Trading Environments

Frontiers, Commercial Knowledge and Environmental Transformation, 1750-1990

Gordon M. Winder, Andreas Dix

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317391616
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Geography
• Index: History

This volume examines dynamic interactions between the calculative and speculative practices of commerce and the fruitfulness, variability, materiality, liveliness and risks of nature. It does so in diverse environments caught up in new trading relationships forged on and through frontiers for agriculture, forestry, mining and fishing. Historical resource frontiers are understood in terms of commercial knowledge systems organized as projects to transform landscapes and environments. The book asks: how were environments traded, and with what environmental and landscape consequences? How have environments been engineered, standardized and transformed within past trading systems? What have been the successes and failures of economic knowledge in dealing with resource production in complex environments? It considers cases from northern Europe, North and South America, Central Africa and New Zealand in the period between 1750 and 1990, and the contributors reflect on the effects of transnational commodity chains, competing economic knowledge systems, environmental ignorance and learning, and resource exploitation. In each case they identify tensions, blind spots, and environmental learning that plagued commercial projects on frontiers.

Part I Introduction Trading Environments

1 Commercial Knowledge and Environmental Transformation on and through Frontiers

Gordon M. Winder and Andreas Dix

DOI: 10.4324/9781315678580-1

Trading environments are the places and environments of trade. To illustrate, once Chicago’s commodity exchange moved indoors in the 1870s, traders conducted their sometimes wild and frenzied business in the trading pits of the new Chicago Stock Exchange. There they were surrounded by support workers supplied by telegraph and later by telephone with notices of qualities, quantities, terms, prices, and delivery dates. Like its sister institution in New York, the Exchange was graced by symbols of bounteous harvests, honest toil, resource wealth, and human ingenuity (Figure 1.1).¹ The trading that occurred in these pits was distanced from the environments where timber was felled, iron and copper ore were mined, hogs were raised, or wheat and corn were harvested but was made possible by the communications infrastructure supplying letters, telegrams, newspapers, and telephone calls that linked them together. The Chicago Stock Exchange was a heavily coded place and therefore a classic example of an environment for trade, but even there trading was never completely separated from nature. This was exemplified by the reactions among brokers to news of hail or snow damage to crops in distant Nebraska. It was signified by the bear or bull, icons of the trading activities in these pits, and by the sculpture of Ceres, goddess of the harvest, that the traders passed each day. The traders understood many environments albeit through the distorted and rescaled lenses of their own calculative and imaginative practices. As they conducted their business, the markets that they framed and performed shaped the environments that were being conformed to the markets. Thus, to paraphrase economic geographers Christian Berndt and Marc Boeckler, their ‘model of the world became the world of the model,’ and their ‘commercial knowledge of the environment became the environment of their commerce.’² But the wheat futures market, the prices and quantities traded, and the market’s ‘performance’ remained outcomes of a complex trading environment.

Figure 1.1 Facade of the New York Stock Exchange, 11 Wall Street, New York, USA. Opened in 1903, the Exchange building features in its pediment sculptured figures designed by John Quincy Adams Ward. Entitled “Integrity Protecting the Works of Man” the group has ‘Agriculture' and ‘Mining’ to one side of the winged figure of ‘Integrity’ and ‘Science,’ ‘Industry’ and ‘Innovation’ on the other.

Source: Gordon M. Winder, 2012.

