Loading summary
Transcript68 lines
- [00:01]
Commercial Announcer
Does your day move faster than you can keep up with new Gatorade Lower sugar. My family and I can stay at the top of our game. No artificial flavors, sweeteners or colors. 75% less sugar and all the electrolytes of regular Gatorade. Now available nationwide.
- [00:17]
Peter Frankopan
Afwa. When I think about the great inventions of all time, you know, I guess the list is pretty obvious. The control of fire, maybe the wheel, Fire printing press. Have you got any ideas about the great inventions of our times that make life easier, better and have changed the world?
- [00:36]
Afwa Hirsch
Electric bikes. Sorry, really? That's been life changing for me. Yeah. Because now I can get around between places that aren't well connected by public transport that would be slower to get to in a taxi because the traffic's so bad. But these like whole bike sharing apps, I think they're amazing. They're greener, cleaner. You get to experience the environment because you're outside seeing the streets and if the weather's right, it's really lovely. And this is my secret tip because when I'm going out in heels or I'm dressed up, I don't want to walk, so I don't want to like go down escalators and onto platforms. But going in a taxi can be really, really slow and I'm always running late. So that's literally.
- [01:17]
Peter Frankopan
So that's you, is it? That's you the person who in kind of very smart party kit who zips past very f on an electric bike. So you take an electric bike over the Internet or MTV or.
- [01:28]
Afwa Hirsch
I have been known to arrive on a red carpet via electric bike share. Yeah, it is literally my jam. No, I think you know what I was thinking. My 14 year old daughter has just really got into vinyl and I keep thinking the record player was a really great invention because it seems to have survived the cassette, the CD, the MP3 and now the iPhone. Young people have gone back to vinyl. So you can't knock it. That's. That's an invention that's endured and I think it's one of those things that's actually becoming more valuable and more appreciated the more digital tech kind of surpasses old fashioned record players. So let's just take a moment to acknowledge the brilliance of the record players.
- [02:10]
Peter Frankopan
We should have talked about this before we agree what we're going to talk about. So I thought, you know, fire, the wheel, purified water, that's a high bar
- [02:18]
Afwa Hirsch
fire, you know, kind of like change the evolution of the species. I'm not sure like aligning bike or A vinyl has quite got that claim. But still they make a difference in my life.
- [02:30]
Peter Frankopan
So I'm going to disappoint everybody who's listening, hoping for something really exciting because I'm obsessed by logistics. Partly because as a historian it's thinking about how things move and the things that people don't often pay attention to. History is always about great figures or great themes and some of the nuts and bolts, as it happens, we're recording this while there is a lot of crisis in the Gulf and Straits of Hormuz are being shut down or more or less they're shut down. So this episode is going to be about the importance of cargo ships. So it's not very glamorous. And you won't find songs about it on mtv. No blockbuster films about. About ships or about shipping containers. But I want to try to talk through why those things have changed the world.
- [03:12]
Afwa Hirsch
You say that. Have you watched 000?
- [03:16]
Peter Frankopan
No. What's that?
- [03:17]
Afwa Hirsch
It's a really underrated, but I think really excellent a TV series. And it's about a family who run a shipping container business. And listen, it's a lot more glamorous, sexy and thrilling than you might think a shipping container story would be. Because of course the things people put in shipping containers range from the very practical and legal to the very criminal and illicit. So it's. It's quite an interesting world. Also, I would like to point out there is basically a whole series of the Wire about shipping and shipping containers. So. And if you haven't seen, I think it's season two and it's all about the kind of politics of the people who work in the port offloading these shipping containers. It's really good. And the third thing I would say as well is that when I was training to be a lawyer, because I didn't do a law degree, I did a law conversion course and then I did my bar training course. It's called the Bar Vacation Horse. And it's so interesting because you have to do commercial law. And I thought commercial law was going to be this like wide range of stuff about commerce. Commercial law, when you study it anyway, is basically about shipping. It's about bills of lading, it's about insurance policies, it's about acts of God and force majeure, a lot of which is in the news at the moment because of what's happening in Iran. It's about all of the things that get transported by shipping and all of the clauses lawyers need to think about for protecting those goods. So it's A bigger part of the world of commercial law and business than I ever could have imagined until I studied it. And I can only talk about it as an academic study because I practiced commercial law for zero days in my career, so it remains an academic subject to me.
- [04:52]
Peter Frankopan
But there is a reason why so much of law is to do with shipping. Because 90% of the world's goods travel by ship. Pretty much everything that you can see behind us on our shelves, everything you can look around, which wherever you're listening to this or watching this, everything you can see has been shipped from somewhere. Your laptop, your clothes, your kitchen utensils, the furniture you're sitting on, chances are loads of those things have traveled thousands of miles inside one of these large boxes that get loaded onto ships. So the extraordinary thing is that although we think a bit about trade, we know stuff comes from a long way away and we rely on it every day. We don't spend a lot of time thinking about, apart from in 000 and season two of the why, which I'm now going to go and rewatch.
