Minor Commodities

Over the last few decades, commodity history has emerged as one of the most popular subfields of global history.Footnote ¹⁰ With the circulation of commodities becoming increasingly critical to the global economy from the early modern period onwards, tracking the shifting trajectory of a single commodity has proven to be a very useful way of comprehending different forms of global connections. Taken together these works have greatly added to our understanding of global capitalism and its close linkages with colonization, slavery and other forms of labour control.

While I draw on these important works, ice, I argue, can help turn our attention towards certain issues that have not received much attention in existing commodity histories. Every commodity history is of course unique, with different commodities helping illuminate different kinds of networks. And ice, in this respect, is no different, providing a window into the largely overlooked trade connections between colonial India and the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. While both the US and colonial India have featured prominently in commodity histories, it is largely agricultural commodities produced in slave plantations and consumed in factories and homes across the Atlantic that have dominated scholarship in the US.Footnote ¹¹ Likewise in India, it is imperial commodities linking the country to Britain that have been the focus of most research.Footnote ¹² The ice trade between the two countries on the other hand draws our attention towards less closely examined dimensions of the two economies and allows us to explore their connections.

Additionally, there are a few things that set ice apart from most of the other commodities that have been examined by historians. The first and perhaps most obvious difference relates to the distinct materiality of ice. The fact that ice melts made it a much harder commodity to transport and preserve compared to many others that were traded over long distances in the nineteenth century. A second difference relates to the scale of the ice trade. It has generally been important bulk commodities traded on a very large scale that have dominated commodity histories, with cotton, tea and sugar serving as prime examples. The ice trade on the other hand was conducted on a much more modest scale. These are not just superficial differences. It is these very peculiarities of the ice trade that help draw our attention towards issues that have not received adequate attention in existing commodity histories.

The industrial revolution and the ensuing exponential growth in global trade, was for long studied and understood largely through a focus on technological innovations. Zooming in on specific commodities like sugar, tea, and cotton and following them as they made their way from producers in one part of the world to consumers in another has allowed more recent works to show that technology, while important, does not by itself explain the unprecedented increase in the production or consumption of these commodities. Through close case studies, these works have instead illuminated the specific configuration of often neglected economic, social, and political forces driving the mass production and consumption of a particular commodity. In doing so, they have also shown how these configurations could sometimes come apart, derailing commodity chains.

Notwithstanding their particularistic and nuanced approach to production and consumption, these histories have either neglected or been quite complacent in their approach to the movement of commodities.Footnote ¹³ When commodity historians have engaged seriously with circulation, as some associated with commodity chain analysis have done, they have for the most part focused their attention on well-known technological breakthroughs like the development of railways and the popularization of steamships.Footnote ¹⁴ Aided by these technologies, the movement of commodities only seems to become cheaper, easier and faster over time.

This is largely a function of the nature of commodities that have featured prominently in such histories. The sheer scale of trade in some export oriented commodities had contributed to a significant fall in transportation costs from the eighteenth century onwards, with investments in infrastructure and the introduction of steam technologies bringing costs down further. Moreover, these reductions did not warrant much further analysis, they could instead simply be assumed and generalised. Most commodity histories, as a result, spend far less time engaging with circulation, devoting the bulk of their attention on providing in-depth analysis of the particular factors shaping the production and consumption of the commodity of their choice. In these accounts it is changes in production and consumption patterns that invariably influence the rise and fall of a commodity chain, with circulation usually playing a secondary role at best, except during wars and other exceptional episodes.

