismal performance in trying to grow rubber at Fordlândia, came up with the idea of a second plantation in the Amazon (and then promptly left the project altogether!)
◊ named after Henry Ford’s three grandsons, Edsel, Benson and Henry
⍟ Ford had banned the playing of football (soccer) at Fordlândia
※ there was lots of talk at Dearborn about “taming savages” and more disturbingly, of pseudo-racial categories – creating a “Latin-Saxonian unity” that supersedes the ‘Indian’ and mestizo groupings, E Esch, ‘Whitened and Enlightened’: The Ford Motor Company and Racial Engineering in the Brazilian Amazon’, in OJ Dinius & A Vergara [Eds.], Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power and Working Class Communities, (2011)
✜ Ford heir Edsel predeceased his father, dying in 1943
◘ Simon Romero, ‘Deep in Brazil’s Amazon, Exhibiting the Ruins of Ford’s Fantasyland’, New York Times, 20-Feb-2017, www.nytimes.com]
✥ but not the crumbled mess of the town hospital
Fordlândia: The Dearborn Carmaker’s Amazon Folly
Pioneering American industrialist Henry Ford built his first commercial automobile in 1901, and went on in the years following to revolutionise the motor vehicle industry with his eponymous Model T Ford and his innovative assembly line production techniques✲. With the advent of Fordism (a system involving modern technological machinery and standardised production in high volumes) Ford was paying his auto industry employees an (at the time) unprecedented $5 a day! However it came with very consequential strings (a dehumanisation of the workplace and the loss of workers’ individual autonomy).
By the 1920s Ford was pursuing a plan to harness the waters of the Tennessee River to power a proposed 75-mile long mega-city, which the car-maker proclaimed would be a “new Eden” in northwest Alabama. A concerted campaign by political opponents within the US however blocked Ford’s efforts to get the scheme off the ground ‘[‘Valley of Visions’, (Adam Bruns), Site Selection Magazine, May 2010, www.siteselection.com]. Vexated but undaunted, Ford turned to the remote Amazon jungle for his next big project.
The rubber market and “latex gold” Rubber was in high demand by car manufacturers like Ford and his American rivals General Motors and Chrysler. Rubber is the source of latex, which is vulcanised to create car tyres and for a range of other vehicle parts (eg, valves, gaskets, hoses, electrical wiring). The problem for Ford and other manufacturers was that the European colonial powers, France, the Netherlands and (especially) Britain, had an established monopoly on the production of rubber through their profitable South-East Asian colonies (Malaysia, the East Indies, Vietnam, Ceylon). Ford was particularly concerned that the British, spearheaded by its secretary for colonial affairs Winston Churchill, was intent on creating a rubber cartel to further monopolise the valuable product for the Europeans. The industrialist therefore was looking round for a cheaper way of sourcing rubber…he briefly considered planting rubber trees in the Florida Everglades but that didn’t turn out to be promising. His focus eventually fixed on Brazil and its vast Amazon Basin (see also the Footnotes).
Eyes on Brazil
From 6,000 km away in Ford’s Dearborn car ‘empire’ headquarters, the Amazon looked a logical location for a rubber plantation. It was after all the original (and therefore seemingly the natural) environment for producing latex, being the home of the plant Hevea brasiliensis, used to make the most elastic and purest form of latex!
Ford’s idealistic and ideological vision Clearly Henry Ford saw the long-term business advantages of securing a consistent supply of latex at the most favourable prices, but in his public pronouncements he let it be known that he viewed the Brazilian project as something grander than an attempt to corner a resource market – “a civilising mission” no less! Ford regularly couched his intervention in Amazonia in terms of it being an act of “benevolence to help that wonderful and fertile land” [‘Lost cities #10: Fordlandia – the failure of Henry Ford’s utopian city in the Amazon’, (Drew Reed), The Guardian, 19-Aug-2016, www.theguardian.com]. While some of the car manufacturer’s overblown utterances may have been an indulgence in PR, the Amazonian venture (and the fact that he persisted with it long, long past its use-by-date) suggests that the idea of Fordlândia represented something in his core that was deeply idealistic. Greg Grandin in his epic study of the Fordlândia experiment, has noted that despite the runaway success of his Detroit-based business empire, Ford had become increasingly disatisfied with modern American society and culture as he saw it, there was a whole catalogue of things that he abhorred…including war, unions, alcohol, cigarettes, cow’s milk(!), modern dance, Wall Street financiers, Jews, the creeping intervention of government into business and into American life as a whole [Fordlândia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City, (2010)].