- [05:32]
Afwa Hirsch
But also I would just add as well, historically, I think I know this isn't about the history of shipping, an empire, but you couldn't really understand, especially Britain's empire, which was such a maritime empire without shipping. And so much of our history and actually what our contemporary world, the international relations and, and the, the communities of nations and the geopolitics of it has been determined by these relationships of trade. And again, some of them fairly harmless and some of them very extractive, and some of them involving enslavement. You know, people were transported as commercial goods on shipping during the transatlantic slave trade. So there's such a. An important history that I think, you know, obviously the way that shipping works now is different. But another thing I learned studying it from a legal perspective is how many of our precedents and how many of our legal ideas come from a time when colonial goods and people were being transported in shipping. I mean, we all know those famous cases like the Zong, for example, which was basically an insurance case because people who were shipping enslaved people found it cheaper to throw them overboard and claim them as insurance cargo rather than protect their lives. So, you know, it's all bound up in this world of shipping. And I think it's an endlessly interesting and complex subject.
- [06:49]
Peter Frankopan
Okay, so it's going to be great to talk about cargoes, cargo shipping, and then in the second series about containers. And I think that you're going to learn lots and be very interested in what we have to say. Hello and welcome to a new episode of Legacy. I'm Peter Franken Per.
- [07:12]
Afwa Hirsch
I'm AFWA Hash.
- [07:13]
Peter Frankopan
And this is Legacy, the show that explores the lives, events and ideas that have shaped our world and asks whether they have the reputations that they truly deserve.
- [07:30]
Afwa Hirsch
This is episode one in our great inventions that change the world, the cargo ship.
- [07:40]
Peter Frankopan
Thank you for joining us on Legacy today. To support the show, please sign up to Legacy Plus.
- [07:45]
Afwa Hirsch
You can enjoy early access, fewer ads, Q&As, and bonus content like escalators or fish fingers.
- [07:54]
Peter Frankopan
Sign up@legacy.supportingcast.net FM so, Peter, let's start,
- [07:59]
Afwa Hirsch
as we always do, by going back to the past. How did people bulk ship in the Roman era, for example?
- [08:07]
Peter Frankopan
Well, people have always wanted to trade by sea because you can carry lots on a ship and you could start even further back in time. But I thought we should maybe start with Rome and its enormous grain fleets. Rome is a vast city, an imperial capital. Very splendid. When you, when you've had a chance to travel around and go to Rome, I mean, it's magnificent to see how much of Rome from the ancient world still survives today. But you sometimes forget when you look at the Colosseum or the Circus Maximus or the Ara Parkus, and so all these great monuments, the Pantheon, probably my favorite building in Europe, how you get through the logistics of feeding people every day. I mean, hopefully we'll do something on things like sewage and water and other things, too, but food is obviously key. Can't wait.
- [08:52]
Afwa Hirsch
Hopefully we'll do sewage. As said, no one ever you.
- [08:57]
Peter Frankopan
Well, okay, that's a challenge, right? We're going to make it interesting. Please let us know if you'd like us to cover sewage. Send us some messages on our social media accounts and we'll see if we can do it. I'll try and persuade Afra. Why it's going to be a good but dirty subject. But to get food into the city required huge challenges. So Rome is a, you know, is on the coast, but doesn't have an enormous hinterland to grow food, particularly to grow crops. And so Rome's primary source of supply was from Egypt and from North Africa. And grain was transported in the holds of large merchant ships that were known as Narvis on our area, which are big ships that are filled up with perhaps 3 to 400 tons of grain, enough to feed tens of thousands of people. But Rome as a city requires 150, maybe 200,000 tons of food every year. So the grain that's brought to Rome is loaded loose in the hold. It's poured directly into the ship after the hull was lined with wood and planking or with matting. And then sailors used amphora. You'll have all of seen those in museums. Whether you love museums like I do, with your drag to them by, by your parents, or if you drag your kids there or your friends. And then there are sacks or stones used as ballast to keep the cargo from shifting dangerously during storms. So the logistics of how you load these ships is kind of important.
- [10:15]
Afwa Hirsch
And the scale of the trade impressed ancient observers who saw it up close. The Roman writer Lucian, for example, described seeing a great Alexander grain ship docked at the port of Piraeus in the second century ad. And this is what he wrote. I saw a ship which had brought grain from Egypt. It was enormous and capable of carrying enough wheat to feed all Attica for a year. So you can just imagine the sight of a year's food supply on one ship. It is quite an awesome image.
