Hamilton Historical Volume III, Issue I: Fall 2023

Hamilton Historical An Undergraduate Journal est. 2020

Volume III Issue I: Fall 2023

Peer-reviwed by Undergraduates for Undergraduates Based out of Hamilton College, Clinton NY.

Hamilton Historical Volume 3, Issue I Fall 2023

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Quinn Brown

Layout Czar Jack Ritzenberg

Peer Editors

Lara Barreira Miko Newman Nicole Mcdonough Kloe Shkane Luke Hayes Mika Tortusa John Sheets Jesse Wexler Nick Fluty Katie Rao

Readers

Sam Minzter Ben Ingram Kevin Ross Helen Ziobrowski Allen Cao Tim Murray Ravi Travers Peter Hinkle Bennett Hauck

Editor’s Preface

Dear readers,

I am so glad to introduce our first issue of volume III of the Hamilton Historical. I would like to thank Emma Tomlins, our former Editor-in-Chief for leaving me such a thriving publication. I would like to thank our staff of readers and editors for their hard work this semester. Lastly, a massive thank you to Jack Ritzenberg, our Layout Czar for his efforts in the creation of this publication.

We are thrilled to continue to publish work both from within and outside of Hamilton. Our publications in this issue come from Middlebury College, Tufts University and our own Hamilton College. They cover a diverse range of historical content ranging temporally from the 13th century to modernity. The publication begins with a discussion of Aramco’s presence in Saudi Arabia. Then we move to the seventeenth century to cover English foreign policy after the Amboyna Massacre. That piece is followed by a piece on agriculture in the Mongolian Empire. We then jump back to the modern piece on the intersection of empire, race, and cricket. This piece is followed by a discussion of Black Barbershops as a capitalist venture. Our issue is then concluded with an art history piece that discusses the collaboration between Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol.

Thank you for continued readership and support of the Hamilton Historical.

Sincerely, Quinn Editor-in-Chief, 2023-2024

Table of Contents Armaco World: Narratives for Economic Gain through Migrant Erasure 6 Luke Hayes

The Amboyna Massacre: A Global Turn In Early Modern English Foreighn Policy 16 Shayiq Ahmed Shah

Trade of Agriculture and Technique: Rethinking the Mongol Empire 26 Ilan Werblow

Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji: Constructing a Visual Celebrity Ravi Travers 32 The American Black Barbershop: Maintaining Racial Difference for Economic Success 42 Kloe Shkane

Basquiat and Warhol’s Collaboration: Rethinking Historical Influence 50 Lily Watts

Aramco World Narratives for Economic Gain through Migrant Erasure Luke Hayes

Hamilton College - Class of 2025

“See those flames?” he asked in a low voice. I looked out through the darkness and saw the dancing lights of the gas flared from a gas-oil separator plant.

“They’re volcanoes,” he said. “Live volcanoes, really!”1 This exclamation of awe comes from an article in the July/August 1968 issue of Aramco World, in which a young William Tracy describes his initial impressions of Ras Tanura, the main oil refinery of Aramco.2 His self-reflexive rhetoric demonstrates the incredible innovation and wondrous nature of the company which created industry out of a vast expanse of desert. Tracy communicated to the American consumer of Aramco World, a historical periodical which discussed Arab culture and the company history, that the oil extraction processes occurring in Saudi Arabia were impressive feats of modern engineering, justifying Aramco’s existence. Yet, oil extraction by Aramco set the tone for American dominance over the natural resources of Saudi Arabia, which hijacked control from the hands of the al-Saud family.

The discovery of small quantities of oil in the early 1930s created transnational excitement at the prospect of immense wealth and stable oil prices as the emerging global economy transitioned to oil as an energy source. The main parties vying for the potential oil reserves were Standard Oil of California and British petroleum companies including the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and the Iraq Petroleum Company.3 King Saud suffered from a loss of revenues from the annual Hajj to Mecca, and the competition between 1 William Tracy, “A Boyhood in Ras Tanura,” Aramco World, July/August 1968, 17.

2 Ibid.

3 Anthony Cave Brown, Oil, God, and Gold: The Story of Aramco and the Saudi Kings (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999), 43.

Standard Oil and Iraq Petroleum Company created a bidding war, which would provide al-Saud with an infusion of cash.4 Standard Oil won the concession due to an anti-imperialism clause in their contract, which guaranteed that anyone “in the company or connected to the company had no right to interfere with administrative, political, or religious affairs within Arabia.”5 This initial concession paved the way for an influx of American geologists and oil experts, which constituted the beginning days of Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company.

The massive oil deposits Aramco discovered in the areas under concession accrued wealth and created a company town, Dhahran, with stratified labor hierarchies. These stratifications mirrored Jim Crow era racial segregation, which American oil executives implemented in Mexico and Venezuela before Dhahran.6 The unprecedented success of the oil wells necessitated influxes of labor migrants, heightening the usage of discriminatory policies towards minorities, leading to the spread of pan-Arab sentiment. These ideals, which emerged from transnational Arab labor migrant solidarity, directly challenged Aramco’s existence through its belief in nationalizing oil profits.7 In the face of apparent labor inequality and a potential threat to oil profits, Aramco World sanitized the company’s history for an elite Western audience, assuming that the read4 Toby Craig Jones, Desert Kingdom How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2010), 28.

5 Brown, 52.

6 Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on The Saudi Oil frontier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 24, 92.

7 John Chalcraft, “Migration and Popular Protest in the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf in the 1950s and 1960s,” International Labor and Working-Class History, no. 79 (2011): 28–47.

7 ers of Aramco World would be the US government and relevant private sector individuals. This elite Western audience had a vested interest in verifying that US foreign aid, such as Lend-Lease money, was being spent appropriately as a means to exert US power efficiently.

In order to increase American familiarity with Saudi Arabia, Aramco World portrayed the company as a site of cross-culture connection between North America and the Middle East, justifying its existence as an institution and its integral role in building the Saudi state.

My contribution towards scholarship on labor issues and nation building in Saudi Arabia uses the backbone of Saudi Arabian oil history built by Robert Vitalis to probe deeper into Aramco’s portrayal of labor issues. Through looking at Aramco World as a vehicle for propaganda and erasure of racism and labor struggles, I analyze contemporary discourses and themes surrounding the mechanisms of labor migrant erasure to keep labor cheap. Aramco World becomes a tool to uncover the power structures dependent on transnational support, given the large quantity of US foreign aid sent to Aramco and Saudi Arabia. Workers jeopardized the profits of Aramco through their organization, so Aramco responded with swift action. In order to erase that history, Aramco World wrote migrant laborers and dissenting Saudis out of narrative, attempting to appear stable and profitable in the eyes of the American tax-payer. Aramco World was a letter home to the United States, bragging about the successes of the operation, as well as providing context in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East at large. Aramco World did not discuss labor policies and concerns. Labor migration provides a lens to analyze the function of the labor structures created by Aramco, the United States, and Saudi Arabia, and how they are relevant to domestic labor structures independent of a US-owned Aramco.

This imperative of control stems from the World-War-II-era sentiment that oil was crucial to world dominance. In 1943, the United States needed to contend with growing numbers of English gold sovereigns and silver riyals ending up in storage instead of in circulation in Saudi Arabia. This led to the creation of the paper riyal, backed by the British treasury and controlled by the Saudi minister in London and representatives of the British government.8 In order to combat the British advances and secure Saudi Arabia as 8 Irvine H. Anderson, Aramco, The United States, and Saudi Arabia: A Study of the Dynamics of Oil Policy 1933-1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 46-47.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. III | Issue 1 a dependable source of oil, Roosevelt signed a LendLease order in 1943 for Saudi Arabia to receive direct financial support from the United States, pursuant to the idea that Saudi Arabian oil reserves were crucial to US geopolitical strength.9 Harold Ickes, the Secretary of the Interior for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, argued in the early 1940s that based on declining US oil reserves, the US war machine would not be able to function independently, and Middle East oil would be crucial to the war time capacity of the US military.10 This foundational belief became the backdrop of US Cold War oil policy, even though false notions of scarcity drove this ideology.11 In the wake of this macroeconomic policy of necessity, The Bureau of Economic Affairs of the United States, beginning in 1944, had concerns that Aramco was not financially stable enough to support the “national interests now entrusted to it,” and proposed opening up the concession agreement to include other American oil companies.12 The Bureau was heavily invested in keeping the concession in American hands.13 Although this plan was never implemened, American officials had a conscious understanding of Aramco’s importance in geopolitics. Aramco World builds a narrative intended to convince an American audience knowledgeable about oil politics, that US financial support was not just successful, but ushered in prosperity and American values to Saudi Arabia, bringing familiarity to a foreign place.

Wallace Stegner, an Aramco company historian, canonized the importance of the transnational Aramco project through his oeuvre Discovery!: The Search for Arabian Oil. Published in book format and as a segmented feature throughout several Aramco World issues, Discovery! was commissioned by Aramco as a public relations tool.14 This particular work was published in 1971, and the fraught history of its existence is a testament to Aramco’s attempt to justify its existence: “Every American, even if he could not place Saudi Arabia on a map, knows that Aramco is one of those ‘legendary institutions.’”15 This victorious statement presents Aramco’s history as a fantastical tale 9 Anderson, 48-49.

10 Stern, Roger J. “Oil Scarcity Ideology in US Foreign Policy, 1908-97.” Security Studies 25, no. 2 (2016): 233.

11 Ibid.

12 Anderson, 140.

13 Ibid., 139.

14 Vitalis, 195.

15 Wallace Stegner, Discovery! (Beirut: Middle East Export Press, 1971), v.

8 from which emerged a formidable global institution.

Stegner also recognizes Saudi Arabia’s relative obscurity in the eyes of Americans, as it was not important to the United States until oil was found. Knowing that the American audience would not be familiar with Saudi Arabia, Stegner narrates the discovery of oil through his own eyes, emphasizing Aramco’s “non-imperialist” goals and aligning the company with the American values of freedom and collaboration.

The Aramco project concentrated on “social engineering” as a tool to justify Aramco’s existence and to increase profits.16 In Discovery!, “Social engineering” created the circumstances through which Aramco could depict their story as a “narrative of uplift” to justify its existence.17 Even though “social engineering” is used in a positive context in Discovery!, this policy foreshadows the manipulation of migrant workers in structured hierarchies to create social control. This reworking of the company’s history defended Aramco’s greatness, preserving the narrative of continuous success. The audience in the United States was interested in reading about the development and success of Aramco, meaning that Aramco World, needed to show its profitability and ability to quickly develop and expand.

The doctrine of development for Aramco was not an act of benevolence, but a business policy to increase profit. The narrative of uplift and development erased inequality in the official Aramco narrative, validating Aramco’s existence in Saudi Arabia. This narrative also shaped the American consciousness of what Aramco and Saudi Arabia were, which was imperative to securing support for the company and government.

Stegner described Saudi Arabia and Aramco’s aims by discussing the creation of the oil camps, and their direct parallels to oil towns of America. Stegner identified Farmington, New Mexico as an analogous town to Dhahran, with Dhahran triumphing as a more comfortable place to live the suburban style.18 This direct comparison helped the American audience of Aramco World visualize the similarities between the United States and foreign Saudi Arabia, drawing the two disparate places together. The narrative of development and comparisons to America instilled a sense of familiarity with Saudi Arabia, strengthening the public consciousness of a hybrid identity, which con-

sists of cultural links.

As an important part of his whitewashed narrative, Stegner idealized the creation of this oil town, conveniently ignoring the racial segregation which characterized the living situations at Dhahran. The consultants for the “suburban style living” championed by Stegner advocated for a life of luxury for white expatriates in ranch-style homes with swimming pools and other suburban trappings. Thomas Barger, a longtime Aramco employee and chairman, quipped in a letter that “the golf course is being improved, though I’m not optimistic over the prospect of any amount of ‘improvement’ making it a decent course.”19 Migrant workers faced a wholly different reality, with the conditions drastically decreasing for Indians and Saudis.20 This choice was deliberate. Aramco consulted Creole Petroleum and Mobil’s savoir-faire; both companies used racial segregation to preserve peace in their oil towns.21 The tension between Aramco World and Stegner’s whitewashed narratives and the truth of life in Dhahran demonstrates the tactics Aramco employed in order to subjugate low skilled laborers. The labor hierarchy ensured the dominance of the highly skilled American workers, preserving the status quo for the extraction of large profits, which benefited the American taxpayers, whose dollars supported this project.

Aramco had an effect similar to an imperial power with its outsized control over Saudi revenues, which gave the Saudi government little leverage over Aramco from the founding date of Aramco to nationalization. Amid immense oil exploitation and rising revenues, Saudi and American workers did not have the same rosy relationship in Dhahran as Stegner portrayed. B.C. Nelson, the manager of labor relations for Aramco around 1934, decreed that “the Saudi Arab had made little distinction between work and leisure time.”22 The American workers looked down upon their staff as unproductive, positioning ideas of work and leisure as dictated by race. In the wake of this report, an incident between Walt Haenggi, an American driller, and an Arab worker illustrated racial animus between the Americans and the Arabs. Haenggi was accused of “cuffing” an “insolent” Arab worker, and after an official complaint, the worker summarily reported Haenggi to the emir, and the conflict rose to

16 Stegner, xii.

17 Chad H. Parker, Making the Desert Modern: Americans, Arabs, and Oil on the Saudi Frontier, 1933-1973, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 11.

18 Stegner, viii.

19 Thomas C. Barger, Out in the Blue: Letters from Arabia 19371940 (Vista: Selwa Press, 2000), 225.

20 Vitalis, 92.

21 Ibid., 24.

22 Brown, 68.

9 the king, who ordered Haenggi to be deported.23 This decisive action drew the ire of the Americans of Dhahran, who collectively threatened an American strike, which would stop the flow of oil. Americans generally held higher level positions in Aramco’s early days, thus high skilled American labor was crucial to the extraction in al-Hasa region. Understanding the ramifications that such a strike would have upon Aramco’s and the monarchy’s revenues, the king reneged on Haenggi’s deportation order to appease the Americans workers.24 This particular anecdote demonstrates the power of wealthy American labor in the transnational project. Tom Barger argued that “[Aramco] can’t afford to have a scarce, $1500 truck bumped about by a 40-cent-a-day laborer who had never driven before”25 Within the racialized labor hierarchy, American labor was valued over the Saudi workers, thus they were prioritized. This decision provides a foil to the treatment of low wage migrant and Saudi labor in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in which striking was viewed as an existential threat to Aramco’s monopoly. If the Saudi government perceived the strikes as valid and successful, Aramco would face repossession by the Saudi government. American labor and Saudi labor were not treated equally, and this inequality was the foundation of Aramco’s labor policies continuing decades later.

Using its power as leverage against actually embracing Saudi culture, Aramco made performative attempts to form a cross-cultural connection between the United States and Saudi Arabia by creating a hybrid identity. Such an identity would align Americans and Saudi Arabians, signaling the foundation of a natural partnership of oil extraction. This identity created cultural fusion, which turned out to be a farce, both displaying innate prejudices against Arabs adopting Western traditions, but also legitimizing Aramco’s existence. The ground zero for this hybrid identity were the Aramco training schools in Long Island New York, which prepared US employees for life in Saudi Arabia, while providing a Western education for Saudi Arabians who could be promoted upon their return. Aramco’s American employees were taught just enough Arabic and essentialized culture to have a veneer of Arabian culture, but the handbook stressed these employees represented “the American way of doing things.”26 The superficial education detailed above demonstrates Ar23 Ibid., 69.

24 Ibid., 69.

25 Barger, 110.

26 Parker, 21.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. III | Issue 1 amco’s intent to both seem interested in forging a cultural relationship with Saudi Arabia, while cultivating a story to reflexively give the Aramco Saudi partnership narrative credence.

Aramco World promoted this idea, as a 1965 article called “A Path to Progress” detailed the upward mobility for Saudi nationals that the schools at Ras Tanura and Dhahran provided through mastery of the English language. In order to participate in this global project; “[S]ome 15 students raised their voices in a curious, clipped chant: ‘Peter went to the meat market this morning. Peter went to the meat market this morning. Peter went to the meat market this morning.’”27 This article emphasized the global nature of the “first-instructors” of Aramco, the teachers from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere who gave the company an international veneer.28 By underlining the different nationalities of Aramco’s teachers, the magazine’s narrative of respect for Arab migrant workers became intertwined with the fabric of the company. This narrative showed the American viewer that the company engaged in a mission of self-strengthening, solidifying American admiration, while fending off criticism of its treatment of Arabs. In this case, Aramco World justified the company’s existence by demonstrating its uplift of “local” populations. Aramco World, in “A Path to Progress,” associated Arabs from all over the Middle East with the company project, thus creating a hybrid identity.

For the Americans who follow oil policy abroad, this article demonstrated the lengths Aramco went in order to integrate with the community in order to secure its existence. These schools allowed American children to get a world-class education in Dhahran, contributing to Aramco’s capacity to attract top talent. The education system in Dhahran served both propagandistic aims and educational benchmarks set by company executives as a way to benefit Saudi Arabians and American expatriates.

27 William Tracy, “A Path to Progress,” Aramco World, January/ February 1965, 19.

28 Ibid., 23.

10

Figure 1: English Classroom at Dhahran, Aramco World, January/February 1965

Aramco World looked beyond company institutions to claim tenuous cultural similarities between the United States and Saudi Arabia to establish a narrative of cross-cultural contact. One such article is “The Beauty of Bedouin Jewelry,” published in 1979. The author speculated about cross cultural contact between Bedouins and Indigenous Americans because their jewelry shared similar silver and turquoise designs.29 The explanation for this phenomenon was that conquistadors brought the art forms from Spain, which was ruled by the Umayyad caliphate for hundreds of years, to Central America.30 This alternate history envisioned cultural commonalities across the Atlantic Ocean. By understanding the speculative bonds which linked North America and the Arabian Peninsula, the American reader of Aramco World could understand the shocking similarities between the two regions, which could be underlying reasons Aramco experienced such success.

In the same 1979 issue of Aramco World, Robert Obojski wrote an article called “Stamps and the Story of Language,” in which he discussed the ways that stamps recognize the connection between ancient languages of the Middle East and modern Western languages. He argued that these languages undergird the European languages that dominated the globe at the 29 Heather Colyer Ross, “The Beauty of Bedouin Jewelry,” Aramco World, March/April 1979, 4.

30 Ibid.

time.31 Both Western states, like France, and Middle Eastern states like Egypt issued stamps commemorating the breakthrough in hieroglyphic reading that French archaeologist Jean-François Champollion pioneered. The representations of this discovery on stamps “celebrate the development of language” and are important “particularly in the Middle East where vital advances in language were once made.”32 Similar to the article on jewelry, this article created undisputable ties between the Middle East and America, extending down to the granular level of the spoken word.

Through deliberate repetition of the same themes camouflaged in various aspects of culture, the American reader understood that close collaboration between Saudi Arabia and America was not simply beneficial, but rather a natural fusion of similar cultures. Aramco was the force of modernization which would transform Saudi Arabia into a glorious country, acknowledging its venerable history as a cultural capital of linguistic advancement. By bridging the gap between the “exotic” of Arabia and the “modern” of America, Aramco created a paper trail of justifications for the placement of Arabian-American in their name and justified the company’s out-sized control over Saudi Arabia.

Figure 2: An Egyptian and a French stamp referring to the deciphering of hieroglyphics by Jean-François Champollion, Aramco World, March/April 1979.

The result of this cross-cultural hybridity was not equality and a clear partnership in development, but rather discriminatory policies which limited Arab voices. The distance between the narrative of cross-cultural impacts and the actual treatment of Arabs who contributed to the other side of the shared identity was immense. In terms of control over workers, the Sau31 Robert Obojski, “Stamps and the Story of Language,” Aramco World, March/April 1979, 10.

32 Obojski, 10.

11 di government decided that it would arbitrate worker conflict, which included a mandatory shortening the workday to six hours during Ramadan.33 However, the company retained authority over the American enclave, which served to prioritize the American residents of Dhahran.34 As a result, Aramco could continue to govern cultural issues, including the consumption of alcohol. Americans were thus allowed to cultivate a version of American cocktail culture in Saudi Arabia by arranging their Saudi Arabian exemptions.35 Alcohol was a large source of friction in the camp because Americans had greater leeway to consume alcohol than Saudi Arabians, even though alcohol was illegal. This “American” exception became incredibly important to the preservation of American culture in Saudi Arabia.36 However, when the Saudi Arabians living in the camp decided to adopt American cocktail culture and consume alcohol, the Saudi government promptly shut down these gatherings.37 The double standard which emerged from the debate around alcohol placed American labor in Saudi Arabia at the summit of an ethnic hierarchy, allowing them to skirt the host country’s laws. Aramco’s narrative of cultural hybridity contradicted the two different realities for Arab and American workers. The structure of Aramco, despite the attempts of erasure by the Aramco World narrative, was not conducive to cross-cultural exchange, and instead created boundaries between the Americans, a highly skilled and managerial labor force, and the working-class Arab population.