A blinkered idealism Ford saw in the challenge of carving a viable city out of the Brazilian wilderness, a potential antidote to all he disliked about his homeland – a way to recreate “a vision of Americana that was slipping out of his grasp at home” [ibid.]. Another driver in Ford’s Amazonian quest was the unflinching faith in his capacity to replicate the Dearborn business success elsewhere, including the Amazon jungle. This idealism led Ford, even when things went “pear-shaped” in Fordlândia “to deliberately reject the expert advice” and blindly cling to his peculiarly personal notion of trying “to turn the Amazon into the Midwest of his imagination” [ibid.]. Moreover, Grandin notes, that the greater the reverses of Henry’s rubber enterprises in the Amazon, the more the carmaker would describe his ‘mission’ in Brazil in idealistic terms – Fordlândia would, he stressed repeatedly, bring economic stability and increases in the standard of life to the impoverished people of the Brazilian interior; the new city would support 10,000 people, etc [ibid.].
Initially, the government and it seems, the Brazilian people in the main, welcomed Ford’s Amazonian industrial city. Brazilian officials, especially consul José de Lima, went to great pains to woo the American carmaker once his interest in the Amazon became known. Some Brazilian officials even heaped overly-lavish, religiously evocative praise on Ford , calling him the “Jesus Christ of Industry”, the “Moses of the Twentieth Century” and “the salvation of Brazil’s long-moribund rubber industry” [ibid.].
By the terms of the business deal, Ford would pay the Brazilian government about US$125,000 for 5,625 square miles of land and the company was to be exempt from taxes✣. Under the concessions Ford’s city was to be granted an autonomous bank, police force and schools, to many observers it was a violation of Brazilian sovereignty…”it was as if Ford had the right to run Forlândia as a separate state”. The sceptical Santarém (local) press mockingly referred to the Dearborn (Michigan) car manufacturer as “São Ford” (“St Ford”) [ibid.].
The blueprint for Fordlândia Ford poured a massive amount of resources into his (new) utopian ‘dream’ city. The plant was equipped with “state-of-the-art” processing facilities. No expense was spared on constructing the American village (known locally as Vila Americana) which was reserved for American management. It was equipped with a swimming pool, a golf course, tennis courts, a library, schools and a hospital. Not surprisingly, the de luxe conditions of the Americans’ village was in grotesque contrast with that of the Brazilian workers whose rudimentary houses lacked even running water [ibid.].
Setbacks and drawbacks The jungle site picked out for Ford’s prefabricated industry town was Aveiro on the River Tapajós, in the state of Pará. From the get-go in 1928 things did not go well! First off, clearing the dense jungle for the site was really hard (and dangerous) work✪…even with Ford’s promise to pay high wages to the locals, labour was in short supply. The project’s logistics provided another headache, the location’s communications and transportation had serious shortcomings, The location was hilly and there were no roads to Aveiro so movement was by boat up and down the river, and seasonal climatic conditions tended to impede access (also latter on hindering the cargo vessels trying to reach Fordlândia to load up the latex).
“Agri-ignorance” The task of planting rubber trees was thoroughly error-ridden. Ford’s managers used antiquated planting techniques, the team lacked basic knowledge of tropical agriculture. A fundamental flaw that proved critical was the company’s practice (ignoring the advice of Brazilian botanists) of planting the rubber trees too close to each other, this resulted in making the plantings susceptible to disease (enabling the destructive South American leaf blight to move easily from tree to tree) [ibid.].
Illness caused by the harsh tropical location wreaked havoc with the work force (especially the migrant workers but also affecting the American staff). Workers went down with various ailments (malaria, VD, yellow fever, beriberi, parasites, snake bites, etc) placing a strain on the already overwhelmed company health services [ibid.].
Subverting worker morale Ford imposed strict conditions of behaviour on the work force – in keeping with his personal puritanical code. A prohibition ban was imposed (to match the prevailing injunction on alcohol in the US at the time). In light of the severely harsh conditions they were working under, Ford’s “absolutely no tolerance” liquor policy was totally unrealistic⊡. Workers were forced to endure a regime of rigid conformity – regimentation of plantation life, adhering to strict standards of discipline and hygiene. And to make things even more onerous, Ford introduced the same, notorious heavy-handed yolk of enforcement he employed in the River Rouge automobile plant in Detroit. Ford’s “Big Brother” like Service Department men were employed to carry out highly intrusive spot searches on workers’ quarters to ensure compliance with the edicts.