- [10:46]
Peter Frankopan
Then you've got to think about how it gets checked. There's a whole infrastructure of port officials making sure that you're not ripping people off. You've then got to get it distributed to markets and think about how people are paying for it. And I guess a bit like today, no one really thinks too much about where their loaf of bread has come from. You know, you buy it in your, your local deli or your supermarket, but the, the products, the ingredients, the bakeries, the, the chips, the lorries, the transport that's got it to where you are are, are really important. And of course, again, because we're doing this at a time of global supply chain pressure because of the Gulf and so on, it's important that people in the past also realize that those networks were very fragile. So the Emperor Claudius, for example, invests very heavily in building up the port of Ostia, which is the main port that serves Rome, partly because storms or bottlenecks or breakdowns could unsettle Rome's food supply. And when you've got people going hungry, they turn against their political masters. So according to Suetonius, one of the great historians of the second century, Claudius even tries to reassure anxious crowds during a grain shortage, say that Rome will never, ever starve while he's emperor. So getting stuff from A to B is really important. But tell me, Afwa, are you, you. You'll have seen all those broken amphora or intact amphora museums, do they do anything for you?
- [12:03]
Afwa Hirsch
I mean, it does take a bit of imagination, Peter, to kind of bring them to life as a fascinating object. In theory, I get why they're really important and appreciate them as kind of the ancient ancestor to the modern shipping container. I have to say they are more esthetically pleasing than a modern shipping.
- [12:23]
Peter Frankopan
But then they're kind of Tupperware of the ancient world. You're not a Tupperware person.
- [12:27]
Afwa Hirsch
I use it. Peter, is it something. Would I go to a future museum of our civilization's Tupperware?
- [12:36]
Peter Frankopan
No Tupperware parties at Afra's place.
- [12:39]
Afwa Hirsch
You know, Ghanaians never, ever go anywhere without either bringing Tupperware or being supplied with Tupperware because it's a mandatory part of the Ghanaian party that you will leave with jollof and chicken in Tupperware. But the exciting thing about that is the Jollof and chicken, not necessarily the Tupperware. Maybe I'm overlooking the importance of the
- [12:59]
Peter Frankopan
container because we spent too much time thinking about all the good stuff rather than if there's no Tupperware, then there's no Jollof and chicken. You have to eat what you've got there. And I. I know, Peter, enough garden dinners where I know that if you can't take it away, the Tupperware with you, you're going to be there for days trying to get through. Trying to get through it all. But I think that there is, there is something exciting about.
- [13:18]
Afwa Hirsch
All right.
- [13:19]
Peter Frankopan
Logistics of transport.
- [13:21]
Afwa Hirsch
Exciting about the amphora.
- [13:23]
Peter Frankopan
I'm embarrassed now because maybe everybody listening is sitting with side of the campus. Tell us about amphora. Well, okay. I mean, the amphora is the closest thing you get to Tupperware or to shipping containers. They're tall ceramic jars with narrow necks and two handles that carry bulk liquids across the Mediterranean. So particularly wide, particularly olive oil. And then famously, the Roman condiment known as garum, which is a fermented fish sauce that was a staple of the ancient diet. And it's quite hard to make fish sauce sound like that's a thrill. But enough Romans write about it saying, you know, you can't live without it. So to be able to have a nice dinner party, to be able to get people over, to be able to not just have the basic foods, to have things like olive oil and good quality wine and fish sauce that give taste. It's the bedrock of how societies work. And what I'm interested about amphora is not just that they exist, but they're completely standardized. Most hold about 20 to 30 liters. They have a pointy base at the bottom that allows them to be packed quite tightly in the holes of ships. That means that mathematicians, scientists, people who are practical, have had to work about how to make them optimal to be able to move things around. And rather than standing upright in the, in the hold of a ship, they're wedged into layers of sand or perhaps rope netting, so they wouldn't move around during rough season. Then their mouths are sealed with a cork or with a clay stopper. So, I mean, they are things that no one is interested in, but they are fundamental to explain those kind of fancy Roman dinner parties and more. You don't look completely convinced.
- [15:01]
Afwa Hirsch
I get the practical application of these amphora and I appreciate it. I was actually thinking, you know, like, the thing about modern shipping containers that's so important is that they can be stacked so without. With minimum volume lost. Amphora aren't quite as space efficient in that way, are they? Beauty, because they have to be kind of like packed with sand so they don't shift. So that means there's, there's buffers between them. They're not like stackable in a modern
- [15:28]
Peter Frankopan
sense, but you need that sand or stones to be able to have the ballast of the ship that keeps it nice and heavy in the water so it doesn't roll around too much. But I mean, there are so many of these things that are being made. So there's a single shipwreck from the south of France, about 2,000 years old, that was carrying 6 or 7,000 of these things. So that's.
- [15:46]
Afwa Hirsch
That is amazing.