The calculations of Chicago’s wheat futures traders hinged upon knowledge of not only news of harvest gleanings but also of the stores of grain in elevators and mills, knowledge of the new standards and classes of grain products, and of prices in both grain production regions and grain markets. As the monoculture wheat crop spread out over the Great Plains and Prairies, grain elevators lined the railroad tracks linking farm production environments with urban grain mills, portside elevators, and distant urban markets. Wheat farmers were empowered by this market-making infrastructure. The elevators and mills, erected by such ‘grain barons’ as Isaac Friedlander, California’s ‘grain king,’ or William W. Cargill and Frank H. Peavey who treated “the whole Midwest” as “a vast Monopoly board,” buffered between markets and harvests.³ Yet to become an international grain trader, even in the early 1900s, “it was not necessary to have huge amounts of capital, big grain depots, ships, and thousands of employees.”⁴ No, according to Dan Morgan, one needed only enough credit to cover margins and storage costs, a telephone, personal connections, and expertise, plus “charm, good instincts, luck, and audacity—the qualities of the gambler, salesman, and entrepreneur rolled into one.”⁵ When they made a market ‘corner’ or were lucky, traders and grain monopolists could extract spectacular profits, and this enraged wheat farmers, with one Granger newspaper of the 1870s railing against them: “Take the robber corporations and shake them all to Hell.”⁶ In fact, as Morgan argued, Americans had “no control over the price of wheat in the towns along the Mississippi River, or in Chicago” because wheat prices “were established in Liverpool, Buenos Aires, Karachi, Odessa, Antwerp, and Marseilles, not just in Chicago and New York.”⁷ As this vignette exemplifies, it turned out that the environments of trade comprised networks of production environments, trading environments, and consumption environments and that these networks had their own geography, history, and time space. They constituted a complicated trading environment, which was, in various ways, abstracted from the natural environments that framed them.

Thus Trading Environments moves beyond the idea of ‘markets’ to address the question how were environments traded and with what consequences? It focuses on the environmental and landscape consequences of trading networks and their associated practices and interdependencies. Particular attention is paid to spatial aspects of resource extraction and to the effects of environments on commercial practices. How have environments been engineered, standardized, and transformed within past trading systems? What have been the successes and failures of economic knowledge in dealing with resource production in complex environments? Environmental history has reasserted ‘environment’ into the histories of social and economic change, and, as part of this broad project, Trading Environments takes up the task of exploring a series of historical projects in order to identify and analyse the slippages, (mis)understandings, problems, and (mis)calculations inherent in the work of remaking environments. Where recent work in business history places the economic enterprises, business networks, entrepreneurs, or regional economies at the center of analysis, Trading Environments gives center stage to environments, to environmental knowledge, and to representations of nature in the business of making commodities and exploiting resources, especially when these are out of step with environments and nature. It therefore explores dynamic interactions between the calculative and speculative practices of commerce and the fruitfulness, variability, materiality, liveliness, and risks of nature.

This collection of essays is not intended as a contribution to global environmental history. Instead, the book’s authors consider diverse environments caught up in new trading relationships forged on and through frontiers. The chapters deal with cases from northern Europe, North and South America, New Zealand, and the Pacific in the period between 1750 and 1990. They touch on agriculture, forestry, and fishing. The authors consider the ways in which transnational commodity chains bound distant environments together and reflect on the history of competing economic knowledge systems, on environmental learning, and on the environmental effects of resource exploitation on frontiers. In each case, they identify tensions, blind spots, and learning that plagued commercial and government frontier projects. This is achieved by focusing on two main themes and their interactions: frontiers and disconnections between first and second nature. ‘Trading environments,’ the places where environments are traded as well as the environments traded off against each other, serves as a shared framework and metaphor. ‘Frontier,’ referring to spatial, temporal, and economic projects, around which actors and environmental and economic outcomes assembled, is used to link the diverse case studies together. Each of these terms is introduced and discussed before the book’s subsequent chapters are outlined.

Trading Environments

Historically, trading has been conducted both close to and far away from the sites of production or consumption, sometimes under strict regulations at other times under loose constraints, and with production environments included in some way or another in the transactions. Whether purchasing milk fresh from the cows stalled at the urban dairy or beer from the brewer across the street, some city dwellers made their purchases at the site of production and from a seller aware of the conditions and nature of production. Other urbanites purchased packaged goods assembled along long commodity chains with only graphic illustrations on the packaging to portray the idealized production or consumption environments.⁸ In contrast, Christopher Kremmer found that the Kabul carpet merchant he met could not only hear the knots as he ran his thumbnail over the ridged back of the carpet, but he could establish the provenance of it by searching for it in its structure.⁹ Note that the gulf in understanding between the connoisseur and the neophyte wine consumer may have diminished as they collected signs of quality, taste, and price from tasting sessions, recommendations, wine atlases, or signs on the bottles, but they may still have wondered about what was not revealed in these advertisements. Such transactions involved buyers or sellers who made calculations on supply, inventory, work, outgoings, and purchase price. Each also involved understandings and misunderstandings of impacts on environments whether local or distant, visible, or represented.

