The Transformation of the World (84 page)

Sometimes these particular histories were closely interconnected. Commercially, for example, Napoleon's Continental Blockade of 1807 had the effect of diverting British timber interests from the Baltic and Russia toward Canada, so that by the 1840s the province of New Brunswick alone was exporting 200,000 tons a year to Europe.
¹⁹³
The late nineteenth century saw the emergence of a veritable global wood market, boosted by mass-circulation dailies hungry for newsprint. Meanwhile, the transfer and “acclimatization” of tree species continued on a larger scale than in the eighteenth century. Whereas 110 tree species were introduced into Britain before 1800, the figure for the next hundred years was over 200. Nevertheless, although local histories can and must be linked together, it cannot easily be argued that they add up to an overarching history of unrelieved environmental degradation. Deforestation did not always continue until the last tree had been felled. In many countries, it was up against the logic of energy use and a rudimentary conservationism whose motives might vary from Romantic nature worship to a sober appreciation of the effects of unchecked exploitation. It would be mistaken to imagine that industrialization continually displaced the wood economy as part of an archaic “primary sector.” But of course it originally raised wood consumption in the form of charcoal for early steam engines and ironworks, both in economies such as Japan's that were starved of fuel resources and in areas such as Pennsylvania and Ohio where cheap wood was plentiful and where charcoal long remained an energy input for heavy industry.

A further major source of demand was private heating. A warm home soon came to be taken for granted as an accompaniment of material progress. In 1860 wood was still the most important fuel in the United States (80 percent), to be overtaken by coal only in the 1880s.
¹⁹⁴
Even where industrialization had little impact on the economy in general, the transport industry devoured huge quantities of wood in the form of railroad sleepers—in India, for example, where the material first had to be procured from distant places. Early locomotives were driven by firewood, to the tune of 80 percent in the 1860s in India; a changeover to coal became evident only around the turn of the century.
¹⁹⁵
In Canada's “modern” economy, and even in the United States, the timber business (which included large sawmills) continued to be one of the sectors with the highest creation of value added. Some of the world's largest fortunes were made out of wood.

Let us now finally consider another kind of ecological frontier, one that resulted not so much from man-made destruction as from gradual climate change. For this we must turn to the Sahel zone, a desert frontier roughly three hundred kilometers wide, which stretches along the southern edge of the Sahara. Life there was affected by increasingly arid conditions from the beginning of the seventeenth century on. Livestock breeding was pushed ever farther south, while the camel, capable of surviving for eight to ten days without water or grass and of moving firmly across sand, assumed greater importance. By the mid-nineteenth century a Great Camel Zone had come into being, extending from the Maghreb to the Adrar Plateau in present-day Mauritania. Growing aridity also imposed new patterns of transhumance within the southward-moving livestock zone, where a mixed economy of cattle, goats, and camels prevailed. These conditions gave rise to a desert frontier, in which Arabs, Berbers, and also black Africans coexisted with one another and took on a kind of “white” identity distinct from that of blacks farther to the south. The lifestyles of nomadic pastoralism and settled agriculture became ever more sharply defined. They also expressed themselves in differential mobility: camel and horse riders could easily make raids against which black communities or villages had little or no defense. Complex tributary relationships stretched across borders in both directions: the dependence of southern farmers being all the greater, the less the “whites” had to do with agricultural production in their own sphere. In the end, however, many common features at the level of social hierarchy—above all, a clear division between warriors and priests or into caste groups—bound the frontier zone together. Islam spread throughout the Sahel zone, by means both martial and peaceful, creating exceptionally deep roots for the slavery it brought from the North. The remnants of slavery in Mauritania in the second half of the twentieth century are clear evidence of this.
¹⁹⁶

Big-Game Hunting

Another ecological variant is the game frontier. In the nineteenth century the world was still full of human communities who lived from hunting, not only in the American Midwest but also in the Arctic, in Siberia, and in the rainforests of Amazonia and Central Africa.
¹⁹⁷
At the same time, Europeans and Euro-Americans discovered new dimensions of the old pursuit. What had once been an aristocratic privilege and a training of belligerent masculinity became
embourgeoisé
in the thoroughly middle-class societies of the New World, as well as in parts of Europe where the bourgeoisie sought and found a way of linking up with the lifestyle of the nobility. The hunt served as a symbolic setting for status convergence. A nobleman hunted, although not everyone who took it up as a hobby thereby became a nobleman; it was a favorite subject for satirists.