- [15:47]
Peter Frankopan
150 tons of liquid, mostly, mostly wine. So it's about how do you create the idea of if you're Roman, you've got to then wear the same sort of things, drink the same kind of thing. So you've got to be able to get products and goods to people so that you have kind of senses of unity too. So some of these things are moved around in vast quantities. We have authors like Strabo say that Italian wine is being moved around and the whole seas are covered with ships carrying wine and oil from A to B. But to give an idea of the scale of this stuff, there's a site in Rome called Monte Tescaccio, which is an artificial hill made up of amphora fragments. It's about 35 meters high and it's estimated to contain about 50 million amphorite. They're all broken up because, like some kinds of food, I think Jollof chicken, you can scrub it all off and reuse the Tupperware. But these amphora, if they're filled with oil or fish, Oil, they're quite hard to reuse, so they get chucked away. But the scale of this industry, underneath the Roman emperors and the gladiators and the rich people going to watch the games, watching animals and Christians being slaughtered, there is this infrastructure that is quite easy to just not pay attention to. And one of the reasons I wanted to do this episode was to remind us about how those connections are today.
- [17:04]
Afwa Hirsch
It's really interesting that they were getting thrown away. It's almost like single use ceramics. But I'm surprised that they weren't used in stuff. I mean, this is, this is the kind of thing that surely you could kind of grind up and use in building materials or couldn't you use it in mosaics or, you know, I'm imagining these kind of like ancient landfills filled with smashed up ceramic jars. But isn't there a way that they could have been incorporated and reused, Peter?
- [17:32]
Peter Frankopan
Yeah, lots do get reused, but you don't reuse all of them. And the stuff that's really stinky, that bit is perhaps less interesting to use because, you know, you can't get rid of it. So lots of stuff gets recycled. And not just amphora, you get columns getting reused. You get, you know, the idea that you can, you should just chuck stuff away. I don't think that's any different. But if things are cheap and you've got millions of these things being made every year, then there's only so far that you can go with recycling. So there are not all these landfill sites, but some of them do get broken up or get broken down. But you tell me, Alfa, about other parts of the world. I know sometimes we could get obsessed by thinking only about Europe. Tell me about trade in other parts of the world.
- [18:10]
Afwa Hirsch
Well, that's the incredible thing about shipping. It's so global by definition, and a way of transporting goods really long distances. And in the ancient period, just like today, there were shipping routes that linked East Africa, Arabia, India, Southeast Asia. And this is where probably goods I get a bit more excited about. You can imagine these fragrant ships. I like to think of them as fragrant ships, Peter, because they're full of pepper, cloves, different spices. Of course, they also have things like rice, ivory, which is a more tragic trade because of the kind of decimation of elephants that was involved, and textiles. And some of these textile routes are worthy of their own series. Actually, they're so interesting. I mean, as someone of West African heritage, I'm endlessly fascinated in the way that prints from Indonesia and Southeast Asia were being transported to West Africa, especially by the Dutch. I mean, till today, they're often called Dutch wax or Dutch print because it was the Dutch who controlled the roots. And this is a millennia old phenomenon of textiles being transported around. I mean, your book is called the Silk Road because silk was such an important trade, right? And these textiles became not just luxury goods, but also they got assimilated into local cultures in the destinations and became symbols of class and wealth. So I would love to actually spend more time thinking about Texas, partly also because I love clothes and I'm just so interested in the ways that our fashions have evolved from shipping routes. But shipping is at the roots along with those really important land transport systems. And China was a really, really important player in this trade.
- [19:49]
Peter Frankopan
Peter well, yeah, I think sometimes we get. We can exoticise the east and we think, well, it's all spices or whatever, but, you know, these big ships, they're about the same size as Roman ships, they could carry between 100 and 400 tons. Basically all ships, their job is to carry heavy stuff. That's bulk rather than luxury goods, because pepper is quite small and you don't need much of it. So we tend to think of textiles and clothes, but they're small compared to what's actually traveling on these ships, which is wood and grain and things that are heavy to move. Because ships are very good at those things that are expensive, you can move them quite efficiently through other kind of networks too. So we can sometimes overthink it. But, you know, you're right, the population movements, the movements of people, of traders, of wood, particularly of metals, are moving around the Indian Ocean in huge amounts, both towards the west, towards the Gulf, but also in towards Southeast and East Asia. So you've got Chinese tribute grain fleets, particularly in the Tang and the Song Dynasties from kind of 600 onwards, where you've got enormous bulk shipping systems that are crisscrossing through, connecting the coast of China with other bodies of water too. And there things are being moved around in wooden bins, inside barges, inside large woven sacks, and they're moving hundreds of thousands of tons around too. But particularly food. Food is the big sort of primary product that moves rice and in Europe, grain. What about wood, though? Afwen and Baltic fleets, when we get to the Middle Ages in Europe, it tends to be the heavy stuff that's being moved around too. The Baltics offer the greatest access to forests that go miles into thousands of miles towards Siberia. And wood becomes a primary product that gets brought into Europe because we were quite good at Chopping our trees down.
