Chinese demand and western Pacific entrepôts

In starting with the ocean's western sphere, our gaze turns first to Qing China, the largest and most dynamic Pacific economy in 1750. Qing leaders fostered maritime commerce with surrounding states through a China-centred tribute system, which permitted a thriving ‘native trade’ in which junks sailed between Chinese and Southeast Asian ports, where they connected with networks of overseas Chinese. In the late 1750s, the Qing court issued a series of decrees that made Canton the sole trading port for western European vessels, and intercourse through it increased in subsequent decades.

Recent scholarship has well chronicled China's influence on the world economy through its demand for silver, and the related growth of trade through Canton.Footnote ⁹ Flynn and Giráldez conclude that Chinese demand led to a steady rise in silver imports into China in the first half of the eighteenth century. European merchants profited, as favourable gold to silver ratios meant that their cargoes of silver often held a 50% higher value in China than in Europe. When the value of silver declined in China compared to Europe after 1750, Europeans (such as British merchants who came to Canton for tea) quickly pivoted, bringing Indian opium instead.Footnote ¹⁰

I argue that steady demand from China for forest and marine products, either unavailable at home or not produced in sufficient amounts to satisfy Chinese consumers, played an equally – if not more – prominent role than fluctuations in the value of silver. Chinese demand for such goods shaped maritime trade throughout the Pacific in the century after 1750 and continued to do so, even after opium gained increasing significance after 1820.Footnote ¹¹ Historians have examined Chinese demand for forest and marine products through studies of individual states, islands, or regions, many of which are cited below. I will here offer a survey of production and trade in forest and marine products, their role in Western and Asia-Pacific silver-substitute and trade strategies, and the related influence upon peoples throughout the Pacific.

Chinese consumers desired specific products for their medicinal value, to enhance haute and popular cuisine, and for household use. Chinese physicians used extracts from Southeast Asian tropical plants – such as dragon's blood, a gum-like substance from the rattan palm – to treat a range of ailments. They also prescribed seaweeds for menstrual conditions and kelp to counteract oedema.Footnote ¹² In some regional cuisines, cooks used imported sea cucumbers in chicken and pork soups and stews. Others complemented soups with shark fins, abalone, and bird's nests, the last seen as an especially refined and delicate ingredient.Footnote ¹³ Aromatic sandalwood was used as incense and to make fans and furniture. Chinese physicians also prescribed sandalwood oil to treat acne and body aches.Footnote ¹⁴

For the historian, an unconventional yet revealing source on Chinese elite consumption of imported goods is the tale of the wealthy Jia family in the novel Story of the stone. In its first volume, a senior woman of the household urges a depressed younger relative to find comfort and invigoration in a bowl of bird's nest soup.Footnote ¹⁵ Later, to help secure a job, a poorer member of the Jia clan proffers a gift of Borneo camphor, natural crystals from the trunk of the Dryobalanops aromatica tree found in Borneo and Sumatra.Footnote ¹⁶ The novel also includes references to sandalwood clappers (employed to keep the beat for a troupe of dancers), fragrant sandalwood fans, and sandalwood incense.Footnote ¹⁷

The Story of the stone also wonderfully illustrates the penchant among wealthy Chinese for clothing adorned with fur. In one scene, Wang Xi-feng, the wife of a Jia son, dons ‘a little cap of red sable, which she wore about the house for warmth, fastened on with a pearl-studded bandeau. She was dressed in a sprigged peach-pink gown, with an ermine-lined skirt of dark-red foreign crêpe underneath it, and a cloak of slate-blue silk with woven coloured insects and a lining of grey squirrel around her shoulders.’Footnote ¹⁸

The significance of Chinese demand for particular marine products is illustrated in Japan's redefinition of its commercial relationship with China, its most important foreign trading partner. Several decades ago, Japanese and Western historians effectively challenged the view that Japan adopted a policy of seclusion in the seventeenth century and steadfastly maintained it until Western military pressure forced change in the mid nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁹ They demonstrated instead that Japan remained commercially connected with East Asia in the seventeenth century: for example, exchanging silver for Chinese silk in trade with Europeans and Chinese at Nagasaki, and with Korean merchants through the fief of Tsushima (on the island of the same name).Footnote ²⁰

Scholars have also examined (though in less detail) how successive Japanese leaders revised the trading system away from a focus on silver exports. Concerned that domestic mines could not keep pace with Chinese demand, officials of the ruling Tokugawa shogunate conducted a market survey at Nagasaki in 1698 to explore other potential exports. Because Chinese traders expressed interest in dried abalone and sea cucumbers, Tokugawa officials encouraged the shipment of those goods, along with dried shark fins and kelp, from coasts throughout Japan to Nagasaki.Footnote ²¹ In subsequent decades the trade expanded, and in 1764 Tokugawa leaders could recast Nagasaki into an entrepôt that invited a steady and profitable trade with the China market – without exporting silver. Increased domestic silk production permitted the shogunate to end silver exports, and to pursue a limited mercantilist policy using marine products and copper to import significant amounts of silver and gold from China.Footnote ²²

In 1785, the Tokugawa regime fortified its entrepôt by establishing tighter control over the marine product trade, directing fishers to sell items at set prices exclusively to Tokugawa officials.Footnote ²³ By eliminating the ability of fishers to sell at market prices, the Tokugawa made the harvesting and production of these marine products acts of tribute, similar to the practice throughout Japan of villages delivering fixed amounts of rice to their feudal overlords. The shogunate also issued edicts in Osaka and other urban areas restricting the consumption of abalone and sea cucumbers, favourite side dishes for those drinking sake (rice wine).Footnote ²⁴ In addition, it moved to control a greater share of the burgeoning market in imported medicinal products (herbs, roots, and even animal parts), which, coming from China, the long-trusted source of medicinal knowledge, commanded premium prices on the domestic market.Footnote ²⁵