The racial friction in Dhahran fomented discontent in marginalized Arab communities toward Aramco’s discriminatory structures. What began as worker solidarity on the grounds of mistreatment led to pan-Arab sentiments as a uniting factor in labor organization. The historical record detailed several instances of firm strike-busting coinciding with a refinery expansion program in 1944 to fuel the Pacific theater of World War II.38 The enlargement of the oil operation drove Aramco to begin active recruitment in India.39 However, this new workforce reacted immediately to 33 Parker, 45.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid.

36 Ibid., 48.

37 Ibid., 45.

38 I. J Seccombe and R. I. Lawless, “Foreign Worker Dependence in the Gulf, and the International Oil Companies: 1910-50.” The International Migration Review 20, no. 3 (1986): 562.

39 Ibid.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. III | Issue 1 the inequality built into the Aramco camps.

The Indians employees recruited for Aramco organized the first strike in Saudi Arabia in March 1943, which almost resulted in a ban of further Indian immigrants.40 The Saudis and Aramco were quick to quell potential unrest, securing the economic viability of their transnational project of oil extraction. This mindset was evident in subsequent years. In 1944, Aramco needed migrants to fill more labor gaps, and while other companies continued to use Indian labor, Aramco decided to switch from Indians, and recruit Italians from Eritrea, who did not have a history of labor strikes.41 Aramco saw it necessary to control migrant labor in order to ensure smooth operations on their concession land. Aramco had zero tolerance for labor struggles impeding progress, especially during the Allied wartime effort.

Aramco’s subsequent actions against their workers did not reflect the solidarity in culture nor the equality which Aramco World championed. The first strikes at Aramco over pay “are accompanied by references to Iraqi ‘trouble-makers’ (read activists), as well as references to the organizational efforts of ‘the better-educated Hijazi clerks.’”42 The records clearly delineated nationality and ethnicity when recording which groups created unrest, indicating the highly racialized life in Dhahran. On August 4th, 1945, “the entire force of 9,000 Arabs employed in Dhahran, Ras Tanura, and the out- lying worksites…defied the Amir and resumed the strike against Aramco.”43 The blatant inequality created backlash in the Arab community in the late 1940s, as a continuation of the discontent which the Indian workers instigated. Workers organized in the late 1940s demanding “equitable treatment with a privileged minority of white drillers and managers.”44 Pakistani workers who organized a union of Aramco workers were fired, and after their repatriation to Pakistan, they revealed the mistreatment and racism that they experienced at Dhahran for the newspaper the New Orient.45 The sordid details of Dhahran, the unsanitary quarters and rampant racism, served to demonstrate the worker’s political engagement. Workers were not numb to the stratified hierarchy in which they worked. The organization and solidarity which 40 Ibid., 570.

41 Ibid., 571.

42 Chalcraft, 38.

43 Ibid.

44 Vitalis, 107.

45 Ibid., 102.

12 emerged from worker protests posed a formidable challenge to Aramco World’s narrative of collaboration and shared identity.

The unrest caused considerable worry within Aramco’s ranks. In 1948, senior executives gathered in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania to stem the unrest.46 Instead of resolving the labor issue with reforms which would benefit Saudi and migrant workers, Aramco decided to ignore the issue. This conscious choice is reflected in the continuation of strikes through the late 1940s and early 1950s. During this period, the Arab workers began to visualize their shared Arab identity as an axis of change. Radical Saudi Arabians created newspapers “filled with letters and editorials discussing the Arab Nation and community grievances,” thus ‘‘[appropriating] Arab nationalism’’ and developing a ‘‘framework for criticizing the Saudi state and critiques of development.”47 By proliferating easily consumable media, pan-Arab ideas spread rapidly, imbuing workers with a sense of agency.

The increased circulation of pan-Arab ideals contributed to the demands from the strikes in 1953 and 1956, which “referred to pay, conditions, equality with American workers, living conditions, the right to elect worker representatives, an end to discrimination against the Shi’a, a more equitable distribution of oil revenues, and closing the American air force base.”48 These demands did not simply reflect a worker’s consciousness as an exploited cog in a well-oiled machine, but extended farther to Aramco’s presence as an institution. The air base, for example, was a collaboration between the United States government, Aramco, and the Saudi monarchy. Aramco and the Saudi government felt threatened by this large-scale organization and solidarity, resulting in the deportation of many of the strike leaders and foreign workers participating in the strike.49 In order to solidify the crackdown, the Saudi government banned labor organizations beginning in 1958.50 The resistance against imperialism and an46 Ibid., 105.

47 Toby Matthiesen, “Migration, Minorities, and Radical Networks: Labour Movements and Opposition Groups in Saudi Arabia, 1950–1975,” International Review of Social History 59, no. 3 (2014): 485-486.

48 Chalcraft, 38.

49 Matthiesen, 489.

50 Salah T. Mahdi and Armando Barrientos, “Saudisation and employment in Saudi Arabia,” Career Development International 8 no. 2 (2003): 74.

ti-Shia sentiment demonstrates the exclusionary nature of the al-Saud monarchy and Aramco’s transnational project. As soon as Arab workers developed an understanding of their plight instead of conforming to the Aramco World narrative, the Saudi government and Aramco stepped in to ensure that their profit-driven interests were secure from the will of the pan-Arab strikes and demands. William Mulligan provides the antidote to this clear denouncement of Aramco, discussing in Aramco World that workers “petitioned” for better housing and transportation because of their fixed status in Aramco, as opposed to the “transients,” who supposedly appreciated the “bunkhouses.”51 The Aramco World narrative flattened the demands into a simple petition, and removed the space for resistance by moving onto the ways in which Aramco created better housing for Saudis.

Arab Aramco workers created their own transnational Arab identity, bolstered by similar overseas movements. The “cycle of contention” in 1956 was contemporaneous with protests in Bahrain, which may have contributed to the voracity of the movement’s strength.52 The potential pan-Arab dimension to the worker unrest was particularly frightening to the Aramco leadership.53 The consequences of pan-Arabism for Aramco were worker solidarity, larger and better sustained movements, and damage to Aramco’s profit margins.

Although Aramco replaced the striking Indian workers with Italians from Eritrea, pan-Arab sentiments as a source of transnational sympathy made it harder to find a workforce immune to these ideas. Even King Saud turned a “deaf ear” to the Aramco protesters because they helped pan-Arab identity, especially because Shi’a workers were important organizers of the strikes.54 Contemporaneously, Aramco World published an article in the January 1961 edition called “Perseverance Pays Off.” This story details the economic uplift of local Saudi Arabians from construction projects in Dammam, specifically the gradual enrichment of Abdullah Fouad, a contractor who experienced success building oil installations for Aramco. He attested to the deliberate interest which Aramco takes in bettering the lives 51 William Mulligan, “A Kingdom and a Company,” Aramco World, May/June 1984, 49.

52 Chalcraft, 39.

53 Laurence Louër, Transnational Shia Politics: Religious and Political Networks in the Gulf (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 43.

54 Ibid.

13

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. III | Issue 1

of Saudi Arabians. Fouad was directly quoted as saying that “Aramco doesn’t want contractors to lose money.

It wants them to make money.”55 Fouad is depicted to believe in Aramco’s genuine desire to enrich local populations. The testimony of Abdullah Fouad attempted to show the American public the power of American ideals of uplift at work. Aramco needed to uphold the idea that they were adhering to their original concession agreement quoted in Errichiello’s article, whereby “the enterprise [ARAMCO] under this contract shall be directed and supervised by Americans who shall employ Saudi Arab nationals as far as practicable, and in so far as the company can find suitable Saudi Arab nationals it will not employ other nationals.”56 Through its utilization of migrant labor as a mechanism of control, Aramco violated this section of the concession.

To cover up the potential existential threats that this clause posed, Aramco World created a new narrative of Saudi Arabian uplift. Fouad’s story deliberately counters the rising pan-Arab and anti-Aramco spirit by claiming that Aramco benefits Arabs; however, the strength of the Arab activism was too potent to be crushed under the glossy narrative. The outward facing Aramco World narrative of idealism stood in contrast to the company’s concerted efforts to delegitimize the pan-Arab sentiments spreading through Dharhan and Ras Tanura.

fought together to combat pan-Arabism and labor organization to preserve the profitability of the transnational project, Abdullah Tariki refused to follow the goals of these two institutions. Tariki, an early government liaison to Aramco and the Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources from 1960 to 1962, pioneered the cause of pan-Arabism and anti-Aramco sentiment in the Saudi government. During his tenure as Director-General of Petroleum and Mineral Affairs in the Ministry of Finance and National Economy, Tariki criticized Aramco, albeit in muted tones, for not supporting local populations, which was a directive of Aramco from its conception.57 His views became stronger as he began to see oil as a crucial modernizing force for Saudi Arabia.58 Tariki vociferously attacked the hierarchy which Aramco created in the Eastern Province, as well as Aramco’s evasion of the tenets of the concession.59 Tariki viewed “the Middle East [as] one economic unit and that the oil- producing nations must aid in the economic development of the non-producing nations.”60 These views, inspired by the pan-Arab world Gamel Abdul Nasser envisioned, developed from Tariki’s earlier exposure to Aramco’s discrimination.61 As minister of oil, Tariki pictured the oil rents of Saudi Arabia improving the lives of Saudi Arabians first, and consequently financing industrialization and agriculture in other Arab states.62 Tariki’s understanding of Aramco as a leech on Saudi riches posed a considerable existential threat to Aramco as an American institution in Saudi Arabia, but also posed a danger to the Saudi royal family in undermining the diplomatic relationship between the United States and the al-Saud family. Losing American financial support would deeply affect Saudi Arabia, even though they would keep the lion’s share of their oil profits. The existential threat of Tariki affected each party complicit in the creation of Aramco.

Tariki’s increasingly radical discourse precipitated his exile. His fall from grace was accompanied by anti-Nasser actions. Aramco and the United States government took drastic measures to ensure that Tariki would not have a detrimental effect on Aramco, a

Figure 3: Picture of Abdullah, a construction worker employed

by Aramco, Aramco World, January 1961.

57 Stephen Duguid, “A Biographical Approach to the Study of Social Change in the Middle East: Abdullah Tariki as a New Man,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 1, no. 3 (1970): 201.

55 “Perseverance Pays Off,” Aramco World, January 1961, 5.

56 Gennaro Errichiello, “Foreign Workforce in the Arab Gulf States (1930—1950): Migration Patterns and Nationality Clause,” International Migration Review 46, no. 2 (2012): 407.

58 Ibid., 202.

59 Vitalis, 135.

60 Duguid, 209.

61 Ibid., 202.

62 Ibid., 209.

While Aramco and the Saudi government

14 crucial entity protected by United States foreign policy. Aramco’s administration split the world between pro-Aramco or pro-communist; thus, Tariki was colloquially known as “that red bastard in Riyadh.”63 Ambassador Donald R. Heath paid a visit to King Saud in 1958 and warned him of Tariki’s emerging Arabization policies, and the King promised that Tariki would never be allowed to succeed to the throne.64 A year prior to this visit, Saudi government use of Aramco planes and books had been denied, and after Heath’s visit and consequent agreement, the ban was reversed, and Aramco’s president approved a loan of $2 million to the Saudi government.65 Aramco successfully held the Saudi government hostage, completely reversing its commitment to abstaining from the internal affairs of Saudi Arabia. As a complementary measure to Aramco’s policy of extortion, Faisal was praised as a reformer when his foreign policy aligned with the United States, so his public image was shaped by Western newspapers and the media.66 In Saudi Arabia, Faisal appointed new people to head leading newspapers to oppose Nasser, who was considered as an antagonist of the United States.67 Tariki embodied the face of opposition to American intervention in Saudi Arabian affairs, and Faisal’s response to Tariki normalized those same policy tenets.

After he was fired and exiled to Lebanon, Tariki recognized the mechanisms which entrapped him; “[Aramco’s] profits are huge and they form governments inside the governments of the countries where they operate.”68 Tariki’s ousting represents divergence from the Aramco World narrative of shared identity and cooperation, as striking workers or non-conforming political figures were deposed with a heavy hand.

Through a carefully planned Aramco World narrative, Aramco camouflaged the inner workings of its extraction empire in order to maintain their legitimacy. Aramco fought off waves of dissent regarding treacherous conditions, segregation, unequal pay, and racial inequality. Aramco weathered these attempts to limit authority by underscoring their importance to the Saudi economy, which the Saudi government recognized and acted accordingly, supporting Aramco to the denigration of the low skilled worker populations.

63 Vitalis, 135.

64 Ibid., 212.

65 Ibid., 213.

66 Ibid.

67 Ibid., 231-5.

68 Duguid, 216.

Aramco created the veneer of uplift for Saudi populations, similar to the aims of the Vision 2030 plan, while in reality the Saudis were used as a tool to achieve Aramco’s institutional status, guaranteeing its existence under the terms of the original concession. Quite opposed to the terms of the original concessions, Aramco’s history of ascendance in power maps onto its trajectory in oil production. Aramco’s political power was symbiotic with its importance as a source of revenues for the Saudi government, giving it tremendous leeway in labor practices and American employee conduct.

These symbioses created the “mythic” conception of Aramco, which Mulligan highlighted in “A Kingdom and a Company.” The history of Aramco lives on through resonances of the labor control tactics used

by Mohammed Bin Salman through his Vision 2030 plans. The use of a strong narrative, however divergent from the truth, remains a strong way to guarantee power and control.

Figure 4: A wide expanse of Saudi Arabian desert, Aramco World, March/April 1967.

________________

15

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. III | Issue 1

The Amboyna Massacre A Global Turn In Early Modern English Foreighn Policy Shayiq Ahmed Shah

Middlebury College - Class of 2024

“The King of Spain has verified the proverb that a King’s daughters are so many ways to deceive his neighbours. The match is injurious to the State, for since the treaty began, the Palatinate and almost all Protestantism abroad are lost, and much Papistry sprung up at home. To proceed with the treaty would only subject us to more abuse, and entangle us in a net; the Spaniards confess they never intended the match, till the Prince paid them the compliment of going over, and will they change for that? If we break it off, we must make war, or at least prepare for it. Protestantism is scattered and disunited in Germany; suppressed in France; threatened in Holland. The Low Countries have now the inestimable jewels of this Crowne in their keeping and are our outworks.”

Sir Ben Rudyard, House of Commons. March 1, 1624.

Sir Benjamin Rudyard’s speech in the House of Commons revealed the twin foundations of early modern English foreign policy: dynasty and religion. All important foreign policy measures either increased the dynastic power of the Stuart monarchs or preserved the Protestant faith, domestically or in continental Europe.

The emphasis on dynasty and religion was evident in the events leading up to and during the Parliament of 1624 in London. Before then, King James I had spent the better half of two decades pursuing a dynastic marriage with the Spanish Habsburgs attempting to secure a union of a Spanish bride with his son Henry first and then Charles later. In February of 1624, the King admitted Spain’s treacherous nature during marriage negotiations before the Parliament. In his address to the Parliament, James declared “(the Crown) Has long been engaged in treaties, hoping to settle the peace of Christendom, but on account of the long de-

lays, allowed his son to go to Spain, and thereby found how fallacious were the treaties.”1 Keen to avoid any criticism or speculation, the King carefully noted that, during negotiations with Catholic Spain, he constantly upheld the Protestant faith. His address further stressed that he “never neglected religion as accused, nor intended more than a temporary alleviation of the penal statutes against Catholics.”2 Dynasty and religion were foundational in the formulation of the early modern English foreign policy for the English Crown.

Recent scholarship challenges dynasty and religion’s centrality to early Stuart foreign policy by alternatively placing emphasis on global events happening in territories on the other side of the world from Europe, specifically in the East Indies. This appears to have much to do with the current interest in globalising history. Valentina Caldari, a historian at the University of Cambridge, discusses the “imperial rivalry” between England, the Iberian powers, and the Dutch in the East Indies, and considers it as instrumental for dynasty politics in Europe. She argues that European powers were increasingly aware of the “delicate balance in the Indies.” Caldari claims that when such a balance was “lacking outside of Europe, the consequences were concretely observed in the dynastic negotiations between the two European ruling houses.”3 This claim lies at the heart of Caldari’s work. Such weighing of global matters challenges and undermines the decisive nature of dynasty and religion as the foundation for early modern English foreign policy. The current pre1 Calendar of State Papers Domestic, James I, 1623-1625, 166.

(Henceforth cited as CSPD).

2 CSDP, 166.

3 Valentina Caldari, “The End of the Anglo-Spanish Match in Global Context, 1617-1624” (Thesis, University of Kent, 2015), 14.

17 dilection with globalising history can be further seen in Marvin Breslow’s work when he argues that Amboyna was the “most spectacular conflict between England and the United Provinces for it seriously strained the generally favourable impression of the Dutch held by many in England.”4 Breslow’s claims elevate the incident at Amboyna from a product of customary friction between the English and Dutch East India companies (EIC and VOC respectively) to a larger diplomatic dispute between the English kingdom and the Dutch republic. A similar tone of dramatisation is observed in the work of Allison Games, a historian at Georgetown. Games analyses the portrayal of the incident as a massacre by the EIC. For Games, such a portrayal “transformed the episode into a European story, a crisis produced by European conflict that required resolution in Europe.”5 Recent literature blurs the lines between the company and the Crown by treating company competition as conflict between European powers. Seemingly far- flung events have been deemed as extremely influential in the formulation of early modern English foreign policy.

This research will argue that globalising the history of early English foreign policy seriously inflates Amboyna’s significance; in reality, Amboyna produced negligible impact on Stuart foreign policy.

Foreign policy in the parliamentary session of 1624 still pivoted around dynastic politics and religion. Nevertheless, almost inexplicably, recent globalising perspectives of the history of early modern English diplomacy have taken the view that the incident at Amboyna placed King James, and later Prince Charles, on the “horns of a dilemma,” as claimed by Caldari.6 Chancey agrees with Caldari’s assertion and argues that to achieve a resolution to the problem arising from Amboyna, James was presented with a complicated situation, what she terms as a “diplomatic dilemma.”7 In contradiction, this essay argues that the events at Amboyna are peripheral at best, when it comes to impacting early modern English foreign policy. Amboyna did not place the English on the “horns of a dilemma.” In4 Marvin A Breslow, A mirror of England: English Puritan views of foreign nations, 1618-1640. Vol. 8400 (Harvard Univ. Press, 1970), 90.

5 Alison Games, Inventing the English Massacre: Amboyna in History and Memory (USA: Oxford University Press, 2020), 77.

6 Caldari, “The End of the Anglo-Spanish Match in Global Context, 1617-1624”.

7 Karen Chancey, “The Amboyna Massacre in English Politics, 1624–16321,” Albion 30, no. 4 (1998): 583.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. III | Issue 1 stead, it was a merely inconvenient diplomatic embarrassment for James and Charles. Meanwhile, dynasty and religion continued playing a drastically more significant and foundational role.

On March 9, 1623, Harman van Speult, the Dutch governor of the Amboyna Island in Indonesia, ordered the beheading of ten English traders. The Dutch accused these traders of conspiring to seize control of Fort Victoria, the island’s Dutch stronghold. According to the EIC’s pamphlet, named “A True Relation of the Unjust, Cruel, and Barbarous Proceedings against the English,” a Japanese soldier had raised suspicion after inquiring about the fortifications at Victoria to a Dutch sentinel.

Figure 1: Map of Amboyna in the East Indies8

Upon imprisonment and subsequent torture, the Japanese soldier confessed and implicated other Japanese residents and English traders on the island in a conspiracy to overthrow the Dutch. This confession led to nine Japanese, ten English, and one Portuguese being executed. The Dutch accused the EIC general, Captain Gabriel Towerson, of instigating such a treacherous revolt. The EIC’s pamphlet, A True Relation, points to the insincerity of English confessions noting that they were taken during torture and therefore could not be trusted. The pamphlet quotes an English prisoner, who said, “they (the Dutch) should do him a great favour, to tell him what they would have him say, and he would speak it, to avoid the torture.” Capturing the resolve of the condemned merchants, A True Relation claims that the convicted English traders urged their fellow traders, who had escaped the sentencing, to “bear witness to their friends in England of their inno-

8 Caldari, “The End of the Anglo-Spanish Match in Global Context, 1617-1624”, 165.

18 cency.”9 Even though the “Dutch betrayal” at Amboyna happened between February and March of 1623, news of its occurrence only reached London in May 1624.