Trading environments bind commercial and environmental knowledge together. They are not only environments for trading, but they are also the environments that are traded. Indeed, trading environments require knowledge and practices such as normalized quality standards or certification that help to coordinate the commodity chain from the site of production and its environment, through numerous other environments associated with other links of the chain to the site of consumption and its environments, including imaginaries of the environments of production and consumption. These aspects of the metaphor are inspired by Actor Network Theory (ANT), which not only helps to make sense of science, its places of generation, centers of calculation, laboratories, field sites, immutable mobiles, networks, applications, and transferability but also business.¹⁰ Thus a trading environment such as the Chicago Stock Exchange can be understood as a node in a network, and in this node immutable mobiles—grain futures contracts, quality standards, weather indicators, news—are brought together in a way that facilitates grain trade. Business is built upon sets of calculative practices that facilitate network building and functioning. This is perhaps most readily apparent in Bruno Latour’s interpretation of pasteurization, where a finding in a laboratory facilitated the generation of a network that penetrated, organized, and regulated diverse environments and businesses; but Timothy Mitchell’s Colonizing Egypt and Richard White’s Railroaded also serve as inspiration for Trading Environments.¹¹

Market, warehouse, and corporation are additional ‘trading environments’ where second natures are produced and networked, and there are many more places besides those already mentioned where environments are traded. These include the officers’ cabins of ships trading on account, auction houses, as well as warehouses and retail shops. In these trading environments, commercial knowledge tends to dominate; but other rules and considerations mark out, for example, trade at fairs and exhibitions, where imagined environments of production and worlds of consumption are assembled and traded using displays, trade catalogues, tests, and competitions. In his Customs House, the customs officer calculates and levies the government’s tariff and perhaps consigns some passengers and cargoes to the quarantine station as health and safety regulations are enforced. In the government’s cabinet rooms, commercial knowledge and interests are weighed against other priorities, including defense, security and imperial expansion, national interests and treaty obligations, property rights, and ideas about nature. As NGOs, societies, trades unions, and lobby groups gathered in their halls to clamor and press for reforms or responses to new experiences of natural abundance or disaster, commercial knowledge was contested. All of these places are considered to be ‘trading environments’ in this volume.

Nature was traded in such places. In his effort to explicate Chicago’s role as Nature’s Metropolis, William Cronon sketched in both a dichotomy between first and second nature and a transformative geography of landscapes and environments associated with investment in second nature. He tended to conflate first nature with indigenous landscapes but was clearly self-aware. He warned that “Second nature, no less than nature itself, is necessarily an abstraction.”¹² In his later work, Cro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Routledge Studies in Environment, Culture, and Society
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Introduction Trading Environments
• 1 Commercial Knowledge and Environmental Transformation on and through Frontiers
• 2 Consumption History and Changing Environments
• Part II Frontier Environments
• 3 New Frontiers and Natural Resources in Southern South America, c. 1820–1870 Examples from Northwest European Mercantile Enterprise
• 4 Opening up Untouched Woodlands Forestry Experts Reflecting on and Driving the Timber Frontier in Northern Europe, 1880–1914
• Part III Valuing Environments
• 6 Valuing Wetlands and Peatlands Mires in the Natural Resource and Land Use Policies in the Nordic Countries from the Late Eighteenth Century to the Present Day
• 7 Lands for Settlement, Forests, and Scenic Reserves Nature and Value in New Zealand, 1890s to 1920s
• 8 Reimagining the Tropical Beef Frontier and the Nation in Early Twentieth-Century Colombia
• Part IV Competing Modernist Logics
• 9 Industrializing Forests and Naturalizing Industrialization Forests, Pulp Wood, and Environmental Transformations, 1860–1930
• 10 Trading Degradation for Conservation Revaluing Rural Landscapes in the American South
• 11 Destruction of the American Fishing Industry
• Part V Environmental Trading
• 12 Frontier Exchanges Commercial Calculation and Environmental Transformation
• Contributors
• Archives Consulted
• References
• Index