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Early modern globalization and the extent of indigenous agency: Trade, commodities and ecology
Abstract
This paper examines the responses of Indigenous nations and European companies to new trading opportunities: the Cree nations with the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) and the Khoe nations with the Dutch East India Company [Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC)]. This case study is important because of the disparate outcomes. Within a few decades the Cree standard of living had increased, while Khoe nations had lost cattle and land. Standard histories begin with the establishment of trading posts, but this elides the decades of prior intermittent contact which played an important role in the disparate outcomes in these two regions. The paper emphasizes the significance of Indigenous agency in trade.
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The economic history of the United States is that of Europeans and their institutions. Indigenous nations are absent. This absence is partly due to a lack of data but perhaps also to a perception that Indigenous communities contributed little to U.S. growth. Three case studies explore the economic complexity and social stratification across different nations/regions prior to contact. Migrants to the United States came not to an empty land but one with settled agriculture, complex production processes, and extensive trade relations, upon which Europeans built.
The speed of ships is a crucial variable in shipping productivity. Despite the dominance of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in Eurasian trade in the early modern era, its ships were generally slower than those of other companies. This article investigates the causes of this gap in shipping speeds. We dismiss reasons that highlight more numerous stops, longer routes, inferior navigation and restrictive instructions, and emphasize differences in ship design resulting from constraints imposed by the Dutch shallow inland waterways, and the slow adoption of copper sheathing in the late eighteenth century, as plausible explanations.
Although a large literature argues that European settlement outside of Europe during colonization had an enduring effect on economic development, researchers have been unable to assess these predictions directly because of an absence of data on colonial European settlement. We construct a new database on the European share of the population during colonization and examine its association with economic development today. We find a strong, positive relation between current income per capita and colonial European settlement that is robust to controlling for the current proportion of the population of European descent, as well as many other country characteristics. The results suggest that any adverse effects of extractive institutions associated with small European settlements were, even at low levels of colonial European settlement, more than offset by other things that Europeans brought, such as human capital and technology.
reflects past resource and economic conditions, government policies, and industry strategy. As economic
conditions and the resource change, industry, communities and governments must also adjust.
Forest sectors vary from one region to another, but all boreal regions face similar challenges. Boreal
forest industries face four main pressures: a changing resource base (reduced inventory, changed species
mix); increased demands for environmental and social amenities; increased demands for non-timber
values, and; increased competition in export markets. These will challenge the industries to remain
competitive vis-à-vis other forest regions throughout the coming decades while also achieving other goals
of sustainable forest management. To sustain competitiveness, Canadian boreal forest industries (timber
and non-timber) require improved forest resource information and development of new tools to support
investment and management decisions that, in turn, maintain and increase value derived from the many
goods and services provided by Canada’s boreal forests.
Opportunities to meet the coming challenges and ensure a competitive and sustainable boreal forest
sector include:
• Organization of the land base to minimize timber costs and enhance non-timber values,
while taking into account the potential impacts of climate change and forest health issues,
and maximizing synergies between non-forest sectors;
• Development of new and innovative tenure arrangements and property-right regimes that
support a sustainable and competitive boreal forest sector;
• Improvement of decision support tools and systems to enhance effectiveness and
efficiency of forest investments in forest renewal and protection;
• Development of non-timber goods and services, including enhanced use of biomass for
energy;
• Development of secondary wood and paper manufacturing;
• Development of new markets;
• Development of new technologies in harvesting, transportation and processing;
• Redesign of policies, including those that relate to transportation, energy, and
environment, that support a sustainable balance between economic, environmental, and
social goals.