Americanisation overkill
Ford insisted that the migrant workers at Fordlândia adhere to Americanised conditions of work and services which ignored the local realities and cultural norms. This meant everyone got American-style housing with metal roofs which were conductors of the already intense tropical heat (in preference to the more sensible natural thatch roofs they were used to in Brazil). Another “First World” error by Ford was to build workers’ houses close to the ground…the locals in the Amazon knew to build high up on stilts so that they didn’t get overrun with animals and insects! Ford was insistent on interfering with the Brazilians’ diets, workers were fed unfamiliar food like hamburgers, whole-wheat bread and unpolished rice, and they were encouraged to plant flowers and vegetables on their plots. The American managers, with scant regard for the workers, forced them to work in the middle of the day in full tropical sun. Inevitably, the migrant workers staged a revolt against the management practices, known as Quebra-Panelas (the “Breaking Pans”). They rioted in late 1930, protesting against Ford’s imposed conditions, and the Brazilian army had to intervene to restore order (with management making some concessions with regard to the food) [ibid.].
Erratic managerial direction Part of the problem with Fordlândia was with the management. They’re was a rapid turnover of managers in the first two years of the settlement. Ford’s often wrong-headed policies were not easy to implement, but some managers were not up to the task and others just couldn’t hack it in the extremely challenging and arduous Amazon and quit. Unsurprisingly, with mismanagement morale plummeted, the American staff increasingly engaged in wild parties and drunken revelry. It wasn’t until Scot Archibald Johnston was put in charge at the end of 1930 that progress started to be made at Fordlândia. Johnston was able to improve the infrastructure, enhance the lifestyles of employees’ – new entertainments and recreations – film and dance nights, gardening, football games (overturning Ford’s earlier ban) and more education options. Grandin feels that under Johnston’s management, the city “came closest to Ford’s original ideal”. But still the yields of latex didn’t come remotely close to the company’s anticipated returns.
With the lack of commercial success, the original Brazilian government enthusiasm for Ford’s project waned badly. Even from the start there had been critics of the done deal that was vague on many details and required Ford to use only 40 % of his land grant for the production of latex♉. Eventually, there was a loss of credibility for Fordlândia – with the situation showing little improvement, the Brazilian middle classes ultimately could not square Ford’s “self-promoted reputation for rectitude and efficiency” with the reality of the plantation’s dismal track record [ibid.]
FN 1: British ‘Bio-piracy’ The European monopoly on rubber had its origins in the unscrupulous actions of British botanist Henry Wickham who clandestinely pilfered Hevea seeds out of the Amazon in the late 19th century. These were propagated successfulyl in Asia✧, putting the three colonial powers in a frontline advantageous economic position in the trade. The sale of latex, especially to the US auto industry which needed rubber for the expansion of the burgeoning industry, helped Great Britain and France pay off its (WWI) war debts [Grandin, op.cit.].
FN 2: The “latex lords” Before the rise of the Asian rubber plantations, Brazil was the dominant world supplier…in the second half of the 19th century, processed rubber accounted for 40% of Brazil’s total exports. The Amazon’s big towns, Manaus and Belem, profited spectacularly from the rubber boom as witnessed by the magnificent BeauxArts palaces and grand neoclassical municipal buildings that sprang up. By the early 1920s however, the country’s rubber industry had bottomed out and Brazil was bankrupt [ibid.].
••••——••——•••——••——•••——••
✲ so successful that the Ford Motor Company had captured over half the US auto sales market by 1921 ✧ rubber cultivation thrived in South-east Asia due to a combination of factors – the parasites (insects and fungi) that feed off the rubber in Brazil were not present; the cross-breeding of trees led to increased yields of sap. The plantations were close to ports (cf. Brazil), reducing the transportation costs. Lastly, the cost of labour (principally derived from China) was significantly lower [Grandin, op.cit.]
✣ as it transpired, the deal was not as great as the Detroit carmaker thought …”swindled by a Brazilian con artist” Ford paid around three-times the value of the land [G Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, The United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism, (2005)]
✪ a hardship compounded by the company providing the clearers with very poor housing conditions ⊡ and impossible to fully enforce…plantation workers got round the prohibitions (Ford’s ‘puritanism’ extended to bans on women in the town, on smoking and on the playing of football as well) by establishing illicit bars, nightclubs and brothels on the so-called “Island of innocence”, [‘Fordlândia’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org] ♉ leading some Brazilians to speculate that Ford’s real motives for intervening were to seek oil, gold and political leverage [Grandin, op.cit.].