Tokugawa policies reshaped trading patterns in neighbouring states. To meet Tokugawa demand, Tsushima purchased sea cucumbers and abalone from Korean merchants and shipped them to Nagasaki for re-export to China. This trade helped the domain to assuage its loss of profits when, owing to Tokugawa limitations on silver, it ceased to serve as a conduit in the silk-for-silver trade with China through Korea.Footnote ²⁶

The Matsumae domain created a more sustained commercial relationship in Japan's north. A fief that controlled the southern tip of Hokkaido, Matsumae used trade to dominate Ainu tribes inhabiting Hokkaido, the Kuril Islands, and Sakhalin. Matsumae initially traded rice, sake, tobacco, and lacquer-ware to Ainu in exchange for hawks and animal pelts, which the domain sold on the Japanese market. In the second half of the eighteenth century, domain leaders, following directives from their Tokugawa overlords, pressed Ainu to harvest and process abalone, sea cucumbers, and kelp. Domain trading outposts would, for example, give an Ainu 3 cups of sake for 100 dried sea cucumbers and a bundle of tobacco for 150. Spending their days harvesting marine products for a distant Chinese consumer, Ainu tribes grew economically dependent upon Matsumae and, in so doing, moved further away from their previous, more autonomous, hunter-fisher economy.Footnote ²⁷

Also in the second half of the eighteenth century, the Ryukyu kingdom (today's Okinawa prefecture) made adjustments in its foreign trade as less silver flowed from Japan, silver which had been a mainstay of the kingdom's tribute trade with the Qing. Previously Ryukyu had traded Japanese silver for Chinese silk. It had then shipped the silk to the domain of Satsuma in southern Kyushu, which had established political dominance over Ryukyu in the early seventeenth century but still allowed the kingdom to maintain its tribute tie with the Qing. As the Tokugawa moved to shut off the flow of silver, Satsuma pressured Ryukyu to find substitutes. In 1758, Ryukyu officials at the capital of Shuri on the main island of Okinawa directed islanders in the Yaeyama island chain, located 400 kilometres to the south-west, to send as tribute sea cucumbers for export to China, to complement the shark fins and skins already being shipped to China in the kingdom's tribute trade. The sea cucumber trade remained steady until 1771 when a powerful tsunami devastated the islands, killing an estimated 10,000 people. Yaeyama and its sea cucumber production only recovered in the early nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁸

Also pursuing trade with China was the Sultanate of Sulu, located further south at the centre of a maritime ‘Sulu Zone’ extending to Palawan in the north-west, Mindanao in the north-east, Sulawesi to the south, and Borneo to the south-west. Three to four Chinese junks sailed annually from Amoy, which, along with Shanghai, emerged as a key port in the marine product trade with Southeast Asia.Footnote ²⁹ The junks brought Chinese goods that were in demand in the region – porcelain, silk, brassware, wrought iron, and rice – which were exchanged for mother-of-pearl, seaweed, and precious shells from Sulu, pepper and betel nut from Basilan and Mindanao, and bird's nests, beeswax, and Borneo camphor from Borneo.Footnote ³⁰ James Warren argues that, in order to obtain these products, including large amounts of sea cucumbers (known as trepang in Southeast Asia), Sulu leaders of the Tausug ethnic group maintained an expansive slave-trading network. For example, they sponsored raids that captured and made slaves of inhabitants of the Visayan Islands in the Philippines, and members of the Minahasa ethnic group in northern Sulawesi, as well as a smaller number of Bugis.Footnote ³¹ An ethnic group that also maintained a slave and maritime trade network extending throughout much of insular Southeast Asia, the Bugis competed with the commercial enterprises of the Dutch East India Company (the VOC) in the region.Footnote ³²

Magotarō, a Japanese castaway, experienced and chronicled slave labour in Sulu. After encountering a storm off the eastern coast of Honshu in 1763, Magatarō's crippled vessel drifted for over one hundred days before finally landing on Mindanao. He and his twenty shipmates stumbled on a temporary beach camp for harvesting and processing trepang. Taken prisoner, they were sent to Sulu, where multiple buyers purchased them as slaves. Magotarō and a crewmate found themselves the property of Kolō, a merchant who owned several junks and traded in bananas, rattan, millet, and trepang. The two joined a trading voyage, part of a crew of thirty male and female slaves, whom Magotarō described as ‘shipwrecked peoples from various countries’.Footnote ³³

Sulu's Tausug leaders also depended upon the Samal Bajau Laut, nomadic boat people of the region. In ways similar to Matsumae's trade with the Ainu, the Tausug created enticements, such as wells to supply fresh water, which encouraged nomads to harvest and sell trepang and pearls to them.Footnote ³⁴ Through the combination of free and forced labour, Sulu created a lucrative system for obtaining marine products.