In order to maintain competitiveness and environmental and social sustainability in the boreal forest
sector, research is needed in the following areas:
1. Economics and policy in forestland management: integrated versus specialized land
management;
2. Economics and policy in integrated land-use management: forestry, mining, agriculture,
recreation, and oil and gas;
3. Economics of forest protection, including fire management and integrated pest
management;
4. Regional and local economic impacts of traditional and non-traditional forest industries
on different aspects of the boreal population—rural and urban, Aboriginal and non-
Aboriginal;
5. Economics of transportation in the context of forest management and manufacturing;
6. Economic and policy research in the areas of non-timber forest products;
7. Economics of climate change mitigation and adaptation in northern forests, including
impacts of climate change policy on sustainable forest management and long-term timber
supply;
8. Analysis of effectiveness and efficiency of environmental, energy, transportation, and tax
regulation and policies in the context of the forest sector (timber and non-timber).
Such research will need to be spatially rooted and consider the varied circumstances that exist
across the boreal forest region; otherwise, the research findings risk being based on ‘average’ conditions,
and will not help resolve resource conflicts nor achieve a sustainable balance of economic, social, and
environmental values at local and regional scales. Moreover, risk-analysis methods and tools specifically
tailored to issues of the boreal forest region would be invaluable for development of future forest policies.
In order to support such research and orient it to questions of greatest relevance to the boreal forest
region, a more complete and detailed assessment of the state of the boreal region is recommended. An
assessment similar to the report, “Criteria and Indicators of Sustainable Forest Management in Canada:
National Status 2005,” with particular attention to regional circumstances, would be a useful reference
point from which to better focus research in the boreal forest sector. At the very least, a compilation of all
socioeconomic statistics by ecoregion or ecozone would facilitate analysis. Other specific information in
the following areas would support relevant economic and social research on Canada’s boreal region:
1. Frequency, extent and impacts of small fires in the boreal;
2. Growth and yield of timber resources in the boreal;
3. Production and use of non-timber forest resources;
4. Inventory and location of water, wetland, carbon, wildlife, and biodiversity resources;
5. Inventory and location of non-forest resources;
6. Boreal timber inventory, timber supply, and harvest trends;
7. Location of industry, and its associated transportation and other infrastructure, within the
boreal region.
We construct a matrix showing the share of the year 2000 population in every country that is descended from people in different
source countries in the year 1500. Using the matrix to adjust indicators of early development so that they reflect the history
of a population's ancestors rather than the history of the place they live today greatly improves the ability of those indicators
to predict current GDP. The variance of the early development history of a country's inhabitants is a good predictor for current
inequality, with ethnic groups originating in regions having longer histories of organized states tending to be at the upper
end of a country's income distribution.
This paper compares public land privatization in New South Wales and the Province of Buenos Aires,in the early nineteenth century. Both claimed frontier lands as public lands for raising revenue. New South Wales failed to enforce its claim. Property rights originated as de facto squatters’ claims, which government subsequently accommodated and enforced as de jure property rights. In Buenos Aires, by contrast, original transfers of public lands were specified de jure by government. The paper develops a model that explains these differences as a consequence of violence and the relative cost of enforcement of government claims to public land.
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Europeans at the end of the eighteenth century had settled across the globe, from North and South America to Australia to the southern tip of Africa. While theories of institutional persistence explain the ‘reversal of fortunes’ between settled and unsettled regions, few studies consider the large differences in early living standards between settler societies. This paper uses newly transcribed household‐level tax censuses from the Dutch and British Cape Colony and the United States shortly after independence to show comparative levels of income and wealth over four decades both between the two regions and within them. Cape farmers were, on average, more affluent than their American counterparts. While crop output and livestock were more unequally distributed at the Cape, ownership of enslaved people in America was more unequal. There was little indication of an imminent reversal of fortunes.