The United Fruit Company: Neocolonial Elites, Banana Monopolists and Oligarchs in the Tropical Americas, Part 2
In Part 1 we saw how robust intervention of the United Fruit Company and other commercially aggressive American companies in Central and South America brought about the socio-economic conditions that led to the characterisation of some of the countries therein as “banana republics”. This second part will focus on the experience of one particular country in the region, British Honduras (modern-day Belize), which, although a different type of polity to the other neighbouring states at the time, nonetheless exhibited the same or similar patterns of disruption and exploitation from the North American banana barons.
Pre-conditions for the banana importers British Honduras in 1900 was a British crown colony, a status it had since 1862✱. At the head of the colony, the Crown’s representative, was the governor [‘British Honduras’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Before bananas, the prized commodity in BH was timber – logwood, cedar, chicle, and above all mahogany✪. Moberg notes that despite the abolition of slavery in 1838, the conditions peculiar to British Honduras (BH) continued to perpetuate a debt servitude of rural workers to an oligarchy of local and immigrant land-holders. Nineteenth century BH economy was dependent on mahogany exports, a situation which created what has been described as an elite ‘forestocracy’ made up of timber companies and merchants (both domestic and foreign) [CH Grant]. This bound generations of forestry workers in BH to the powerful employer-class…one resident colonial secretary described the plight of the workforce as being “virtually enslaved for life”. Moberg’s case study describes the role of the British authority in this status quo as one of aiding and abetting the goals of the timber and mercantile elites [Moberg 1996].
Br.Honduras mahogany exports ▸
The debt peonage that the unskilled BH farm workers were forced into (known locally as the “advance-truck” system), helped create a climate favourable to industry (ie, cheap and docile labour force) in the later American intervention by banana companies. Banana industry workers on plantations inherited similar harsh working conditions, including being subjected to the draconian ‘Masters and Servants’ Acts. Checks on what the United Fruit Co (UFCo) could do within British Honduras resided at least on paper with the colonial chief official, the governor (after 1884), (formerly the lieutenant governor 1862-1884, who during which time was subordinate to the governor of Jamaica). As Moberg’s study shows, the will to resist United Fruit’s incursions into the colony varied considerably from governor to governor. Early governors like Goldsworthy earned the ire of the resident elites who agitated for more political power. Under pressure from the business elites and oligarchs, the Colonial Office (in London) was forced to curb the power of governors in the 1890s and give the Legislative Council (and especially its five ‘unofficial’ members) a right of veto over the governor. In the 1900s governors like Sweet-Escott and Swayne made token efforts to dilute the members’ clout on council (with minimal success), but most governors ultimately conceded power to the elites [ibid.].
Acceding to the demands of big foreign capital The governors discovered that the interests of foreign capital in British Honduras – initially through British mercantile and timber firms but increasingly through a burgeoning of US investors❅ – could not be ignored. By around 1900 bananas represented 71% of the value of exports to the US✥. It amounted to increasingly significant revenue for the colony’s coffers. The British Honduras government saw it as vital to the colony’s economy. Moberg indicates that “despatches from the governors to the Colonial Office reveal an eager accommodation to the banana multinational”. One of the most compliant, Governor Wilson, proposed to his masters in London that the government build railroads in the colony as an incentive for United Fruit to invest. Governor Swayne, undergoing a 180° turn from his earlier opposition to UFCo, started to act like a “virtual agent for the company in London”, negotiating the approval of incredibly generous land concessions to UFCo…under its terms United Fruit was asked to pay only $1 an acre compared to between $3 and $8 an acre required of small landholders (and UFCo was largely exempted from standard land tax). Sometimes UFCo received land gratis or for virtually nothing in exchange for the company’s promise to build railroads in the tropical lowlands (which of course benefitted UFCo’s business!) [ibid.].
United Fruit Co’s corporate muscle-flexing On the rarer occasions that the BH government were reluctant to automatically lay down and do the American banana giant’s bidding, UFCo’s immediate reflex was to engage in bullying tactics against the government and threaten retaliatory action. When United Fruit asked the government for the unprecedented control of the British Honduras wireless (a very “banana republic” situation by which the British Central American colony’s entire radio communications would be held in foreign hands!), the Colonial Office declined its request. UFCo responded by withdrawing its steamship passenger line from service until the Colonial Office finally caved in to its demands for control of the radio system in 1911. UFCo took the same measure with its service on another occasion (which deprived the colony of mail delivery for over a month) in order to extract a higher subsidy payment from the government [ibid.].
