Love Lane Lives
The history of sugar in Liverpool and the effects of the closure of the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery, Love Lane
SUGAR and GLOBALISATION
Written by Ron Noon at 21:29 on Sunday, September 13th 2009
SUGAR AND GLOBALISATION
This is my first blog since late July when although holidaying in North America, I managed to write a short piece about Mr Cube, History’s most famous sugar lump. It was on the eve of his 60th birthday and was duly zapped off into cyber space from a communal computer terminal in a motel in Sacramento, California, just before I boarded an AMTRAK train to Salt Lake City to watch Everton play the MLS All Stars. Those of you not interested in soccer are surely thinking there’s more to SUGAR AND GLOBALISATION than pre-season globe trotting and watching the TOFFEES beat the MLS, albeit in a penalty shoot out, on a barmy hot evening, nearby the Nevada desert!? (“Toffees” is the affectionate nick name of my beloved EFC but the origins of our club lie in St Domingo Road, a telling geographic reference to a sugar island in the tropical Antilles.)
There is indeed much more to follow, and this third web category supplementing ON THE LANE and BEYOND THE LANE, will hopefully add to the interest and wider relevance of our LOVE LANE LIVES project by engaging with some of the debates around GLOBALISATION. They are far too important to be left to professional economists and politicians, especially as an American friend of mine sagely remarked “so much fatalistic globaloney is spoken in its name”! To paraphrase playwright, Dennis Potter “the trouble with words like Globalisation, is that we don’t know whose mouths it’s been in before”!
Our sugar bustin’ website can’t ignore these debates and with the help of technical wizard Warren Keith and the bright filmmaking talents of Leon Seth, there will hopefully be more “multi-media” engagement with these issues before the end of 2009. I’m a “labour academic” who although incapable of putting film in my digital camera, have spent a long time researching “capitalism’s favoured child”, and also redressing the historical amnesia I suffered in adolescence about our great port city and its rich working class history.
That’s Liverpool in case you are new to the site, the sleepy insignificant fishing village that had been eclipsed by Chester for four hundred years after the signing of its Royal charter, but jolted into Transatlantic take off in the late 17th century, by two commodities, sugar and slaves. In the century that followed Liverpool was not only at the epicentre of an infamous chapter in world history, but “globalised” long before the G word was shoehorned into the dictionary.
“Sugar did not create negro slavery…but the gigantic scale of the transatlantic slave trade and its maintenance for several centuries were due primarily to the demand for sugar in Europe and North America.” What was missing from Aykroyd’s comments, (he wrote Sweet Malefactor in 1967), was reference to the unsavoury fact that Liverpool merchants proved the most adept slave takers and profit makers and so the scatterings of millions of black people that constituted the Africanisation of the Caribbean sugar bowl, was indelibly “made on Merseyside”.
This is not local and parochial history. “The history of Merseyside is greater in quality and significance than that of many a nation. To speak of ‘local’ history with reference to the slave trade, the Liverpool-Manchester Railway, the establishment of the port, the Irish immigrations, Gladstone, the development of public health, and a dozen other facets of Liverpool’s story, seems odd, for Liverpool has reflected, more especially since the eighteenth century, not only the national but the international picture.” (1) The links between Liverpool and the sugar world which were broken in 1981 with the closure of Love Lane are an important part of that much bigger global story.
The grass that has changed the world (and mine too) is highlighted in a fascinating book by Henry Hobhouse: “Sugar cane, taken by the white man to the West Indies at the time of the Renaissance and cultivated on plantations by black slaves, (the only people who could work in the climate), was the cause of the infamous transatlantic slave trade, which made the Caribbean black rather than red. All this was for the sake of a product which is wholly superfluous in the diet, a luxury when expensive and a menace when cheap. The brutality of the treatment of the slaves could not possibly be matched by the toothache, the heart pains, or the obesity of the consumer. Yet the consumers misery is undoubted, since after the acknowledged drugs sugar is probably the most damaging of the commonly consumed addictive substances, and is associated with at least one type of cancer… The story is now so well known that there is little need to repeat that sugar, after the illegal drugs, and tobacco and alcohol, is the most damaging addictive substance consumed by rich, white mankind.” (2) Small wonder the French food writer Montignac suggested a skull and crossbones for labelling packets of sugar.