Fourie and Green construct estimates of the Khoikhoi population over the 1652-1780 period using benchmarks for the initial and terminal Khoi populations and benchmarks for the punctuated population declines from smallpox epidemics in 1713 and 1755. I review the evidence underlying each of the four population benchmarks. For population benchmarks to be comparable, they need to compare the same populations over the same geographic areas. Since the 1652 benchmark is for the Khoi population and the 1780 benchmark is for the Khoi and San populations, the 1780 benchmark is revised to include just the Khoi population. Qualitative evidence also points to a higher rate of population decline between 1652 and 1723 and a smaller rate of decline between 1723 and 1780. Using the Fourie-Green methodology and adopting 3 of their 4 population benchmarks, I develop two revised estimates of the Khoi population to supplement the original Fourie-Green estimates.
We examine the formation of property rights in land during the early settlement by the Dutch of the Cape Colony at the southern tip of Africa. After its founding in 1652 as a provisioning outpost for ships of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the colonial government promoted settlement initially by granting land with well‐specified and enforced property rights in restricted zones near Cape Town. By 1714 it transitioned to accommodate rapidly expanding settlement by creating a weaker form of property rights, the loan farm, which was imprecisely defined and had limited government enforcement. We develop a profit‐maximizing monopsony model to explain the VOC's choice to transition from the better‐specified land grant to the less well‐specified loan farm. We conclude that the decline in the population size and ability of the Khoikhoi, the Cape's original inhabitants, to organize effective resistance to the Dutch invasion was critical to the transition, as it lowered the costs of private enforcement of settlers’ territorial claims. The choice of property rights thus enabled and encouraged the rapid taking by European settlers of the western Cape of Africa for the expansion of the Dutch colony's pastoral economy.
Locally available copper and iron were used by the Indigenous inhabitants of the Arctic for several centuries before the arrival of Europeans. This chapter provides an overview of the use of metals across this region, methods of analysis, and issues of visibility in the archaeological record. Ideas regarding the movement of metals through networks of trade and exchange are summarized and the chapter concludes with suggestions for future archaeometallurgical research in the region.
This book presents tables which give a virtually complete survey of the direct ship ping between the Netherlands and Asia between 1595-1795. This period contains, first, the voyages of the so-called Voorcompagnieen and, then, those for and under control of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC). The survey ends in 1795. That year saw an end of the regular sailings of the VOC between the Netherlands and Asia, since, following the Batavian revolution in January, the Netherlands be came involved in war with England. The last outward voyage left on 26 December 1794. After news of the changed situation in the Netherlands was received in Asia, the last homeward voyage took place in the spring of 1795. The VOC itself was dis banded in 1798. In total 66 voyages of the voorcompagnieen are listed, one more than the tradition ally accepted number. The reconnaissance ship, POSTILJON, from the fleet ofMahu and De Cordes, that was collected en route is given its own number (0022). Since the attempt of the Australische Compagnie to circumvent the monopoly of the VOC can be considered as a continuation of the voorcompagnieen the voyage of Schouten and Le Maire is also listed (0196-0197). For the rest, exclusively the outward and homeward voyages of the VOC are men tioned in the tables. Of those there were in total 4722 outward and 3359 homeward.
This text offers insight into one of the classic questions of history: why did sustained industrial growth begin in Northwest Europe, despite surprising similarities between advanced areas of Europe and East Asia? As the author shows, as recently as 1750, parallels between these two parts of the world were very high in life expectancy, consumption, product and factor markets, and the strategies of households. Perhaps most surprisingly, he demonstrates that the Chinese and Japanese cores were no worse off ecologically than Western Europe. Core areas throughout the eighteenth-century Old World faced comparable local shortages of land-intensive products, shortages that were only partly resolved by trade. The author argues that Europe's nineteenth-century divergence from the Old World owes much to the fortunate location of coal, which substituted for timber. This made Europe's failure to use its land intensively much less of a problem, while allowing growth in energy-intensive industries. Another crucial difference that he notes has to do with trade. Fortuitous global conjunctures made the Americas a greater source of needed primary products for Europe than any Asian periphery. This allowed Northwest Europe to grow dramatically in population, specialize further in manufactures, and remove labor from the land, using increased imports rather than maximizing yields. Together, coal and the New World allowed Europe to grow along resource-intensive, labor-saving paths. Meanwhile, Asia hit a cul-de-sac. Although the East Asian hinterlands boomed after 1750, both in population and in manufacturing, this growth prevented these peripheral regions from exporting vital resources to the cloth-producing Yangzi Delta. As a result, growth in the core of East Asia's economy essentially stopped, and what growth did exist was forced along labor-intensive, resource-saving paths, paths Europe could have been forced down, too, had it not been for favorable resource stocks from underground and overseas.