Things were different in the case of a relatively minor commodity like ice. Ice was firstly not produced or consumed on a mass scale. Economies of scale therefore did not really apply in its case. State involvement in its production, circulation, or consumption was also far more limited when compared to commodities like cotton or opium. Ice was additionally not a commodity that could command very high prices, unlike the early modern luxury goods that were traded over long distances. What then made it possible for companies in New England to profitably sell ice in cities as far away as Bombay, Singapore, and Hong Kong? Was it simply because of a reduction in global transportation costs? The late nineteenth century did after all witness a dramatic fall in freight rates and other transportation costs both domestically and internationally. But the popularisation of steam technologies and other associated changes do not really help account for the ice trade, because ice became a global commodity in the 1830s, a few decades before the transport revolution. The global ice trade would also ironically unravel precisely in those decades when transport costs declined the most following the opening of the Suez Canal. This is all the more significant once we recognise that natural ice from New England continued to have a growing market within the United States during this time, despite the gradual development of refrigeration technologies.Footnote ¹⁵ American ice in other words remained a coveted commodity in the final decades of the nineteenth century. It would, however, cease to be a global commodity, with its circulation now largely restricted to the United States. What had therefore changed in the ice trade had less to do with its production or consumer demand, than with its global circulation, which had started becoming unprofitable just when global trade was touching new heights. In the case of the ice trade the decisive factor in both its emergence and decline as a global commodity was not shifts in production or consumption, but changing costs of circulation. The ice trade therefore compels us to reckon closely with these costs and the forces determining them. The timing of these shifts also forces us to move away from generalised factors like the rise of steam to explain these reduced costs and to instead examine the specific constellation of forces that came together to make it possible to move ice cheaply across the oceans in the middle decades of the nineteenth century before coming apart during “the first wave of globalization.”

A “Slippery Speculation”

Writing in 1863, Govind Narayan, one of Bombay’s earliest chroniclers, took the trade in this unusual commodity as yet another sign of English enterprise and ingenuity.Footnote ¹⁶ But Narayan’s praise was a little misplaced, because this trade was not really driven by the English, but the Americans. Natural ice from mountains and glaciers was routinely transported over land in different parts of the world throughout the early modern period. But it was a businessman from Boston, Frederic Tudor, who first began to ship the slippery substance across the oceans. Most histories of the ice trade as a result begin with Tudor, aptly nicknamed the “Ice King.” It is hard to ascertain whether Tudor was in fact the first to ship ice out of the east coast.Footnote ¹⁷ What is clear, however, is that it was Tudor who not only regularised this trade but greatly expanded its orbit, with ice from the US reaching distant ports in Asia by the 1830s. Commoditising a slippery substance like ice was far from easy, though. Tracing the way in which Tudor and others after him turned the frozen waters of Massachusetts into profitable commodities on a global scale can therefore reveal a lot about how nature is commoditised and some of the tensions emerging out of this process.

The son of a wealthy Boston lawyer, Tudor’s involvement with the ice trade began when he started shipping blocks of ice from his family estate to Martinique. Tudor’s unusual venture did not find many takers initially. Shipowners, for instance, refused to carry his unusual cargo, forcing him to lease a brig himself. While his ship did reach its destination, much of the ice had melted by the time it arrived at the port. Worse, no one seemed to be interested in buying whatever was left of the cargo, leading Tudor to incur a heavy loss. Over the following years, Tudor, as several historians have noted, would face numerous setbacks forcing him to innovate. These accounts have shown how Tudor along with his partner Nathaniel Wyeth, developed several novel techniques which greatly facilitated the harvesting, transportation and storage of ice, eventually making his trade increasingly profitable.Footnote ¹⁸ Recent studies centred on the United States have suggested that it was these technological developments that were ultimately responsible for the start of the global ice trade.Footnote ¹⁹ But while these innovations were important, they would by themselves not have made the trade profitable. As I show in this article, the ice trade ultimately rested on Tudor’s ability to procure, transport, and store ice exceptionally cheaply. In order to do so, Tudor and his associates would repeatedly use arguments based on ice’s materiality to insist that ice was an extraordinary commodity that could not be subjected to regular rules or fees.