John Chamberlain, the most influential writer from the period, wrote a letter to Dudley Carlton, the English ambassador to the Dutch, that characterised the English’s’ anger towards the Dutch. Voicing his disapproval of the English merchants’ beheading, Chamberlain writes, “And now in the very nicke comes newes how barbarously the Hollanders have dealt with our men in the East Indies in cutting of ten of our principall factors heads after they had tortured them, upon colour of a plot that had to surprise their fort of Amboyna.” Such disapproval of the actions of the VOC in the East Indies quickly became popular in England. The anti-Dutch public sentiment reached such alarming levels that the government felt compelled to order an extra 800 men to maintain order in London on Shrove Tuesday in 1625 fearing anti-Dutch riots.10 Such outrage, Milton claims, is the product of the “public sphere.” The EIC’s strategic propaganda campaigns that were carefully manipulated to invoke feelings of anger from the English public were responsible for the invoking of this public sphere. Inexplicably, such public outrage found little representation in the foreign policy of the English Parliament.

On June 17, 1624, Secretary Conway sent a letter to Prince of Orange of the Netherlands reassuring him of King James’s affection to the Prince and the United Provinces “which will increase daily.” Secretary Conway reminded the Prince to prevent the “ill offices and bad feelings” by Dutch subjects upon those of his Majesty in the East Indies.11 Chamberlain deemed Conway and James’s approach to be too soft or too inactive and voiced such frustrations with James. In a letter addressed to the English Ambassador in Amsterdam, Dudley Carlton, Chamberlain wished that James 9 Skinner, Bentley, Hope, Sheares, and Diggs. A True Relation of the Unjust, Cruel, and Barbarous Proceedings against the English at Amboyna in the East-Indies, by the Netherlandish Governour & Council There: Also the Copie of a Pamphlet of the Dutch in Defence of the Action. Published by Authoritie.

London: Printed by Will. Bentley, 7.

10 Anthony Milton, “Marketing a massacre: Amboyna, the East India Company and the public sphere in early Stuart England,” in The politics of the public sphere in early modern England (2007), 168.

11 Calendar of State Papers Colonial, East Indies Volume 4 1622- 1624, 475. (Henceforth cited as CSPC)

“would say lesse and wold do more.”12 On the other hand, many in Parliament praised King James and his seemingly passive response to the news of Amboyna.

In a letter to Conway, Carleton praises King James, writing that he, “cannot but much admire the King’s wisdom in one particular of this proceeding, as in all things else, for distinguishing so aptly (in this bloody accident of the Amboyna, which might breed ill blood) betwixt the States General and the Bewinthebbers— the United provinces and the East Indies—till he see whether the actions there be avowed here, which hitherto they are not, but on the contrary, the States, on the receipt of Conway’s letter to the Prince, have summoned the Bewinthebbers to a more strict account of their proceeding against his Majesty’s subjects.”13 It is evident here that, at least in the Parliament of 1624, the English commonly believed that the VOC must be treated separately from the Dutch republic. Both the VOC and the Dutch Republic had their own considerations for their respective foreign policies with the VOC’s based on economic interests while that of the republic, this essay claims, was founded on dynastic interests and religious preservation.

A similar analytical framework must be applied to the EIC’s relationship with the Crown in England.

The EIC’s foreign policies and ambitions were different from the Crown’s. Even though, constitutionally, it was the Crown that was responsible for foreign policy decisions, there were numerous other actors affected foreign policy such as popular opinion and not in the least- the EIC itself. Having said that, this essay argues that although the EIC exerted some influence over the Crown’s foreign policy, the Crown ultimately shaped early modern English foreign policy. Although events such as Amboyna may have been significant for the EIC, they remained a minor inconvenience for the Crown rather than a diplomatic disaster.

This essay evaluates Amboyna’s impact, or lack thereof, on two of the most pressing foreign policy debates in England during the 1620’s- the Spanish Match and the protection of the Protestant faith in Europe. In doing so, this essay finds that Amboyna’s impact on early modern English foreign policy has been negligible at best with dynastic and religious matters still being of paramount importance, making Amboyna a minor inconvenience rather than a diplomatic dilemma.

12 John Chamberlain, The Letters of John Chamberlain Vol. 2, no. 2. American philosophical society (1939), 568.

13 CSPC, 480.

19

Amboyna and the Spanish Match Queen Anne, James I’s wife, first suggested an Anglo-Spanish royal marriage. Her proposition for such an alliance during the Treaty of London, in 1604, did not come to fruition as neither James I nor Phillip III were prepared to make necessary religious compromises to realise a marriage between Protestant England and Catholic Spain.14 A few years later, the Count of Gondomar, the new Spanish ambassador to England proposed the marriage alliance again. Gondomar was motivated to prevent a possible English intervention in the Palatine on behalf of the German protestants.15 He was convinced that the Anglo-Dutch alliance could be disrupted, if the right terms were granted to James I.16 Gondomar was correct. James was capable of being pursued away from the Anglo-Dutch alliance with the right treat conditions.

To some, the events at Amboyna made an Anglo-Spanish match even more probable. Caldari’s bases her claim about Amboyna’s influential nature on foreign policy on King James’s reiteration of his position that it was more important than ever to successfully achieve the match with Spain. Evidence for this can be found in Carleton’s letter to Buckingham addressing Amboyna’s impact on the Spanish match. Carleton told the Duke that the “entering [by the Dutch] into open hostility in the East Indies” has made the King even more inclined to the Spanish alliance.17 Caldari claims that such increasing rivalries between the English and the Dutch, regarding the East Indian trade, produces an “inextricable link” with the “diplomacy of the Anglo-Spanish match.”18 Caldari and Carleton logically conclude that VOC’s open hostilities in the East Indies would push England closer to Spain, yet they did not. Proceedings at the Parliament of 1624 effectively terminated all negotiations with Spain with Charles and Buckingham successfully rallying anti-Spanish voices in declaring war on Catholic Spain.

14 Ethel Carleton Williams, Anne of Denmark: Wife of James VI of Scotland, James I of England (Longman Publishing Group, 1970), 146.

15 Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess: Thomas Middleton (Manchester University Press, 1997), 14.

16 Simon Adams, “Spain or the Netherlands? The dilemmas of early Stuart foreign policy,” in Before the English Civil War: Essays on Early Stuart Politics and Government (1983), 89.

17 CSPC, East, vol. 4, Carleton to the Duke of Buckingham, s.d.

[1624].

18 Caldari, 168.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. III | Issue 1 Such a chain of events contradicts Carleton’s prediction and is therefore at odds with Caldari’s explanations for foreign policy decisions. Therefore, Caldari’s narrative scratches nothing but the surface of the complexity of early modern English foreign policy decisions. Nevertheless, the events in the Parliament and the decisions taken regarding the Spanish Match can be explained by identifying not peripheral events such as Amboyna but dynasty and religion as the twin foundations driving foreign policy decisions.

Rather than Amboyna, the Spanish Match relied on two other elements- the Palatinate’s fate and negotiations for Catholic toleration in England. These two elements generated the desire for the marriage, drove the nature of negotiations, and determined the eventual failed outcome. Amboyna played no role in any of these three crucial segments of the Spanish Match.

Rather, the twin foundations of dynastic interests and religious preservation impacted these elements. The first of these elements revolved around the fate of the Palatinate. From the English Crown’s perspective the Spanish Match was viewed as the potential guarantee of the defence of the Stuart dynastic interest in the hereditary lands of the Elector Palatine Frederick V.19 Married to James’s daughter Elizabeth, Frederick was living in exile in the Netherlands after having been forced from his throne after the Spanish invaded in 1620.20 Motivated by dynastic interests instead of familial affection, James had sworn to restore the status of his daughter and son in law. He viewed this as a way to achieve a restoration of his grandchildren’s inheritance.21 Having said that, the concern for the Palatinate’s fate included not only dynastic interests but also concerns for the Protestant faith. The Protestant fate in Germany in 1623 looked bleak with the population of Bohemia having been converted by imperial troops, Protestant refugees from the Palatinate fleeing to safety in the Netherlands, and the Danish army having suffered huge losses.22 Dudley Carleton captures Protestantism’s grim fate in his letter to the Duke of Buckingham noting that “for these three or fower yeares past affaires on this side have gone in a continual decadence 19 Adams, “Spain or the Netherlands? The dilemmas of early Stuart foreign policy,” 80.

20 Chancey, “The Amboyna Massacre in English Politics, 1624–16321,” 590.

21 Simon L Adams, “Foreign Policy and the Parliaments of 1621 and 1624,” in Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History (1978), 149.

22 Chancey, 590.

20 and now threaten a final mine, unless it be withstoode by some princely resolution.”23 Thus, the search for a resolution to the Palatinate affair generated the desire for a Spanish Match, riddled with dynastic and religious interests in Europe and not events in any other part of the world such as Amboyna.

The twin foundations, dynasty, and religion, drove the nature of negotiations between Catholic Spain and Protestant England. Catholic Spain’s representatives showed enthusiasm for the successful completion of the marriage between Prince Charles and Spanish Infanta Maria. Gondomar displayed such readiness, urging Prince Charles to come to Madrid in 1623 as Spain was ready to “be mounted.”24 Gondomar’s optimism for the match between Prince Charles and the Infanta Maria was no longer shared by Philip III or Phillip IV who had grown disillusioned by the match.

Unexpectedly, this interest would resurface dramatically in Catholic Spain upon the visit of Charles and the favourite, Duke of Buckingham to Madrid. As Redworth notes that while it was not unprecedented to sail to your wife’s country once the marriage was concluded, as James did himself, however the case of Charles was vastly different.25 Charles, the son of a King, had travelled to court the daughter of another King before the marriage articles were agreed upon.

Such a dramatic and unusual gesture was perceived as, by the Venetian envoy, as a sign of Charles’s willingness to convert to Catolicism for his marriage to Infanta Maria. Not only the Venetian envoy, but the Count of Olivares shared a similar perspective on the prince’s visit to Madrid. Buckingham narrated his conversation with Olivares, in which Olivares revealed his assumption that Charles’s conversion was imminent.26 Buckingham refuted Olivares’s assumption and claimed that Charles would rather renounce his marriage rather than convert to Catholicism. The effect of the religious divide between the two parties was evident in the nature of negotiations. Moreover, dynastic interests also impacted the nature of negotiations. The Spanish Match guaranteed Palatinate’s Restoration for the Stuarts. However, Philipp IV lacked the political abilities to do so. The Duke of Bavaria, who controlled

the Upper Palatinate, had been promised the lands for his support in the imperial cause by the emperor. The Archduchess of Isabella controlled the lower Palatinate and not Philip IV. Catholic Spain was negotiating on a territory it did not possess and therefore could not give any concrete guarantees or agree to definitive treaty arrangements. This led to the furthering of the English away from the marriage alliance. Therefore, such negotiations reveal the continuing importance of dynastic interests and religious preservations in early modern English foreign policy.

Amboyna also did not in any way impact the third crucial element of the Spanish Match- its eventual failure. Adams has rightfully identified that in Stuart parliaments, debates over foreign policy were “debates over means rather than ends.”27 The overarching policy goal was the Palatinate’s restoration, and the Spanish marriage alliance was the means to that end. In the years preceding 1624, James seemed to have been more devoted to the means (the Spanish match) rather than the end (Palatinate restoration).28 He remained hopeful for the success of the marriage diplomacy with Catholic Spain and even dissolved the Parliament of 1621 after it suggested that the monarch cut ties with Spain.29 Nevertheless, Prince Charles’s visit to Madrid had raised the expectations for the Match’s success in both England and Spain. However, his visit to Madrid also gave Phillip IV significant political leverage in the marriage negotiations. This concerned the English ambassador to Spain, the Earl of Bristol. Commenting on the suddenness of Charles’s visit, having not been warned, the Earl of Bristol remarked that “nothing could have happened stranger and more unexpected unto me.” Redworth captures that the Earl of Bristol’s concerns lied in the possibility that the presence of the Stuart’s heir at the court of Phillip IV would dramatically increase Spanish demands for a successful conclusion of the Anglo-Spanish marriage arrangement.30 The embarrassing marriage concessions that the English ceded, reveal that Bristol’s assumptions were accurate. The marriage treaty had “four private articles” to which James and certain Privy councillors

23 CSPD, Sir Dudley Carleton to the Duke of Buckingham, December 13, 1623.

24 Middleton, A game at Chess: Thomas Middleton, 12.

25 Glyn Redworth, The Prince and the Infanta: the cultural politics of the Spanish match (Yale University Press, 2003), 4.

26 Robert E Ruigh, The Parliament of 1624: Politics and Foreign Policy No. 87 (Harvard University Press, 1971), 163-165.

27 Adams, Spain or Netherlands, 90.

28 Ruigh, The Parliament of 1624: Politics and Foreign Policy, 384-387.

29 Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English politics 1621–1629 (1979), 133-135.

30 Redworth, The Prince and the Infanta: the cultural politics of the Spanish match, 75.

21 had sworn an oath to.31 These articles inherently sanctioned the practice of Catholicism in England. Moreover, Charles agreed to receive Catholic instruction whenever the Infanta wished so during their marriage.

Such terms embarrassed the Crown, and continuation of the negotiations with Spain on such marriage terms would not have been accepted in parliament. When Charles returned along with Buckingham in October 1623 to London, Thomas Middleton cleverly described his condition as “still protestant and safe.”32 Therefore, the marriage negotiations raised serious concerns for the English monarchy’s Protestant faith. Such failure to reconcile religious expectations of Catholic Spain with concessions that the English Protestant parliament would be willing to make was what caused the eventual failure of the Spanish match, not Amboyna.

After the Privy Council decided to terminate negotiations with Spain, Parliament was a relieved body. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s speech thanked God for “opening the King’s eyes to see how he has been abused; then, thanks to the King for the honour done in consulting them, and next, thanks to the Commons for their concurrence in opinion.”33 Nonetheless, having already squabbled with MPs in the Parliament of 1621, it was clear that King James’s reputation had waned by 1624. As quoted in Breslow’s work, Alexander Leighton’s pamphlet, Speculum Belli Sacri (the looking glass of the Holy War) compared the Parliament of 1624 to the gathering of Israel at Hebron.34 King David, for this gathering, was not to be King James but instead the role was shared by Prince Charles and the favourite, Duke of Buckingham. Gondomar accurately warned James that Buckingham, having called for a Parliament, would enjoy popular support.35 James’s influence had significantly reduced with Charles and Buckingham’s ascendancy in foreign affairs. Therefore, if Caldari’s central claim of Amboyna’s importance relies on the reinvigoration of James’s desires for a Spanish match, such claims are on thin ground. Firstly, James’s undiminished enthusiasm for an Anglo-Spanish alliance had existed for almost two decades before Amboyna happened.

Scholarship that focuses on the globalised history of foreign policy fails to highlight Amboyna’s exclusivity in invoking James’s enthusiasm for a Spanish bride.

31 Ibid., 13.

32 Middleton, 13.

33 CSDP James I, 1623-1625, 175.

34 Breslow, 28.

35 CSPD, James I, XI, 231.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. III | Issue 1 What exclusivity did Amboyna hold that would have excited James for the Spanish match any different from his existing excitement from the two decades prior is a question left unanswered. Secondly, even if taken at its best and we assume such exclusive invigoration for a Spanish alliance from Amboyna, this essay demonstrates James’s reducing influence and limited control over foreign policy discussions. Instead, Stuart dynastic interests in the Palatinate’s restoration and the preservation of the Protestant faith are much graver considerations for foreign policy decisions of the Stuarts regarding the Spanish Match. Such an analysis affirms dynasty and religion as the twin foundations for early modern English foreign policy and counters the misplaced importance bestowed on Amboyna.

Amboyna and the Anglo-Dutch alliance The EIC and VOC had shared the East Indies as a theatre for their “imperial rivalry.” The Treaty Provisions of 1619 had identified the Dutch as the major power in the East Indies by awarding rights over twothird of total trade in the region. To say that the relations were tense between the two companies would massively underplay the regular friction and animosity between them. Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the governor of the Dutch possessions in the East from 1618-1623 and for a second time from 1627-1629, reflects such animosity. Remarking on the Treaty of 1619, he considered it unfairly advantageous to the English as he believed that they had “no claim to a single grain of sand” on the islands of Moluccas, Amboyna, or Banda.36 Paradoxically, while English and Dutch companies were engaged in constant rivalry, the English kingdom and the Dutch republic had enjoyed a stable relationship in the years preceding 1624 and an even stronger one later. The Parliament seemed to perceive the Dutch positively. The Dutch were seen, by John Holles, a member of Parliament, as the “bulwark of Christendom,” that having stood firm against Spanish aggression had protected England.37 Such differences highlight the importance of treating the EIC’s and the Crown’s policies as separate, a key analytical aspect overlooked by recent literature. Amboyna, according to the globalised historical perspective, should serve as too inflammatory of a flashpoint for an Anglo-Dutch alliance to continue in any form after. The Venetian am36 Caldari, 172.

37 Quoted in Caldari, 194.

22 bassador in London incorrectly assumed that Amboyna meant the end of the Anglo-Dutch alliance.38 In June of 1624, less than a month after the news of Amboyna, King James agreed to pay 6,000 troops for a two year period to assist the United Provinces in maintaining their independence from the Spanish.39 Additionally, Charles signed the Treaty of Southampton with the United Provinces the following year in 1625 in opposition to the Spanish. Therefore, it is hard to see how Amboyna impacted Stuart relations with the Dutch in any way as the Crown’s policy ambitions superseded those of the EIC. Like in the Spanish marriage affair, we must counter a misplaced emphasis on globalised history and return to our twin foundations of dynasty and religion to understand the actions of both the EIC and the Crown. Milton, a leading scholar on the subject, rightly identifies the role of the political and religious pressures on the EIC in their careful depiction of the Amboyna incident. He identifies that the company was occasionally the target of the country’s criticism for three key reasons: being a private monopoly, exporting bullion, and constantly clashing with Protestant Dutch, the most important reason being the last.40 Competing with Protestant Dutch made the company vulnerable to charges of undermining Protestant unity. To counter such an image, the EIC had to ensure that they engaged in public signs of Protestant zeal to reaffirm their perception as a Protestant organisation. Dudley Diggs’s work, The Defence of Trade, written in 1615 was aimed at reinforcing a similar Protestant image of the EIC. He stated that the EIC was contributing “good summes of money yearely to releeve poore painfull preachers of the Gospell.”41 Depiction of Amboyna was carefully manipulated by various actors to further uphold the Protestant and innocent perception of the EIC traders. John Goninge, the EIC trader at Batavia was the first to deploy the term “massacre” to describe Amboyna. He identified three key features of the incident, all of which are equally important in inventing a massacre, as Games argues. First was the act of the massacre itself- the butchering of the English traders. Secondly, the perceived innocence of these said victims. And lastly, the 38 Calendar of State Papers Venetian, 18: 359.

39 Chancey, 592.

40 Milton, “Marketing a massacre: Amboyna, the East India Company and the public sphere in early Stuart England,” 170172.

41 Milton, 171,172.

fear and uncertainty of Dutch authority.42 Each of these have been invoked by different artwork or literature surrounding the incident at Amboyna. Three of such pieces are noteworthy to discuss. To invoke a vivid image of the act of the massacre itself, the woodcut piece is particularly notable. An image of a woodcut with English traders being hung up on crosses appeared in second editions of the company’s accounts of what happened at Amboyna.43

Figure 2: Image in the second edition of the EIC pamphlet.44

At least one of the figures represented seems to have been chosen from a description of a martyr in the 1570 editions of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.45 Secondly, to alleviate the condemned merchants of all accusations, the company published A True Relations which famously claims that the merchants were “martyred by torture.”46 A third piece completed this image of a massacre of Protestant English merchants. Myriell’s republishing of The Stripping of Joseph, originally a sermon by Robert Wilkinson, invoked the theme of 42 Games, Inventing the English Massacre: Amboyna in History and Memory, 77.

43 Milton, 175.

44 “Executedtoday.com,” ExecutedToday.com “ 1623: Amboyna Massacre. https://www.executedtoday.com/2010/02/27/1623-amboyna-massacre/.