A new aspect was the assault on exotic big game, the largest and most organized since the bloodbaths in the arenas of the Roman Empire, which for an unconventional commentator such as Lewis Mumford made Roman civilization
especially repugnant.
¹⁹⁸
In Africa, Southeast Asia, and Siberia, early travel reports expressed wonder at the paradisiacal abundance of the large fauna, but all that changed as soon as a struggle for “civilization” got under way against the beasts of the wild. In the name of upholding the colonial order, for which a figure such as the tiger could only be a rebel both real and symbolic, wild animals were killed and abducted on a grand scale to satisfy the curiosity of visitors to menageries and circuses in the capitals of the North and to provide spectacles for the greater prestige of their rulers. The technical prerequisite for this was the dissemination of the rifle, which made it possible for Asians and Africans to imitate the exterminatory practices of Europeans. The profession of big-game hunter appeared only after the repeater rifle became widely available, since this reduced the likelihood of having to face a bellicose tiger or elephant with one's last bullet spent.

In many Asian societies big game hunting had been a royal prerogative, but now, in keeping with the European model, lower ranks of the aristocracy began to join in. In India, the tiger hunt served to cement the British alliance with native princes that was essential to the stability of the Raj. A maharajah and a high official of the colonial government might have little to say to each other, but they could always find common ground in the hunter's lifestyle. European penchants often had a trickle-down effect. In the early twentieth century the sultan of Johor—a prince in the hinterland of Singapore dependent on the British—was considered a great tiger hunter: thirty-five stuffed trophies were on display in his palace. But he was not following in the footsteps of any ancestors; there was no such tradition. The sultan, for reasons of prestige, simply copied the behavior of Indian maharajahs, who in turn imitated the British rulers.

Villagers, too, had no tradition of ferocity toward wild animals. Of course, an ingenuous harmony had never prevailed between the two. Tigers were capable of terrorizing whole districts; and villages would be abandoned if the livestock (their most valuable possession) could no longer be protected, if the gathering of fruit and firewood (a task for young girls and old women) became impossible, or if an excessive number of children fell into the clutches of wild beasts. There are harrowing stories about such things, but the water buffalo who defends a child from the tiger is also a popular literary theme. Some regions could be crossed only at great peril. People undertaking such a journey often positioned an old horse at the rear of their column, as a sacrifice to a stalking predator. In West Sumatra, as late as 1911, a tiger attacked a mail coach and dragged its driver into the jungle.
¹⁹⁹

The tiger hunt was not only a luxury but often an actual necessity, having existed since before the arrival of European colonizers. In many cases it mobilized whole villages, under the leadership of an elder or a low-ranking colonial official, for a full-scale punitive expedition. Especially on Java the tiger was straightforwardly defined as a military enemy, liable for revenge and annihilation; Muslim Javanese knew no bounds in this, since their monotheistic religion excluded any superstitious notion that a spirit (good or evil) dwelled within the tiger.
Nevertheless, the idea that tigers should be wiped out seems to have remained fairly uncommon. There was a tendency to leave “innocent” ones in peace, and in general the non-Muslim population of Asia—as well as Muslims marked by popular culture—had an awkward feeling when they went after a tiger. Often they asked pardon of the slain beast, even blaming themselves for its (practically necessary) killing as if it were a case of regicide, or else it would be honored like a fallen war chief on the village square, with dancing and weapon play.
²⁰⁰
The European custom of the hunting gallery, arranged according to a hierarchy of the animal kingdom, or the use of distinctive horn signals for different species, shows a certain mental affinity with such practices.