- [21:36]
Afwa Hirsch
I was in Bergen the other day in southern Norway for a literary festival. If you're ever in the area, the Bergen Lit Fest is so great. I had such a good time, but I did a real deep dive into Hanseatic League, Peter, and it was so interesting. This quite a few. I mean, one of the things about these Nordic towns is that they seem to burn down every like 50 years. But there are still some of these medieval buildings remaining that were used as wharves and storage facilities by the Hanseatic League. Who are these? These kind of loose and quite difficult to define networks of merchants who were managed to monopolize this trade in wood and other items like stockfish from Nordic countries through the Baltic, all over the world, actually, of incredibly lucrative trade. And they got to the point of having their own armies and conducting kind of diplomatic relations, waging wars. And that's partly, as you said, because the forests of northern Europe were so lucrative for timber, grain, tar and pitch. And these were in high demand by the growing cities and the navies of Western Europe. So they were constantly passing from places like Bergen through Prussia and to ports in Bruges, London, Hamburg. If you go to King's Lynn in, in Norfolk, you can still see the remains of Hanseatic League wharves that were used as part of this trade there. So all over Europe and beyond, and they really were the backbone of the medieval economy. And timber was shipped in these long beams stacked across the deck or lashed across ships, while grain travelled in large sacks piled deep in the hold. And then tar and pitch, which were needed for waterproofing ships and for sealing hulls, were sealed, were loaded into these large wooden barrels, and you could carry several hundred kilos in each one of these barrels on these ships. And there was a main innovation that was fueling this trade, Peter, and that was the cog.
- [23:32]
Peter Frankopan
Well, you get ship technology that starts to think about if you could make money from moving goods and in bulk and the heavy stuff, then how do you move more? So the cog is a broad, high sided vessel that dominates European shipping between about 1100 and about 1500 or so. And unlike earlier long and narrow vessels, cogs have these deep hulls that are specifically designed for heavy cargo. So Hanseatic cogs could carry really big loads. And it was also important, like you said, to be able to move tar and pitch around too. And that that was the kind of key to the northern European forests. The trees and the pine trees produce the resin that you need to seal the seams of ships that make the Baltic effectively the kind of fuel depot of the medieval maritime world too. That resin is flammable too, so it's very valuable in all sorts of other ways too. So you couldn't get ships to be sealed properly and couldn't seal safely without that too. So by the 14, 15, hundreds, you've got hundreds of these ships moving around from those coasts of Norway. Afraid. I hope they welcomed you back as one of their own as a Norwegian writer.
- [24:37]
Afwa Hirsch
They did, actually, Embarrassingly so. Because my Norwegian. Norwegian is nowhere near your level, Peter, because I'm sure that that's one of the billions of languages you do speak Norway.
- [24:48]
Peter Frankopan
I do speak a bit Norwegian, but I get told I speak with a very thick Swedish accent, which I then don't bother trying. I once gave a talk in Denmark and I tried to give it in Danish and I thought, and I came off the stage. I bet you haven't had that many authors who've been able to do that before. And my host said you've got a very thick Swedish accent when you speak Danish, so stick to English next time.
- [25:07]
Afwa Hirsch
That's just because the Danes are salty about the Swedes. Don't mind them. I'm sure it was excellent Danish.
- [25:13]
Peter Frankopan
I think it's northern Europe. People don't like a show off and it's quite good to be reminded that from time to time. But anyway. But these forests are hugely important. But you know, one of the things is that all this stuff, this wood that's being laid out in these long planks that's very heavy to lift, every sack of grain, every piece of timber is being lifted by human manpower. And of course you forget also that those ports, Bergen and others in the Baltics too. A place like Riga, are they noisy? They're dirty, they're chaotic, they're crowded. There are thousands of people there who are counting items in, counting them out before they could sail. But when we come back from the ad break, we're going to talk about how shipping in the Atlantic starts to change the world too.
- [25:57]
Commercial Announcer
Does your day move faster than you can keep up with new Gatorade Lower sugar. My family and I can stay at the top of our game. No artificial flavors, sweeteners or colors. 75% less sugar and all the electrolytes of regular Gatorade now available nationwide.
- [26:12]
Peter Frankopan
Okay, caller one wins courtside seats to tonight's game. What? I won floor seats. You did? I've been calling for 13 months. Wait, Chris. Yes. I finally did it. What are you gonna wear? Men's Wearhouse. They've got today's looks for any occasion. And I need to look like a celebrity. Don't want to stick out. Exactly. They've got Chill Flex by Kenneth Cole, Joseph Abood, and a tailor at every store for the perfect fit. Congrats. You can stop calling now. Not a chance. Hit any look for every occasion at Men's Wearhouse. Love the way you look. So there's another product that starts to dominate shipping and bulk, and that's not timber. It's sugar in the Atlantic. Tell us a bit about that, Afra.