Warren identifies ‘Western traders’ insatiable demands for produce acceptable in Chinese markets’ as driving a rapid expansion in Sulu's economy in the decades after 1768. To meet demand, the Tausug sponsored more raiding expeditions, which seized slaves who, along with the Samal Bajau Laut, harvested the marine products sought by western European merchants increasingly sailing into the region.Footnote ³⁵ Many were ‘country traders’ who, while independent, often maintained affiliations with the English East India Company (the EIC) as they traded between India, insular Southeast Asia, and China. Financed by Anglo-Indian and Parsee concerns, the ships brought Indian cloth, opium, and guns to barter for sea cucumbers, pearls, shells, and bird's nests, which they carried to Canton.Footnote ³⁶

The EIC pursued on a larger scale the country trader's strategy of obtaining forest and marine products to substitute for silver at Canton. Following its victory in the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the Company gained broad colonial control in Bengal, and in turn garnered a larger share of revenue from the region's economy. Om Prakash stresses how, from this new, stronger position, the EIC successfully exploited Bengal's revenues and implemented its own mercantilist policy. In contrast to the VOC, the Company ended shipments of bullion from Europe to Asia. When it resumed bringing treasure from Europe two decades later, it earmarked much of it for military spending.Footnote ³⁷ The decision to reduce silver in trade with China, the fact that Britons were drinking more tea, and the limited Chinese demand for British cotton and woollen manufactures together caused socioeconomic ripples throughout much of Southeast Asia.

One effect was the Company's search to establish a strategic entrepôt that, like Nagasaki, could function as an emporium for the collection of both silver substitutes and Chinese goods. Eric Tagliacozzo notes that Alexander Dalrymple, a Company official, developed the first entrepôt plan, pushing EIC officials to obtain the island of Balambangan, near Sulu off the coast of Borneo, in 1763. Dalrymple sought to attract not only Company vessels and country traders but also Chinese and other Asia-Pacific merchant ships to the island. He planned for Asia-Pacific traders to bring shark fins, cowries, and bird's nests to Balambangan. In turn, tea- and silk-laden Chinese junks would arrive to obtain those products, thereby allowing the Company to acquire desired Chinese goods without using bullion.Footnote ³⁸ The EIC finally established a settlement on the island in 1773, but officials never effectively developed the entrepôt model and neglected relations with the Sultanate of Sulu. Tensions rose, and in 1775 a cousin of the sultan led a successful attack on the island, ending the Company's presence there.Footnote ³⁹ EIC and British government officials continued to search for a viable entrepôt, in 1786 establishing a trading base on Penang. The island proved only partially successful in supplying large quantities of forest and marine products for the China trade, both because of its distance from active trading routes further south and because ships carrying the goods from insular Southeast Asia shied away from sailing up the Strait of Malacca owing to concerns about piracy.Footnote ⁴⁰ While other sites, such as Cochinchina (present-day southern Vietnam), were proposed, British interests found more lasting success with the establishment of Singapore in 1819.Footnote ⁴¹

Further south, the Sulawesi port of Makassar, on the cusp of the Indian and Pacific oceans, developed into an entrepôt tied significantly to Pacific networks, particularly via trade with China. While the VOC administered the port, Chinese merchants controlled commercial transactions, and country traders were excluded. Makassar merchants concentrated on collecting trepang from Sulawesi fishers, shipping the holothurians to Amoy on junks that began to call annually after 1769, bringing tobacco, tea, silk, pans, and linens from China.Footnote ⁴² Heather Sutherland emphasizes that, unlike transactions at Sulu, where slaves harvested a large share of trepang, Makassar's fishers generally worked on behalf of themselves and others as part of trading networks in the region.Footnote ⁴³ Makassar-based fleets timed their activities to coincide with patterns of agricultural production, departing in December or January to obtain trepang, either collecting it themselves or purchasing it from locals. Returning in May or June, the fishers delivered their cargoes and paid off debts to Chinese merchants, who financed their voyages.Footnote ⁴⁴

Makassar-based fishers also began to make long voyages to northern Australia to obtain trepang. C. C. Macknight explains that harvest and preparation of sea cucumbers for transport necessitated that Macassans remain for extended periods on the Australian coast. At beach camps, they built stone fireplaces to boil the holothurians before next burying them in the sand to remove unwanted skin, finally drying them in smokehouses. During these sojourns, Macassans traded food and goods with Aborigines, and some had sexual liaisons with Aboriginal women. Rock paintings and a smattering of Macassarese words in the vocabularies of northern Australian Aboriginal groups are vestiges of these regular interchanges, created by demand from the China market.Footnote ⁴⁵

Around the same time, Borneans living in inland mountains began to harvest more forest products for Chinese consumers: beeswax, Borneo camphor, and bird's nests, which Borneans thought useful only as pig fodder. Although Borneans had offered such products as part of a tribute trade with China since the early days of the Ming empire, Tagliacozzo explains that the trade expanded because of demand from European merchants for silver substitutes. The port city of Brunei, already a regional trading centre, welcomed more European and Asia-Pacific traders bringing Chinese gongs, iron bars, porcelain, glassware, and cutlery, to be traded for forest and marine products for the China market.Footnote ⁴⁶

In a parallel activity, Bugis, Tausug, Chinese, and ‘Free Bajau’ traders, visiting coastal areas in search of trepang and pearls, began to move upriver to purchase forest products. Borneans in the interior learned of the demand for bird's nests and Borneo camphor during encounters with foreign merchants at markets that sprung up in their forests. Many made long treks, sometimes spanning months, to find the rare crystals of the Borneo camphor tree. Some organized expeditions to obtain heads for local rituals, and to protect their share of access to bird's nests, which were bartered for cloth and knives, which peoples throughout Borneo soon came to deem necessities.Footnote ⁴⁷