United Fruit Co’s strategy in BH: Beginnings of the ‘Musaocracy’ When it commenced business as a buyer of bananas in Central America (1899/1900), UFCo embarked on a strategy that envisaged a monopoly situation end-game. One of the first moves was into transport. In 1900 UFCo acquired majority ownership of six Caribbean coast steamship lines⌖, this also gave it the government mail contract as well (the Belize Royal Mail). The strategy to maximise its stake in the colony’s bananas was clinical and precise: UFCo first raised the price it was paying to independent growers, this allowed it to eventually crush all competition from other buyers…a monopoly of the market achieved, the company was now free to “dictate ruinous prices and conditions to private growers”. At the same time United Fruit thwarted the marketing efforts of independent growers, thus denying them alternate sources for the sale of their produce [ibid.].
Restrictive competitive practices 101: United Fruit achieves vertical integration in bananas After securing a stranglehold over the exporting side of the banana game in Belize and having established its own rail network to transport the produce, UFCo’s next step was to create its own banana plantations in the colony’s south at Stann Creek and Toledo. As a major BH producer United Fruit consolidated its position in several stages, it set about monopolising the land available for cultivation. By 1930, the land area of Belize cultivated by the company comprised 139,000 acres, but UFCo also held over 20 times this area of unused land in BH, seriously limiting the area of cultivable land available to competing planters. United Fruit’s price-fixing had the ultimate effect of decimating the local banana growers✧ [ibid.]
Fusarium wilt (‘Panama disease’) ⬆️
Industry reversals and exit strategy In the 1910s the banana business in British Honduras was hit by a series of natural and climatic disasters…heavy rains causing flooding with loss of 90% of banana crop; infectious diseases especially the Panama disease (a soil-borne fungus), particularly devastating to UFCo’s Middlesex and Stann Creek estates; poor cultivation techniques exacerbated the losses (reliance on primitive milpa cultivation). The persistence of Panama disease⊠ further depressed production and United Fruit gradually reduced its banana operations in BH and in some cases, in locations like South Stann Creek, eventually replaced banana cultivation with citrus fruit [ibid.].
⬇ UFCo promotional booklet (Source: JJ Burns Library, Boston College)
Successive Belize colonial governments were repeatedly outwitted by United Fruit negotiations leaving it in a default position vis-á-vis the US company that was inferior and subordinate. One weakness stemming from the contractual arrangements was the governors’ abject failure to make UFCo keep its side of bargains. When things started to go “belly-up” for United Fruit in the banana colony, UFCo in imperious contempt of their contractual obligations simply pulled the plug. To compound the folly, subsequently, the colonial officials meekly bought back the key Middlesex estate from United Fruit✜, incredibly and bizarrely on terms which allowed the withdrawing company to make a profit! [ibid.].
United Fruit’s activities in British Honduras were typical of its approach throughout the Caribbean littoral. Large-scale integration into the local economy with massive infrastructure, using its economic clout to manipulate the local authorities into making advantageous concessions banana market…control of the market in bananas allowed it to set artificial low prices which Belize suppliers were obliged to accept because they were bereft of alternate viable markets. BH, being a colony of the British, varied from the prevailing pattern in other Central and South American countries in only one respect, a lack of personal graft. Unlike the banana republics, UFCo had no recourse to bribery with the colony’s British career diplomats, but bluff and intimidation usually produced the results it sought. As Moberg noted, “Colonial officials acted on behalf of the multinational not from venality or corruption…rather (it) reflected an ascendant US political and economic influence…one that officials found increasingly difficult to resist” [ibid.].
Tentacles of ‘El pulpo’ (“the octopus”) United Fruit was particularly adept at playing one country off against another. When British Honduran officials kicked back against the demands of the company, UFCo would make clear that not acquiescing to what it wanted, had serious consequences. A standard ploy was to pit British Honduras against neighbouring states. On the occasions that the BH governor would deviate from his default submissive position to UFCo demands, the company manager in Belize Town would drop none-too-subtle hints about moving the centre of United Fruit’s Central American banana operations to Puerto Cortés in Hondurus. Similarly, United Fruit would also periodically issue threats to both Guatemala and British Honduras that it would switch its investments from one to the other [ibid.]