- [27:01]
Afwa Hirsch
Sugar is a crop that changed the world in every sense, Peter, and has been a huge focus of my work just because it helped reshape Africa's relationship with the world, create the African diaspora, and lead to the invention of racism, among other things. But long before the Caribbean plantations that we often think of when we think about sugar production reached their peak, there was already nascent sugar production in these proto plantations in Atlantic islands, especially Madeira, in the 15th century. And actually, if you ever read George Monbiot's book about neoliberalism, there's such a powerful account of how Madeira was a template for the kind of sugar cultivation, but also environmental destruction that went along with this plantation system. And it was. It was pioneered in Madeira and also in the Azores, so these Atlantic southern European islands. And sugar, when it was produced, was not shipped loose. It was packed into wooden chests or barrels, and these often weighed 50 to 100 kilograms each. And then they were loaded onto merchant ships bound for Europe, where there was this growing taste for sugar which completely transformed, well, the dental hygiene of Europeans, but also food habits. And these boxes were stacked very tightly in the hold so that they could form dense blocks of cargo that could maximize space but also survive these long ocean voyages. So just thinking about Madeira, because it was such an important large scale early center of sugar production, by the late 15th century, ships were leaving Madeira each year carrying hundreds of tons of sugar. And most of it was destined for the great commercial cities of northern Europe. Bruges, later, Antwerp, were major hubs where sugar was refined, traded and. And redistributed across the continent.
- [28:50]
Peter Frankopan
It was a time when sugar replacing honey, the sweeteners, meant that if you were rich, you had blackened teeth. And that was a way of showing that you were really well to do, was that you could get the calcification of your teeth that give you chronic toothache. But sugar is a driver of globalization and so much more. As you mentioned, afwa, the opening up of different relationships with West Africa, and then the Caribbean. And how you make those plantation economies grow. But just before we get to that, you know, one of the things that's interesting. Is the speed at which you're getting shipping moving. You're getting. The Portuguese, for example, Being able to get goods and sugar. From Madeira. Back to Europe incredibly quickly. Because the Atlantic produces enormous waves. You have to learn how to sail in slightly different ways. And the Portuguese and Spanish learn how to adapt their ships. And learn how to navigate. Through much more tricky swells. And difficult storm conditions. Than you have in the channel or in the North Sea. And that's a kind of key part. Of being able to get those ships across the Atlantic. In due course. Further, too. But sugar's popularity grows. And what's once been a rare luxury. Just for the elites. Starts to become democratized. Foods and its democratization. And things becoming more rare becomes important, too. But eventually, as you mentioned, afraid, those expansions from the Azores. And from the Canaries and Madeira. Starts to reach Brazil and the Caribbean. After Columbus. And those who follow him across the Atlantic. And that's very heavily dependent on forced labor. Because sugar is a cash crop. That requires a lot of work to make it and to process it.
- [30:22]
Afwa Hirsch
And I can't overstate enough how much this new trade. Is shaping whole societies. If you go to Sao Tome, which is a archipelago of islands. Kind of in the crook of Africa. In between Nigeria and Angola. Just where it curves around from kind of central to southern Africa. The most beautiful islands. But it's a really bizarre society. Because it feels like a Caribbean island in Africa. In the sense that there was no indigenous population. It was virgin rainforest. Until the Portuguese began transporting Enslaved Africans. That they captured elsewhere in Africa. And moved them to Sao Tome. So that they could work on sugar cultivation. So it's a society that was completely shaped. By the trade in people, by enslavement, and by the demand for sugar. Until today. You can really see the difference. Between South Tomato and other African societies. That, of course, have millennia tradition of human cultivate cultivation in society. So it was a powerful force. Shaping generations of human experience. But also these new societies, new economies. That were primarily enriching western Europe. And it was the beginning of what we now often call the triangular trade. Because the pattern was that European ships sailed from famous ports Like Bristol and Liverpool. Carrying textiles, firearms, Metal goods that were produced there, and alcohol. These were packed in crates and barrels. They were shipped to Africa. Where they were then sold or exchanged for humans who were captured and enslaved. And then those enslaved people were Transported back across the atlantic in what we often call the middle passage. These brutal, fatal, for many people, voyages where the enslaved people would be offloaded and the ships would be loaded again with the products of the plantations. Enslaved people were working, more than anything, sugar, but also the off products of sugar, so molasses and rum, and these would be shipped back to europe. So at every stop on this triangular journey, A trade was being done that was creating further profit for those who owned and ran these routes. And they weren't just rich plantation owners and owners of ships. There were many ordinary working people in port cities who would put, you know, a few pennies or a few pounds into one of these slave voyages, Knowing that the potential for return was great. Peter.
- [32:49]
Peter Frankopan
And, you know, we talked about amphora and how they were mathematically designed to all be packed together. I mean, you know, aphra, about the thought that mathematicians and ships captains put into making sure we have the optimum number of enslaved people who could be packed into the bottom of ships. I mean, there's a horror about treating humans as commodities in their own right. You mentioned the zong case. I mean, tell us a bit about that and about how life gets treated as being just an object. I mean, literally, in the eyes of the law.