This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the origins of globalization. It examines the process of commodity price convergence, an indicator of globalization, between Europe and Asia on the basis of newly obtained price data from the Dutch East India Company (VOC) archives. Prices for many commodities in the Dutch-Asiatic trade converged already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a result of the growth of trade and competition among traders and companies. The extent of convergence, however, was determined, in part, by the ability of the VOC to control commodity markets.
The Thule migration from Alaska to the eastern North American Arctic is central to the understanding of Inuit history. However, despite decades of study, its timing remains controversial, with recent reappraisals suggesting that it may have occurred much later than the date of A.D. 1000 most often assumed for it. In this paper, we present newly obtained radiocarbon dates from two early Thule sites, Nelson River (OhRh-1) and Washout (NjVi-2), located on the Beaufort Sea and Amundsen Gulf coasts. This region is crucial to any understanding of the migration, because Thule Inuit would have had to pass through it in order to reach the eastern Arctic. Nelson River in particular has long been considered a good candidate for the earliest Thule site east of Alaska, based on a number of lines of evidence including the presence of both Natchuk and Sicco harpoon heads. In this paper, we present new dates for Nelson River and Washout that demonstrate that neither site was occupied before the thirteenth century A.D. The new dates have profound implications for Arctic archaeology, because they strengthen the case for a thirteenth-century migration, and by doing so demonstrate that it was more rapid and widespread than has generally been believed. The dates also suggest that the "Classic" Thule period is a relatively brief phenomenon, lasting perhaps only 200 years or less, before being rapidly reorganized into the diversity of Inuit societies encountered in later Arctic history.
The Europeans who landed on the shores of the South African Cape from the late 15th century onwards encountered local herders whom they later referred to as the Hottentots (now known as the Khoekhoe). There are written references to the settlements and livestock of these pastoralists, but archaeologists have not had much success in discovering any such sites. This absence of archaeological evidence for recent Khoekhoe kraals has been interpreted by some scholars as an indication for a general archaeological invisibility of nomadic pastoralist sites. This article reports on the archaeology of an extensive, low density surface spread of artefacts, KFS 5 (Western Cape), which possibly represents a Khoekhoe kraal dating to the time of the first contact with Europeans. Data are compared to other archaeological evidence of cattle pens in southern Africa and the issues of the visibility of prehistoric and historic kraals are re-addressed.
The most complete evidence we have for the earliest small stock husbandry in South Africa comes from the Vredenburg Peninsula in the Western Cape. The introduction of sheep some 2000 years ago begs the question of how they got there. Connections further north are examined, but the evidence for their passage south is weak, and we often have to use ceramics as a proxy for their existence. It is suggested that the original model of a Khoe connection with northeast Botswana on linguistic grounds seems the most viable. If this is correct then the model of an early Khoe migration to the Cape would have greater validity than local hunters becoming herders, which, in turn, rejects any idea of a local 'neolithization' event.