Magotarō also experienced trade in Borneo, after the ship of his Sulu master arrived in Banjarmasin, a port that included a Dutch factory and a sizeable Chinese merchant community. As was the case in Makassar, the denizens of the port feted the arrival each January of a large junk from Amoy. At stalls in the Chinese quarter, they purchased the ship's cargo of silks, glassware, and earthenware.Footnote ⁴⁸ Sold for thirty silver pieces to a Chinese merchant in Banjarmasin, Magotarō thereafter assisted in the sale of silks and pottery. The peripatetic castaway also joined excursions deep inland; one such trip involved a ten-day canoe trip upriver to a village where the people lived ‘by the sale of wild animals’, perhaps a reference to the gathering of bird's nests. Magotarō went door-to-door peddling pottery, once, to his shock, visiting a house where three human heads were stacked neatly on a shelf, commodities ready for sale.Footnote ⁴⁹

As the above examples show, demand from China for particular forest and marine products, combined with the entrepôt strategies of the Tokugawa shogunate and the EIC, had a far-reaching effect throughout the Pacific's western sphere. From the Ainu in Hokkaido to Aborigines in northern Australia, peoples engaged in time-consuming harvesting practices, often involving long-distance travel, to obtain products that they did not usually consume. In turn, peoples throughout the Asia-Pacific became more dependent upon imported goods, often from China. In all, commercial and socioeconomic integration spread, bringing more peoples, especially in coastal areas but also further inland, into intra-Pacific and global trade via slave, tribute, and free labour relationships.

Into the eastern sphere and the insular middle

On the other side of the Pacific, beginning in the mid eighteenth century, Russian trappers/adventurers (promyshlenniki) forcibly initiated a similar process of integration. To obtain fur-seal and sea-otter pelts to sell both to their home market and especially to China, the promyshlenniki exploited natives of the Aleutian Islands, holding Aleut women and children hostage until their men delivered prescribed amounts of pelts. Although resisting such tactics, the Aleuts eventually succumbed to Russian domination as infectious diseases and a series of brutal Russian raids took their toll.Footnote ⁵⁰ Historians have thoroughly explored the imperial-centred story that involved Russian expansion to points further south, as well as commercial competition between Russians, Spanish, British, and Americans along the Pacific Northwest coast and in the eastern Pacific.Footnote ⁵¹ What I offer here is instead a discussion of the spread of trading systems, which had emerged in the Pacific's western sphere, into the ocean's insular middle and eastern sphere. It will highlight how Westerners aimed to develop entrepôts to gather forest and marine products to trade with China, and how maritime trade facilitated a deeper socioeconomic integration of Pacific peoples into intra-Pacific and global networks.

Learning of the grand profits garnered for sea-otter pelts at Canton by members of Captain Cook's Pacific expedition, in the 1780s Spanish officials and merchants in Spanish America and in Manila developed plans to exploit the fur trade by funnelling it through the ports of San Blas and Acapulco. In addition to the revenue, Spanish officials hoped to obtain, at low prices, Chinese quicksilver (mercury) for use in mineral mining. Spanish missions along the California coast began to acquire sea-otter pelts from Amerindians, exchanging them for Mexican flannel, beads, blankets, and abalone shells (gathered along the Mexican coast and valued by Amerindians for their colours). The furs were shipped via San Blas to Acapulco, and then transported on the annual galleon to Manila, and eventually to Canton. In Spanish America and Manila, many began to advocate streamlining the trade to exclude other Westerners and enhance Spanish profits. Offering a detailed plan was Esteban José Martínez, a Spanish captain who in 1789 boldly seized several British ships for illegally trading at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island. Martínez urged that a merchant company be established to gather pelts from missions. The company would also supervise the creation of coastal outposts that could obtain more furs in exchange for Chinese clothing and other goods, brought to San Francisco and Monterey by the same ships that carried the furs directly to Manila and Canton. Like other Spanish plans, Martínez's never came to fruition, hampered by the competing interests of officials in Spanish America and Manila, as well as the challenge of regularly supplying outposts with food and provisions.Footnote ⁵²

At Nootka, Martínez seized the ships of John Meares and thereby helped to quash the British trader's scheme to establish a permanent trading base there. Meares had earlier demonstrated the profit available in the fur trade by sailing from Canton directly to Nootka, where he obtained furs before making his way again across the Pacific to Canton. While ending in failure, the scope of Meares’ plan underscores the strong desire among Westerners to create an outpost to exploit intra-Pacific trade. Indeed, Meares ambitiously brought a group of Chinese artisans to Nootka, stressing that, ‘If hereafter trading posts should be established on the American coast, a colony of these men would be a very important acquisition’.Footnote ⁵³

Soon after the 1783 Treaty of Paris established the United States as an independent nation, US merchant ships began to sail into the Pacific, primarily via the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. They became a commercial force, freely pursuing maritime trade unencumbered by the monopolies that defined the commerce of their European competitors.Footnote ⁵⁴ US ships made their way to Canton, most carrying Spanish dollars, trusted by Chinese merchants because of their high silver content. Like their European rivals, US traders acquired silks, porcelains, and especially tea, feeding an increasing US appetite for the beverage. US tea consumption, chiefly of green tea, rose steadily from an annual average of 3.35 million pounds between 1801 and 1812, to 7 million pounds annually between 1821 and 1833.Footnote ⁵⁵

