Global commerce links producers to consumers across long distances. This distance is primarily geographical, but geographical distance has an impact on information, emotional relationships, and projections. Consumers may or may not be aware of the conditions under which the goods they purchase are produced, and they may or may not care. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries offer paradoxical insights into the relationship between global commerce and morality. On the one hand, as the editors of this volume succinctly put it, the period witnessed “human exploitation on a new and unprecedented scale” (p. 1). On the other hand, campaigns to end or mitigate exploitation emerged. Their success – at least with regard to the transatlantic slave trade – was initially linked to their ability to tie the (widely accepted) individual moral dangers that resulted from the temptations of luxury consumption to “unacceptable practices abroad” (p. 14).
Taking a historical approach to a topic that is, as the editors concede, quite well researched, but where significant knowledge gaps persist in some areas, this volume places the focus on the mechanisms, extent, and consequences of “popular mobilization” (p. 2) in a broad sense. This poses the obvious problem that the motivation and actions of individual consumers are frequently difficult to reconstruct from the available sources, whereas the debates of economic experts, published opinion, or the motivation of prominent activists are documented much more comprehensively. As a result, many articles in this volume take creative approaches to the topic, which allow them to address attempts to shape consumers’ (or, more rarely, producers’) conscience in particularly illuminating ways. By contrast, there is less emphasis on how consumers actually balanced the temptation of commercial offers, moral caveats, and rising or declining purchasing power.
The volume's temporal focus is on the eighteenth century and the late 1800s (with some attention to current developments), and most contributions concern the British Empire and Germany. Eleven essays focus on theoretical texts, fiction, biographical case studies, as well as boycott and marketing campaigns. The key first impression after reading the excellent chapters is that of a multiplicity of approaches to balancing the moral pitfalls of commerce in an increasingly unequal world and the wide range of potential outcomes.
The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German cameralists examined by Justus Nipperdey projected their idea of an economy composed of small-scale, independent producers entitled to fair and secure incomes onto the world at large, and expected this model's global success because “wages at or below subsistence level were simply bad political economy” (p. 46). This provided a strong basis for moral claims but was at odds with reality even when first proposed. Indeed, Laura Tarkka's study of British and French writings on India during the period highlights the importance of references to national differences as a justification for colonization and exploitation around the same time. Joyce Goggin's chapter takes the very creative approach of exploring the link between fictional literature and financial exploits in the early eighteenth century. Financial scandals did (and do) not just make for good novels, financial schemes can be (and were) conceptualized as a type of fictional endeavour in themselves, given the degree of wilful suspension of disbelief many of them required. In the 1720s, this included glossing over slavery as the main basis of colonial enrichment. Yusuke Wakazawa discusses a similar topic in a contribution on the influence of Adam Smith's economic theories on Tobias Smollett's fiction.
A very different take on commerce and morality emerges when the focus is on individual actors. This is illustrated by Aaron Graham's study of William Clarke, a commission agent who arrived at Louisbourg shortly after the British conquest. His moral dilemma was the difficulty of balancing his various obligations: to his principals; to his local customers; to the British imperial political order; and, occasionally, to the liquidity of markets in a situation in which there was little effective oversight and a sequence of shortages of either goods or money, which would have allowed for large profits.
Campaigns aimed at consumers collectively become more prominent when the collection turns to the late eighteenth century. Two linked chapters, by Jordan B. Smith and Sarah Lentz, discuss attempts to undercut slavery by sourcing sugar and rum from outside the Caribbean. Smith's contribution deals with the more practical side, which centred on alternative commodities (maple sugar) and sites of production (India). While the movement experienced some short-term success, it ultimately faltered because the alternatives on offer could not compete in terms of quantity or price. Lentz's focus is on discourse: German research aimed at replacing cane sugar with beet sugar was framed as a contribution to the abolition of slavery around 1800. Again, it would take quite some time until the product became commercially viable. Two further contributions are concerned with the morality of colonial imports in the nineteenth century. Deborah J. Neill studies the entrepreneur turned campaigner John Holt, whose experience with the Congo rubber trade convinced him to oppose the suppression of workers’ rights. William G. Clarence-Smith deals with the debate on the morality of the import of pearl products, given the difficult conditions under which they were harvested, the waste involved (mollusc flesh was usually not consumed, but left to rot), and the difficulty of confirming the authenticity of the product as either “real” or cultured pearls.
The only article to reverse the perspective by highlighting an immoral export to colonial spaces is Kim Sebastian Todzi's illuminating study of the failure of attempts to curtail alcohol sales to German colonies in West Africa around 1900, which apparently succeeded in raising prices by way of export duties but did not cause demand to decline very much. The volume's final essay, by Alex Balch, Claire Hannibal, and Joe Kelly, provides an overarching perspective on Britain's history of legislation focusing on supply chains, beginning with the 1824 Slave Trade Act and concluding with current legislative initiatives. It highlights the difficulty of forcing intermediaries and consumers to focus on supply chains rather than specific goods, and the potential difficulties of legislation on – to quote the German variant – “Corporate Due Diligence Obligations for the Prevention of Human Rights Violations in Supply Chains” in making a real difference.
On occasion, there are productive tensions between the essays’ perspectives. For example, whereas India was presented as a zone of free labour in the late eighteenth-century debate on sugar production, in the article on pearls it appears as a country where labour conditions previously considered akin to slavery had not been abolished by the 1830s. This raises the broader question of the role governmental approval for certain forms and areas of trade (e.g. those covered by supply chain legislation or free trade agreements) may play in curtailing the impact of consumer movements, though this may not be their intention at all. Another point that emerges quite strongly from the individual essays, but is not particularly prominent in the introduction, is the role increasing wealth (and thus discretionary spending) played in the resonance of the appeals of intellectuals to the public, and thus in the success or failure of consumer movements. But this is a minor point of criticism. The volume excels in mapping the broad range of moral responses to economic inequities associated with trade.