Ice harvesting as one contemporary observer noted was “attended with no other charge than the labour of cutting and transporting the article, for the pond belonged to no man, any more than the air which hung above it.”Footnote ²⁰ Ice, in other words, could be virtually procured for free since it was not considered to be the subject of property in most parts of the United States, at least in the early decades of the nineteenth century.Footnote ²¹ This was due to the fact that large water bodies in the United States were considered to be common property based on principles drawn from English common law. In Massachusetts, rights over the colony’s ponds were granted to all inhabitants through the Great Pond rights of 1641.Footnote ²² While this free access to ponds was challenged in the mid-nineteenth century once ice became a coveted commodity, in the early years of the ice trade Tudor and Wyeth could procure ice in large lakes around Boston at a very low cost.Footnote ²³ Wyeth’s family already owned property around Fresh Pond, which became one of the most important sources of ice for Tudor and Company in the early years. With ice available for the taking almost free of cost, the main expenditure incurred at this stage was for the labour that was employed to cut ice, transport it to the port and to ultimately load it on ships. Workers were paid an hourly wage, but based on calculations made by the economists Bosker and Buringh, the costs seem to have been fairly low. The cost of procuring and loading ice to the company was calculated at a little over 10 dollars per ton, while the sales price in New Orleans for the same amount of ice was estimated to be around 35 dollars.Footnote ²⁴

During this period ice would not just be cheap to procure, it would also become an exceptionally cheap commodity to transport out of Boston. This was not simply due to a general reduction in transport costs but a consequence of developments that affected ice in particular. The ice trade therefore provides us with an unusual window into these important but often overlooked developments.

With its access to timber from the New England forests and its strong maritime orientation, Boston had by this period emerged as the most important centre of American shipping. From the late eighteenth century, freedom from British tariffs and restrictions had contributed to a surge in American commerce, providing a huge boost to Boston’s shipping interests.Footnote ²⁵ Unlike ships departing from ports with vast agrarian hinterlands like Philadelphia or New York, ships from Boston often did not have sufficient cargo on outward journeys, leading to a high demand for ballast. Ice from the New England ponds soon began to fulfil this function. While shipowners were initially reluctant to transport ice out of fear that melting ice might cause significant damage to other cargo and the vessel itself, these concerns were allayed by the 1820s when Tudor and Wyeth had developed new ways to insulate ice. Shipowners could now depend on ice merchants to provide the ice without having to worry about finding other bulky material to steady their ships. This arrangement worked well for ice merchants, who insisted on low freight charges for transporting their commodity.Footnote ²⁶

As a result, a symbiotic relationship developed between ice traders and shipowners in Boston, allowing ice to be transported cheaply to port cities in the Caribbean, South America, and even distant locations in Asia and Australia. Among these faraway locations, India was undoubtedly the most important. It was here that the trade reached its greatest extent, allowing Tudor to secure the highest profits.Footnote ²⁷ Interrogating the factors that facilitated the sale of American ice in India is therefore vital for understanding the rise of ice as a global commodity.

The first shipment of ice to India was sent on the Tuscany which left Boston harbour on 7 May 1833 with 180 tons of ice, reaching Calcutta four months later.Footnote ²⁸ From the beginning, this voyage, which involved two equatorial crossings, generated significant interest. Tudor himself played up the importance of this inaugural passage to India, presenting it as a voyage of discovery. Over the previous decades Tudor and his associates had sharpened and perfected insulation techniques to allow ice to travel far without melting, but the more than 10,000 mile voyage to Calcutta was their greatest test. As Tudor had learned with experience, stacking large, uniform blocks of ice closely together along with sawdust significantly reduced the amount of loss due to melting. Eventually about 100 tons of the ice made it to Calcutta on this exploratory voyage generating significant excitement. While Tudor presented the voyage as the culmination of a long cherished dream, one that he had been chasing for decades, the timing of the voyage was revealing.