This study investigates the interannual variability and interdecadal trends in streamflow input to Hudson Bay (including James Bay) over 1964–2008. The 23 rivers chosen for this study span a maximum gauged area of 2.54×106km2 and collectively transport 522km3 of freshwater to Hudson Bay each year. Adjusting this value for the missing contributing area yields a total annual freshwater flux of 760km3 into Hudson Bay. The standard deviation and coefficient of variation in annual streamflow to Hudson Bay reach 48.5km3 and 0.09, respectively. The monotonic trend assessed with a Kendall–Theil Robust Line shows no detectable (|signal-to-noise ratio|
Among countries colonized by European powers during the past 500 years, those that were relatively rich in 1500 are now relatively
poor. We document this reversal using data on urbanization patterns and population density, which, we argue, proxy for economic
prosperity. This reversal weighs against a view that links economic development to geographic factors. Instead, we argue that
the reversal reflects changes in the institutions resulting from European colonialism. The European intervention appears to
have created an “institutional reversal” among these societies, meaning that Europeans were more likely to introduce institutions
encouraging investment in regions that were previously poor. This institutional reversal accounts for the reversal in relative
incomes. We provide further support for this view by documenting that the reversal in relative incomes took place during the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and resulted from societies with good institutions taking advantage of the
opportunity to industrialize.
1. Fire is an important process in Mediterranean-ecosystem shrublands, and prescribed burning is often used to manage these ecosystems. Analyses of past fire regimes are required to interpret biotic responses to fire, as well as to assess the degree to which management interventions have been able to influence the fire regime.
2. We used a spatial data base of fires within 10 protected areas covering >720 000 ha to examine the frequency, seasonality, size and cause of fires over four decades. Our study covered five fire climate zones and a range of mountain fynbos shrubland types. We examined whether regular prescribed burning would be necessary to rejuvenate the vegetation, and also to reduce the incidence and extent of wildfires.
3. Cumulative fire frequency distributions indicated that the probability of fire was not strongly affected by post-fire age, with 50% of the area experiencing a successive fire within 10–13 years after the previous fire in most areas. This suggests that the accumulation of fuel did not limit the occurrence of wildfires, and that regular prescribed burning would not necessarily reduce the risk of wildfires.
4. Inland zones experienced more severe fire weather than coastal zones (∼35% vs. 11–19% of days with high to very high fire danger, respectively). Despite these differences, fire return periods were similar (10–13 years), suggesting that the availability of ignitions, and not fuel or weather, limited the occurrence of wildfires.
5. Despite a policy that promoted prescribed burning, a relatively small area (between 4·6% and 32·4% of the area of all fires) burned in prescribed burns. Seasonal restrictions for safety and ecological reasons, the imperative to integrate planned fires with invasive alien plant treatments and unplanned wildfires have all contributed to the relatively small area that burnt in prescribed burns.
6. Synthesis and applications. Recurrent wildfires, and not prescribed burning, are providing sufficient opportunities for fire-stimulated regeneration in fynbos ecosystems. Because of this, and because burning to reduce fuel loads is unlikely to prevent wildfires, there should be less pressure to conduct prescribed burning. The predicted growth in human populations in all areas is expected to increase the number of ignition opportunities and the frequency of fires, with detrimental consequences for biodiversity conservation and the control of invasive alien trees. Fire frequency should thus be monitored and steps should be taken to protect areas that burn too frequently.
The Hudson's Bay Company traded European goods for furs that were hunted, trapped, and brought down to the Bayside posts by Native Americans. The process of exchange was deceptively simple: furs for goods. Yet behind this simple process lies a series of decisions on the part of the company about which goods to provide, what levels of quality to provide, and what price to set. We examine the marketing strategies used by the Hudson's Bay Company and the role played by Native traders. We find that Native Americans were demanding consumers, concerned not only with the quantity of goods they received but also with their quality and variety. In a world where neither side could coerce the other, Natives' preferences were paramount.
