Mahogany: The costs of luxury in Early America by Jennifer L. Anderson (review)

This book is a fine example of how the history of a single commodity, in this case mahogany, can produce a sweeping historical narrative that spans three centuries and a vast region (the West Indies, Britain and America) to demonstrate the long-range and devastating impact of colonialism on people and the environment. Drawing on an impressive array of British, American and Spanish evidence and a truly interdisciplinary body of secondary sources, Jennifer Anderson has shown how “the British Empire’s appetite for mahogany required a veritable army of people spread out across the Atlantic hemisphere—enslaved Africans, itinerant woodcutters, colonists, and planters in the West Indies and Central America, ship captains, sailors, and stevedores, as well as merchants, cabinetmakers, and laborers in England and its northern colonies” (12). The density, size and insect-resistant nature of the earliest mahogany made it ideal for shipbuilding. When the British eliminated the duties on it in 1721, however, those same characteristics made it a highly desired consumer good as British and American cabinetmakers began to create intricately carved and highly polished furniture that remained in demand until the mid-nineteenth century when familiarity, changing fashion and the introduction of new exotic woods made it less desirable. By the twentieth century as mahogany became scarce and on the verge of extinction, it became fashionable once again.

Beginning with the early eighteenth-century Caribbean, in particular Jamaica, Anderson shows that mahogany harvesting supplemented sugar production (which commanded primacy of labor) either seasonally or when demand for sugar was low. Jamaica had two regions from which mahogany was extracted—the coastal lowlands, with large sugar plantations, and the central highlands, where small producers grew commodities such as coffee. A case study of each region, as illuminated through family records, showcases the importance of slave labor for mahogany removal. Over time, the logging progressed into increasingly remote areas, making it difficult to control the labor force as the slaves had to range over a large territory, making it possible for them to disappear into the forest. As early as the 1760s British Jamaica was logged out, resulting in competition for good wood on nearby, foreign-controlled, islands; the resulting high labor costs caused a substantial price increase for mahogany. Anderson chronicles how island after island (Bermuda, Bahamas, Tobago, Honduras and Haiti) experienced the same fate as Jamaica, establishing that the devastation on each was not only ecological but also human, as both Indigenous populations and imported African slaves were exploited in the process.

Shifting perspective from the Caribbean to mid-eighteenth-century New England, Anderson’s analysis of three parties involved in acquiring and selling mahogany demonstrates the interconnectedness of those involved in its extraction, trade and distribution: a Newport, Rhode Island, merchant who bought and sold both mahogany and slaves; a ship captain who transported them; and his brother who oversaw the extraction of the wood in the Bay of Honduras. The difficulty for the British of harvesting mahogany in Spanish-controlled Honduras where they could not own land, combined with a large slave population and a dearth of women, often made life violent and dangerous. Here, continued dependence on slave labor to cut down the trees and haul them to the shore required that the small group of British woodcutters grudgingly accommodate their slaves, given their knowledge of both the environment and the political system, in addition to the fact that here, too, they could run away. The logging settlements were composed of a few White men, a small group of freed Blacks (the shortage of women meant many Europeans often freed the children they had with female slaves), and until abolition, an overwhelming majority (70-80 percent) of Black slaves. Anderson vividly portrays the lives of this disparate population struggling to manage in such a challenging environment, all for the purpose of creating elegant mahogany furniture to grace the homes of British and American elites.

Although Anderson concentrates on the eighteenth century, she also chronicles the impact...