45 Games, 97.

46 A True Relation, 28.

23 fraternal betrayal.47 This highlighted that even though the Dutch and the English were united in faith, there still existed a fear or uncertainty of Dutch authority in the East Indies because of their treacherous nature. The company’s conscious effort to design their depiction in such a way that invoked the memory of Protestant martyrdom testifies to their acknowledgement of religiosity’s importance in English politics. Upholding a Protestant image put pressure on the Crown to demand reparations from the VOC. Nevertheless, this is never fully realised in the case for Amboyna. Even though James and Charles both demand reparations from the United Provinces with Charles even taking three VOC ships hostage at Portsmouth, English foreign policy is never as stern with the Dutch as the EIC had hoped for.48 The Crown’s and the Parliament’s decision to pursue a Dutch alliance even after Amboyna can again be explained by our twin foundations: dynasty and religion. Having terminated negotiations with Catholic Spain, the focus had shifted to strengthening the alliance with the Protestant ally in Europe- the United Provinces. As Breslow states, the Parliament sought to help “fellow protestants” in Germany through pursuing a “war of diversion” against the Catholics in Spain.

This war of diversion would be complemented by the most “stringent controls” over the Catholics in England.49 As discussed earlier, the foreign policy debates were focused on the means and not the ends. Parliament had since then decided that the means of a Spanish marriage alliance to achieve the restoration of the Palatinate would now be given up. The War of Diversion along with the revived Anglo-Dutch alliance were the new means to restoring the Palatinate. Amboyna did not have enough diplomatic significance for it to hamper any plans for a wider Anglo-Dutch alliance.

Additionally, any pressure that reparations applied on the Dutch Republic inherently rose from dynastic interests. The EIC petitioned to James in July of 1624 and threatened to cease trade all together in the East Indies.50 To this petition, the Privy council replied that necessary measures would be taken to prevent the EIC from having to stop trading in the East Indies. They claimed that the function of the Company “in so much as it is become a business of state.”51 Stuart dynastic 47 Milton, 178.

48 CSPC, 1625-1629, 390, 395.

49 Breslow, 30.

50 CSPC, 4, 302 51 Chaudhari, 30.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. III | Issue 1 interests motivated such a response. Losing the prospects of a Spanish dowry and funding a war against Spain made securing the finances of the Kingdom of utmost importance for the government so trading in the East Indies had to be continued. Thus, the dynastic interests needed the EIC’s continuance of trade. To ensure that trade continued, certain diplomatic concessions had to be asked from the Dutch making Amboyna nothing more than a minor diplomatic inconvenience rather than a policy dilemma.

Religion played a pivotal role in determining the English foreign policy towards the Dutch after Amboyna. Extreme Protestants, sometimes loosely called “puritans,” in the Parliament and the public had adopted a forgiving attitude towards the Dutch and were tolerant of most of their faults.52 Puritans came out in support of the Dutch, none more famous than Thomas Scott and his series of pamphlets advocating for a closer alliance with the Dutch. He applauds the Netherlands’ safety for being “a hiding place for the pore prosecuted members of Christ hunted out of Bohemia, the Palatinate and other distressed countries.”53

Figure 3: Thomas Scott, The Second Part of Vox Populi (1624)54 52 George Edmundson, Anglo-Dutch Rivalry During the First Half of the Seventeenth Century: Being the Ford Lectures Delivered at Oxford in 1910 (Clarendon Press, 1911), 34.

53 Breslow, 75.

54 Ernesto E. Oyarbide Magaña, “Between Love and Hate: Thomas Scott’s Puritan Propaganda and His Interest in Spanish Culture” in Literary Hispanophobia and Hispanophilia in Britain and the Low Countries (1550-1850) (2020), 103.

24 In his pamphlets Vox Populi and Symmachia, he goes a step further and claims that it is the Spanish that are attempting to create Anglo-Dutch rifts. He includes that “the enemye both to our religion and state.... have used all endeavours to makes breaches betwixt us.” Puritans that shared Scott’s view refused to alienate a Protestant ally over the incident at Amboyna. Therefore, we observe how the protection of the Protestant faith and Stuart dynastic interests remain the twin foundations of early English foreign policy towards the Dutch, rendering the events at Amboyna insignificant.

The events at Amboyna and their depiction negligibly impacted the formulation of early modern English foreign policy unlike what recent globalised historical literature would argue. Dynasty and religion remained the twin foundations in the foreign policy deliberations. Nevertheless, this essay recognizes that the memory of the events at Amboyna was invoked during the Anglo-Dutch wars in the middle of the 17th Century. Studying its importance as a national memory against the Dutch could be a more relevant application of Amboyna. This research can thus be extended to studying how Amboyna potentially grew in importance as more time had passed and the reasons for the Anglo-Dutch alliance to exist were not as strong as before. ________________

25

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. III | Issue 1

Trade of Agriculture and Technique Rethinking the Mongol Empire Ilan Werblow

Tufts University - Class of 2024

When discussing the Mongol Empire, people often focus on the military campaigns during the 12th and 13th centuries. Others focus on how a nomadic culture had the organization to conquer and form an empire stretching from Vietnam to Eastern Europe. However, a key detail often left out of the historiography is the changes to the agricultural sphere throughout the empire. The Mongol Empire brought together many cultures, from Persian to Chinese, into one em mpire.

This incorporation of societies not only brought together people and ideas on governance, but it also brought different agricultural ideas and crops together, which significantly altered each culture’s cuisine. While the transportation of agricultural goods and practices was only possible with the creation of the empire empire, it largely occurred outside of government influence.

Instead the ideas traveled with people moving around the empire. To examine this movement, I will examine the movement of agricultural goods through trade, then show how the trade of goods facilitated the incorporation of new goods into local cuisines, subsequently examining how agricultural techniques were moved from one corner of the Mongol Empire to the other. Recipes, both food and medicinal, as well as archeological evidence, provide the best sources to answer this question.

Recipes show what goods could be gathered and recent archeological digs show the prevalence of certain crops at a specific location.

Before Chinggis Khan rose to power in Mongolia in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, the Mongolian, Chinese, and Persian diets and agricultural production techniques were relatively different. These cultures mostly traded for the few foreign agricultural products they consumed instead of attempting to grow them instead. This was due mainly to climate. The Mongols, being nomadic people in small tribes, did not

develop a complex agricultural system. The Mongols also originated from a region with an average temperature of zero degrees Celsius, which made settling down and farming very difficult.1 In Persia, the settled population grew local grains and other crops with some foreign plants. The Persians tended to trade for small amounts of foreign medicinal herbs and food plants.

The story is very similar in China, as the Chinese traded for their agricultural goods instead of attempting to grow them. This is shown by the lack of Asian rice seeds in Northern China during the Jin dynasty.2 Trade of agricultural products was common in China through the Silk Road, and provided China access to foreign foods and plants. While trade was worth it for the Chinese, it remained costly and time-consuming, meaning very few plants made the journey, with the remaining plants rarely planted due to lack of demand for unknown foods. The difficulty of transporting different crops confined these cultures to their local products until a change in the ease of trade happened.

These three cultures’ diets and food sources would radically change with Mongol invasions and the establishment of the Mongol Empire led by Chinggis Khan and his son Ogedei. With the suppression of the tribes and their absorption into a single Mongol state under Chinggis Khan in 1206, Mongolia spread outwards, eventually conquering parts of China and Iran before Chinggis Khan’s death. This greatly changed the landscape of trade in Asia. Now, most of Northern 1 Findlay, Ronald, and Mats Lundahl. “The Economics of the Frontier.” In The First Globalization Episode: The Creation of the Mongol Empire, or the Economics of Chinggis Khan, 75-88.

BRILL, 2016.

2 Haw, Stephen G. Marco Polo’s China : A Venetian in the Realm of Khubilai Khan. Routledge Studies in the Early History of Asia ; 3. London ; New York: Routledge, 2006.

27 Asia was under one state, where people and products moved around the empire with ease. Ogedei continued Chinggis’s expansion, extending the borders of the Empire into Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

While administratively similar to previous empires, the sheer size of the Mongol Empire was its key feature. By connecting almost all of Asia, the Mongols far exceeded the size of previous empires such as Alexander the Great’s Macedonian Empire. This allowed for greater communication and movement from one corner of the empire to the other, connecting all of Asia, allowing for trade to flourish.

Agricultural products and production methods moved across the Mongol Empire frequently but were largely independent of any central Mongol government policy, with the exception of the forced movement of people. Agricultural goods moved across the empire, following people as they traveled, instead of being exchanged for the purpose of trade. While agricultural techniques and other methods of production remained largely stationary, ideas of agricultural production and storage began to develop through the rise of Mongolian trade. Trade inspired new ideas, while old methods were reintroduced and spread across the Empire.

The formation of the Mongol Empire allowed for an increase in trade across various regions. While complex systems of trade, like the Silk Road, existed, trade flourished more than before. A major contributor to the success of trade under the Mongolian empire was the Pax Mongolica, the peace across Asia during the Mongol period. The prevailing myth described how a woman could walk from one end of the empire to the other with a gold nugget in her headdress.3 While the myth was exaggerated, the fact the Mongol Empire was a safe place to travel existed. Before, traders on the Silk Road and other trade routes had to worry about bandits and other raiders, many of which were from Mongol tribes. Now with the Mongolians controlling most of Asia firmly, punishing bandits and other raiders, trade became safeguarded and consequently increased.4

3 Anderson, E. N. Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. http://www.jstor. org/stable/j.ctt83jhpt.

4 Song Zizhen, “Spirit-Path Stele for His Honor Yelu, Director of the Secretariat” in The Rise of the Mongols Trans. Atwood, Christopher and Struve, Lynn. Hackett Publishing Company Inc, 2021

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. III | Issue 1 In addition to making trade routes safer for merchants, the Mongol Empire facilitated the flourishing trade networks by creating new routes. While the majority of trade routes remained in place, the Mongols made it easier to transport goods through the use of new canals and irrigation techniques. An example is Khanbaliq, the capital of the Yuan Dynasty founded by Khubilay Khan because of its proximity to the coast and other tributary rivers of the Hai He.5 Furthermore, The Mongols quickly realized that the trip up the coast can be a costly one, especially during the typhoon season. One example is in 1286, with a quarter of the grain sent to Khanbaliq lost in storms.6 This constant loss of grain was an unsustainable pattern that needed to be changed and Khubilay Khan decided the best way to allow for easy access to the city to expand trade was to create a canal. During his reign, the city dug a canal connecting the Gu River with the Jiao. This allowed for the quantities of grain shipped to the capital to rise substantially. Northern China was far from the only place with the idea of building canals. This concept then spread across the empire, particularly in Persia, where there were also trade benefits.

In addition to the greater transport of goods, there is also plenty of evidence of the transportation of agricultural products. Medicine and cookbooks written during the period highlight this movement. One such medicinal book, Huihui Yaofang, highlights the transmission of agricultural products across the Mongol Empire. Written in China during the Yuan Dynasty, it gives a list of illnesses and their cures. The Huihui Yaofang is a prime example of the transmission of both agricultural products and ideas. The word “Huihui’’ means Uigher or Middle Eastern, and the book is a record of medicinal techniques from all corners of the Mongol Empire. The book describes a total of 398 different plants, of which only 258 are from Eurasia.7 Of those from Eurasia, the origin of the plants ranged from Vietnam to Iran. There are lists of medical recipes and their origin, of which 128 of them are Chinese while 517 are from the Near East. This section of Huihui Yaofang highlights the theory that during the Mongol reign, there was enough communication and transportation of goods for them to enter the common Chinese medicine. This is more impressive considering the institution of Chinese medicine is a long and proven practice, so the adoption of new approaches 5 Haw, Marco Polo’s China.

6 Ibid.

7 Anderson, Food and Environment.

28 from the Middle East shows the success of Mongolian agricultural ventures.

Written in Chinese, the intended audience of the Huihui Yaofang was the widespread Chinese population. The author expected enough Chinese doctors to be comfortable to adopt at least some of the new ideas coming out of the Middle East, implying that medicinal ingredients and knowledge of the medicine was widespread. A medicinal book is useless without the ingredients to make the actual medicine, implying that at least some of the crops were planted or common enough in China at the time. For doctors to adopt a new medicinal recipe, they had to engage with the people throughout the Mongol Empire to understand how to use the plants for medicine. The products making their way to China not only impacted the future agriculture of China but also highlighted the movement in the Mongol Empire. Instead of a disorganized empire, the movement of these crops shows that a framework of trade throughout the empire existed.

Cookbooks from the time also show a similar story. The Yinshan Zhengyao was the official court cookbook for Khan Temur in 1330 and it shows how the Khan’s diet was based on showing the power of the Empire.8 The cuisine brought all four corners of the empire together for the meal. These feasts were set up for when foreign dignitaries arrived in the capital. At their arrival, the Mongols wanted to be perceived as powerful and wealthy, and to achieve this they showed off using the meal as evidence of their influence. Similarly, another symbol of power was a fountain in the original capital of Karakorum. William of Rubruck describes the fountain in the middle of the city of Karakorum as the following: it had four faucets, each with a different alcoholic beverage coming out of them, grape wine, rice wine, honey mead, and fermented mare’s milk.9 The intent of the fountain to show off the power of Mongke and the unity of the empire with the widespread beverages worked. The use of different spices and ingredients in the food also supports this theory.

Many of the recipes can be described as a form of fusion cuisine, combining Central Asian recipes with Chinese spices or the other way around.10 This was a way to show that they not only had the wealth to gather all the spices, but they were able to control where they

came from and integrate those regions into one empire.

While the official court cookbook may have been a fusion of ingredients and plants from across the empire, ordinary people’s cuisine stayed somewhat the same.

As the prominent historian E. N. Anderson points out, the Chinese diet remained roughly the same before and after the Mongols for those outside the court.11 This steadiness in diet shows the difference between the court and the common people.

While looking at food and the transportation of agricultural products, it is important to examine the nutritional value of foods as well as how well adaptable they are for the environment, however, this excludes the influence of individual taste. It is hard to track and predict which foods will be adopted and which ones will not, but it needs to be considered. The lack of difference in Chinese cooking before and after Mongol rule may be based on individual tastes as most people will continue to prefer what they like, and avoid foods they dislike. Even though the Mongols made it easy to move agricultural products across the empire through a new system of roads and canals, it was still costly and time-consuming. This ensured that there was not only a taste boundary in the way of the transportation of food but also a price and time boundary. The combination of these boundaries ensured that, for the most part, food remained somewhat stagnant.

While the costs will always remain, there is a way to remove the majority of the transportation costs of food. To examine this phenomenon it is helpful to discuss the example of rice. Before Mongol rule, rice was primarily grown in the Southern Song dynasty and traded up to Northern China. China remained split in two before the Mongols, meaning that while trade and communication occurred between the two halves, they were still very separate and distinct. The split allowed for the trade of agricultural products but prevented the wholesale transportation of the production to occur. This system changed once the Mongols invaded the Southern Song dynasty. Once under one ruler, that barrier disappeared, permitting a free-flowing system of communication and ideas. This allowed for the production of rice to travel North with people from Southern China moving North. While rice is a very easy crop to grow, creating an industry out of it is considerably

8 Ibid.

9 William of Rubruck, Journey of William of Rubruck.

10 Anderson, Food and Environment.

11 Ibid.

29 difficult.12 All crops have different methods to grow, however, rice is very different from other crops. Rice patties are flooded to prevent the growth of weeds and to ensure the plant has enough water. This is opposite to other crops where irrigation is needed, but not that much water is used. This new technique requires experienced farmers to be there helping grow the new plants. Due to the experience required, for rice to start to be grown somewhere new, experienced farmers had to move, with a wave of farmers from southern China moving North. The mass movement of farmers from Southern China was only possible under Mongol rule.

Rice did not only move North to Jin China, but it also moved to Persia and the rest of the Near East.

Today, rice is a staple in Iranian cuisine, but it was not used before Mongolian rule. Some very key, influential figures, including Rashid al-Din, a regional governor, adopted rice and they persuaded many people in Persia to start growing the food.13 The widespread adoption of rice in Persia occurred mostly through the new technique of cooking pilaf rice. This process is frying the rice in fat before boiling it, then adding whatever extra ingredients the cook wishes, usually spices and meat.

This makes the dish last longer without refrigeration in Persia, while also being a different taste.

While rice was shifted North and West with some help from the leaders of the Mongol Empire, most of the movement happened on the individual level. A recent archeological dig at the site of the old capital of the Mongol Empire unearthed over 50,000 identifiable remains of plants in the historic city of Karakorum.14 The remains of plants come from all over the world, ranging from jujubes from China to einkorn wheat from Western Asia. The wide variety highlights the use of trade networks for both the already made grain as well as the seeds themselves to plant new farms closer to the city. The large quantities of certain grains that 12 Cullen, Christopher. “Reflections on the Transmission and Transformation of Technologies: Agriculture, Printing and Gunpowder between East and West.” In Science between Europe and Asia, 13-26. Vol. 275. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2010.

13 Jackson, Peter. Studies on the Mongol Empire and Early Muslim India. Collected Studies; CS923. Farnham, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate/Variorum Pub., 2009.

14 Rösch, Manfred, Elske Fischer, and Tanja Märkle. “Human Diet and Land Use in the Time of the Khans—Archaeobotanical Research in the Capital of the Mongolian Empire, Qara Qorum, Mongolia.” Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 14, no. 4 (2005): 485–92. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23419303.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. III | Issue 1 appear just outside the city, implying they must have come from farms and storehouses. The quantity of certain plants also highlights the availability of certain crops. Emmer wheat, originally from the Levant, was present, and could theoretically be grown in the region during the summer. However, it was noticeably small in quantity, implying that it was imported.15 This is probably due to the difference in taste, where producing einkorn wheat or millet, either proso or foxtail, is more useful for Mongol farmers because more people would buy those.

While local production of several grains and other crops can be confirmed, most of the grains found are from near Mongolia, just slightly to the East in Northwestern Jurchen territory.16 Trade was limited and only included local products. The prevalence of nearby crops, such as jujubes, could also be down to the Mongols having interacted with these plants for a longer amount of time. The Mongols, being neighbors, had been interacting extensively with the Jurchen dynasty for long before Chinggis Khan rose to power, meaning that they had already developed a taste for Jurchen food. The Mongols now had the means to produce the grains themselves, when they brought more settled people into the capital and other areas of the empire.

The movement of people became the reason behind the transportation of goods in the Mongol Empire. As shown above, individual taste is behind many of the choices of which crop to produce in the Mongol Empire, but there was no one production center. Due to the size of the empire, local cities had to rely mostly on local production with the occasional trade. The individual population centers and regions were responsible for their food source and its production. If the local population drives the production, and the local population would favor what they are used to, then agricultural products would remain, on a whole, stationary. But as was shown in Karakorum, there are many different varieties of food. This is because people moved, bringing with them, their food preferences, both for taste and health benefits.

Within the Mongol Empire, the safety provided with the Pax Mongolica, may have primarily fostered trade, but it also fostered migration. It became a lot easier for one to move from Persia to China, or the other way around, because they would still be subject to the 15 Ibid.

16 Ibid.

30 same laws, and they are used to the same administration. There were also large movements of people from Persia to China due to Mongol government policy. The Persians had a long tradition of trade and valued merchants, while Chinese culture at the time did not value merchants as much. When the Mongols invaded China, they found it hard to set up trade networks with the rest of the empire. To solve this issue, they incentivized Muslim merchants from Persia and elsewhere in the Near East to move to China and set up trade systems that are connected with the routes connecting the rest of the Mongol empire.

There was a third way that large populations of people moved, and it was the most common in the Mongol Empire. When Chinggis Khan and the Mongols invaded a territory, they would approach the cities. If the city submitted, they would be spared and much will remain the same. However, if they resisted the Mongols would fight them, eventually winning, and then sack the city. Once they have entered the city, they will take a portion of the citizens inside and forcefully bring them with the Mongol army.17 There would also be another draft of the local citizens, usually of the artisans, to be handed out to powerful Mongols in the form of appanages. When they would be given to the powerful Mongol, they would be forcefully moved, usually across the Empire.

Either of the three ways—personal preference, professional, or forced—of transportation of people across the Mongol Empire brought the same end goal in terms of agricultural production. The result of these transfers allowed for people to take their food preferences, practices, and plants with them. This idea can be seen in the remains of Karakorum. There are a wide variety of seeds and other plant materials, however, most of them are in small numbers.18 The small numbers of the crops could be a sign of only personal use. If the crops were used, either for food or medicine, by the entire city, then there would be significantly more found.

But instead, there is little to be seen, implying that perhaps only a handful of residents in Karakorum used certain agricultural products. Karakorum, being the capital of the very large Mongol Empire, was a cosmopolitan city. The capital offers a good example of the movement of agricultural products as it was a major city that drew in people from across the empire to work with the government. This brought a wave of new trade 17 ‘Ala l-Din ‘ Ata-malik Juwayni, trans. J.A. Boyle, The History of the World Conqueror. (Manchester, 1958), vol. I, pp. 3-27.