The slave trade and slavery in the British empire long abolished, an early 20th century source celebrated how “today all seas lead to Liverpool, if not as a terminus, at least as an exchange or a clearing house for world wide international transport. There is no part of the globe, however remote, whose natives may not be met on the Liverpool landing stage, and there is no territory so distant whose products do not pass from time to time through the docks and warehouses of Liverpool and Birkenhead. Those passengers and merchandise are, for the most part, en route for other, and often remote, parts; and it is this character of Liverpool as the great traffic exchange of the world that gives the port such a cosmopolitan tone, and that makes its name so familiar in every land and on every sea.” (3)
Before World War, this edgy port city had shipping lines like Cunard which helped make Liverpool and New York the most important landing stages of the 19th century and no part of the “Globe” was unrepresented on either. The Big Liverpool, the Cosmopolitan Liverpool, arguably became the most American of all English cities, and it not only spawned more millionaires than any other city outside of London as it embarked on its Merseypride excesses of constructing the biggest Gothic Cathedral in the world plus “three graces” to adorn its historic waterfront, but demonstrated more starkly than most the contrasts between a wealthy patrician elite and a desperately poor, casualised working class. “At its peak in the years 1880-1899, Liverpool produced as many millionaires as Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, West Midlands, Tyneside and East Anglia combined.” (4) The Reverend Ackland Armstrong who arrived in Liverpool in 1885 to be minister to the wealthy Unitarian congregation in Hope Street commented that “the contiguity of immense wealth and abysmal poverty forced itself upon my notice…. I had seen wealth. I had seen poverty. But never before had I seen the two so jammed together.” (5)
So much rich food for thought? If three quarters of a century before the term globalisation became common currency, Liverpool was proxy for what is happening today, then a recurring social theme is the shocking one that the rich are still getting richer faster than the poor are getting less poor. When Karl Marx coined that lapidary phrase “the philosophers have merely interpreted the world, the point is to change it” the G word was not in use, but perhaps like all of us who want to change the world for the better we need to grasp our need to understand that world first. We can only do justice to the concept of globalisation and the excesses it is associated with by developing an historical understanding and sense of context, especially now that it has moved from the rareified atmosphere of the academic seminar room into popular parlance?
Invariably you will not have to search too far to find suggestions that the micro-electronics revolution has irrevocably changed our world, indeed changed the nature of human contact on Earth. There is talk of “time-space compression” and other jargonistic phrases that emphasise how distances are shrinking and information is spreading faster than ever before. (The “Atlantic ferry” crossing mentioned earlier, represented a conquest of time and space in its day and it was brought about not by Gerry Springer but by the substitution of steam for sail!) Of course the Pheonix night “tinternet” and the World Wide Web have helped this process, enabling business to communicate more smoothly and efficiently but have they narrowed the social distances between rich and poor? Do we really talk more to each other?
Wayne Ellwood in a stimulating book entitled The No-Nonsense guide to Globalization, published in 2001 argued how “there is little doubt that ‘globalization’ is the buzzword of the moment, the most talked about and perhaps the least understood concept of this new millennium”. What it describes and what our case study of sugar will demonstrate is that Globalisation is not just a late 20th century phenomenon? (Six centuries of global expansion make the products of Bill Gates pre-pubescent.)
“The entanglement of diverse cultures and economies now known as globalization, has been spreading for centuries and the world has been shrinking as a result. In that sense it is an old story…But the ‘old story’ of globalization today has developed a new twist sparked by the rapid rate of technological change over the last 25 years.” Elwood.
You can hear the punter exclaim “Well it’s gorra be technology ‘anit?” Superficially that appears to be the case but my experiences of teaching on the Open University Social Sciences Foundation course DD100, suggest the need to curb the “breathless tone” of those who hype technology, technology, technology! (More commentary about the OU and sugar will crop up in future blogs.) “Global culture is disseminated via an increasingly complex network of distribution technologies. So technology is commonly implicated in debates about the burgeoning global dissemination of culture. As well as being prominent in debates about globalisation, technology is seen by many as the defining characteristic of the contemporary era. Across the full breadth of social spheres and institutions – work, family, leisure, education and even the construction of identity – technological developments are seen as enormously significant for processes of transformation. According to this ‘information society’ thesis, information technology is the key feature of the contemporary social order, and information flows and networks lie at the heart of its organization.” (6)
This is where students have to be warned of the dangers of an information rich and knowledge deficient society, and that we are a long way from an instant K Knowledge society. Information overload and easier access to WIKIPEDIA is not the real K! There is also here another important warning about the dangers of Technological Determinism and the assumption that societies are indeed determined by their prevailing technologies. The argument goes like this: The common place expressions of “the stone age”, “the steam age”, “the computer age” convey the notion that the technology, stone, steam or computers is responsible for the dominant social characteristics of the era being discussed. The form of social organisation, hunter-gatherer society, the industrial revolution or the information society is read off from knowledge of that dominant technology. Technology is seen as the driving force of history.