As had been the case in the Pacific's western sphere, participants’ choices about silver proved influential. Philadelphia-based merchants thrived using silver at Canton but faced criticism from congressmen and many in the press, who angrily complained that the traders were draining the national wealth.Footnote ⁵⁶ Beginning in 1804, Philadelphia and Baltimore ships began to sail to Smyrna in the Ottoman empire, where they used goods such as coffee, sugar, and logwood to acquire opium before making their way around the Cape of Good Hope to Batavia or directly to Canton.Footnote ⁵⁷ The trade flourished until the 1830s, when US and British merchants switched to carrying Indian opium, preferred by Chinese consumers.Footnote ⁵⁸

Not enjoying the access to bullion of their Philadelphia competitors, New England and especially Boston merchants focused on silver substitutes from the start.Footnote ⁵⁹ Many initially placed their hopes in ginseng, which grew naturally in the forests of New England and eastern Canada. In another example of the far-reaching power of Chinese demand, Amerindians harvested the root, selling it European and later US buyers.Footnote ⁶⁰ Because of its poor reputation compared to Korean and Chinese ginseng, Canton merchants never regarded the North American variety highly.Footnote ⁶¹ New England traders therefore moved to capitalize on the coastal fur trade. In 1799 the crew of a Boston ship, Eliza, bartered for furs with coastal Amerindians, finding that ‘the articles most in demand were Blue board cloth, & red—Muskets—Great Coats—Powder, Wire, Axes & coarse Cutlery’.Footnote ⁶²

A US merchant plan for a coastal entrepôt soon emerged, backed by the financier John Jacob Astor. In 1810, Astor's Pacific Fur Company moved to create an emporium at the mouth of the Columbia River. Washington Irving described how the ‘chief trading post or mart’ was intended to function:

As it turned out, a senior partner at Astoria scuttled the enterprise, selling the outpost to the British North West Company amid fears of a British attack after the start of the War of 1812.

The case of the Tlingit, one of the more dominant Amerindian tribes along the North American Pacific coast, demonstrates how the fur trade, like similar trades in forest and marine products in the Pacific's western sphere, drove socioeconomic integration. The Tlingit consistently parried Russian attempts to force them to supply pelts solely to Russian traders. Historians of the Tlingit conclude that tribal leaders grew especially troubled by Russian plans to make Sitka, established in 1799, a collection point for pelts that Russian trappers harvested during forays deep into tribal lands with the assistance of long-standing Tlingit enemies. Like the Sultanate of Sulu, the Tlingit demonstrated their strength against a European interloper by launching, along with the powerful Haida, a successful, coordinated attack on Sitka and two other Russian outposts in 1802.Footnote ⁶⁴ Although they regained Sitka two years later, the Russians never subdued the Tlingit. Over the next few decades relations remained generally peaceful, but violent skirmishes did occur. Over time, the Russians at Sitka employed more Tlingit men, and grew dependent upon the Tlingit to supply food and fish to feed the outpost.Footnote ⁶⁵

Paralleling events in the Pacific's western sphere, the Tlingit abandoned established economic pursuits such as fishing, hunting, and gathering of foods and instead became increasingly involved in intra-Pacific trade, consuming goods brought by Russian and US traders. They also became intermediaries between Western merchants and inland Amerindian tribes and villages. From other Amerindians they obtained furs desired by Westerners involved in trade with China. In exchange the Tlingit offered not only established products such as fish oil and dried molluscs but also increasing quantities of Western goods: metal kettles, axes, knives, and flour. And, for a considerable price, Tlingit would barter slaves, usually other Amerindians but also, in a few instances, Hawaiians brought by US ships. All told, the Tlingit expanded their trade routes to the upper and middle Yukon in the north and to Puget Sound in the south.Footnote ⁶⁶

While the boom of the sea-otter fur trade waned around 1810, US and European ships continued to visit the Pacific Northwest and California coasts, partly to obtain beaver and other furs. Drawing on his database of the 953 known vessels that entered California waters from 1786 to 1848, David Igler calculates that the number of ships surged after 1820. Most were from the United States and just over half visited a Pacific island to pursue trade. Many also sold goods at Hawai'i instead of making the trans-Pacific journey to Canton.Footnote ⁶⁷ US and western European vessels sailed to Honolulu in particular, because it had, within a few decades after the first European visit by Captain Cook in 1778, emerged as a thriving Pacific entrepôt for furs and other North American goods destined for the China market.

Sandalwood also drew US and western European traders to Hawai'i, mirroring earlier events in the Pacific's western sphere and in the insular middle islands of Fiji. As was then transpiring in the Marquesas Islands further south, Hawaiians abandoned established agricultural and commercial enterprises in favour of harvesting for the Chinese consumer a wood for which they had previously found little value.Footnote ⁶⁸ After achieving domination of the Hawaiian Islands, King Kamehameha I and his successors wielded a high level of control, via kinship networks, over the harvest and sale of the archipelago's rich stands of the wood. Leaving their gardens and fields, groups of Hawaiians – at times numbering in the thousands – cut sandalwood in mountain areas and hauled it to the coast, in labour-intensive campaigns that sometimes spanned months. The ordinary worker received little remuneration, except for rare instances when a cutter was allowed to sell individually small amounts. The Hawaiian kings, as well as chiefs who held privileges to goods produced on their lands, used the profits to obtain Western ships, weapons, and wares.Footnote ⁶⁹