18 Rosch, Fischer, and Markle, Human Diet and Land Use.

connections and changes to the diets of those in the city. Imported goods become valuable in part due to their rarity. Being valuable, these agricultural products from across the empire became sought after. However, because they were valuable, they were expensive, which restricted the number of people who purchased them. This contained it to people who already knew the products and had a strong desire for these specific crops.

This theory that the movement of agricultural products occurred because of the widespread movement of people is also supported by the writings of Rashid al-Din. In his book Jami’ al-Tawarikh, Rashid al-Din describes China under Mongol rule. In the book, he references the town of Simali near the Sang-kan River near modern-day Beijing. In this town, Rashid al-Din points out how a majority of the residents are from Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan, and the town represents that. He describes the “abundance of grapes,” a product common to Samarkand. He also addresses the gardens built in the style of Central Asia, not China. individual people brought their food and farming practices with them, as opposed to the Mongol government telling its citizens how and what to farm.

While the majority of agricultural products moved following people, there are a few exceptions.

The primary exception is the growth of mulberry trees in Mongolia. Soon after the Mongols invaded China, they decided that they did not want to import their silk from far away, and instead to grow and produce it in Mongolia. Silk was the central product for the Mongols as it represented great wealth while also being easy to carry around, a necessity for a nomadic culture. The central Mongol government set up a centralized system for the production of silk. One of the roles of this new administration was to set up silk production in Mongolia. They started by planting several mulberry trees in the region and bringing the silkworms to begin the process. However, the mulberry trees and silkworms did not grow well in the cold Mongolian winters, and the project was canceled.19 Not only were new agricultural products moved across the empire, but new agricultural techniques became ubiquitous during the Mongol reign. One of the most notable agricultural practices to come out of this period was the implementation of the ever-normal gra19 Allsen, Thomas T. Commodity and Exchange in the Mongol Empire : A Cultural History of Islamic Textiles. Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

31 nary in China. While not a brand new concept, it was under the Mongols in the Yuan dynasty that reimplemented it after a long period of absence.20 The ever-normal granary is a concept where in years of plenty, the central government will buy up grain and other important products so that when there is a period of famine, they will be prepared. This practice is very important and helps significantly in famines.21 This idea came out of China in the second century BC and was used consistently until the first century AD when it fell out of favor.22 For the Mongols to bring back the system of the ever-normal granary suggests that they were looking into the history of their conquered territories, and were actively seeking new knowledge. This means that Chinese concepts were being written and read about all across the empire. In addition, as Anderson points out, Rashid al-Din knew about agricultural practices such as grafting, fertilizer, prevention of crop failures, and agricultural product storage.23 When Rashid al-Din was writing at the turn of the 14th century, the practice of the ever-normal granary under Mongol rule had been in force for 40 years.24 The example of appearances of the ever-normal granary in Persia shows the travel of ideas on both the production and storage of agricultural goods.

The Mongol Empire changed the agricultural landscape of each of the areas they conquered. The Pax Mongolica allowed for the safe transfer of goods, creating an environment for plants and ideas to travel with ease from Vietnam to Russia. The transfer of people facilitated the transportation of products. With the mass movement of people, they brought with them their unique and special tastes and plants, creating a fusion of cuisines. However, this was primarily done through the initiative of individuals separate from the central Khans policy. ________________

20 Yunte Deng, The History of Famine Relief in China (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

21 Wallace Henry, The Ever-Normal Granary (Wallaces’ Farmer 51.41 [October 8, 1926], p 1314).

22 Bodde, Derk. “Henry A. Wallace and the Ever-Normal Granary.” The Far Eastern Quarterly 5, no. 4 (1946): 411–26. https:// doi.org/10.2307/2049789.

23 Anderson, Food and Environment.

24 Zizhen, Spirit-Path Stele, trans. Atwood, Struve.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. III | Issue 1

Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji Constructing a Visual Celebrity Ravi Travers

Hamilton College - Class of 2023

In a world where sporting celebrities are ubiquitous, Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji stands out as a significant pioneer of this model of fame and the public image. “Ranji”, as he was known by the British, subverted British racism to become a Brown sporting celebrity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As such, Ranjitsinhji has been an oft analyzed figure in the histories of cricket and India, yet these analyses ignore the significant visual record of Ranjitsinhji through photography. Ranjitsinhji, a feature in any pantheon of great cricketers, negotiated the power structures of racism, gender, and political identity in his popular, commodified image.

Ranjitsinhji first learned cricket in India, as the adopted heir to the throne of Nawanagar, a small, princely state in Gujarat. He was educated at English schools in India, where he demonstrated his unique cricketing proficiency. From India, he would continue his education at Cambridge. This move was fraught with challenges due to British structures of racism. At Cambridge, Ranjitsinhji used his financial privilege, as a prince, to buy into Cambridge social life. He had a car, which was rare in Cambridge at the time, and he threw extravagant parties.1 At Cambridge, he became the first non-white player to be picked for the cricket team in 1892.2 He would go on to play for Sussex and later England after his position was contested on racial grounds. Originally, his England call up was blocked

by Lord Harris of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), but Ranjitsinhji eventually made his English debut in 1896.

During Ranjitsinhji’s career, cricketing administrators in India began the process of organizing a touring all-Indian team to visit England. As Prashant Kidambi illustrates in his book on the first all-Indian team to tour Great Britain in 1911, Ranjitsinhji was non-committal and reluctant to participate in these tours. As a capped player for England, Kidambi argues that participation in an all-India tour may have posed a risk to Ranjitsinhji’s complicated celebrity status and national identity.3 As Kidambi asserts, British ideas of orientalism racialized Ranjitsinhji’s play.

Ranjitsinhji negotiated and subverted British power hierarchies by leveraging components of his social position. As his visual record demonstrates, Ranjitsinhji’s image was composed of his negotiations with the societal hierarchies of race, gender, and political identity. Ranjitsinhji’s image became ubiquitous in a period marked by innovations in the means of disseminating photographs. Half-tone printing, namely, enabled photographs to be cheaply reproduced in books, newspapers, and other ephemeral sources such as postcards and cigarette cards. The historical literature on Ranjitsinhji aptly characterizes his image as contradictory within the social and political power hierarchies of England. This image, in an age of increased distribution of visual print mediums, reflected Ranjitsinhji’s complex position in the racial, gendered, and political power hierarchies of England at the turn of the twentieth century.

Part I

1 Prashant Kidambi, Cricket Country: An Indian Odyssey in the Age of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 69.

Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji and his image, as it proliferated through Great Britain, illuminates complex questions concerning the relationship between

2 Ibid., 68.

3 Ibid., 76-77.

33 the photograph and its reproduction, social and institutional power dynamics, and the construction of an image in the public eye. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, photographs of Ranjitsinhji were distributed through news media, cricket instructional manuals, and as postcards and prints. Artistic renderings of “Ranjitsinhji,” likely from photographs, also appear in the visual record through collectible cigarette cards, cartoons in magazines, and even in a collection of postage stamps issued in the Caribbean. Geoffrey Batchen traces the importance of the dissemination of early forms of photography to build an analytic frame which is applicable to the different mediums through which Ranjitsinhji’s image was disseminated. Ranjitsinhji’s image is also imbued with the institutional and social power dynamics of British colonialism, as examined by Christopher Pinney in his work on portraiture in India under the British Raj. However, Ranjitsinhji was not a passive actor in the proliferation of his image. As Satadru Sen demonstrates, Ranjitsinhji actively negotiated his racialized and gendered identity, as well as his political identity as a princely Rajput.

Crucially, existing scholarship addresses photographic images as individual images. In the case of Ranjitsinhji, many different photographic depictions represent a composite of his social identities. In this respect, his experience is like that of celebrities today who construct a public “image” composed of many parts. This is then an essay about the construction of an image from many images.

Ranjitsinhji’s image was widely distributed through photographs, but also importantly through artistic reproductions. In Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination, Geoffrey Batchen establishes the historical imperative to separate the image from the photograph as an object. As he asserts, the singular photograph is too often “privileged over its dangerously multiple supplement, the reproducible photographic image.”4 Batchen locates processes of dissemination as key to early photography through the first two commercial studios in London owned by Richard Beard and Antoine Claudet. He argues that these studies employed engravings which allowed the distribution of daguerreotypes, although not as direct replicas.5 The engraved reproductions still retained the “presumed truth value” of a photograph, while allowing for the 4 Geoffrey Batchen, Apparitions: Photography and Dissemination, (Sydney: Power Publications: 2018), 148.

5 Ibid., 75.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. III | Issue 1 movement of photographic images.6 Photographic reproductions, such as cigarette cards or postage stamps, which figure in Ranjitsinhji’s visual record, are also ephemeral primary sources too often ignored in writing the history of photography.

Batchen focuses on the early years of photography between the inventions of the daguerreotype and the calotype in 1839 and the invention of wet-plate collodion photography in 1851. However, Ranjitsinhji’s celebrity status grew much later, in the 1890s. His debut in the Cambridge cricket team in 1892 quickly elevated him to county cricket with Sussex and then on to the English national side. Following his cricket career, he went into politics and represented India at the League of Nations. His celebrity outlasted his death in 1933. Early in this period, new technology such as half-tone printing allowed photographic images to be distributed widely through newspapers and books, including the instructional manuals that featured Ranjitsinhji. His image also proliferated through artistic interpretations in magazines and cigarette cards. Thus, considering Batchen’s writing, the dissemination of Ranjitsinhji’s image is privileged alongside the content of the singular photograph in order to analyze the forms through which his image travels. In instructional manuals, cigarette cards, and newspapers, Ranjitsinhji’s image became accessible to the British public.

Photographs of Ranjitsinhji are also significant in the contexts of racist British ideas of orientalism and the structures of colonialism. Christopher Pinney attempts to answer the related question: “How do photographs get entangled in different systems?”7 Pinney builds his analysis upon the work of John Tagg, who is concerned with the power hierarchy, or the “...field of institutional spaces” that surround the production of photographs.8 Thus, the significance of photography is established through social practice. Pinney, writing on photography in the context of British colonial rule in India, argues that British official records used photography as a controlling mechanism which Indian photographic studios undertook as an artistic endeavor that countered imperial racial typologies.9 In contrast to Batchen, who centers his argument on the dissemination of photographs, Pinney and Tagg focus on the 6 Ibid., 106,128.

7 Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (London: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), [PDF E-Book], Preface, 10.

8 Ibid., Chapter 1, 15.

9 Ibid., Chapter 1, 18-19, Chapter 2, 62.

34 structures of power which surround the production of photographs.

Ranjitsinhji’s position as a Brown celebrity was fraught with complicated colonial power dynamics.

Even his cricketing ability subverted the racist British narratives which originally denied the development of cricket in India. The British believed that Indians would be unable to replicate what the British saw as the uniquely English spirit of cricket and sportsmanship.

10 As we will see, Ranjitsinhji’s image was produced and reproduced both in British media, but also by Ranjitsinhji himself. Ranjitsinhji interacted frequently and intentionally with the British media through interviews during his cricketing career. Similarly, Ranjitsinhji would interact directly with the political structures of the Raj and the emergence of internationalism during his rule as a maharaja, the Jam Saheb of Nawanagar. In line with Pinney, Ranjitsinhjii’s image is significant in the context of the social and political structures of racism and British colonialism in which it was produced.

Prior scholars, such as Batchen, Pinney and Tagg address photographic images one at a time. However, I will address images of Ranjitsinhji not as individual images but as a composite of his identity. Satadru Sen writes extensively on Ranjitsinhji’s image, which he argues was actively constructed by Ranjitsinhji himself, who leveraged central aspects of his social position. In his article “Chameleon Games”, Sen divides this argument into sections on Ranjitsinhji’s race, his gender, and his political identity. Sen establishes Ranjitsinhji as a contradictory figure in the context of the race, gender, and politics of the British empire. As he asserts, “...He [Ranjitsinhji] was the definitive upper-class Englishman as well as the authentic Oriental.”11 The racialized and gendered dynamics of empire restricted Ranjitsinhji, but they were simultaneously assets that he learned to leverage into an image, or a brand, which was not only acceptable, but wildly popular among Britons.12 Sen treats the abbreviation of Ranjitsinhji to “Ranji” by the British as evidence of the contradictory forces that surrounded Ranjitsinhji’s celebrity. On Ranjitsinhji’s racial identity, Sen argues that he was able to maintain both a familiar and foreign appearance in the eyes of the British through his Rajput identity,

which, like British white supremacy, relied on ideas of racial or “blood” purity.13 This was furthermore linked to the British imperial vision of Rajputs as a “martial race.” In an 1895 interview with The Sketch, an illustrated British news outlet, Ranjitsinhji interacts with British renaming practices and rebukes questions over his racial position. In the interview, Ranjitsinhji explains the meaning of his name, that “Kumar Shri” is a princely title to his name, which the British interviewer incorrectly breaks into “Ranjit Sinhji.” Ranjitsinhji also speaks against the use of the nickname “Smith,” which was a joking attempt to repackage his name by former teammates. The cricketer tellingly bristled at a question which suggested that he was “of the Sikh or Parsi race.” Ranjitsinhji responded,

10 Satadru Sen, “Chameleon Games: Ranjitsinhji’s Politics of Race and Gender,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 2, no. 3 (2001), accessed November 23, 2021.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 “RANJITSINHJI: THE INDIAN PRINCE RELATES HIS DOINGS ON THE CRICKET FIELD.” The Sketch 11, no. 133 (Aug 14, 1895): 165.

15 Sen, “Chameleon Games.”

Not at all. (I [the interviewer] Fancied the Prince was rather annoyed.) I am a Jareja of the Rajput race, a Hin du nation, which, almost alone among the original in habitants, offered a successful resistance to the Muham madan invaders or India, and have never been subdued by anyone in their native hills of Guzerat.14

Ranjitsinhji’s response, and the corresponding transcription by the British interviewer, reveal Ranjitsinhji’s struggle to construct his image in the context of British ignorance. Ranjitsinhji’s answer reveals the central position that his race held in his identity. Ranjitsinhji distinguishes himself as a Jareja, or Jadeja which references a blood lineage to the Hindu God, Krishna. As Sen argues, Ranjitsinhji’s racial identity and princely identity were familiar racial and gendered constructions to the British population.15 In the next two sections, I will divide visual portrayals of Ranjitsinhji into two key periods of his life: his move to England and cricketing career from 1889 to 1907 and his political career as the Jam Saheb of Nawanagar from 1907 to his death in 1933. Photographic depictions of KS Ranjitsinhji represent pieces of the puzzle which, together made-up Ranjitsinhji’s public image.

This image traveled across numerous formats to a broad audience in the context of the power hierarchy of empire.

35

Part II Ranjitsinhji became a legendary cricketer. He drew some of the largest crowds of his time, which compare even to those of W. G. Grace—who was the greatest batsman of the Edwardian period and whose name is immortalized in the form of the entry gate to Lord’s Cricket Ground.16 Ranjitsinhji’s illustrious playing career coincided with key developments in photographic technology, and in processes of dissemination. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, exposure times became shorter which allowed photographers to capture moving objects more accurately. Similarly, the advent of half-tone printing, which became common in the 1890s, created a process through which photographs could be reproduced in mass print media such as books, newspapers, and magazines. Ranjitsinhji could then be captured in action and his image could travel through a vast number of widely acceptable forms. As John Broom explains, in his book on cigarette cards, books could be expensive and inaccessible, yet mediums such as cigarette cards were widely available. However, despite illusions of objectivity, photography of Ranjitsinhji reflects his negotiation with the power hierarchies of racism and colonialism.

Discourse on Ranjitsinhji’s batting was filled with the exoticized terms of orientalism. As Pinney illustrates, orientalism was a racial paradigm that assigned agency to western actors.17 Satadru Sen explains that the British employed language that applied the racial code of orientalism to explain Ranjitsinhji’s success which contradicted the cricketing power hierarchy which denied cricketing competency to non-white players. For the British, “...the image of Ranjitsinhji as a magical product of an exotic nature eliminated the need to rationally explain his success in England, and the anomaly of his color.”18 Ranjitsinhji did face discrimination which explicitly referenced his color, namely by Lord Harris who originally blocked his entry into the England team.19 However, Ranjitsinhji’s image, which incorporated the mystical view of the Orient, was key to portrayals of the cricketer, which did not mention the color of his skin.

Pinney, in Camera Indica, details the racial 16 Kidambi, Cricket Country, 68.

17 Pinney, Camera Indica, Chapter 1, 43.

18 Satadru Sen, Migrant Races: Empire, identity and K. S. Ranjitsinhji, (New York: Manchester University Press, 2004), 21.

19 Kidambi, Cricket Country, 69.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. III | Issue 1 typologies of the official British record. Pinney traces racial types to Johann Casper Lavater and his ideas of physiognomy, or that external characteristics reflected truths about the internal.20 As Pinney asserts, ‘types’ were a repackaging of this idea that external factors marked innate difference. However, in these types, difference was marked by clothing as well as occupational markers. Thus, physical difference is insufficient to distinguish people and suggests that there is a cultural component to race. Photographs of Ranjitsinhji, and commentary on these photographs, reflect racial hierarchies without referring explicitly to Ranjitsinhji’s brown skin. Instead, Ranjitsinhji’s body and movements were racialized as the exotic oriental cricketer, an image that drew on physical and cultural ideas of race.

This idea of oriental exoticism remained attached to Ranjitsinhji, who Sen asserts “...was constantly called a juggler, a magician, a wizard who had not so much become English as miraculously materialized on the English cricket field.”21 While British batsmen played in a familiar way to the British audience, Ranjitsinhji’s movements mystified and captured observers. At the same time, Ranjitsinhji was characterized through ideas of colonial ownership. As Sen explains, “The perception that he belonged to England and in England, like the Crown Jewels and the exhibitions of imperial curiosities--made the English celebrate his presence in their society and on their terms.”22 Prashant Kidambi adds perceptively that the British regarded Ranjitsinhji as a “possession of Empire.”23 Photography of Ranjitsinhji during his cricketing career reflects both the centrality of his racial and colonial identities.

Famed cricket photographer G. W. Beldam, and Ranjitsinhji’s Sussex teammate C. B. Fry incorporated photographs of Ranjitsinhji in their book, Great Batsmen: Their Methods at a Glance, published in 1905. The book, which visually documents the techniques of the game’s prominent players, is “Illustrated by 600 Action-Photographs.”24 As a result of the half-tone printing process[a], books could feature photographs cheaply, without the necessity of physically pasting each photograph onto a page, as before with albumen prints and other photographic forms. Beldam 20 Pinney, Camera Indica, Chapter 1, 42.

21 Sen, “Chameleon Games.”

22 Ibid, 23 Kidambi, Cricket Country, 89.

24 George W. Beldam and Charles B. Fry, Great Batsmen: Their Methods at a Glance (London: Macmillan and Co., 1905), cover.

36 and Fry, using cameras with exposure times as short as a thousandth of a second, center their book “...upon Action-Photography and the Actual Experience.”25 Introducing the book, the authors emphasize, “Not a word of the text was written until finished prints of the photographs were studied and discussed.”26 In this new era of photographic reproducibility, action shots and the perceived objectivity of photography became the foundation for Beldam and Fry’s display of batting.

Figure 2.2 (left) and 2.3 (right): Ranjitsinhji playing an off drive.29 30

Figure 2.1: Ranjitsinhji’s Grip on the Bat27

In Great Batsmen, the first photograph of each batsman is a close-up shot of their hands holding their bat. Ranjitsinhji holds a distinctly racialized place in this otherwise consistent series of images (Figure 2.1).

In their biographical account of Ranjitsinhji, which prefaces the photographs, Beldam and Fry emphasize the exotic nature of Ranjitsinhji’s movements. They explain, Yet if any particular stroke of his, except that leg-glance, were analysed by the cinematograph, it would probably be found that he goes through very much the same move ments with bat, legs, arms and body as several English batsmen do. But he has a more subtle and more supple manner of moving; he moves as if he had no bones.28

In this description, Ranjitsinhji’s simultaneous familiarity and foreignness—the duality outlined by Sen—is central to the authors’ perception. Although Ranjitsinhji moved in a comprehensible way, the outcome in his play perplexed the viewer. The observation, “he moves as if he had no bones,” illustrates the otherworldly nature of Ranjitsinhji’s movement. Ranjitsinhji’s racialized body rendered his play exotic and magical.