TECHNOLOGIES are shaped by SOCIETY in the first place. The computer and communication technologies did not come from the ether, nor are they the result of some abstract genius on the part of their inventors. THEY CAN BE SEEN AS A DIRECT OUTCOME OF THE COLD WAR. – THE RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT BUDGET OF THE US DEPARTMENT OF DEFENCE. Society in the shape of the Cold War shaped the technology not the other way round. William Greider (7) provides details about the origins of the New Revolution that we are going through. The findings of two Americans working for two different companies discovered the integrated circuit or silicon chip which is the emblem or logo of the ‘global’ revolution. Economic revolutions always originate with the invention of a new power source. This one can be dated ‘quite confidently as the autumn of 1958 and early 1959”. Within a few months of each other Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments, and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semi-Conductor arrived at the same breakthrough the silicon chip. They conceptualized the device that inscribes electronic circuitry in a tiny space much too small to see. This has become exponentially smaller as technology has continued to perfect the idea - the new integrated circuit was the inventive watershed of this revolution - fabulous powers of memory and complex calculation.
Clearly technologies do have profound effects, always have, but those effects are not pre-ordained. They are not built into the technology but are very much a consequence of how the technology is introduced. In making such a big thing of the technology (“reifying” it as the sociologist would say and forgetting the politics of the cold war period as with the example above), people fatalistically forget about choices and how that thing called Society is crucial to the decision making process. Does technological change have to lead on to redundancies? Do we all have to become croppers? (That expression is frequently used but how many know its genesis or why Luddites were not always Luddites! Sorry for the riddles but this is an experimental blog on a new category that will have to throw up questions about the T word.)
Here’s another riddle to resolve. What then “new technology” did this next extract hail?
“The celebrations that followed bordered on hysteria. There were two hundred-gun salutes in Boston and New York; flags flew from public buildings; church bells rang. There were fireworks, parades, and special church services. Torchbearing revellers in New York got so carried away that City Hall was accidentally set on fire and narrowly escaped destruction. ‘Our whole country’ declared Scientific American ‘has been electrified by the successful..?”
If you are struggling we’ll give you another clue:
“It revolutionised business practice, gave rise to new forms of crime, and inundated its users with a deluge of information. Romance blossomed over the wires. Secret codes were devised by some users, and cracked by others. The benefits of the network were relentlessly hyped by its advocates, and dismissed by the sceptics. Governments and regulators tried and failed to control the new medium. Attitudes to everything from newsgathering to diplomacy had to be completely rethought. Meanwhile out on the wires, a technological subculture with its own customs and vocabulary was establishing itself.”
So what technology and when? Hopefully this example illustrates that it is not only today that new technologies are greeted with excessive claims about their revolutionary significance and the fanfare that a new society is being heralded. (Will someone please convey the answer to our website comment column? The “owner” of the first correct answer will be rewarded with a bag of cane sugar and will have convinced me on this lovely sunny Saturday afternoon, that there are intelligent people outside the blogosphere, and my Summer House/garden shed, and Anfield, [it’s now just after 4pm and we don’t kick off for another 24 hours], building up really useful knowledge.
I’m conscious of having gone on for far too long with this blog, but while rambling on about technology we could consider the fact that the “tiger in the tank” that drives cars in Brazil is produced from sugar cane and that this non-food use for sucrose, from an annually regenerable crop, has resulted in many “breathless toners” forecasting that this plant could save the world! Let’s leave the hype and illusions there and maybe come back to flex-fuel cars and sugar in a later blog. The most important thing about my subject HISTORY and its relevance to studies of globalisation which have often have lacked that vital context and chronology, is that we do try to work out why déjà vu is not just a Crosby Stills and Nash album!
One of the most important bits of advice I give my students is not to develop the memory at the expense of the intelligence but think the details through and arrive at what I heard an American trade union leader sagely describe as glittering generalisations! (Where are the GGs?) With such a complicated phenomenon it’s hardly surprising that many people are generally confused and rudderless in understanding and comprehending all the talk about globalization but some like UAW President Owen Beiber speaking to Chicago businessmen on May 4th 1992 have grasped one very obvious GG about what it often means for organised labor (American spelling! So is it globalization or globalisation?) “I’m getting a little sick of hearing the word ‘global’. I’m sick of global competitiveness.” Maybe on the eve of the TUC annual conference in Liverpool this view will have some resonance.
