Alcohol: A History

11. ALCOHOL AND NATIVE PEOPLES, 1800–1930: Race, Order, and Control

216 11 AlcoholandNativePeoples 1800–1930 race, order, and control While alcohol was under attack by temperance and prohibition advocates in Europe, Europeans were channeling vast volumes of alcohol into their overseas empires, where, along with textiles, beads, and guns, it was used as a trading commodity. The flow of alcohol swelled during the nineteenth century , especially in Africa after the territory not already claimed by European powers was divided up among them at the 1884 Berlin conference. Alcohol was also implicated as Europeans extended their domination over the whole of North America during the 1800s, as spirits were traded and sold to the native peoples. In both Africa and North America, the European administrators and governments wrestled with the implications of drinking by the indigenous populations, and most applied prohibition policies to them well in advance of such policies being widely imposed on Europeans anywhere. Just as the temperance movement in Europe and elsewhere informed policies enacted in the African colonies and imposed on the native populations of North America, it is possible that the lessons learned were absorbed by European, American, and Canadian governments as they dealt with demands for greater alcohol regulation in their own countries. Europeans brought their alcoholic beverages, attitudes, and patterns of consumption with them, and in Africa they encountered indigenous peoples with their own alcoholic beverages and modes of consuming them. The interplay was complex and the results were sometimes unexpected, but they were always informed by the relationships of power in colonial societies. Within that framework, each colony presented unique cultural, political, and alcohol and native peoples, 1800–1930 217 economic conditions. The degree of contact between European and African populations varied and could be minimal even where railroads were extended into the interior of the continent. Trading networks employed alcohol more in some colonies than in others, and while missionaries urged the indigenous people to drink moderately if they could not abstain entirely, their influence on local alcohol consumption appears to have ranged from a little to a lot. Some colonial administrators were content to see vast quantities of alcohol flow into their colonies because they brought a steady flow of tax revenues into their treasuries; others, motivated by economic or moral concerns, tried to control the access that local populations had to alcohol. Colonialism in Africa was a complex narrative, and alcohol was a constant theme. Throughout the continent, alcohol became an important medium of exchange—less among the Muslim populations of North Africa than in the south—and it was used, sometimes alone and sometimes in conjunction with other trading commodities, for the purchase of the goods in demand by Europeans: palm oil, rubber, ivory, gold, diamonds, and slaves. A British trade commissioner sent to Nigeria in 1895 reported to the Colonial Office that trade was impossible without spirits because liquor was the most popular currency.1 Alcohol played an extremely important role in the acquisition of slaves; sometimes it was part of the actual price, and sometimes it was a gift to ensure that local leaders made slaves available for Europeans to purchase. In 1724, for example, French traders purchased fifty slaves for cloth, beads, guns, gunpowder, lead shot, and brandy.2 Alcohol was also used as payment for territorial concessions. In 1843, the king of Assinie (a small state in Côte d’Ivoire) gave up sovereignty to King Louis-Philippe of France for cloth, gunpowder, guns, tobacco, hats, a mirror, an organ, beads, six 200-liter barrels of brandy, and 4 cases of distilled spirits. In 1894, a British trading company that wanted to extend its riverside frontage by twenty feet agreed to pay 20 cases of gin a year.3 In Cameroon, chiefs along the coast agreed to a treaty placing themselves “under the protection” of the Germans rather than the British because the German authorities provided them with liquor.4 During the nineteenth century, the consumption of European alcohol became far more common throughout native communities. By the middle of the century, the same alarm bells that were being sounded in Europe at what was believed to be the widespread abuse of alcohol among the working classes were also ringing in the colonies. European missionaries reported on the havoc that alcohol played on indigenous cultures, and accounts were published by temperance advocates in Europe to amplify their descriptions 218 alcohol and native peoples, 1800–1930 of the harm liquor was causing at...