25 Ibid., xiii, xi.

26 Ibid., xi.

27 Ibid., 55.

28 Beldam and Fry, Great Batsmen, 53.

In the photographs, the authors further separate Ranjitsinhji’s play from the accepted conventions of batting. They display the orientation of his body and bat in Figure 2.2, noting that the upward facing blade of the bat indicates the level of wrist movement required to play Ranjitsinhji’s off-drive.31 Beldam and Fry write, Ranjitsinhji relies more upon timing than upon absolute correctness; and upon quickness of swing, with heaps of wrist work in it, rather than upon urging body weight into the stroke; and he gets over the ball more by a dex terous management of his wrists than by throwing his weight to the front foot.32

The authors reference these photographs to argue that Ranjitsinhji’s play subverts the norms of “absolute correctness,” but in an advantageous way. The scrutiny of Ranjitsinhji’s unique style of batting, as represented through photography, reflects the racialization of his body as an Indian cricketer.

The stroke captured in Figure 2.4– the stroke which Ranjitsinhji was most famous for—was another heavily racialized movement.33 The authors identify the shot as “a genuine wrist-stroke,” made possible

by Ranjitsinhji’s oriental wrists.34 They add, “Playing this stroke in this way would be impossible for any29 Ibid., 63.

30 Ibid., 67.

31 Ibid., 63.

32 Ibid., 62.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid., 91

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one less supple and less quick than Ranjitsinhji.”35 The so-called leg-glance was characterized as the most foreign movement in Ranjitsinhji’s arsenal of scoring shots. While the authors may liken Ranjitsinhji’s movements to those of an English player in many respects, the leg-glance set him apart. For Beldam and Fry, Ranjitsinhji’s oriental body allowed him to play this stroke which involved a sharp reflex and unique bodily contortion. Beldam and Fry’s Great Batsmen exemplifies the social power hierarchies which are embedded in photographs of Ranjitsinhji. As their accompanying captions demonstrate, Ranjitsinhji’s image was racialized through the lens of colonialism. Great Batsmen also illustrates a way in which Ranjitsinhji’s photographic image was disseminated in the age of the half-tone print, through books, and further dispersed through even more accessible print forms.

Figure 2.5: Julius Ceaser pictured on an Ogden Cigarette Card.37

Figure 2.6: H. R. H The Duke of York ictured on Ogden’s Guinea Gold Cigarettes: 38

In contrast to large, expensive books, cigarette cards were intentionally simple to distribute and to collect. As John Broom explains, cigarette cards were born from the ability to mass-produce photographs in Figure 2.4: Ranjitsinhji plays the leg-glance.36

35 Ibid., 91.

36 Ibid., 90.

37 Julius Caesar, approx. 1900, Ogden Cigarette Card, https:// www.ebay.com/itm/332267829307?var=0&mkevt=1&mkcid=1&mkrid=711-53200-19255-0&campid=5335808978&toolid=10039&customid=SetList%20Page. Accessed November 26.

38 Ogden’s Guinea Gold Cigarettes: H. R. H The Duke of York, 1900, Cigarette Card, https://www.ebay.com/itm/265395037108?var=0&mkevt=1&mkcid=1&mkrid=711-5 3200-19255-0&campid=5335808978&toolid=10039&customid=SetList%20Page. Accessed November 26, 2021,

38 the context of a growing consumer market; “each complete set of cards formed a mini-encyclopaedia on the given subject.”39 The cigarette cards above were produced by Ogden Tobacco Company, who were based in Liverpool in the northwest of England. The Ogden cards covered numerous subjects. Historical figures such as Julius Caesar, British royalty such as the Duke of York who later became King George V, and foreign leaders such as the Czar and Czarina of Russia appeared in these collectible photographic reproductions.

While books were more exclusive, cigarette cards which were, as Bloom writes, “designed to be collected,” and they transported Ranjitsinhji the cricketer to a broader audience.40

Figure 2.7: K. S. Ranjitsinhji on Odgen’s Cigarettes Tab A Series.41 Figure 2.8: Ranjitsinhji on“Tally Ho!” Cigarettes. 42

jitsinhji is cleanly dressed in his cricketing whites.43 As Sen explains, batting holds unique status in the power hierarchy of a cricket team. It embodies stamina, concentration, and courage, which were important values in Edwardian English masculinity. Sen asserts that Ranjitsinhji’s expressed familiar forms of masculinity for a British audience through his batting and princely identity.44 These collectible cards with Ranjitsinhji’s photograph demonstrate the significance of Ranjitsinhji’s image, as an Indian man, which was packaged into a commercially favorable image.

Ranjitsinhji’s racial identity, in the context of British imperialism, was central to his popular public image. The image in figure 2.9, which was collected in the form of cigarette cards from England to Australia, outlived even Ranjitsinhji himself, as exemplified by postage stamps in India and in the Grenadines of St. Vincent. In the Indian stamp, Ranjitsinhji is depicted playing the leg-glance, which lives on as a part of his cricketing legacy. In the Grenadines of St. Vincent, artistic renderings of Ranjitsinhji from photographs appear in a stamp collection of the “Leaders of the World.” K. S. Ranjitsinhji subverted colonial power structures to become a wildly popular celebrity, whose image was disseminated and collected on an international scale. After his cricketing career, Ranjitsinhji became the Maharaja of Nawanagar, a small princely state, where his image shifted from cricketing celebrity to princely ruler.

Ranjitsinhji appears in several cigarette card collections, ranging from the British-based Ogden’s Cigarettes, to the Australian “Tally Ho!” cigarette card in Figure 2.8. In contrast to the action shots employed

by Beldam and Fry, these cards contain portraits in which Ranjitsinhji’s features are more clearly defined.

In keeping with his own advice in his own illustrated cricketing manual, The Jubilee Book of Cricket, Ran39 John Broom, A History of Cigarette and Trade Cards: The Magic Inside the Packet, (Barnsley: Pen and Sword Books Ltd, 2018), Introduction. [Google Books EBook].

40 Ibid., Introduction.

41 Odgen’s Cigarettes Tab A Series: K. S. Ranjitsinhji, 1902, Cigarette Card, https://www.ebay.com/itm/175032582911?hash=item28c0c142ff:g:LYUAAOSwZvxhmqVe. Accessed November 15, 2021.

42 “Tally Ho!” Cigarettes: K. S. Ranjitsinhji, 1897, Cigarette Card, https://www.ebay.com/itm/403313370240?hash=item5de759a480:g:Wk0AAOSwd-FhnOFT. Accessed November 26, 2021.

Figure 2.9: K. S. Ranjitsinhji Leg-Glance Indian Postage Stamp.45 43 K. S. Ranjitsinhji, The Jubilee Book of Cricket, 6th ed. (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Son’s, 1898), 5.

44 Sen, “Chameleon Games.”

45 K. S. Ranjitsinhji Leg-Glance Indian Postage Stamp, 1973, Postage Stamp, https://www.ebay.com/itm/154109114981?hash=item23e19e7a65:g:m84AAOSwt55fcqkZ. Accessed November 22, 2021.

39

Figure 2.10: Ranjitsinhji: Leaders of the World Postage Stamp. 46

Part III Ranjitsinhji’s princely status was not guaranteed. When he was a child, Ranjitsinhji was adopted by the Jam (ruler) of Nawanagar as an heir in the event that the Jam did not have a legitimate heir of his own. Thus, during Ranjitsinhji’s playing career, he was spoken of as “the prince”, although his claim to the throne was tenuous. When the Jam, Vibhaji, died, he left Nawanagar to a son who was born after Ranjitsinhji had been adopted.47 However, Vibhaji had multiple wives who were both Hindu and Muslim. The mother of the heir was one of Vibhaji’s Muslim wives, which Ranjitsinhji seized on to assert that only he, as a true (Hindu) Rajput, was the legitimate heir. He lobbied his allies in the Raj to legitimize his rule and supplant the wishes of Vibhaji.48 As Sen asserts, Ranjitsinhji’s racial identity as a member of the Rajput martial race was key to his image in England and, eventually key to his successful claim upon the throne of Nawanagar.49 Eventually in 1907, Ranjitsinhji ascended to the throne and became the new Jam Saheb of Nawanagar.

In published photographs, his likeness shifted from that of Ranjitsinhji the cricketer to Ranjitsinhji the maharaja. In a cigarette card printed by Cohen Weenen & Co as part of its World War I collection, Ranjitsinhji embraces the occupational imagery of an Indian prince.

As Pinney illustrates, occupational markers such as clothing or tools were central to British portraits of racial and class types in colonial India.50 Ranjitsinhji traded his cricketing whites for the uniform of Princely wealth, with his turban and clothing adorned with jew46 Ranjitsinhji: Leaders of the World Postage Stamp, 1984, Postage Stamp, https://www.ebay.com/itm/382944700869?hash=item59294869c5:g:BMUAAOSwkiZcuJAE. Accessed November 22, 2021.

47 Sen, Migrant Races, 54.

48 Ibid., 57.

49 Sen, “Chameleon Games.”

50 Pinney, Camera Indica, Chapter 1, 43.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. III | Issue 1 els. His mustache also features more prominently and appears slightly fuller and more well-groomed than in his cigarette card portraits in the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century. The caption on the back of the card recognizes Ranjitsinhji’s cricketing accomplishments, before affirming his desire to serve with the British in the First World War. In his new position as the Jam of Nawanagar, Ranjitsinhji entered the world of international politics in a transformative period marked by World War I and the emergence of internationalism.

Figure 3.1: Front and Back of a Cohen Weenen & Co.’s Cigarettes: No. 47 H.H. Maharaja Jam Saheb of Nawanagar.51

Figure 3.2: E. H. D. Sewell’s “Bat, Ball and Bullet” from March 20th edition of The Graphic. 52 51 Cohen Weenen & Co.’s Cigarettes: No. 47 H.H. Maharaja Jam Saheb of Nawanagar, Front and Back of a Cigarette Card, https://www.ebay.com/itm/154727041954?hash=item2406734ba2:g:fMQAAOSwTMhhpmCJ. Accessed December 1, 2021.

52 E. H. D. Sewell, “Bat, Ball and Bullet.” The Graphic (March 20, 1915).

40 During this period, Ranjitsinhji leveraged his position as a maharaja to exploit both the politics of empire and the internationalist politics fostered by the First World War. In an article written by the prominent British cricket journalist Edward Sewell, Ranjitsinhji expressed his desire to support the British in their war efforts. In the Figure 3.2, Ranjitsinhji appears with his princely turban combined with a western military uniform. In the interview, Ranjitsinhji expressed his optimism about prospective cricket tours to unite the empire and asserted his belief that the most talented players from across the empire should represent England, as he once did. Furthermore, Sewell writes the Ranjitsinhji contributed to the war effort by mobilizing his able, male subjects to fight in the trenches.53 Ranjitsinhji himself expressed a desire to go to the trenches, which he eventually did (Figure 3.1), although he was kept far from danger.54 In this interview with Sewell, Ranjitsinhji declared his loyalty to both England and the wellbeing of the Empire.

After the war, Ranjitsinhji’s position as a maharaja opened the door to his involvement in international government in the League of Nations. Daniel Gorman, in his book The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s, asserts that the internationalism that emerged in the 1920s was uniquely cooperative and that it incorporated non-state actors into international politics. Gorman writes that the creation of the League, “...marked an end to foreign ministries’ monopoly on the conduct of international politics...”55 Gorman also represents imperialism and internationalism as interconnected during this period. These two processes, Gorman asserts, were tied together from Versailles, where the victors of the war claimed new colonies and expanded their empires under the mandate system, while U.S. President Woodrow Wilson espoused self-determinism.56 These different programs were reconciled in the principle of trusteeship, under which all of the mandatory power declared the rule over former German and Turkish imperial territories to be temporary. Within this new international framework, Ranjitsinhji was an Indian delegate to the league in 1920, 1922, and 1923.57 Gorman places Ranjitsinhji 53 Ibid.

54 Sen, “Chameleon Games.”

55 Daniel Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3.

56 Daniel Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 3.

57 Ibid., 139.

among “moderate Indian nationalists,” who criticized unequal treatment of Indians as imperial citizens while remaining committed to the imperial framework.58 As Sen illustrates, while Ranjitsinhji criticized British imperial policies, he remained an imperial loyalist.59 Gorman asserts that the League of Nations and 1920s internationalism was, in part, defined by the incorporation of new voices into international politics.

“The democratization of foreign relations”, as Helen McCarthy asserts, led to the formation of organizations like the League of Nations Union (LNU) which aimed to educate the public on the activities of the League.60 Ranjitsinhji, who took part in the League’s proceedings, interacted with this newly involved public and centered public perception as the key test of the league.61 In keeping with his internationalist identity, Ranjitsinhji wrote a chapter on the League’s proceedings around disarmament. The chapter is in another book by C. B. Fry, his old Sussex teammate, in Fry’s Key-Book of the League of Nations, published in 1923.

Ranjitsinhji emphasized the necessity of international participation by calling out missing key nations such as the United States, Germany, Russia, and Turkey. H62e established himself as a supporter of the League while also illustrating a limit of the League, as enumerated

by Gorman, that “The league cannot by itself reduce armament; its task is to persuade and enable Governments to do so.”63 Ranjitsinhji, the ex-cricketer and Maharaja of a small princely state, appeared as a representative of India—the only non-self-ruling state with a seat at the League of Nations.64 This chapter is significant in that it shows that Ranjitsinhji and the League were making efforts to reach the public, but also in that it affirms the validity of Ranjitsinhji’s opinion in the space of international politics.

58 Ibid., 110-11.

59 Sen, “Chameleon Games.”

60 Helen McCarthy, The British people and the League of Nations: Democracy, citizenship and internationalism, c. 1918-45 (New York: Manchester University Press, 2011), 16.

61 K. S. Ranjitsinhji, “The Disarmament Question,” in Key-Book of the League of Nations, by C. B. Fry (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1923), 128.

62 Ibid., 29.

63 Ibid., 136.; Gorman: The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s, 320.

64 Gorman, The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s, 113.

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Conclusion

Figure 3.3: Post card depicting Ranjitsinhji in British military uniform.65

Ranjitsinhji appears in British military uniform again through postcards. These postcards, printed after his death in 1933, indicate the reach of his celebrity. As Sen writes, Ranjitsinhji became a celebrity, or someone who is “famous for being famous”.66 Ranjitsinhji and his photographic image were ubiquitous, and this ubiquity funded the reproduction and marketing of his image. Here, Ranjitsinhji is pictured in a British military hat in contrast to the turban which is more common in photographs of Ranjitsinhji as a maharaja (Figure 3.3). These photographs mark the temporal separation between Ranjitsinhji’s early cricket career and his transition to the Maharaja of Nawanagar by dating this photograph of Ranjitsinhji from his ascension to the throne in 1906 to his death. In these photographs, Ranjitsinhji appears as a subject of the British Empire, in British military uniform. Vitally, as these are portraits, Ranjitsinhji was able to choose what he wore. These changing occupational markers are intentional negotiations with social structures. These postcards, printed in London, were produced by people who felt that the British consumer would purchase this photographic depiction of Ranjitsinhji. Like collectable cigarette cards, which depict Ranjitsinhji the cricketer, this category of photographic depiction was popular because of Ranjitsinhji’s negotiations with the power structures of empire.

65 The Rotary Photo Co., Sri Ranjitsinhji Vibhaji – 1906-1933, Post Card, https://www.ebay.com/itm/234277864703?hash=item368c0c84ff:g:BjgAAOSwuS1hCgvE. Accessed November 26, 202 66 Sen, Migrant Races, 1.

Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji was forced to negotiate structures of racism and imperialism throughout his life, despite the ubiquity of his image. Satadru Sen, writing on Ranjitsinhji’s princely identity, identifies that Ranjitsinhji was able to buy into sections of society through his princely financial means. At Cambridge, Ranjitsinhji grew his image through his extravagant parties and his expensive car. Despite his fame in the coming decades, Ranjitsinhji faced similar barriers at the League of Nations. Sen explains that Ranjitsinhji’s glamorous dinner parties as a League delegate were a strategy to guarantee his seat at a table from which racism could otherwise exclude him.67 Even at this late stage of his life as a celebrity, Ranjitsinhji remained concerned with racial discrimination as a Brown man in predominantly white spaces.

Ranjitsinhji’s photographic image constructed his public image in the context of racial, gendered, and political power dynamics. As a Brown, Indian, princely subject of Empire, photographs of Ranjitsinhji leverage his societal position into a hugely marketable entity. Ranjitsinhji’s image foreground racial and political power hierarchies and traveled in numerous widely disseminated and marketed forms. Through his life in the public eye, as both a cricketer and as an Indian princely ruler, Ranjitsinhji’s image captured audiences and became ubiquitous in exclusive, white and English spaces. First, Ranjitsinhji’s photographic image during his cricket career reflects the power hierarchies which he negotiated as a Brown player. These photographs were produced and disseminated in the context of his body, which was racialized through orientalism to justify his talent as a non-white player. As a maharaja, the position he obtained through his British connections and by espousing ideas of racial or blood purity as a Rajput, Ranjitsinhji was photographed in a way which reflects the emerging values of 1920’s internationalism.

Through photography, Ranjitsinhji created an identity which negotiated the numerous societal contradictions which accompanied his position as a Brown celebrity in late nineteenth and early twentieth century England. ________________

67 Sen, “Chameleon Games.”

The American Black Barbershop Maintaining Racial Difference for Economic Success Kloe Shkane

Hamilton College - Class of 2024

During the Antebellum period, barbering functioned as a path to economic freedom and respectability in a time when freed and enslaved black people’s heavy restrictions on their rights. Because whites viewed barbering as a servile position, black barbers’ economic success depended on their assumption of a subordinate status to serve their primarily white clientele. With the Great Migration, and the rise of immigration, the black consumer class, and segregated districts, barbers found their clientele shifting from white to black customers. These significant changes resulted in barber shops’ transition from servile spaces to gathering areas for black communities. Whereas barber shops once functioned as places of deference that enforced white supremacy, they transformed into community spaces that facilitated, and currently facilitate, the formation of black political ideology, identity, and culture. Despite the shift from white to black clientele and change in shop dynamics, significant continuities exist between antebellum and modern barber shops.

They have historically been places that maintain racial difference, even to the point of reproducing inequality, to ensure their primary goal of economic success in a capitalist system Barbering during the Antebellum period served as a path to economic prosperity, granting free blacks the opportunity to establish themselves as businessmen in an industry with low entry barriers. Free black men looking to become entrepreneurs found success in barbering due to the low start-up costs, negligible competition from whites, and high earning potential. Quincy T. Mills demonstrates the low entry barriers and entrepreneurial opportunities through William Wells Brown’s case. After getting denied employment at the only barbershop in one of Michigan’s towns in the fall of 1835, Brown opened his own humble shop, with the

most expensive item being a sign over the door. He successfully competed with the town’s other barber and gained considerable business from white residents in merely a few weeks.1 Despite his modest monetary investment in the shop and his recent entry into the industry, Brown’s economic status improved after opening his barbershop. Because barbering offered an opportunity for profit at a low investment cost, freed black people looking to acquire entrepreneurial status pursued the profession.

Although average barbers like Brown still obtained middle class status, barbers who specifically catered to affluent whites’ interests in luxury and exclusivity could earn high rates of profit and establish themselves as members of the black antebellum elite. Juliet E.K. Walker writes about William W. Watson, a barber from Kentucky who, with the profits accrued from his white clientele, earned enough money to purchase his mother, brothers, and sisters from slavery. One of his contemporaries estimated that his lifetime wealth stood around $30,000.2 Another barber from Baltimore, Thomas Green, owned a shop valued at $11,000 and additional assets of $20,000.3 To attract such wealthy white customers, barbers promoted their shops as exclusive places of opulence that included services like baths. Mills explains that a link existed between bathing and luxury, because the wealthy’s greater access 1 Quincy T. Mills, Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 21-24.

2 Juliet E.K. Walker, The History of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship (New York: Macmillan Library Reference, 1998), 107.

3 Douglas Walter Bristol, Knights of the Razor: Black Barbers in Slavery and Freedom (Baltimore: Johnson Hopkins University Press, 2009), 49.