PostScript: Modern Belize Tiny British Honduras was one of the last crown colonies in the Americas to shed the shackles of European colonialism. It achieved self-governing status in 1964, renamed Belize in 1973, it finally gained full independence from Britain in 1981. Mestizos, Creoles, Maya and Garifuna make up around 90% of the population. Belize’s much delayed passage to full independence largely stems from its neighbour Guatemala’s long-standing claim on the territory of Belize (or part thereof). Guatemala’s largely military regimes have aggressively pursued its claim (including making a number of threats to invade Belize and border-massing of troops since the 1940s), with Guatemala refusing to recognise the new nation in 1981. Accordingly the UK maintained armed forces in Belize after independence (till 2011) [‘Belizean-Guatemalan territorial dispute’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼𖤼
✱ although as far back as 1783 a local British presence had existed following the Treaty of Versailles which gave them the right to cut logwood between the Hondo and Belize Rivers ✪ the following, outlining what transpired in British Honduras in particular between 1900 and 1920, is heavily based on a case study by Mark Moberg [Moberg, Mark. “Crown Colony as Banana Republic: The United Fruit Company in British Honduras, 1900-1920.” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 28, no. 2, 1996, pp. 357–381. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/157625]
❅ by the early 1900s US capital had attained a hegemonic position in BH (overtaking British capital) as it was in the rest of the Caribbean littoral ✥ at the same time the Belize mahogany trade was starting to taper off
⌖ UFCo’s passenger and cargo ships were known as the Great White Fleet. The ships were painted white apparently to keep the shipment of bananas cooler! [‘United Fruit Company: The Great White Fleet’,https://visitpuertoarmuelles.com]
✧ tactics replicated elsewhere in the region with similar results – the independent Jamaican growers, the Jamaican Banana Producers’ Association, resisted the United Fruit Co dominance of the Caribbean island’s market for a time but in the end couldn’t compete in a price war
⊠ United Fruit established very large plantations in different countries (known as ‘divisions’), when Panama disease hit, it would abandon the farm and relocate…each time UFCo would “systemically destroy the infrastructure (railroads, bridges, telephone lines, etc) to prevent competitors from being able to renew production on a smaller scale” [PI Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work, cited in Moberg]
✜ these days United Fruit Co goes under the banner of ‘Chiquita Brands International’ (still extensively in bananas)
The United Fruit Company: Neocolonial Elites, Banana Monopolists and Oligarchs in the Tropical Americas, Part 1
Banana republic: In politics the term “banana republic”✱ describes a politically unstable country with an economy dependent upon the exportation of a limited-resource product such as bananas or minerals. The term was coined in 1901 by American author O. Henry as a depiction of Honduras and neighbouring countries under intense economic exploitation by US corporations as typified by the United Fruit Company of Boston [‘Banana Republic’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
❖❖❖ ❖❖❖
When I first heard the saccharine, content-lite melodies of “Bubblegum Pop’s” 1910 Fruitgum Company, I didn’t realise that the name of this innocuous, syrupy 1960s musical group was a corny pun on a historic commercial entity that I did not know of at the time…this commercial enterprise was in fact something much less edifying and infinitely more sinister and consequential – the United Fruit Company of Boston, Mass. As the following will show, the United Fruit Co would come to epitomise the high degree of hegemony established by US business interests in the tropical regions of the Americas after the late 1890s.
Boston Fruit C°’s ‘Golden Vale’ plantation, Jamaica ⬇
From railroads to plantations
The United Fruit Company had its origins in 1899 from a merger of various fruit exporting concerns (including the Boston Fruit Company which had already embedded itself in the banana trade in Jamaica) controlled by American railroad constructor and entrepreneur Minor Cooper Keith. Earlier Keith stumbled into the banana trade virtually by accident. In 1872 Costa Rica defaulted on it’s bank loans and was unable to pay Keith for constructing the country’s railroad. In lieu of part of what it owed Keith, he was granted over 5% of vacant Costa Rican land. Accordingly the American used the land to establish banana farms alongside his newly finished railroad. The crops when yielded had a ready-made, on-the-spot transport line to carry the produce to port. Keith’s early banana experiments in Costa Rica proved a lucrative earner and paved the way for United Fruit’s later role as producer and exporter of the fruit. From that base in Costa Rica Keith the banana trader looked further afield in Latin America for other openings.