The responses of the Khoisan peoples to the Dutch at the Cape of Good Hope in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have generally been dismissed summarily by historians. This article attempts to place their reactions into the broader framework of the receptivity of Late Stone Age society in South Africa to cultural innovation, and suggests that the usual dichotomy drawn between the rapid disintegration of the pastoral Khoi in the face of the Dutch settlers and the fierce resistance of the San hunter-gatherers is an oversimplification. There was little to distinguish cattleless Khoi from San, or San who had acquired cattle from Khoi, and both processes were at work both during and before the Dutch period in South Africa. The belief that the Khoi ‘willingly’ bartered away their cattle for ‘mere baubles’ is challenged, and it is maintained that the violence which punctuated every decade of the eighteenth century, and which culminated in the so-called ‘Bushman Wars’, were in large measure the Khoisan response to their prior dispossession by the Boers. On the other hand, the readiness of the Khoisan to acculturate to both the Dutch and the Bantu-speaking intruders, their relatively small population and loose social organization, meant that their ethnic identity virtually disappeared. Nevertheless their responses were more complex than is generally realized and resemble those of other colonized peoples. They were also to have a profound influence on the attitudes towards whites of Bantu-speakers on the Cape's eastern and northern frontiers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
This study of Indian behavior in the fur trade is offered more as a report of a study in progress than a completed piece of historical research. In fact, the research has barely begun. But in spite of its unfinished state, the tentative results of the work I have done to this point may be of some interest as an illustration of the way in which the recent revival of analytical interest in institutions may be used to develop an approach to the economic history of the fur trade.
This article develops a model of trade-induced learning whereby both domestic and cross-border learning externalities could drive long-run growth. This framework is used to synthesise the emerging empirical evidence, revealing how trade-induced learning could underpin the mechanics behind trade and growth in at least three important ways: first, trading matters, as firms might be able to increase their productivity due to export and import linkages with buyers and suppliers; second, whom you trade with matters, as richer and more technologically advanced trading partners offer more scope for trade-induced learning; and third, what products you trade matters. Copyright © The Author(s). Journal compilation © Royal Economic Society 2010.
The times taken by ships of the English East India Company (EEIC) to sail from the Cape of Good Hope to St. Helena Island during the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries represent proxy measures of the strength and steadiness of the Southeast Trades which are compared with present-day data from the Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (COADS). Both wind speed and steadiness appear to have reached maxima in the 1760s and increased again, from lower values in the following decade, to the 1820s.These changes need to be further substantiated with the available log entries concerning winds, weather, and rates of progress. A similar fleshing out of fragmentary preinstrumental pre-standardized records with current climatic characteristics is suggested for the routes fanning out east of the Cape towards Arabia, India, China, Indonesia, and Australia.
This paper traces the history of prices and wages in European cities from the fourteenth century to the First World War. It is shown that the divergence in real incomes observed in the mid-nineteenth century was produced between 1500 and 1750 as incomes fell in most European cities but were maintained (not increased) in the economic leaders.
The problem of controlling overseas managers confronts all multilocational firms. Historians have argued that because of the extreme time lags in communication, chartered companies were unable to control managerial behavior. We argue that not only did the Hudson’s Bay Company understand the agency problem but also put into operation strategies designed to attenuate opportunistic behavior. The company used employment contracts and control systems and established a social structure compatible with the company’s aims.
This article argues for constructive responses to the dominance, in the analysis of African economic history, of concepts derived from Western experience. It reviews the existing responses of this kind, highlighting the fact that some of the most influential ideas applied to African economies, past and present, have been coined in the context not of Europe or North America but rather of other relatively poor regions formerly under European colonial rule. These “Third World” contributions have been enriching for African studies, though they have been duly criticized in African contexts, in accordance with the usual scholarly pattern. It is argued here that the main requirement for overcoming conceptual Eurocentrism in African history, in the interests of a more genuinely “general” social science and “global” history, is reciprocal comparison of Africa and other continents—or, more precisely, of specific areas within Africa with counterparts elsewhere. Pioneering examples of such comparisons are reviewed and, to illustrate the possibilities, a set of propositions is put forward from African history that may be useful for specialists on other parts of the world. The article concludes with suggestions for ways in which Africanists can best pursue the project of reciprocal comparison, and with a plea for us to be more intellectually ambitious.
- Harris R. C.
- Webber J.