Westerners soon noted the importance of Hawai'i's key position and speculated about future trade through the islands that would link the Pacific's western and eastern spheres. Writing in 1816, Alexander McKonochie, a commander in the Royal Navy, urged British leaders to establish a colony on the islands to enhance the EIC's trading relationship with China, seeing a Hawaiian entrepôt as a means to limit the Company's use of silver in the China trade. By utilizing furs and other North American products instead, he calculated that the Company could cease the costly business of shipping specie from Europe and begin to sell Chinese and East Asian goods to Spain's American colonies. McKonochie also envisioned expanded access across the Isthmus of Panama – at the time limited to river, mule, and foot routes – to move goods to and from China.Footnote ⁷⁰ The new Hawaiian colony would be distinctly commercial, and would also serve as a provisioning centre for what McKonochie correctly speculated was the growing Pacific whaling industry.Footnote ⁷¹

Demand from western Europe and the United States prompted an increase in Pacific whaling in the 1830s and especially the 1840s.Footnote ⁷² Whaling ships arriving in Hawai'i, most flying the US flag, jumped from 177 in 1842 to 383 the following year. The boom continued throughout the 1850s and made Honolulu a provisioning and trading centre.Footnote ⁷³ Additionally, western European and US demand for fertilizer advanced the trade in guano, thick deposits of sea-fowl excrement. Peru, which became independent in 1825, profited from guano dug from its coastal Chincha Islands, thereby diversifying the nation's economy beyond agriculture and mining.Footnote ⁷⁴ Imports of Peruvian guano into Britain surged from 1,733 tons in 1841 to just over 13,000 tons the following year. By 1855, Britain imported 210,000 tons.Footnote ⁷⁵

Chinese coolies, part of an estimated 87,000 who entered Peru from 1850 to 1874, worked the guano pits, representing another layer of the new labour relationships created by trade in forest and marine products.Footnote ⁷⁶ A similar trend in migrant labour had emerged in previous decades as Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders became seamen on ships that acquired and transported furs, sandalwood, and sea cucumbers. They also numbered among the crews of whaling vessels that crisscrossed the Pacific.Footnote ⁷⁷

The rising importance of guano and whale oil – products destined chiefly for western Europe and the United States – did not diminish the influence of Chinese demand on Pacific trade. In the late 1820s, familiar forest and marine products began to be harvested in new parts of the ocean. US ships, which had bypassed Fiji after its sandalwood stands were depleted, called again, this time to obtain sea cucumbers. Akin to Hawaiian leaders, Fijian chiefs ordered their subjects to spend extended periods harvesting and drying sea cucumbers. When holothurians grew scarce in the late 1840s, Fijians, who had grown dependent upon imported manufactured goods and iron, faced an economy in crisis.Footnote ⁷⁸

Westerners also visited Yap, an island located roughly between Palau and Guam, in search of new supplies of trepang. A British trader, Andrew Cheyne, stopped there in 1843 and gained permission to harvest and process sea cucumbers, being told by an island leader that ‘biche de mer [sea cucumber] is plentiful on the reefs, and of no use to us; why then should we keep it?’Footnote ⁷⁹ In sporadic exchanges with Western merchants in subsequent decades, Yapese acquired guns, alcohol, cloth, and iron goods, although their island's economy did not become dependent upon the sea cucumber trade.Footnote ⁸⁰

Established trades in marine and forest products continued in other parts of the Pacific's western sphere. In 1832 a Singapore newspaper noted that ‘the British merchant has begun extensively to avail himself of Singapore, as an entrepôt for China goods’.Footnote ⁸¹ Flowing into Singapore were dragon's blood, bird's nests, and trepang, which John Phipps asserted ‘forms the most important article of commerce between the islands of the Indian archipelago and China, excepting, perhaps, pepper’.Footnote ⁸² Still choosing to avoid exporting silver, in the same year the Tokugawa shogunate issued decrees prohibiting non-sanctioned trade in marine products to assure a steady flow of those goods to Nagasaki.Footnote ⁸³

The persistence of silver-substitute strategies in Pacific trade is further illustrated by Australian merchants who sought to counteract a perceived loss of specie used to import Chinese tea, consumed by all classes in the British colony. Australian traders attempted to use domestic goods – seal skins, lumber, and wool – as barter for tea at Canton. But, as a commentator lamented in a Sydney newspaper in 1830, the ‘cunning China merchant’ rejected those goods, forcing the colony to send instead ‘hard dollars’ (Spanish dollars), often in short supply.Footnote ⁸⁴ In response, Australians obtained a tried and true product: sandalwood. Commencing the final phase of the Pacific sandalwood rush, during the 1840s and 1850s Australian merchants bartered beads, fish hooks, and knives for the wood during visits to Melanesian islands largely bypassed by previous maritime traders: New Caledonia, the Loyalty Islands, and Vanuatu.Footnote ⁸⁵ Merchants also recruited Melanesian islanders to work on their ships that transported sandalwood to Canton, often via Sydney. In addition, Australian captains came to rely on Melanesian seamen and fishers on ships that obtained trepang and pearl in the Admiralty and Belep Islands, the Torres Strait, and Australia's Barrier Reef.Footnote ⁸⁶ By the 1870s, Yapese were also numbered among the crews of such voyages.Footnote ⁸⁷

Yet while trade in forest and marine products continued throughout the Pacific, the successive rushes eventually reduced available supplies. Despite continued Chinese demand, beginning in the late 1840s forest and marine products therefore played a diminishing role in Pacific maritime trade. What is more, US and British traders carried more opium, which (as historians have long noted) allowed them to turn the tables and acquire significant amounts of silver at Canton, and later at other treaty ports established by the Treaty of Nanjing (1842), signed in the wake of Britain's victory in the Opium War (1839–42).Footnote ⁸⁸

