“There would be no opium trade. . . ALSO, no Blue Willow dishware (like the vintage stuff recently donated to the thrift store), no Pekingese dogs, no Caribbean sugar plantations (maybe), and no Broadway play about Alexander Hamilton.
if there weren’t a tea trade before that.”
--"How opium, imperialism boosted Chinese art trade"--Harvard Gazette
So good! So dubious...
Photographed by Annie Leibovitz, Vogue, July 2015
I went looking...
I. First--I know you know, but my god, do NOT BELIEVE A.I.!
I just googled, What year was 2600 years ago?
[Because I am dim with numbers, and this involves counting backward, I wanted to double-check.
The Chinese invented porcelain 2600 years ago, and I figured that was 575 BCE.]
But AI answered (How can I turn this feature OFF?):
2,600 years ago, the time was the 26th century BCE (2600 BCE - 2501 BCE).
Thank you, we are not in Year Zero.
Here's a BC to AD Calculator, and yes, of course 2,600 years ago = the 6th cent. BCE.
I was checking because I
was looking for a link between Blue Willow china and the Opium Trade (Because of reading (listening to) Anita’s Ghosh’s Smoke and Ashes).
II. But also first, dogs!
I'd just mentioned plants (tea, opium poppies) as agents in history--specifically, British smuggling opium into China leading to the Opium Wars--and this morning I read that Pekingese dogs were caught up in that too:
"Pekes entered Britain amid the nineteenth-century Opium Wars, after conquering European forces ransacked Beijing’s Summer Palace in 1860 for art and other valuables.
Among the loot of the destroyed palace were five Pekingese dogs.
"Toy-sized, these 'Chinese spaniels' were considered appropriate for women.
One was named Looty and given to Queen Victoria.
The rest went to the duchesses of Richmond and Wellington, whose plans to breed their new pets sparked a market for peke imports."
--daily.jstor.org/the-surprising-imperial-history-of-the-pekingese-dog
III. As for Tea, Blue Willow, Sugar, and Alexander Hamilton
1. Tea first arrived in Britain in the 1650s via the Dutch East India Company. Tea consumption in Britain increased across the 1700s, imported by the British East India Company. . .
From the London Museum:
londonmuseum.org.uk/blog/steeped-in-history-tea-drinking-in-britain/
2. . . . Leading to a fourfold increase in sugar consumption. Used to sweeten tea in
Britain, sugar was produced on Caribbean plantations using the
labour of enslaved African people.
3. Alongside tea’s rise came an increasing desire for Chinese porcelain tea sets , etc. In
1734, the British East India Company imported over a million items of Chinese
porcelain.
Europeans learned to make fine china and blue glazes, and in later 1700s, the Blue Willow pattern was designed in England.
4. And that's all why Alexander Hamilton was born c. 1756 a British subject in the Caribbean (British West Indies, the island of Nevis, site of sugar plantations):
His Scots father, James Hamilton, was a trader.
I can't find out what he traded, but sugar is a good bet.
Ah--yes, here, from the Smithsonian Magazine:
The Hamilton family owned a sugar plantation and processing plant on Nevis.
(It stayed in the family until the 1950s.)
5. Meanwhile in the 1700s, the opium trade in China had begun when the British East
India company found that the drug, mostly produced under their auspices in India, would be a
competitive commodity in trade for tea.
Outlawed by the Qing dynasty,
opium was sold through a network of European (and American) smugglers and corrupt Chinese
merchants.
IV. White as Sugar
Sugar isn't naturally white (it's processed--sometimes with "bone char"––burned cattle bones–– as a carbon filter), but the Founding Fathers were.
Yeah, so... I got rummaging around because I went to see the film of the Broadway musical Hamilton for the second time yesterday.
And this time I saw beyond its enormous creative energy (really, it's so good!) to its very dubious portrayal of the Founding Fathers.
Depicted by actors of color, in reality, of course, they were white men, and mostly enslavers--including Hamilton.
A Chicago documentary filmmaker Arlen Parsa put red dots on 34 faces in the painting Declaration of Independence (1818, by John Trumbull), which hangs in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.
These 34 (of 47) signers of the Declaration were slave owners.
“This is one of the most famous paintings in American history”, Parsa said. “Next time someone puts them on a pedestal and says we can’t question their judgement on guns or whatever, show them this image.”
Fact checked here:
"We found strong evidence to back the claim on the 34, recognizing there is no one definitive source on the question.
We rate the statement True."
illinoisanswers.org/2019/09/10/fact-check-evidence-shows-most-of-the-men-in-famous-declaration-of-independence-painting-were-slaveholders
Was Alexander Hamilton an enslaver?
(He was a Founding Father but not in the painting as he did not sign the Declaration.)
Smithsonian Magazine, again:
Yes.
smithsonianmag.com/history/new-research-alexander-hamilton-slave-owner-180976260
And he opposed slavery.
It's socially and economically complicated (if not morally).
I always say that it's sorta like us owning cars but opposing climate change. I don’t own a car but I benefit all the time from friends who do, and from mass transportation, including flying on airplanes and consuming goods transported around the world. A German beer the other day!
We all do – – benefit from and pay for carbon fuels. You could say it’s our collective karma. I’m not aiming for purity, I’m aiming for awareness. And maybe harm reduction.
The play Hamilton is a weird whitewash––like filtering the brown out of sugar with the ashes of bone–– and if we weren't still suffering so much from the history or slavery, it wouldn't matter.
Maybe LM Miranda thought that was behind us in the Obama era?
As the Trump era quickly proved, it is not.
Sugar, opioids, and the tentacles of slavery are very much with us.
Hamilton is terrific, if you see it as the AU (Alternate Universe) fan-fiction that it is.
I highly recommend it!
Also the film To Kill a Mockingbird.
Good stories, well done, but not Get Out of Jail Free cards.
_____________
I have to go to work now--
I found a couple essays critical of Hamilton--I'm putting the links here, to read later:
"Review Essay: Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton", by Lyra D. Monteiro, The Public Historian (2016) 38 (1): 89–98.
https://online.ucpress.edu/tph/article/38/1/89/90687/Review-Essay-Race-Conscious-Casting-and-the
'Hamilton: The Musical': Black Actors Dress Up Like Slave Traders . . . and It’s Not Halloween”, by Ishmael Reed, CounterPunch, August 21, 2015:
Life is complicated isn't it..and not easy
ReplyDeleteIt’s quite an intricate puzzle, yes! Fascinating, and sometimes frustrating or frightening
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