The year 1833 would see the passage of the Charter Act which ended the East India Company’s last remaining monopolies over Opium and Tea. In an era associated with free trade, the end of the company monopoly would lead to an influx of private traders, including from the United States.Footnote ²⁹ American trade policies also underwent a simultaneous shift which further stimulated American commercial involvement in the region.Footnote ³⁰ In the preceding decades tariffs on imports had risen steadily, from about 25% in 1820 to 62% in 1830.Footnote ³¹ From 1833 to 1859, however, the average tariffs would come down from 62% to less than 20% ushering in a period of significant foreign trade.Footnote ³² While American trade with India does not seem to have expanded uniformly throughout this period, it was clear that the reduction in tariffs had provided a boost to mercantile activity.Footnote ³³ It is no coincidence that apart from a few lean years, this was also the heyday of the ice trade between the two regions. A surge in America’s foreign trade and an expansion of Boston’s shipbuilding industry created the perfect conditions for Tudor to ship ice to distant locations like Calcutta.

Freight rates for shipping ice to Indian locations were quite low since many ships sailing out of Boston depended on ballast.Footnote ³⁴ Rates largely depended on two factors, distance to destination and the expected return cargoes. “Freight rates,” as Bosker and Buringh have noted, “were thus lowest to destinations offering the best opportunities for profitable return or onward cargoes, and to those importing little from Boston.” This meant that rates to ports like Calcutta, from where several coveted commodities could be procured, were often lower or equal to some locations within the United States, despite the large distance.Footnote ³⁵ The cost of procuring ice and transporting it to Calcutta and other ports in India was as a result relatively low, especially from the 1830s when America’s import trade got a boost following reduced tariffs. Under these conditions the ice trade to India began to expand, becoming increasingly profitable over the following years.

Global historians have recently begun to look more closely at ballast, a hitherto overlooked aspect of global trade.Footnote ³⁶ In this scholarship, however, ballast is invariably studied as a “non commodity” made up of materials that did not usually have value on their own. This is true even in cases where scholars have acknowledged the role that commercial goods could play as “ballast substitutes.” Throughout the nineteenth century, apart from ice, a wide variety of goods, including coal and salt, were often used to keep ships afloat. In the case of ice, however, this role as ballast was not incidental to its movement, it was critical. Ice’s emergence as a global commodity, in other words, was to a significant extent made possible by the functions it served as ballast, forcing us to recognise that the line separating ballast from cargo could be, and was, often quite thin. If procuring and transporting ice had become relatively cheap by the 1830s, in the following section I examine how Tudor and his associates leveraged the materiality of ice to create a series of exemptions around the commodity, making it especially cheap to import.

The Weight of Water

Almost immediately after the Tuscany had arrived in Calcutta, William Rogers, Tudor’s business partner, addressed a letter to the board of customs requesting that the ice on board be imported duty-free. Rogers began by emphasising the importance of ice and Tudor’s role in popularising it in other parts of the world. “One of my partners, Mr. Tudor,” he stated, “has been for many years engaged in supplying the west India islands and several ports in south America and the southern section of the US with ice.”Footnote ³⁷ Rogers insisted that in all these locations, ice had “become if not a necessity at least a common luxury of life, its use not being confined to the table but extending to medical practice as an auxiliary and in some cases even a primary cure in many of the fevers and other acute diseases peculiar to the tropics.”Footnote ³⁸ The increasing consumption of ice, he noted, was facilitated by the fact that it was admitted into these places without the payment of duties. In many of these locations, he went on, the question of duties had never come up since ice was “considered as free as water itself.” The same principle that allowed ice to be procured from the Boston ponds cheaply as common property, would thus also be used to facilitate its import across the globe.

If ice’s relationship with water was one reason to allow the free import of ice, then its unique materiality was another. Rogers pointed out that the trade in ice “is charged with great loss from the melting of the ice on board the ship,” and he noted that the loss was much greater “in its passage from the ship to the godown even when conveyed with the utmost dispatch than has ensued on the entire voyage.”Footnote ³⁹ This was because on a ship, ice was packed carefully and insulated using sawdust and other materials. Ice was, however, more susceptible to the elements while being transported from the ship to the godown and if it were to be subjected to normal port procedures like weighing and tabulation to ascertain duties and other fees, the ice would simply melt. Rogers therefore warned that if his experimental cargo was “charged with a high rate of duty, the ice subjected to the delay of passing through the custom house, laying a large part of the day in its compound and exposed to a slow process of weighing or measuring so small a portion would reach the godowns that the most exorbitant price which I might obtain for it as a novelty would not defray the expenses already incurred upon it and shall be forced to relinquish the business.”Footnote ⁴⁰