Monopoly, oligarchy? Other players in the tropical banana trade
Although classically monopolistic in its practices, United Fruit Co (UFCo) was not the only player (American or foreign) in the Central American/Caribbean banana game. In fact at the turn of the 20th century there was plenty of competition in bananas, in 1899 some 114 firms were engaged in importing bananas to the US via New Orleans [Davies 1990, cited in S Striffler et al, (Eds.), Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas, (2003)]. UFCo grew by acquisition, quickly adding 20 smaller banana export firms to its list of business holdings.
United Fruit’s main rival during this time was the Standard Fruit Company. This company was first known as the Vaccaro Bros & Co✧. The Vaccaros began by importing fresh produce – initially coconuts and then bananas – from Honduras. After establishing a beachhead in the region the company diversified into operating steamships✪ and eventually provided the ice for onboard refrigeration❅. In 1924 Vaccaros Bros reformed into the Standard Fruit Company (in 1926 renaming itself ‘Standard Fruit and Steamship Co)…during this period Standard Fruit and United Fruit maintained competitive relations with each other for the lucrative banana trade in New Orleans – the principal marketplace in the US for banana sales. Like its gargantuan rival United Fruit, Standard Fruit’s profound impact on the economies of Latin American countries like Honduras courtesy of the high degree of control it was able to exert over the supposedly sovereign governments, contributed to the perception of these nations as banana republics. Hondurus was particularly vulnerable to the Banana barons with its banana monoculture and economic reliance on a single export crop. In the 1960s Standard Fruit was acquired by the Castle & Cooke Corporation (which in 1991 was renamed the Dole Food Company). [‘Standard Fruit Company’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; [‘Vaccaro brothers’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]
United Fruit Co soon extended its tentacles (the Latin American press was fond of labelling the firm El pulpo – “The Octopus”) beyond the Caribbean littoral, establishing banana exporting concerns in Columbia, Panama, Spanish Honduras, British Honduras (Belize), Jamaica and elsewhere in the region. Everywhere it invested, UFCo would rely on its famous “dollar diplomacy” to induce the local elites to grant it concessions which allowed the company ever increasing monopoly control over the banana trade.
Rivalry with mutual benefits
In addition to Standard Fruit, another US rival of United Fruit was the Cuyamel Fruit Company. Cuyamel started in transportation as the Hubbard-Zemurray Steam Ship Co and morphed into a large New Orleans-based agricultural corporation (see ‘Sam the Banana Man’ below). The three American companies in the Central and South American banana business (United Fruit, Standard Fruit and Cuyamel) were separate business entities, each in competition for bananas et al products from the same tropical region. And yet there was something slightly schizophrenic about the relationship between the three…concurrently with the earnest rivalry was the existence of a cartel-like cooperation between the companies – which was of mutual benefit financially, eg, being able to launch joint business efforts in advertising and in increasing banana agricultural outputs in Honduras. United Fruit Co’s dominant position in the triangle (always the senior player) facilitated this arrangement…it had both a 60% stake in Cuyamel and a 50% stake in Vaccaro Bros⊠ [Ralph Lee Woodward Jr, Central America, a Nation Divided (3rd ed. 1999), cited in ‘Cuyamel Fruit Company’ (Wikipedia entry].
‘Sam the Banana Man’
Schmuel Zmurri was an immigrant from the Russian Empire (born in Bessarabia, in modern Moldova) who changed his name to Samuel Zemurray after coming to the United States. Zemurray was to become a major player and shaper in the banana republic phenomenon, a seminal figure who contributed to the massive imprint left on the tropics by American banana barons.
Zemurray, establishing himself in Honduras around 1908, was to have a career as a “recidivist Yankee intervener” that made him one of the most controversial figures in the Central American banana republics’ tainted and sorry history. When the current Honduran regime favoured the rival Vaccaro Bros over Cuyamel, Zemurray agitated to foment a series of coups against President Dávila. The first coup failed but Zemurray in 1911 having chosen former president Manuel Bonilla to replace the elected Dávila government, bankrolled two Americans (“soldier of fortune” Lee Christmas and New Orleans gangster Guy “Machine Gun” Molony) to overthrow Dávila. With the malleable Bonilla back in charge, Zemurray’s Cuyamel was soon the beneficiary of generous land and tax concessions [‘The ousting of the president of Honduras, 1911’, (Stephen Kinzer), www.libcom.org]. Zemurray’s unconscionable incursion into the domestic politics of an independent state by hijacking its political process was to set a dangerous precedent for other banana republics.