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to indoor plumbing gave them a sense of superiority over lower classes. He writes that “barbers capitalized on the new technology and air of exclusiveness bathhouses brought to the public sphere” by including them in their service offerings.4 An 1845 St. Louis newspaper advertisement promoted Louis Clamorgan and Mr. Iredell’s barbershop, announcing their “ ‘Splendid Hair Cutting and Shaving Saloon’ with recently installed baths with tubs of ‘the finest Italian marble, the rooms large, airy and elegantly furnished.’”5 Providing such additional services allowed barbershop owners to enjoy multiple streams of income, which in turn gave them greater affluence, respectability, and access to the black middle class and occupational elite.6 Due to their high earnings, barbers met the middle class standard that many other black elites could not attain, and such a status of economic independence granted them a level of respectability among whites that other black elites could not enjoy.7 Douglas W. Bristol claims that successful black barbers benefitted from a “middle class respectability,” which meant they “could afford to let their wives remain at home, educate their children, and serve as deacons of their church.”8 Although black barbers never occupied a position of equality among whites, the networks and relationships that they formed with their white clientele proved useful and seemed to evidence their elevated societal status. By presenting themselves as industry pioneers, successful businessmen, and trustworthy craftsmen, barbers earned incredible reputations. Bristol explores the relationship that Pierre Toussaint maintained with his clients, revealing that one white customer “claimed that Toussaint’s respectability made him forget their racial differences.”9 The client believed that the barber possessed the attributes of a true gentleman, allowing him to “serve without being degraded.”10 Such a reputation proved beneficial when barbers faced losing their businesses due to laws that required free blacks to leave the state in which they were freed. Mills writes that free black barbers who petitioned these laws relied on their reputation to keep their residency, and they “usually referenced their industriousness, business

acumen, honesty, and family ties in these appeals.”11 White citizens even attested to barbers’ character to state authorities, because they wanted to stabilize the service industry by keeping free black servicemen in the state. Mills cites one newspaper article that announced the possible expulsion of several barbers in New Orleans, but he reasons that their reputation prevented their prosecution.12 The high earnings that barbers achieved propelled them to an economic position in which whites recognized their middle class status and granted them respect. Barbers’ financial success opened the door to privileges that other freed blacks could not enjoy, such as a good reputation, that they could use to protect themselves from state laws.

The life of William Johnson, a barber from Natchez, Mississippi, exemplifies the great levels of financial success that barbers could achieve during the Antebellum period. Johnson owned three barber shops, a bathhouse, rental property, a merchandise store, a few horses, a plantation, and enslaved people. Walker figured that with the flat rates of $1.50 to $1.75 for a month of shaving and $.75 cents per haircut across his three barber shops, his annual income could reach $3,600.13 Johnson kept a journal in which he recorded his lending practices, the state of his businesses, his hunting outings, investments, and interactions with his white customers. In October 1835, Johnson recorded a 162-acre land purchase that he made at $4.12 per half acre, and in early November that same year he purchased a horse.14 Johnson frequently loaned out money to whites in his town, and he kept a detailed log of the loans’ status. On December 17, 1835, Johnson wrote, “I Loaned Dr Reed Potts $380;” on March 18, 1837, “I Loaned Mr. A Speilman $300 payable in thirty Days after date at 5 per Cent per month;” and on May 28, 1838, “To day Mr. Saml Gocian Came and paid me $25, being a part of 50 Dollars that I Loaned him some time ago.”15 The economic transactions between him and Natchez’s white agriculture and business sectors testify to his wealth and reputation. Through the provision of multiple services in his luxurious barber shops, Johnson earned high profits that both awarded him the

4 Mills, 26.

5 Walker, 107.

6 Bristol, 4.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid.

9 Bristol, 59.

10 Ibid.

11 Mills, 38.

12 Ibid.

13 Walker, 108.

14 William Johnson, William Johnson’s Natchez :The Antebellum Diary of a Free Negro, ed. William Ransom Hogan and Edwin Adams Davis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 65 and 76.

15 Ibid., 85, 169, and 230.

44 time and money for expensive purchases and leisure activities, and a level of respect among whites in Natchez.

To achieve his great financial success and respectability, Johnson ceded control to whites and their preferences, which required that he perpetuate racial inequality and difference in his shop. Johnson owned and employed enslaved men to work as his apprentices, and he often impressed the value of deference upon them through punishment. One of his apprentices, Steven, drank excessively and ran away frequently; his bad habits negatively affected his work, and Johnson disciplined him harshly.16 On February 23, 1836, Johnson wrote, “I had to Beat Steven this morning for taking the shop key away and was not ready to open the shop.”17 Over the course of eight years, Johnson recorded several entries concerning Steven’s public drunkenness. Finally, on January 1, 1844, he revealed that he sold Steven: “I would not have parted with Him if he had Only Let Liquor alone but he Cannot do it I believe.”18 This was not the first time that Johnson fired a worker for his drinking problems. On July 24, 1840, Johnson recorded that he could no longer keep a free worker named Sterns because “his maner of doing business would never do. To be Drunk ½ of his time would never Suit me nor my Customers.”19 Johnson’s frequent admonishments of his apprentices’ poor behavior indicate his concern about how his employees’ public drunkenness might adversely affect how Natchez’s white community would view him. Through assuming the role of a patriarchal master, Johnson taught his employees the barbering trade and the submissiveness that came along with it. Steven clearly did not satisfy this requirement, and he was terminated. According to Mills, “White men wanted their black barbers to be submissive and deferential, and in return, black barbers would receive patronage and protection.”20 In order to maintain his high profits, Johnson showed subservience to whites and catered to their preferences, even if that meant beating or selling his own employees. Johnson traded deference for money and cultivated a culture of submission and racial inequality that perpetuated white supremacy.

Natchez’s white residents never fully accept16 Mills, 33.

17 Johnson, 103.

18 Ibid., 470.

19 Ibid., 287.

20 Mills, 35.

ed Johnson into their community, despite his achieved respectability, and so a level of inequality necessarily existed in his shop to ensure that he received white patronage. Johnson could be trusted to maintain loan contracts with whites, but whites still barred him from fully participating in their society. For instance, he could not sit next to white men at public meetings or vote.

To describe Johnson’s peculiar position, Mills quotes his biographer: “He was a part of the community and yet not a part of it.”21 Johnson’s status reflects that of many other wealthy barbers during the Antebellum period whose financial success depended on the preservation of racial difference. For black barbers to thrive in a capitalist society, they perpetuated inequality in their shop because white men would only patronize a barber who served whites only and submitted to their demands. No matter how good of a reputation someone like Johnson obtained, white business would only continue to flow if a distinction existed between black barbers and their white customers.

At the end of the day, antebellum barber shops were servile spaces where barbers perpetuated racial inequality by assuming a subordinate status to whites and refusing to groom black customers. Whites associated barbers with servitude, and they patronized black barbers because they could not stand to see other whites in service positions. Bristol explains that “the sight of another white man in personal service apparently revolted” whites, and that if a white client saw another white man coming to shave him he would leave the shop because it was “not a white man’s place to play the part of a servant.”22 White customers commonly asserted their authority over their black barbers, thus reinforcing blacks’ lower socioeconomic status.

Bristol reveals that when one barber tried to join a conversation about politics in his own shop, a customer stared him down and asserted that he “had no right to listen to gentlemen’s conversations.”23 Further, the rule of the barbering trade required that black barbers deny black customers; many white men refused to receive a shave or a haircut from the same blade or shears used to groom a black man.24 Mills claims that this widely accepted rule was made by the barber’s white customers as it “was based on the racial custom that prohibited symbols or signs of social equality.”25 A reporter 21 Ibid.

22 Bristol, 53.

23 Ibid., 52.

24 Mills, 83.

25 Ibid., 84.

45 for the Cleveland Gazette asked several barbers why they did not shave black men, and they referenced their white customers’ demands of segregation; white customers opposed any modicum of social equality that integration may have represented.26 For black barbers to maintain steady revenue from their white clients, they necessarily showed deference to white customers and denied service to black people. Barbers’ desire for economic freedom in a capitalist society outweighed their desire for racial integration, so they maintained inequality in their shop.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, competition from white Americans and arriving immigrants prompted the switch in black barbers’ clientele from primarily white to black customers.

First and second-generation immigrants rivaled black barbers for customers, especially German and Italian barbers whom whites viewed as more skillful at cutting hair than blacks. Mills quotes Manuel Vieira, who noted that “Germans display a great deal of taste in cutting and hair dressing,” and that “Germans take more pains in trying to please their customers” than blacks.27 A huge influx of 7,000 Italian barbers in New York worried black barbers who previously dominated the industry, and the amount of white American and immigrant barbers outpaced the number of black barbers in many cities.28 Although black barbers tried to keep their client base through shop improvements, the invention of new marketable shaving equipment sealed their fate. At-home shavers allowed white barbers to turn their focus to cutting hair and present themselves as re-inserting skill into the industry, which caused white customers to view black barbers who primarily provided shaves as unskilled. Mills claims that “barbering gained prestige among white men as a skilled craft” as the new commercial razor “contributed to the whitening-up of barbering.”29 By intimating that they possessed more talent in haircutting than black barbers who specialized in the less-skilled art of shaving, white barbers convinced white men to switch to their services.

The Great Migration of World War I and the increased segregation of northern and southern urban areas contributed to the creation of black business districts, which facilitated the rise of barber shops that served the rising black working and business classes.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid, 109-110.

28 Ibid., 114.

29 Mills, 118-119.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. III | Issue 1 Many blacks moved north due to strict Jim Crow segregation and the poor opportunities that southern rural areas offered. Walker believes that the Great Migration was the most notable event that brought about the rise of black business districts in U.S. cities as blacks settled into distinct and separate neighborhoods.30 In the twenty-year period from 1910 to 1930, 1.5 million rural migrants relocated to southern and northern cities, where they were then forced to settle into segregated districts. Further, because of the increased property values and white competition in prime business areas, black business owners, including barbers, necessarily migrated to segregated business districts. These business districts functioned as commercial sites for the growing population of black consumers, and black barbers took advantage of this to attract customers and rebuild their client base.31 Barbers found their financial success linked to the growing black working class and its demand for places to get a haircut.32 The Great Migration and the increased settlement of black working classes into segregated urban districts signified barber shops’ transition from places that served whites to those that serviced blacks.

This transition resulted in barber shops’ transformation into community sites for black congregation in private spaces separate from white surveillance, which, in turn, facilitated discussion of politics and the creation of a collectivist black political ideology.

Customers often talked about the precarious position of black people in the U.S., and emphasized the importance of not only voting, but voting Democratic, to improve their societal position.33 Men and shop owners discussed the importance of regular voting, political candidates, local, national, and international news.

Barbers controlled the amount of political activity occurring in their shops, with some taking politics so seriously they barred unregistered voters from talking about politics in their shop.34 Barber shops serve as democratic forums where men of all social and economic status may gather to debate political issues and form opinions central to black political ideology.

Blacks’ ability to congregate and freely discuss their opinions indicate barber shops’ shift away from places 30 Walker, 213.

31 Mills, 149-150.

32 Mills, 156.

33 Melissa Victoria Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 176 and 180.

34 Mills, 226.

46 of servitude to community centers.

These new-generation barber shops operated as democratic spaces, and many barbers acted as mediators by facilitating and shaping political discussion.

Enoc P. Waters Jr., a writer for the Chicago Defender, records a barbershop conversation regarding the Mitchell Bill, through which he depicts shops as democratic forums. Arthur W. Mitchell, an Illinois representative, proposed a bill that involved founding an Industrial Commission of Negro Affairs to solve black people’s problems and encourage their welfare and wellbeing.35 A brave proponent of the bill argued that it “gives our men a chance to handle the problems of their own people,” proving that blacks possess the intelligence to solve their issues.36 Many customers interrupted his speech, but the shop owner demanded that they “let the man have his say. Ain’t no hurry. Your turn’s coming.”37 Upon taking the floor, the opposition rejected the idea that a few men, answerable to the president and receiving substantial salaries, could solve all of black people’s problems; they believed that the government would make little effort to find the right people who were actually in-tune with their race’s issues.38 This debate represents just one of the many conversations that occurred, and still occur, in black barber shops across the country. Unlike antebellum barbers, these new barbers did not necessarily assume a subservient position that barred them from participating in their clients’ conversations. They have not only contributed to political debates, but also mediated them.

With the rise of the black freedom movement after World War II, barber shops served as gathering spaces to resist, organize, and mobilize against racial inequality due to their communal disposition. Mills notes how one barber from Mississippi, Reverend Louie Redd, gave the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) space to continue working on their voter registration campaign after their office was burglarized.39 Customers who sat in the shop received

a political education either by participating in debates or simply listening. Political activists who owned barber shops viewed their clients as perfect candidates to converse with about local politics or to enlist for organizing campaigns. Curtis C. Bryant, a barbershop owner who became president of the NAACP in Pike County, Mississippi in 1954, kept black newspapers and magazines, NAACP material, and other radical literature in his shop for his clients to read. Bryant’s recruitment tactics convinced one customer, Joe Martin, to join the NAACP Youth Council after reading and listening to conversations from local people.40 Barber shops’ conduciveness to gathering resulted in political debate, ideology formation, and organization among black customers.

As language of integration intensified during the 1960s with the Civil Rights Movement, many blacks opposed barber shops’ racial integration, preferring to keep shops as spaces where black men could gather without white surveillance. Black people claimed that they would not feel comfortable talking about politics or exchanging cultural information in white people’s presence. In pursuing their goal of congregating comfortably with other members of their racial community, black people actively chose to patronize a black-owned shops.41 Melissa Victoria Harris-Lacewell reveals that men come into the barbershop because they always feel welcome there, describing the shop as a “universal home.”42 The idea that black barbers would serve white clients threatened black customers’ sense of security and community that the barbershop provided them. Al Duckett, a columnist for the Chicago Defender, detailed a conversation that he had about racial integration with a customer named Big Mouth.43 Big Mouth recounted his experience at a hotel barbershop where white barbers serviced both black and white clients, and claimed that it was a part of integration that he was not ready for. Boiling it down to a matter of trust, Big Mouth said, “I don’t ever want to become so integrated

35 Enoc P. Waters Jr., “The Mitchell Bill Bane or Blessing?: How It Is Regarded By—Kelly Miller, NAACP, Barbershop Forum,” The Chicago Defender, August 10, 1935, https://www. proquest.com/hnpchicagodefender/docview/492416452/fulltextPDF/6C1D9E2E4994406EPQ/1?accountid=11264&parentSessionId=S2%2B%2FQVT1g8%2B2QJJpShRUQmekVzKrQIm0bqQe023Cw7w%3D 36 Ibid.

37 Ibid.

38 Ibid.

39 Mills, 224.

40 Mills, 224-226.

41 Ibid., 217.

42 Harris-Lacewell, 162.

43 Al Duckett, “Know the Negro: Don’t Get Too Integrated,” The Chicago Defender, April 4, 1964, https://www.proquest. com/hnpchicagodefender/docview/493051954/AB3219C991B4BC7PQ/1?accountid=11264&parentSessionId=zfLPkqQremLZ2htRQSg%2F7o9%2BKwgIePazMa%2FqeN5USCw%3D

47 that I can’t find the colored section.”44 Big Mouth vocalized the sentiments of many blacks who would not feel welcome in integrated shops, which gave barbers an economic incentive to maintain segregation in their shops; if they cut whites’ hair, they would lose patronage from black clients who preferred to get groomed in an exclusively black setting. Recognizing black customers’ desire to have a separate cultural space, just as antebellum barbers did with whites’ segregationist preferences, many barbers continued to only serve blacks. Although shop dynamics newly favored community building and identity formation over deference, shops remained places that reinforced racial difference as it proved profitable for barbers.

From the 1960s on, black barbers have increasingly viewed the cultivation of a black community in their shops as economically advantageous, and they have made a conscious effort to develop a welcoming environment for their customers. Shops reinforce racial difference by rejecting integration to establish shops where customers feel comfortable openly conversing without a white presence. Mills asserts that the negative perception of integration and desegregation in barber shops shows barbers that it is “actually good for business that men were comfortable talking, arguing, and debating about various issues in their shop.”45 Mills emphasizes barbers’ incentive to maintain their shops as welcoming spaces, writing that their “ideas of economic security also rested in the shop as a public space.”46 Barbers take advantage of their customers’ desire for gathering and acceptance for economic gain as they foster a comfortable environment so that clients will continue coming back and patronizing them.

Despite their transition from servile to community spaces, barber shops have remained sites that reinforce segregation as a business strategy. Just as antebellum barbers profited from necessarily perpetuating racial difference to survive as businessmen, modern barbers benefit from maintaining a shop that serves an exclusively black clientele. Although barber shops’ nature has changed over time, their strategy of catering to their clients’ preferences for racial separation has continued to bring them economic success.

Barber shops’ transition from servile spaces to community centers has further facilitated the perpetuation and modification of black culture. Part of this culture lay in the popular hairstyles that barbers produce, 44 Duckett, “Know the Negro.”

45 Mills, 219.

46 Ibid., 218.

HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. III | Issue 1 such as the conk and the Afro. Adjusting to the fashion trends, barbers from the 1920s to the 1960s commonly “processed” hair, which involved straightening the hair and styling it in a wave pattern.47 According to Mills, the conk was “a hallmark of black entertainment,” related to Nat King Cole, Duke Ellington, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Otis Williams, the co-founder of the musical group The Temptations.48 The conk symbolized coolness and trendiness that kept customers coming back because black barber shops were the only place that could provide this token of black culture.49 When the Afro became popular in the 1960s and 1970s during the black consciousness movement as political statements of black identity, barbers readily provided Afro cuts. Mills quotes Clinton Simpson, an Alabama barber, whose concern for profitability motivated his provision of this new style: “I changed my styles; whatever the customer wanted, that’s what I gave them.”50 Black culture is ideal for business as black clients could not get a haircut like the process or the Afro at a white shop, and they regularly return to black shops for their grooming needs. Mills explains that barbers knew that even though blacks may gain entry to white shops, they could not “get the latest culturally specific haircut… Black culture would continue to be the value that black barbers and their shops offered.”51 Through their adjustment to changing hairstyles emblematic of black culture, barbers have assured their continued economic success. By producing popular culture hairstyles in an exclusively black setting, barbers satisfy their clients’ demand for a safe cultural space while reaping the economic benefits.

Aside from haircuts, barber shops provide a space conducive for social exchange between community members through regular conversation, which further drives black culture. Gossip and oral exchange, although sometimes discounted in significance, act as agents for political and cultural formation. Earl Byrd, a writer for the Baltimore Afro American, referred to barber shops as “gossip factories” where men discussed “police brutality, crooked politicians, crooked merchants not giving back to the community, sports, fathers

47 Mills, 231.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid., 233.

50 Ibid., 239.

51 Mills, 247.

48 not taking care of their sons and daughters…”52 Regardless of social or economic standing, barber shops allow people to come together, socialize, and share their experiences; African American thought spreads across classes, rendering barber shops optimal places for cultural exchange.53 In a separate article, Byrd focuses on barber shops as places of social interaction and enjoyment, referring to them as “the Black Country Club, where life’s experiences are shared.”54 Gossip and conversations about any topic from religion, to the best heavyweight boxer, to how the mayor should allocate funds to improve neighborhoods characterized everyday interactions in the barbershop.55 Sports, a significant part of black culture, has been a common area of discussion in barber shops. McNair Taylor writes in his article for the Baltimore Afro American that people could get an “education in racial pride through sports,” because any victory for a black athlete symbolized a victory for the entire race.56 Barber shops’ existence as community centers where black clients feel comfortable congregating and discussing their opinions on a variety of issues without a white presence in turn renders them sites of cultural modification and formation.

Barber shops’ transition away from places of servitude and deference characteristic of the Antebellum period toward their current status as communal spaces facilitates social interactions that perpetuate black culture.

In a relatively modern study of black barber shops, Bryant Keith Alexander explores shops as cultural sites constructed around a community of intellectual and social exchange. According to Alexander, barber shops are places of cultural performance, as achieved by “the signaling of cultural traditions (handshakes, verbal greetings, language, etc), the nature of talk and social play, [and] the acknowledge awareness 52 Earl Byrd, “Barbershops- cultural institutions, ‘country clubs,’ ‘gossip factories,’ ” The Baltimore Afro American, October 6, 2001, 1, https://www.proquest.com/hnpbaltimoreafricanamerican1/docview/2637673338/E34A99D887E440B9PQ/1?accountid=11264 53 Ibid., 2.

54 Earl Byrd, “Barbershops groom, entertain, and educate,” The Baltimore Afro American, October 20, 2001, 2, https://www.proquest.com/hnpbaltimoreafricanamerican1/docview/2637671585/ B30F6BD8E4D547F2PQ/1?accountid=11264 55 Ibid.