The government promptly acceded to this request for special treatment and informed the collector of customs that it would provide “every facility” to facilitate the transport of ice “without delay or impediment from the ship to the godown or place of store.” It also noted that arrangements could be made to transport ice at night if that might reduce wastage. While initially these exemptions were only meant for the ice itself, with other materials like tan used to insulate ice subjected to regular duties, within a few weeks the exemptions were extended to these materials as well.Footnote ⁴¹ A few years later these exemptions were also extended to fresh fruit that began to be gradually imported along with ice.

Another set of exemptions emerged around the storage of ice. Despite its important role in trade, storage has often been neglected in discussions of commerce and infrastructure.Footnote ⁴² But storage, as Marx himself pointed out, was an indispensable part of circulation.Footnote ⁴³ While it did not generate value, storage was essential for preserving the value of any commodity and therefore is a vital part of the production process. This role is even more important for commodities like ice that could lose their form and utility very easily. In ordinary circumstances, storage costs would have added significantly to the cost of transporting ice to distant locations and might have even made the trade unprofitable. In India, however, city residents agreed to finance the construction of ice-houses and leased them to Tudor for free.Footnote ⁴⁴ What would have been additional cost, ended up becoming an asset, with Tudor getting access to ice-houses which were invariably built in prime locations close to the docks where ice was brought. It also allowed him to establish a virtual monopoly over the ice trade to India. By the end of the 1830s, ice had as a result become unusually cheap to procure, transport, import and store, with its nature and materiality being successfully leveraged by Tudor and his associates to demand various special privileges. It was these privileges and changes in trade patterns following the reduction of import duties in the United States that had made the global trade in ice possible.

The following section examines how this trade expanded over the following decades before beginning to unravel on the eve of what many regard as the first wave of globalisation. It focuses on Bombay, where ice from the United States began to be imported regularly from the 1840s. Of all the ports in India, it was Bombay that ultimately gained the most from the changes associated with the late nineteenth century transport revolution, allowing the city to emerge as India’s prime metropolis. This was largely spurred by the city’s location on India’s west coast which saw a surge in steam traffic following the opening of the Suez Canal, as well as its proximity to Indian cotton growing districts. But even as Bombay became more closely integrated with global commerce, the city began to face a series of “ice famines,” with elite residents continually complaining about their lack of access to ice. Why did the supply of ice to Bombay begin to decline during a period otherwise associated with unprecedented commercial expansion and connectivity?

Fire and Ice

Once ice was successfully exported to Calcutta in 1833, the ice trade would expand significantly with more individuals and companies becoming involved with the trade. These developments necessitated greater regulation and demarcation of water rights around the Boston ponds and greater investment in infrastructure to facilitate the procurement and transport of ice.Footnote ⁴⁵ Statistics illustrate the increasing scale of the trade. In 1832, 4352 tons of ice were exported out of Boston, a decade later this number had risen to 48,422 tons and by 1854, more than 150,000 tons of ice were transported out of the port.Footnote ⁴⁶ But these statistics only tell part of the story because even in these boom years, important tensions and challenges remained, highlighting the contingent nature of this commerce.