Even with the opium trade and the increasing scarcity of forest and marine products, the reciprocal trading relationship created by Chinese demand and the Western desire for Chinese products continued. In 1844 Robert Forbes, a prominent Boston merchant involved in Pacific trade, stressed that ‘the prospective extension of the China trade, in consequence of the opening of four new ports, is very much over-estimated’. He asserted that ‘we must materially increase the consumption of tea and silks in this country, before we can expect to enlarge materially our trade with China; and the same remark applies to Great Britain’. Forbes concluded that ‘Therefore it is clear, that we can only sell in China, profitably, just as many goods as will pay for the articles of export from China, which we respectively want’.Footnote ⁸⁹

Beginning in the late 1840s, US and British demand for tea did increase; in 1849, China exported over 65 million pounds of tea to the United States and Britain but by 1856 exports to those two nations jumped to over 131 million pounds. In 1849 the United States imported just over 18 million pounds of tea, a figure that climbed to 40.2 million by 1856. Over the same period, Britain's tea imports surged from 47.2 million to just over 91 million pounds.Footnote ⁹⁰ As Forbes predicted, Anglo-American demand for tea (and silk) meant that more opium and manufactured cloth and clothing flowed to China, but not enough to pay for the increased purchases of tea, prompting British and US ships to bring more silver.Footnote ⁹¹

The China-based British firm of Jardine, Matheson and Company (hereafter Jardine) commissioned the transport, usually on US ships, of silver and also copper from Peru and Chile. In October 1848 a clipper ship, Sea Witch, loaded just over $126,000 in silver bars and coins at Lima before making its way to Canton. Two years later another US vessel, Congress, stopped at Valparaiso, where it took on silver and copper (and some gold) valued at over $120,000, which it transported to Canton.Footnote ⁹²

The continued importance of silver to Pacific trade is also evident in the US mission to Japan headed by Commodore Matthew Perry, which departed from the United States in 1852. The mission is popularly remembered as the commodore cleverly presented it: an avatar of US industrial progress surging across the Pacific, despite the fact that Perry sailed via the Indian Ocean to ensure access to coal en route. Commanding a fleet comprised of half of the steam-powered warships then commissioned in the US Navy, Perry carried a letter from President Millard Fillmore boasting that US steamers could sail in a scant two weeks from California to Japan. Nonetheless, Fillmore's appeals for trade were firmly planted in the context of mid-nineteenth-century Pacific commerce. He stressed that the United States could export precious metals to Japan, as ‘Our great State of California produces about sixty millions of dollars in gold every year, besides silver, quicksilver, precious stones, and many other valuable articles’.Footnote ⁹³ In a report submitted following his mission, Perry was challenged to identify ‘valuable articles’ other than manufactured cotton clothing that might entice Japanese leaders to open trade. It is not surprising that he therefore advocated establishing a ‘commercial entrepôt’ on Taiwan, which could use the island's coal to supply the steamships increasingly plying the waters of East and Southeast Asia. Perry asserted that the entrepôt ‘unshackled by the restrictions of duties upon foreign or domestic commerce beyond some trifling municipal impost, would draw to its ports vessels of all nations, and it would not be long before it would rival the great commercial marts of Hong Kong and Singapore’.Footnote ⁹⁴

The 1850s and 1860s transition

Fillmore's and Perry's appeals underscore how Pacific trade had entered a period of transition during which some previously dominant flows, such as those in silver and tea, continued, but others, such as the China-focused entrepôt model, were fading. Had it come to fruition, Perry's Taiwan entrepôt would probably have acquired attributes similar to those of Singapore and Nagasaki in the late 1850s and early 1860s: namely, while trade with China was still vital, the ports were ceasing to be defined as entrepôts for forest and marine products. Instead they became emporia in an emerging Pacific commercial network increasingly shaped by demand from Western nations and an influx of Western-manufactured wares, chiefly cotton clothing. In Singapore in 1863, cotton manufactures formed the most valuable article imported from Britain, the origin of most imports (by value). From Manila, Singapore chiefly received tobacco and sugar, and from Borneo, sago, a starch extracted from varieties of native palm trees, which was exported exclusively to Europe where it was used in puddings and to thicken soups. Borneo also sent coal, which fuelled the growing number of steamships calling at Singapore. To China, Singapore shipped tin, rice, opium, and cotton goods in values that well outpaced exports of bird's nests and trepang, mainstays of shipments just three decades earlier.Footnote ⁹⁵

In 1850, the shogunate again issued edicts to maintain the flow of marine products to Nagasaki in order to continue to obtain medicinal products from China.Footnote ⁹⁶ After Westerners were allowed to trade at the port in 1859, Japanese and Western merchants first competed for shares of the still profitable trade with China. During the 1860s, Jardine and other Western merchants increasingly moved away from trade with China, focusing instead on exports of tea and silk to Britain and the United States.Footnote ⁹⁷ Nagasaki would also later become an important purveyor of coal to steamships sailing newly established routes.