56 McNair Taylor, “In the Barbershop,” The Baltimore Afro American, November 30, 2002, https://www.proquest.com/ hnpbaltimoreafricanamerican1/docview/2669800577/F064500F88574125PQ/1?accountid=11264.

and concern of issues relative to the community.”57 Alexander further explains how barber shops help to solidify black culture through the dissemination and discussion of shared interests, thoughts, goals, desires, political and social attitudes, or religious beliefs.58 Bryant calls barber shops community centers, and claims that they perpetuate culture as black people “come in contact with each other through touch, the manipulation of hair… the sounds of talk, information sharing, and the deep penetration of cultural memory.”59 Barber shops, due to their conduciveness to congregation, create a comfortable environment where blacks feel welcome and safe to converse in public without white scrutiny. Barber shops’ shift from servile spaces to gathering sites allows for the dissemination, preservation, and formation of black culture.

Barbering has remained a profitable business for black entrepreneurs from the Antebellum period through today as it offers blacks the opportunity to achieve sustained economic success. Antebellum barbers assumed a deferential position of servitude and enforced racial difference by refusing to serve black customers, which allowed whites to assert their supremacy. Although such a strategy did not favor racial uplift, it certainly proved financially beneficial for barbers, allowing them a level of respectability and income that propelled them into the middle class. The rise of immigration, the Great Migration, and the formation of segregated black districts contributed to a shift in black barbers’ clientele from primarily white customers to black customers. This transition initiated a shift in shop dynamics, with shops becoming places of congregation and community that facilitate black political ideology, culture, and identity formation.

Although they have created a new cultural space for black people that facilitates democratic discussion and safe congregation, barbers have remained businessmen whose financial success in a capitalist system depends on maintaining racial difference in their shops. ________________

57 Bryant Keith Alexander, “Fading, Twisting, and Weaving: An Interpretive Ethnography of the Black Barbershop as Cultural Space.” Qualitative Inquiry 9, no.1 (2003): 107.

58 Alexander, 108.

59 Ibid., 123.

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Basquiat and Warhol’s Collaboration Rethinking Historical Influence Lily Watts

Hamilton College - Class of 2026

“Last year, I wrote of Jean-Michel Basquiat that he had a chance of becoming a very good painter providing he didn’t succumb to the forces that would make him an art world mascot. This year, it appears that those forces have prevailed, for Basquiat is now onstage at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery at 163 Mercer Street, doing a pas de deux with Andy Warhol, a mentor who assisted in his rise to fame. Actually, it’s a version of the Oedipus story: Warhol, one of Pop’s pops, paints, say, General Electric’s logo, a New York Post headline or his own image of dentures; his 25-year old protege adds to or subtracts from it with his more or less expressionistic imagery. The 16 results - all ‘Untitleds,’ of course - are large, bright, messy, full of private jokes and inconclusive.”1 - Vivien Raynor This seemingly contemptuous judgment of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol’s 1984 collaborative series, written by Vivien Raynor for the New York Times, was a popular opinion within the art world at the time. Basquiat and Warhol’s collaboration was not well received by critics. Andy Warhol, widely regarded as the father of the Pop Art movement who built his career off paintings and screen prints of branded objects and celebrities, was 55 years old at the time of this collaboration.2 Jean-Michel Basquiat, the 27-year1 Vivien Raynor, “Art: Basquiat, Warhol,” The New York Times, September 20, 1985.

2 David W. Galenson, “Revising the Canon: How Andy Warhol Became the Most Important American Modern Artist,” University of Chicago, Becker Friedman Institute for Economics Working Paper Series, no. 2021-14, February 4, 2021, 1.

old phenom, rose to fame in the art world from his representations of Black American life and street graffiti.

From 1984 to 1985, Basquiat and Warhol would make over 100 collaborative pieces together.3 Critics and scholars across the country shared Raynor’s presumptions that Andy Warhol had a strong influence over Jean-Michel Basquiat’s career, and that Basquiat was relegated to the older artist’s shadow during their collaboration. In this paper, I argue instead that Basquiat had a greater overall impact on their collaborative pieces, as Warhol embraced the younger artist’s vision and translated his style to fit Basquiat’s during their works together. There was no silkscreen printing, no photography, and no mass production involved in their collaborative series which were all hallmarks of Warhol’s niche. Basquiat had been painting his entire career while Warhol, at this point, had not been for over two decades. Their partnership gave Warhol a resurgence on Basquiat’s terms, and their single exhibition’s title, “Paintings”, signified a comeback for the older artist. This paper will analyze the unique contributions made by each artist to the series, the effect that the collaboration had on each artist’s career, and the effect the collaboration had on the art world. In doing so, I aim to disprove the notion that Warhol influenced Basquiat in their series by exploring what a collaboration truly means in the art world through an intersectional lens. I will explore the possible power dynamics surrounding the narrative that Warhol was a guiding influence in the series. Rather than focusing solely on the products of their collaboration, I will also analyze how the act of collaborating itself, especially between two artists with starkly different identities, is culturally significant.

3 The Andy Warhol Museum, “Warhol and Basquiat: Collaboration & Contrast,” The Andy Warhol Museum.

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An Unlikely Pair Artistic collaborations have been in practice for centuries. Apprentices who trained in Master workshops would collaborate on works together, oftentimes crafting the body of a massive sculpture, or painting while imitating a Master’s style.4 Collaborations are multifaceted and can complicate the way in which we look at an individual’s style. Basquiat and Warhol abandoned the traditional apprentice-master relationship where one imitates another’s style, and instead each contributed uniquely to their collaborative series.

Their methods also transitioned from the traditional process of collaborating on one cohesive piece to combining their distinct styles without regard for congruency in their works. Art historian Claire Bishop argues in her essay, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents” that, “This mixed panorama of socially collaborative work arguably forms what avant-garde we have today: artists using social situations to produce dematerialized, antimarket, politically engaged projects that carry on the modernist call to blur art and life.”5 Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1984 collaborative series tests the boundaries of avant-garde art by refiguring the relationship between collaborators as two distinct partners engaging on the same canvas.

Though they came from starkly different backgrounds, both artists used their positionality to inform their critiques of society through their art. Andy Warhol was born in 1928 and grew up in Pittsburgh during the Great Depression. He built his career off the appropriation of famous products and celebrities through his highly saturated paintings and screen-prints. Warhol was an openly queer artist during a time of extreme homophobia and heteronormativity. Comparatively, Jean-Michel Basquiat was born in 1960 to a middle-class family, and found his calling on the streets of New York City.6 Through his neo-expressionist style, Basquiat explored what it meant to come of age as a Puerto Rican/Haitian teen in the eighties, building his career off his large-scale portrayals of Black American life and his distinctive graffitero style.

4 Franciszek Skibiński, Willem Van Den Blocke: A Sculptor of the Low Countries in the Baltic Region, (Belgium: Brepols, 2020,) 35.

5 Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents,” ARTFORUM, February, 2006, 2.

6 Alaina Young Mosny, “The reconsideration of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work from the hybrid cultural Perspective,” (University of Richmond, 2008), 4.

Figure 1: Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Arm and Hammer II, 1984, Acrylic on cardboard

The works that Basquiat and Warhol made together are evidence of their intersecting identities and modus operandi, especially in the case of one of their most well-known pieces, Arm and Hammer II (Figure 1). In this work, Warhol traced two Arm and Hammer baking soda logos onto cardboard and positioned the icons side by side. Central to Warhol’s Arm and Hammer logo design is a white worker with rolled up sleeves who tightly grasps a hammer, personifying human labor.7 José Esteban Muñoz, author of “Famous and Dandy Like B. ‘n’ Andy: Race, Pop, and Basquiat,” in Pop Out: Queer Warhol, writes that “The refiguration of the trademark on Warhol’s side of the canvas interrupts the erasure of labor by calling attention to the trademark’s very inscription, one that, when properly scrutinized, reveals the thematics of labor that the commodity system works to elide.”8 Warhol pushes the narrative that hidden in the everyday items of American consumerism are ironies that seek to question the basis of capitalism. The right side of the piece is left unmarked, and the Arm and Hammer logo stands on its own, contrasting heavily with the left side of the piece. The logo on the left is painted over in Basquiat’s signature graffitero style, obscured by a large dime that centers a black man playing the saxophone, this time in the form of famous jazz musician Charlie Parker. The juxtaposition of Warhol’s side with Basquiat’s points to the vastly different upbringings, identity, and cultural habits of the two artists.9 Basquiat often honored Black artists in his artworks, and his series with Warhol was no exception. Muñoz emphasizes Basquiat’s de7 José Esteban Muñoz, “Famous and Dandy Like B. ‘n’ Andy: Race, Pop, and Basquiat,” in Pop Out: Queer Warhol ed. by Jennifer Doyle, Jonathan Flatley, and José Esteban Muñoz (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 157.

8 Muñoz, “Famous and Dandy,” 158.

9 Ibid., 159.

52 liberate choice of centering Charlie Parker on his side of the work: “[Basquiat] calls attention to the erasure of Black cre atives and interrogates the ways in which the United States was built off a slave economy that still exploits nonwhite labor… Such symbols remind the viewer that the history of consumer culture on which Basquiat is sig nifying is an economy that was, in no small part, formu lated on the premise that the ownership of other human beings was entirely possible.”10

Arm and Hammer II supports Bishop’s argument about collaborations being social situations, where two artists get together to create products that question capitalism from the labor angle, but also from the historical Black perspective, joining forces to recognize and condemn society for its complicity in American consumerism.11 Warhol would supply his own critique of labor in the United States, and Basquiat would expand on it by incorporating aspects of race and exploitation. We can see these themes repeated in their 1985 piece, Untitled (Figure 2), where Warhol painted an enlarged image of a Ford motorcycle, obscured by Basquiat’s trio of shaky brown and black figures. Muñoz further writes that: “The black figures that Basquiat contributes to the frame work once again show the black presence that has been systematically denied from this representational prac tice.These primitive jet black images look only vaguely human and bare sharp fangs. Through such representa tions Basquiat ironizes the grotesque and distortive Afri can American presentations in consumer culture.”12

Figure 2: Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Untitled, 1984, Acrylic on Canvas.

10 Ibid., 158-159.

11 Bishop, “The Social Turn,” 2.

12 Muñoz, “Famous and Dandy,” 164.

Basquiat’s commentary on racial hierarchy and the fusion of Black figures with animalistic features transforms Warhol’s commodity form once again; Basquiat provides a new form of social commentary, one going beyond just consumerism, incorporating layers of systemic racism and depictions of Black identity in America. In their collaborative pieces, Warhol’s illustrations served as a vehicle for Basquiat’s political, social, and cultural commentary.13 This enlarged illustration of the Ford motorcycle is an image that Warhol would repeat in his last ever painting series, “The Last Supper,” in 1986.

Influence and Style Andy Warhol wrote in his diaries extensively about his collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Studying the process of how the two artists collaborated is crucial within the framework of this paper.

Warhol described how he started one of their works, African Masks, writing: “I had a picture, and I used the tracing machine that projects the image onto the wall, and I put the paper where the image is, and I trace. I drew it first and then I painted it like Jean Michel. I think those paintings we’re doing together are better when you can’t tell who did which parts...We painted an African masterpiece together. One hundred feet long. He’s better than I am, though.”14

Warhol explicitly describes the process of translating his style to fit Basquiat’s image. He even goes as far as to say that the paintings they do together are better when their styles are indistinguishable, and blithely acknowledges that Basquiat is a better painter than he is. In African Masks, Basquiat determines the way in which the figures are depicted; dark, abstract, and vaguely human, a testament to his earlier work.

Warhol’s stylistic trademarks are not present in this piece, and his contributions to the painting blend with Basquiat’s signature style seamlessly. These anecdotes from Warhol himself beg the question of how Basquiat could be influenced by Warhol when his style, methods, and ethos as an artist were more present within most of their collaborative series. Contrary to what critics at the time claimed about the pair’s dynamic, 13 Ibid.

14 Michael Dayton Hermann, Warhol on Basquiat: The Iconic Relationship Told in Andy Warhol’s Words and Pictures, (Cologne: Taschen, 2019), 140.

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we can see through Warhol’s perspective that Basquiat was not overpowered by the older artist within their collaboration. Basquiat is the one pushing Warhol to paint differently; the one painting over Warhol’s work.

The presumption that Warhol had a large influence on Basquiat, and the narrative that Basquiat was Warhol’s “mascot” does not hold when we consider Basquiat’s individual anecdotes as well. Basquiat shared in a 1985 interview with journalist Cathleen McGuinan that: “Andy hadn’t painted for years when we met. He was

very disillusioned, and I understand that. You break your ass, and people just say bad things about you. He was very sensitive. He used to complain and say, ‘Oh, I’m just a commercial artist.’ I don’t know whether he really meant that, but I don’t think he enjoyed doing all these prints and things that his stooges set up for him. I think I helped Andy more than he helped me, to tell you the truth.”15

Warhol was discouraged, and perhaps even insecure at the thought of painting again after 22 years.

Critics were harsh, and he was even harsher on himself. Warhol wanted a break from the masses of screenprints he had been selling for twenty years. Warhol felt he had lost his spark, and even admits this in his diary, writing that “Bruno came by and saw a painting that Jean-Michel hadn’t finished with yet, and he said, ‘I want it, I want it,’ and so he gave him the money and took it, and I felt funny, because nobody’s done that for me in so long. That’s the way it used to be.”16 From the sentiments expressed by both Warhol and Basquiat, we see a vulnerable side to Warhol where he longs for the past; Basquiat’s youth, passion, and vigor are all things he once saw in himself. Lastly, we can see that collaborating with Basquiat revived Warhol’s career. Muñoz supports this argument by stating, “If we look at Warhol’s work after his collaboration with Basquiat, we see a renewed interest in painting by hand, which he had done little of, beyond some abstract backgrounds, since 1962. Warhol’s star status was equally revitalized

by Basquiat.”17 Warhol seemed to become invigorated through working with Basquiat, appropriating his energy and channeling his emotion into creating art by hand.

After Warhol and Basquiat ended their collaboration in 1985, Warhol started his final series “The 15 Mosny, “The reconsideration of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work,” 39.

16 Hermann, Warhol on Basquiat, 172.

17 Muñoz, “Famous and Dandy,” 163.

Last Supper”, which debuted in 1986. Joseph Ketner, author of the book Andy Warhol, writes that Warhol’s Last Supper series is one of the artist’s most innovative compositions as well as one of the most ambitious series of religious paintings in the twentieth century.18 Warhol worked continuously on this series for over a year, creating hundreds of paintings, drawings, and prints.19 The Last Supper- The Big C (Figure 3), was one of Warhol’s most detailed paintings from this series. This piece focuses heavily on religion and the commodity form, where Ketner writes: “...Selections from Leonardo’s fresco revolve around a detail of Christ and his disciples within an oval price tag, 6.99. The golden yellow silhouettes Christ’s torso and serves as a halo, highlighting his head within a mandorla… Below him is the phrase ‘The Big C’, an obvious reference to Christ, who is surrounded by the owl of wisdom and the eagle of redemption.”20

Figure 3: Andy Warhol, The Last Supper- The Big C, 1986, Oil on linen.

The Last Supper- The Big C is evidence of Basquiat’s impact on Warhol. Warhol’s depiction of a price tag as an aureole that surrounds Christ is also similar to his use of the price tag in dozens of pieces he made with Basquiat; three of the most notable pieces being Bananas (Figure 4), 6.99, and Third Eye (Figure 5).

We can also see the repeated image of the Ford motorcycle from the aforementioned Untitled work painted three times within this single piece. By including these recurring symbols from his collaboration with Basquiat, Warhol seemingly pays homage to his partner. Warhol’s choice to use only primary colors is also reminiscent of Basquiat’s signature color use, and the biblical figures in this painting morph together in a way that again harkens back to Basquiat’s style. Regarding his Last Supper series, Warhol even said, “I painted them 18 Joseph Ketner, Andy Warhol, (New York: Phaidon Press, 2013), quoted in “Andy Warhol Died 31 Years Ago Today,” Phaidon.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

54 all by hand- so now I’ve become a Sunday painter…

That’s why the project took so long. But I worked with a passion.”21 In the last two years of Warhol’s life, it seemed he was ready to paint again after creating over 150 paintings with Basquiat.

Figure 4: Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat Bananas, 1984-1985, Acrylic, silkscreen ink, and oil stick on canvas

Figure 5: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Third Eye, 1985, Acrylic on canvas

and Warhol as a white and openly gay artist during a time of extreme heteronormativity and homophobia.

The two men were underrepresented in different ways, and race dynamics complicated their collaboration even further; the sheer act of creating politically charged artworks together in the 1980s is profound. José Muñoz expands on the idea of intersectional collaboration by explaining, “The relationship of queerness and race is often a vexed and complicated one… Basquiat rejuvenated both Pop Art and Warhol by exploding racial signifiers that had been erased, obstructed, or rendered dormant by the discourse.”22 Within their series, Warhol would present his critique of commodity forms and consumerism, and Basquiat expanded on Warhol’s messages with issues of racial hierarchy and racism in America. The pair’s collaboration was important for representation in the art world, and their methods diverged completely from what was historically understood as artistic collaboration.

It is necessary to reframe the idea that Warhol was the influencer within this series because Jean-Michel Basquiat was an established artist at the time of their collaboration. Claiming that Warhol “shaped” or “molded” Basquiat upholds systems of power imbalance. When we assert that Warhol had a large influence over Basquiat within their collaboration, we detract from Basquiat’s autonomy and authenticity as an artist in the face of Warhol’s popularity. Alaina Mosny, author of “The reconsideration of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work from the hybrid cultural perspective” argues that: Those who catapulted [Basquiat] to gallery success in the early 80’s overlooked the transcultural nuances of Basquiat’s work, mostly pegging him as a black street artist. Basquiat’s works make apparent that he was not depicting this or that ‘other’, rather he was ‘othering’ those uninitiated in the vibrant urban street culture of New York… It is wrong to evaluate Basquiat’s work in terms of the similarities of his work with the oeuvre of such ‘Western’ artists as Andy Warhol or Cy Twombly.

Basquiat himself wrestled with the subject of black col lusion.23

Significance Warhol and Basquiat’s collaboration is artistically valuable in the 21st century largely because of Basquiat’s role as a young Puerto Rican and Haitian-American artist during a time of extreme racism, 21 Ibid.

22 Muñoz, “Famous and Dandy,” 167.

23 Mosny, “The reconsideration of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work,” 49.

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HAMILTON HISTORICAL | Vol. III | Issue 1 uphold power imbalance. Naming Warhol as the influencer, despite heavy evidence that pushes against this categorization, sides with the notion that Warhol was the superior artist within the series and Basquiat the inferior. Granting Warhol superiority in their collaboration erases the work the artists did to dismantle the traditional Master and apprentice relationship.

Conclusion

Figure 6: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Quality Meats for the Public, 1982, Acrylic and oil stick on canvas

This can be seen in Basquiat’s individual works, one example being his 1982 painting Quality Meats for the Public (Figure 6). In this piece, Basquiat’s subjects articulate fear of being tormented by the pursuits of white masters.24 Mosny explains: “[Basquiat’s] Commodified and enslaved black bodies are not full figures; they are left unfinished. The work suggests that adaptation and acceptance of white arche type can lead to self-objectification that is just as degrad ing as being subject to racial discrimination. The work is a metaphor for Basquiat himself, whose self image was fragmented by the white elite. Basquiat personally experienced the isolation that comes with integration.”25

What critics like Vivien Raynor fail to recognize or appreciate is that regardless of what one may think about the products of their collaboration, the mere act of Warhol and Basquiat collaborating was significant. The representation of a young, Black artist and a significantly older, white, queer artist working together publicly had never been seen before. There is no version of an “Oedipus story”26 involved in their collaboration. In fact, the older artist had much to gain from his collaboration with the younger one, both socially and artistically. Warhol began painting again for the first time in 22 years, inspired by the conviction with which Basquiat worked. Larry Warsh, author of Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Notebooks, emphasizes that within their collaboration, “...Each separate identity asserts itself, whether actively or, paradoxically, passively, each one giving to, taking from, affecting the other.”27 It is clear that within the context of their collaboration, Basquiat had a greater overall impact on their collaborative pieces, as Warhol translated his style to fit Basquiat’s during their works together. Through medium and style, Basquiat’s technical skill was more present and therefore more impactful in this series than Warhol’s. Together, these two artists paved a path and redefined what it meant to collaborate in the 21st century. ________________

When we consider Mosny’s argument and the discomfort Basquiat felt in trying to assimilate into a predominantly white art world, we also must recognize the consequences of pushing a narrative that Basquiat was influenced by Warhol within their collaboration. When we uphold this notion of influence, we simultaneously 24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Viven Raynor, “Art: Basquiat, Warhol.”

27 Larry Warsh, Jean-Michel Basquiat, The Notebooks, 34.