The profitability of the ice trade to India was dependent on various factors. Special exemptions, freight rates, and trade patterns all contributed to enabling the transport of ice over long distances in the 1830s. But this also meant that the fortunes of the ice trade could vary significantly from port to port, even within India. In Bombay, Tudor found it hard to turn a profit in the early years of trade. This was partly due to the lack of adequate demand. Wealthy British residents would complain about the local population’s disinterest in ice. The size of the European population in Bombay was too small, they ruefully remarked, to sustain sufficient demand.Footnote ⁴⁷ According to the Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce, while the average daily sale of ice in Bombay was around 680 lbs, Tudor insisted that his business would only be profitable if raised to 1500 lbs.Footnote ⁴⁸ The freight rates to Bombay from the US were also much higher since there were few goods being transported on return journeys back to Boston unlike from Calcutta, which was an important port for tea, silk, and other coveted commodities. This was accentuated in the 1840s, which saw a general decline in trade between India and the United States.Footnote ⁴⁹ At a time when fewer ships were travelling from the United States to India, especially Bombay, the cost of transporting ice increased significantly, bringing down profits. In this context, Tudor started threatening to stop supplying Bombay with ice, generating some anxiety among his small but loyal and influential clientele. To increase demand, a model was devised by which subscribers would agree to purchase a minimum amount of ice every month.Footnote ⁵⁰ An Ice-House was also erected by 1843 and leased to Tudor for free. At the same time, the ice committee and Tudor himself would keep lobbying the Bombay government for greater concessions to compensate for the high cost of bringing ice to Bombay. These included the extension of exemptions already granted to ice and related commodities in Calcutta. Despite these exemptions, the supply of ice would continue to be dogged by problems over the following decades, becoming especially acute from 1860s. Mild winters in Boston were partly to blame. But these “ice famines,” as the shortages began to be called, were primarily a product of changing dynamics in global trade. These changes might have heralded the start of globalisation, but they also marked the beginning of the end of the global ice trade.

While the opening of the Suez Canal is rightly credited with revolutionising global trade in the second half of the nineteenth century, important reorientations were witnessed several years earlier. One was the switch from sailing ships to steam which gathered pace in the 1850s. Equally important from the perspective of the ice trade was the shift from wood to iron in ship construction.Footnote ⁵¹ Wooden ships were, for one, better for carrying ice because they provided better insulation.Footnote ⁵² The switch to iron ships also reduced the need for ballast, with solid ballast being gradually replaced by ballast water in iron vessels after 1850.Footnote ⁵³ At a broader structural level, the increasing reliance on iron also contributed to a dramatic decline in American shipbuilding.

The United States had become an important shipbuilding centre in the first half of the nineteenth century. However, at a time when iron-built steam ships were growing in popularity, British dominance in the iron industry began to have an adverse impact on American shipping interests. The impact of this shift to iron became visible quite rapidly. In 1850, for instance, the new tonnage built by the United States was around 272,218 tons while that built by Great Britain was less than half that number.Footnote ⁵⁴ But within just a decade there would be a significant turnaround, with new tonnage built in the United States falling to 214,000 tons while construction in Great Britain increased to more than 300,000 tons.Footnote ⁵⁵ These developments affected Boston particularly badly. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the port had emerged as the primary hub for the American shipbuilding industry due to its access to timber and its long history of seafaring. The share of registered tonnage owned by New Englanders had accordingly increased from 45 to 58%. But with the shift to iron, this industry began to decline by the 1860s.

Boston had already begun to lose its share of foreign trade to New York, and the decline in its shipbuilding industry would only accelerate this process. Historians have attributed New York’s ascendance over Boston to various financial policies and technological developments, including the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825.Footnote ⁵⁶ The one exception to this trend was the trade to India, which continued to be dominated by Boston. Several commentators noted that it was the ice trade that had allowed Boston to continue to “hold the key to the rich and extensive commerce between Calcutta and the United States”Footnote ⁵⁷ Ice provided shippers with a commodity to send on outward journeys from the United States in a context where there were few American commodities with a market in India. So even as New York had emerged as the preferred port of entry and exit for American trade with China and other places, the India trade continued to be routed through Boston. In 1857 it was estimated that 9/10ths of America’s exports to India were shipped out of Boston.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the following years, though, Boston would lose its primary position in this trade as well. Broader maritime transformations, especially the shift to steam, would allow New York to claim this final hold out.Footnote ⁵⁹