San Francisco, which burst on the Pacific maritime scene as a prominent port following the discovery of gold in 1848, provides another example of the transition in Pacific trade. Initially much of the port's traffic involved transporting prospective miners and supplies to the rapidly growing city, as well as shipping gold to the US eastern seaboard. After the gold rush ended, trade remained focused on Western markets, with wheat, transported primarily to Britain, becoming the largest export.Footnote ⁹⁸

Yet San Francisco also became a centre for a still thriving silver trade to China, partly because, after 1856, Chinese merchants came to adopt the Mexican dollar rather than the long-trusted Spanish dollar.Footnote ⁹⁹ US clipper ships sailed from New York or Boston to San Francisco, where they took on chiefly Mexican dollars, as well as Spanish dollars and silver bars for Hong Kong. In August 1856, the clipper Young America loaded Mexican $12,000 and sailed directly to Hong Kong in forty-four days. In December of that year, Golden City and Joseph Peabody together loaded approximately Mexican $16,000 for Hong Kong. In May 1859 the clipper Sweepstakes left San Francisco with Mexican $75,000, arriving in Hong Kong forty-seven days later; in July of the same year Whirlwind carried just over Mexican $100,000 across the Pacific.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The cargoes of these ships illustrate the significant amount of treasure flowing through San Francisco to China in the 1850s and 1860s, estimated to have totalled nearly US $25 million in the period from 1854 to 1863.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The 1860s also witnessed the opening of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company's regular line between San Francisco, Yokohama, and Hong Kong, as well as the completion of a transcontinental railway in the United States. In February 1871 a prominent trade paper proclaimed the ‘eve of a great revolution in the course of the vast trade which is carried on with China, India, and Japan’. This was proven, it argued, by the arrival in San Francisco of the steamship Great Republic, carrying tea and silk from China. The paper noted that the transcontinental railway would carry the tea to Chicago and Boston, and the silk to New York:

What is more, the United States and western European nations were steadily expanding their shares of global manufacturing, a trend revealed, for example, in the aforementioned increased trade through Singapore in British cotton goods.

However, it was national and imperial agendas as well as market trends, rather than technology and manufacturing output, that brought about the weakening and eventual disappearance of the reciprocal demand dynamic that had shaped Pacific trade since the mid eighteenth century. This is illustrated in the case of Japan, where a new central government, after gaining power in 1868, championed Western social practices and fashions. By 1877, Western-manufactured woollen and cotton cloth, along with miscellaneous clothing, made up just over half of all imports (by value).Footnote ¹⁰³ The government also espoused Western medicine, creating a medical institute that employed German physicians to teach on the subject. The institute established quality standards for medicines and regulated their sales on the domestic market.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ With such government measures, quinine, a drug developed by Western medicine, soon became the largest import (by value) among medicinal goods, outpacing, for example, rhubarb, a mainstay of the previous, China-centred, trade.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

More significantly, Japanese and British initiatives led to the creation of tea export industries that challenged China's position as sole supplier to the world market. Japan's new central government shepherded the development of tea and silk exports centred on the US market. By 1877 in export columns, tea (occupying 20% of all exports produced in Japan) ranked second behind silk (at 47%) with kelp, abalone, sea cucumbers, and shark fins totalling just over 3%.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

By fostering the development of tea plantations in India, Britain carved out an even larger share of the world's tea trade and in so doing eliminated its dependence on Chinese tea. In 1865, Britain imported 97% of its tea from China but thereafter the steady growth in production of Indian tea meant that in 1871 it made up 11% of all tea imports. The share climbed to 28% by 1880 and became a majority (51%) in 1887.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Overall, with more options for acquiring tea, British and US merchants could move beyond the reciprocal demand dynamic that had long shaped their commerce with China, and by implication their activities in Pacific trade. The United States developed exports of kerosene, and by the 1880s it was a leading export to China and Japan. Oil was not, of course, discovered in the United States until the 1850s and a subsequent domestic glut contributed to the growth of the trade.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ But, importantly, oil was a domestic product, unlike previous mainstays of Latin American silver or Pacific forest and marine products.

In addition, Indian tea represented the success of the plantation model being more widely adopted throughout the Pacific. In 1857, when the whaling industry began to taper off, Hawai'i had just five sugar plantations.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Over the next three decades, plantation production grew steadily and the US–Hawai'i Reciprocity Treaty of 1875 helped to expand US consumption of Hawaiian sugar. Chinese and later Japanese contract and free labourers augmented the Hawaiian workforce.Footnote ¹¹⁰ By 1887 sugar amounted to 94% (by value) of all Hawaiian exports to the United States. In contrast to the earlier entrepôt trade, bilateral US–Hawai'i commerce dominated, totalling more than 90% of Hawai'i's foreign trade in 1887.Footnote ¹¹¹

With US demand playing an increasing role and China ceasing to be a fountainhead of goods such as medicines and tea, traders in both Asia-Pacific and Western nations became less beholden to Chinese demand. In turn, those harvesting forest and marine products moved to meet burgeoning western European and US demand. For example, Taiwanese peasants harvesting camphor in mountainous areas began to sell to purchasing stations established by British merchants in the island's interior. British merchants sought more camphor, a commodity previously shipped mainly to China, as Westerners increasingly used it in the production of early plastics and photographic film.Footnote ¹¹² In Sitka in the decades after Alaska came under US control in 1867, Tlingit and other Native Americans began to work as wage labourers in mines, on docks and ships, and in salmon canneries feeding US demand for canned fish. The Tlingit used their new-found monetary incomes to purchase US manufactured goods, including ready-made clothing and windows for their homes. They also jealously guarded their jobs when mine and factory owners attempted to replace them with Chinese workers.Footnote ¹¹³ Beginning in the 1860s, Western Pacific Islanders were increasingly recruited, often forcibly or through deception, to work not only as seamen and fishers of marine products but also in Australian agriculture. Many travelled to other Pacific islands, where they toiled in plantations producing copra and tropical products destined for Western markets.Footnote ¹¹⁴ All told, in their labour pursuits, Taiwanese, Tlingit, and Western Pacific Islanders participated in a new socioeconomic chapter of Pacific history that was more strongly defined by Western demand.