- [33:20]
Afwa Hirsch
Well, this is where you can't really separate the story of shipping and the cargo that shipping is designed to transport with the idea of race. Because what was required in order to treat humans as cargo was a common a philosophy and a science. And I say that in quotation marks because we often call it pseudo scientific racism, but the invention of an idea that would persuade people that it made sense to turn humans into chattels. And, you know, if you think about it, I mean, people, I think, are inherently reasonable, right? They. They are capable of critical thinking. And these. This is an era where people are religious. So you need quite a strong ideology to detach people from their values and make them think that this is an acceptable thing to do. And that's where race became important, because it was a narrative that suggested that it's actually fine, because these aren't really humans. They're a different category. They're closer to animals. They're a subspecies. And that was how you underpinned the practical idea of actually enslaving and shipping humans in the holds of ships. And I think it's important to say that because, you know, long after the triangular trade in that form has disappeared, the ideas that facilitated it endure. It's much harder to dismantle an idea Than it is to Pass a law abolishing slavery or mechanized sugar production. So while those things have happened, these ideas about race, I mean, the fact that we even still identify with racial markers is a legacy of the expansion of sugar trade in this era and what was necessary to make it happen. And as well as changing our ideas about race and the outcomes of generations of people who are enslaved, it really transformed the economies of Europe. And ports across Europe became completely dependent on and connected to this trade. So London, Amsterdam, Nantes, entire industries that are not just profiting from the trade in sugar, but also the industry of sugar refinement. Because these colonies now in Africa and the Caribbean are producing the raw commodity, but all the value adding is being done in Europe. And that is a really important process because these raw loaves or crystals of sugar are arrived, but then they have to be turned into a product that can be used and distributed across Europe.
- [35:30]
Peter Frankopan
PETER and of course, you know, the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade, we can think, mercifully we do now think about the legacies of racism, of enslavement, of exploitation. We also think, I think, about plantation economies and how that the role that plays in what people are eating, how there are profits, how that drives processes of change across European cities and elites and so on. But again, it's important to underline that without big ships, without ship technology, without the pitch and tar required to seal those, then you don't have any of this economy at all. So going back to the basic bottom lines of where the ships get built, where do they get made, what are they made of, and how big are they? How do those technologies change, I think is a hidden part of all of these stories, too. But when we come back, I'd also like to talk about a different ocean that sees large scale trade, not the Atlantic, but across the Pacific, and particularly about the Spanish silver fleets.
- [36:32]
Commercial Announcer
Does your day move faster than you can keep up with new Gatorade lower sugar? My family and I can stay at the top of our game. No artificial flavors, sweeteners, or colors. 75% less sugar, and all the electrolytes of regular Gatorade now available nationwide. Why?
- [36:57]
Peter Frankopan
So from the 1500s, those enormous galleons that are crossing the Atlantic start to head in the other direction, too. From the Americas, particularly, carrying one commodity from central Mexico and from South America. And they're the key that drives everything across. This Trans Pacific trade is silver. And silver is so important because it's the fuel that powers the Chinese economy. The appetite for silver is absolutely enormous. So the opening up of silver mines On a hugely commercial scale in Portos here, what's now Bolivia, and in Zacatecas, in what's now Mexico, sees these cargo ships crossing all the time backwards and forwards from Acapulco to Manila. Manila, I write about in Silk Roads, is the first proper, truly global city because you're connecting the Americas, Asia, Europe and Africa all together. And the silver is absolutely critical. It's minted into coins or cast into bars before being taken overland to ports like Veracruz or Portobello, where it's loaded onto the fleet and then it's transported across the Pacific. And Mark Koyama, who's a fantastic historian, economic historian, who I've spoken to about this before, has done some fantastic work about looking at how the incentives for ships captain to take bribes to either overload their ships or wait till the till it's a little bit too late before the storm season comes. And then the chances of their ships running into trouble and being sunk very closely correlated to all these inefficiencies of corruption. Incredibly interesting. So I'd love to do something about silver in practice, but those ocean going galleons, the Pacific trade is a vital part about joining the world together. Another part of this transcontinental stuff, Afwa, not silver. But I know something you're very fond of, we spoke of them before, is you're a big tea addict.