There is much complexity and detail which makes it difficult to “get a handle” on the G word. That said we need to think the details through and search for the GGs. That is how we will get to “unpack” and understand this concept and whether we like Beiber get a “little sick” of hearing its mantra like sounds from politicians who argue TINA like, that there is no alternative to adjusting to global market forces! Perhaps Beiber like the other American trade union leader whose name escapes me, had read from an enlightenment philosopher who thought that “meaningless details in history are like the baggage of an army: impedimenta; one must take the wider view”. That was Voltaire writing in the 18th century and towards the end of last century William Woodward recommended that “In seeking to understand the totality, complexity and diversity of the past” the focus has to shift “from the parts to the whole, from the trees to the forest”. Perhaps he plays in a band called the Holistics, but with not far short of 7 billion on the planet and global meltdown much more than a futuristic sci-fi film scenario, they are the best live band around today The guiding principle is that only in historical terms can we “ever hope to understand the metamorphosis of the modern world”. And to save it!
Sometimes the “language” of the intellectual needs to be leavened out by not just a little levity but by a more chatty, conversational style of communication which presumes people’s intelligence and ability to grasp words that reflect real meanings, not just technical jargon. History is probably the least jargon ridden subject in the social sciences, (although none of us are unaffected by it), but the public role of historians is to build on those communication skills and make good analytical narrative history more easily available and accessible.
That is not to trivialise serious debate, or dilute the “academic labour process”, or the work of ostensibly more theoretically orientated social sciences like economics and sociology, rather it’s to try to irradiate commentary on difficult subjects with common sense and broader perspectives. There are dangers in the colloquial as we’ve discussed in relation to technology where “you can imagine some Alf Garnett of the 21st century, splitting vowels and spitting bile over the very word. ‘Well it’s yer globalisation, innit? All those bloody huge companies, hand in glove wiv the World Bankers, runnin’ riot all over the place, settin’ up an closin’ dahn wherever they bloody well feel like it’.”
That was Pat Kane amusingly reviewing Globalization: The Human Consequences by Zygmunt Bauman a few years before the banks came a tumblin’ down, and taxpayers took over from the Bank of England as “lenders of last resort”. Bauman’s a brilliant academic but he’s not an easy read and that again emphasises the importance of “public intellectuals” and “public historians” going busily about their business of reaching a much wider audience than the academy and Guardian and Independent readership.
Failing that “there are 3,300 books in English in print on the subject of globalization. Add to these 700 recent French titles on mondialization, 670 on globalisierung in German, and hundreds more in Russian, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Spanish and other languages. In all, there are over 5,000 titles in print on globalization. It’s a crowded field” says Alex MacGillivray in a “A brief history of Globalisation”! But how many references are there in this crowded field to SUGAR? (8)
According to Anthony Giddens, Globalisation is a word that has come from nowhere to be everywhere. My unorthodox way of unpacking the term and ignoring the breathless tone of those who eulogise technology, time space compression and gismos and gadgets, is to place it in more fitting historical perspective, and to deliberate on the story of capitalism and its favoured child, sugar! And why not? Sugar, just like the G word has come from nowhere to be everywhere and its ubiquity provides a great example of how a simple too much taken for granted everyday commodity has a complicated social history, that nonetheless provides clear insight into the drivers that still operate in the world economy today. Sugar is a great example of an intensely political product that links the story of agriculture and agribusiness to the inexorable logic of world food markets today.
For me the “empty calorie” offers more food for thought than nutrition but is always an important reminder how production under capitalism is driven by want not need, wealth not health! Looking around today at the global warming of our one world and the stark evidence reflected on earlier, that the rich are getting richer faster than the poor are getting less poor, agitates a final bitter sweet thought about the 500 year old system which reduces human beings to commodities and costs of production at the end of the day! There’s a great line in the poem Augeries of Innocence by William Blake “to see the world in a Grain of sand”! (9) In the words of an inveterate sugar bore of no poetic ability, but who like Blake is addicted to a drug, (albeit a legal one), I can see a world of capitalism and greed in a granule or cube of sugar! I hope I’m not the only one.
References
1. Eric Midwinter Old Liverpool 1971
2. Seeds of Change: Six plants that transformed mankind (1999) page xv & 59
3. Liverpool and Birkenhead in the Twentieth Century: Contemporary Biographies Edited by W T Pike Publishers: W.T.Pike & Co 19, Grand Parade, Brighton 1911 Pike’s New Century Series
4. Tony Lane Gateway to Empire pps 54,55.
5. My Secret in the Stone pamphlet 2004
6. Hugh Mackay page 79 in the OU text on Globalisation
7. One World Ready or Not: The Manic logic of Global Capitalism
8. Alex MacGillivray A Brief History of Globalization
9.
To see a world in a grain of sand,
and heaven in a wildflower,
hold infinity in the palm of your hand
and eternity in an hour