With American trade being increasingly carried in non-American, especially British, ships and with Boston’s trade moving to New York, the confluence of factors that had made it possible to transport ice out of Boston cheaply began to come apart. It was after all the close symbiotic relationship between Boston’s shipping interests and ice merchants that had made the ice trade to India possible and profitable. Now with Boston’s shipping industry in crisis, and with steamers increasingly preferring New York to Boston for long distance trade, ice merchants would find it increasingly hard to secure ships willing to transport ice across the oceans cheaply. Soon ports in India, like Bombay, would unsurprisingly start reporting increasing shortages of ice, with these shortages becoming especially acute from the middle of the decade.

The American Civil War of course affected many of these developments. As far as America’s shipbuilding industry was concerned, the Civil War would provide a temporary boost to the flailing industry by increasing the demand for ships. This boost was however short-lived, with the American merchant marine never quite regaining the position it enjoyed before the start of hostilities, and by the end of the war the shipbuilding industry was in interminable decline.Footnote ⁶⁰ Apart from the loss of many ships in battle, the threat from Confederates had also prompted many merchants in the northern states to sell their ships, often to the British.Footnote ⁶¹ This only accentuated the decline in American shipping that had begun with the ascent of iron. Moreover, import tariffs in the United States which had come down in 1833 were once again raised during the war to meet war time expenses, and would remain in place for the next two decades, signalling important commercial reorientations.Footnote ⁶² During this period, which is most closely associated with America’s “industrial revolution,” the composition of the country’s exports would also begin to increasingly shift away from agricultural commodities to manufactured goods.Footnote ⁶³

The Civil War years also saw a huge change in Bombay’s fortunes. With southern ports in the US facing blockades, Bombay would become the main point of exit for raw cotton from western India destined for mills in Britain. With Bombay becoming increasingly critical to the imperial economy, its port was developed and reoriented to facilitate steamer traffic.Footnote ⁶⁴ While these developments helped better integrate the port with global commercial networks, a trend that would intensify with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, they made it harder for ice ships to operate around the port as cheaply as before.

Up until this point, trade in Bombay was conducted across several private and government docks, with the latter charging very little to no wharfage or docking dues. The expansion of trade in Bombay during the US Civil War would, however, change this situation. By the end of the decade the government had started charging wharfage fees to finance infrastructure development around the harbour. At the same time the government began to buy up large sections of the foreshore, including land that had been recently reclaimed by private companies, in order to centralise port administration and to bring it under its control. The large debt incurred on these purchases forced the government to further increase port dues, especially following the establishment of the Bombay Port Trust in 1873.Footnote ⁶⁵

So while the export of ice from Boston to India had continued to grow in the early years of the Civil War, rising from around 12,000 tons in 1858 to more than 17,000 tons in 1862,Footnote ⁶⁶ by 1865, at a time when ports in both India and the United States were going through momentous changes, Bombay would begin to report serious shortages of ice. Though the immediate trigger for this shortage was the loss of a ship called Eagles Wing, there was a growing perception within the city’s ice committee that this “ice famine” was caused by Tudor’s complacency.Footnote ⁶⁷ By this time, several other companies had become involved with ice harvesting in Boston, but they found it hard to operate in India and other parts of the British Empire because ice-houses, which were essential for storing ice, had been leased to Tudor’s company as part of their contract with the government. In Bombay, this contract stipulated that the Ice-House would be leased to the company if it maintained a steady supply of ice and agreed to sell it at a certain price. Thanks to this contract, the Tudor company enjoyed a virtual monopoly over the ice trade to Bombay. As the city began to experience more frequent interruptions in the supply of ice in the 1860s, the clamour to end Tudor’s stranglehold over the trade started gaining ground. While the Tudor Company kept insisting that these shortages were a result of accidental losses that were inevitable over such long journeys and an unexpected increase in demand, many members of the city’s ice committee felt that the company was not despatching ships at regular intervals to keep up a steady supply of ice.