Zemurray’s company made deep inroads into the Honduran banana trade (Zemurray became universally known as “Sam the Banana Man”), but at great cost to the national sovereignty of the country and to the detriment of the local economy✥. In 1930 Zemurray was able to sell his company to United Fruit for $31.5M in stock, after a short retirement he returned to active banana involvement, managing to join the board of UFCo and eventually take the helm of it (CEO and president until retiring for good in 1951) [K Norsworth & T Barry, Inside Honduras, (2nd Ed. 1994), cited in ‘Cuyamel Fruit Company’ (Wikipedia entry)].
United Fruit “a state within the state” of Guatemala: another intervention by Zemurray in the banana republics
Although no longer UFCo president, Zemurray wasn’t quite finished meddling to gain a financial advantage for United Fruit, he had one last contribution to the destabilisation of Central American regimes. The Guatemala banana trade had long been one of United Fruit’s most prized possessions…from the early 1900s President Manuel E Cabrera’s cosy relationship with UFC saw him grant the company a 99-year concession in Guatemala. United Fruit’s role in Guatemala has been described as “a state within a state” [William Blum, cited in ‘1954 Guatemalan coup d’être’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. In 1953 Zemurray enlisted UFCo in a US State Department propaganda campaign to overthrow the left-leaning but democratically elected Guatemalan government of Colonel Jacobo Arbenz. The campaign together with the active intervention of the CIA paved the way for a coup the following year which ousted Arbenz and replaced it with a military junta which immediately reversed Arbenz’s decision to expropriate a portion of the unused land owned by the United Fruit Co [‘Sam Zemurray’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. The fallout from the 1954 coup – for which the contribution of Zemurray and UFCo was no small part – was long-term destabilisation for the Guatemalans. The country, through a succession of military rulers, descended into three decades of civil war, 200,000 deaths including genocidal outrages against the native population [‘Ghosts of Guatemala’s Past’, (Stephen Schlesinger), New York Times, 04-Jun-2011, www.nytimes.com
United Fruit thrives in neo-colonial conditions
UFCo and Zemurray’s banana export and production triumph in the equitorial Americas owed in no small measure to the compliance of the countries’ political elites. In some instances, compliance, especially from right-wing authoritarian/military regimes, was bought. The neo-colonial charge against the banana republics and against UFCo as an employer, also concerned a claim of exploitative treatment of its labour force. In Part 2 I will focus on a case study of the United Fruit Company in one country which is instructive in detailing the pattern of how United Fruit went about securing and consolidating its “banana hegemony” in much of the region in the period. 
PostScript: Banana Wars The banana as a metaphor for the region lends itself to the pattern of American imperialist intervention in Latin America over the course of the 20th century. Coined by Lester D Langley in the early 1980s, the “Banana Wars” descriptor has been applied collectively to a sequence of ‘backyard’ US military occupations and police actions – these include the ‘1000 Days War’ (American intervention in support of Panamanian independence from Columbia/protection of US future interests in construction of the Panama Canal); the Spanish-American War (US invasion and occupation of Cuba and Puerto Rico); Dominican Republic (ongoing and intermittent occupations between 1903 and 1924); Nicaragua (an in/out pattern of occupation 1912-1933); the Border War with Mexico (1910-1919, including the occupation of Veracruz 1914); Haiti and the 1st and 2nd Caco Wars (occupation 1915-1934); and Honduras (seven interventions between 1903 and 1925). Aside from that, between 1869 and 1897 the US sent it’s warships a total of 5,980 times into Latin American waters to protect its national commercial interests [Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, The United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism, (2005)].
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗ ✱ in political taxonomy, ‘republics’ they may (nominally) be, but in practice most so-called banana republics are grotesquely dysfunctional ‘republics’, typically, thinly masking what effectively are dictatorships and or regimes of ruthless military juntas ✧ the founders being three Italian-American businessmen brothers from Sicily (and their brother-in-law) ✪ expansion of fleet ownership was achieved by buying surplus steamships at a discount…by 1935 Standard Fruit had 35 ships in operation ❅ ultimately earning company president Joseph Vaccaro the sobriquet “Ice King” ⊠ this was a characteristic stratagem of United Fruit’s upward trajectory in Central America…the stake-holdings in Cuyamel and Vaccaro’s enterprises in Honduras were an initial import foothold on the path to becoming a direct producer in its own right – when United Fruit later acquired its own Honduran plantations in Trujillo and Tela [Woodward] ✥ as a disadvantaged party in its business dealings with UFCo, Honduras was worse off than all other banana republics in that it was unable to either urbanise or diversify its economy beyond the banana industry (for which its equatorial location was ideal) [Norsworth & Barry]