- [38:42]
Afwa Hirsch
You might have noticed anyone who Watches legacy on YouTube, which I encourage you to do, because if not, you're missing out on how much tea I drink. In fact, our lovely producer Dan has made me mention to me that I might need to up my teacup game because tea has become the third contributor to the Legacy podcast. And it's funny because, you know, when you're a consummate tea drinker, people say, gosh, that's so British. But of course, tea is not British. It is a commodity that was introduced here from Asia across these maritime networks. And it was one of, along with rice, the most important food item that was proliferating in this era of maritime trade and shipping. And these were highly organized trading systems. So rice, which is the staple for much of Asia, was a bulk commodity from the 16th century onwards that began to be carried from fertile river deltas in southern China, Vietnam, Siam and Burma to cities and regions where harvests were less reliable. And tea became one of the most valuable long distance exports. So by the 17th and 18th century, European demand for Chinese tea had grown so large that it created one of the most organized maritime trades in the early modern world. And tea leaves were Carefully dried, compressed and packed into these lined wooden chests, which would typically hold 60-70 kg each. Now, if you think about the weight of a tea leaf, to achieve 60-70kg of tea, which is kind of around my body weight, is a lot of tea. That's a huge volume. And these huge chests had to be stacked tightly in the holds of merchant ships, ships belonging to companies like the East India Company and other trading organizations. One voyage would carry thousands of chess. And the quantities were staggering. By the late 18th century, Britain alone, although Britain is a bit of an outlier in its obsession with tea, was importing tens of millions of pounds of tea each year. Transforming had initially been a rare luxury into a daily habit of for millions of people. You get people like Samuel Johnson, who joked about how he was a hardened and shameless tea drinker, who for 20 years has diluted his meals with the only infusion of this fascinating plant. I feel like I could have written that myself.
- [41:07]
Peter Frankopan
I mean, don't get me wrong. I mean, I like. I like tea as much as the next person, but I mean, it is. When you read this stuff, I've done lots on tea in the 17, 1800s. It's basically like people saying I'm hooked on hard drugs or, you know, I can't get enough wine. But I mean, a cup of tea every now and again is fine, but the idea. That is the kind of miracle drink. I'm slightly sort of scratching my head.
- [41:27]
Afwa Hirsch
I mean, Peter, I think you're doing it wrong. You know, it's like sex. If you don't get what the big deal is, then you probably haven't got how to do it. I am all down with the tea as the wonder drink. I think it is transformative. It's definitely addictive. There is a theory that it has more caffeine than coffee. I don't know if that's true, but I've heard it said. And of course, don't forget, this is also part of the earlier story of sugar, because the arrival of sugar is transforming many of these quite bitter products. Tea, cocoa, coffee that were not that palatable to the European sensibility. And now there's the potential to sweeten them. They're becoming highly coveted drinks, and so they go hand in hand. Although I. If I drunk sugar in my tea, I would also have no teeth because I drink so much of it that I've had to wean myself off ever sweetening it. But the scale of this trade, I mean, it's transforming people's individual lives. But it's also transforming history. Imagine American history, Peter, without tea, for example.
- [42:31]
Peter Frankopan
Well, we're going to do something on that later this year on the 250th anniversary of independence. But it's no surprise, I guess, that the Boston Tea Party, which is the, I guess the starting point for most people of the American War of independence in 1773, evolves tea from British ships that have been imported by the East India Company of tea grown in China that is dumped into the sea as a way of saying that we're not willing to pay tax and also we want representation. Actually, the story is a bit more complicated and a bit more interesting than that, as we'll see later this year. But you're right, the shipment of goods around the world across these ocean lanes, what's being moved by whom, what levels of tax should be paid, what prices get created in ages of standardization and globalization are, I think, really, really interesting. So a bit like rice shipments across Asia, tea cargoes are also very labor intensive and they require a lot of unloading. So when we come back and do the next episode, afri, we're going to talk about the sort of, I guess, the globalization of the 19th century, the ways in which all of these themes we talked about goods, people, movements, technologies, ships, the ways in which content's been drawn together, how they bring the world into a kind of really recognizable format where things are grown on the other side of the world and start getting shipped incredibly quickly and more and more cheaply that create supply chains, create interdependencies, of course, create vulnerability. So next time on Legacy, we're going to start with coal and look at the formation of the modern world. Thanks for listening to Legacy.
- [44:05]
Afwa Hirsch
To dive deeper and to support the show, sign up to Legacy plus, you'll get to enjoy bonus episodes. Early access, fewer ads, Q and A's, and you'll be part of the core Legacy family. So please do sign up and get deeper into legacies with us.
- [44:22]
Peter Frankopan
You could do that if you go to Legacy supportingcast fm. And of course, don't forget, you can also watch all of our episodes on Spotify and YouTube to and for everything else, including our substacks and updates on TikTok and Instagram. Just check out the show notes or search Legacy Podcast. I'm Peter Frankerpern.
- [44:41]
Afwa Hirsch
I'm AFWA Hirsch and we'll see you on the next episode of Legacy.
- [45:04]
Commercial Announcer
Does your day move faster than you can keep up with new Gatorade, Lower Sugar? My family and I can stay at the top of our game no artificial flavors, sweeteners or colors, 75% less sugar and all the electrolytes of regular Gatorade now available nationwide.