In 1865, following the loss of the Eagles Wing and the ensuing ice famine, the ice committee decided to end Tudor’s contract and to transfer the lease to another company, prompting the Tudor Company to build their own private Ice-House. Over the next few years Tudor and new lessees, Farnham and Company, would compete to bring ice to the city, temporarily increasing the supply of ice. This situation, however, did not last long. By the end of the decade, the city began to face more ice shortages, following which the contract and the lease were once again transferred to the Tudor company.Footnote ⁶⁸ After reaching its greatest extent in 1867 when 27,000 tons of ice were shipped from Boston to India, the trade between the two regions would become increasingly more erratic and unpredictable in subsequent years.Footnote ⁶⁹ It is no coincidence that 1867 was also the year when New York finally surpassed Boston as the primary port in the India trade. As steamers began to replace sailing ships, and as New York began to gain upon Boston, the entire infrastructure of the ice trade between the United States and India would begin to unravel. Over the next decade, as the demand for ice continued to increase in Bombay, the supply of ice began to decline.

Under these conditions, artificial ice started attracting greater attention. In 1862, an ice factory was established in Girgaum to supply Bombay with artificial ice.Footnote ⁷⁰ At the time of its opening, some optimistically noted that by producing ice cheaply, the factory would allow the residents of Bombay to free themselves from their dependence on American ice.Footnote ⁷¹ The manufacture of ice had been developing gradually since the 1830s. As Rebecca Woods has noted, within the British Empire in particular, the development of artificial ice was seen as an urgent task in the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷² Cooling technologies could be hugely beneficial given the importance of cold for the preservation of various imperial commodities including meat. These concerns had stimulated experiments in ice manufacturing across the empire, with various machines securing patents.

The Girgaum ice factory in Bombay, set up by Edwin Heycock, however, failed to meet these rosy expectations. The factory could only produce ice in thin slabs, which meant that it would melt faster.Footnote ⁷³ Its opaque appearance also made it seem less pure compared to natural ice. This ensured that throughout the 1860s and 1870s, artificial ice could not compete with natural ice. Nor could it insulate Bombay and other port cities from frequent “ice famines.” By the 1870s shortages of ice became a regular feature of city life in Bombay. Residents continued to complain about the lack of ice which was by now being used in large quantities for recreational and medicinal purposes. As ships were becoming harder to procure, the Tudor company was forced to build three ships of its own, but the loss of one of these ships on its way to Bombay in many ways presaged the fate of the trade itself.Footnote ⁷⁴

With the supply of ice from the United States declining sharply, and artificial ice still not being considered a worthy substitute, Bombay residents suggested that America be replaced by Norway or Italy as the primary source of ice.Footnote ⁷⁵ As another serious ‘ice famine’ was experienced in 1877-78 due to a shortage of American ice, the ice committee resolved to terminate its contract with the Tudor company. This decision was taken because the trade itself had become unpredictable and not because the manufacture of artificial ice had made the trade redundant, as commonly assumed. As with most technologies, ice manufacturing would evolve over several decades, and it would take many improvements and innovations for artificial ice to be accepted as a substitute for natural ice. In India it was only by the end of the nineteenth century that artificial ice began to be produced at a high enough quantity and quality to take on natural ice. By this time, however, the natural ice trade was already in crisis as reorientations in world trade had made the cheap procurement and transportation of ice to India increasingly untenable. The unravelling of the ice trade to India, the commodity’s primary market outside the Americas, also marked the gradual end of the global ice trade itself, with natural ice becoming almost impossible to find in cities like Hong Kong and Singapore where its supply had always been erratic.

Uncharacteristically warm winters around Boston struck a further blow to a trade that was already on its last legs. It was the resulting ice shortages, which provided manufacturers with sufficient incentives to experiment with different types of ice machines in India and elsewhere.Footnote ⁷⁶ Within the United States and in regions like western Europe, which were not affected by the commercial reorientations discussed in this article, however, natural ice would continue to be preferred over artificial ice until the early part of the twentieth century.