The dead tiger was scarcely ever sold on the market until the early twentieth century, and, although it is reported that tiger meat was a delicacy among the Javanese aristocracy, ordinary people never ate it. At least in Southeast Asia there is almost no evidence that the animal was killed for its skin, which had no particular value attached to it. To decorate houses with tiger skins was unusual even among the nobility. The hunting trophy seems to have been invented in Europe, where it sometimes degenerated into a bedspread. In the early twentieth century there was a substantial tourist demand in Indian port cities for animal skins or even stuffed bodies. Traders and taxidermists often ordered a supply from native hunters. Tiger remains were especially sought after in the United States.
²⁰¹

Some hunters specialized in acquiring big cats for European or North American zoos and circuses. The first modern zoo opened in London in 1828; Berlin followed in 1844 (with the addition of a large predator house in 1865), and there were zoos in the United States after 1890. They were supplied by a small number of internationally linked dealers. Johann Hagenbeck, the half-brother of the Hamburg dealer and circus pioneer Carl Hagenbeck who eventually opened his own zoo in 1907, set himself up in 1885 as an animal procurer in Ceylon, buying specimens from local people and undertaking expeditions of his own to India, the Malay Peninsula, and Indonesia. Such people did, of course, employ methods that were somewhat more merciful than those of other hunters, but the effect was the same: a decline in the animal population. The business itself was risky; many animals did not survive the trip. But huge markups amply compensated for this. In the 1870s a rhinoceros purchased in East Africa for 160 to 400 German marks could be sold in Europe for 6,000 to 12,000 marks. By 1887 the Hagenbeck company had traded more than 1,000 lions and 300 to 400 tigers.
²⁰²

The tiger was the most spectacular victim of deforestation and the hunting passion imported from Europe. Specialists in India, Siberia, or Sumatra might shoot 200 or more in the course of a career; the king of Nepal and his hunting guests totted up a combined score of 433 between 1933 and 1940.
²⁰³
After timid beginnings in the colonial period, the effective protection of tigers began only after 1947 in the Republic of India. Elephants gained legal protection earlier, in 1873 in Ceylon, and the times when a single hunter could claim to have killed 1,300 specimens did not last. The deployment of elephants as working
animals does not seem to have promoted the biological stability of the species in Asia. On the other hand, the colonial authorities ended their use in warfare—traditionally a cause of major losses.

In the nineteenth century, some hunting was big business in the world economy. This was not entirely new. The fur trade, by no means a totally “premodern” sector, had been spanning continents since the seventeenth century, and in 1808 Johann Jacob Astor founded his American Fur Company, soon to become the largest of any kind in the United States. The advance of a commercial hunting frontier had an especially deleterious effect on the African elephant. In the Boer Republic of Transvaal, until the gold and diamond boom, ivory was by far the most important export item. Elephants were slaughtered en masse to keep Europe supplied with knife handles, billiard balls, and piano keys. In the 1860s alone, Britain imported 550 tons of ivory a year from all parts of (not yet colonized) Africa and India; exports from Africa peaked between 1870 and 1890 year, at the height of the rivalry among colonial powers to grab territorial possessions. In those years, 60,000 to 70,000 elephants were killed per annum. In 1900 Europe still imported 380 tons of ivory, representing the “yield” from approximately 40,000 elephants otherwise of no commercial value.
²⁰⁴
After the elephant population slumped in a number of colonies, resulting in the first timid measures (in the British Empire) to protect it, the Belgian-ruled Congo Free State remained the last source of tusks—not only a place of extreme human exploitation but also a gigantic cemetery for elephants. Between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth, the regal animal disappeared from large parts of Africa, from the northern savannah belt as well as Ethiopia and the entire South. Until after the First World War, more elephants were killed in Africa than were born. Only in the period between the wars did something like an effective species protection strategy get off the ground.