145ating in other spheres of interest’.87 Something of the significance of these business networks can be seen from the colonial Chambers of Commerce. By the second half of the nineteenth century these chambers were well established in settler societies. They were also increasingly well networked with each other. Cape Town’s Chamber, for example, was founded in 1861. With the encouragement of its first president, the merchant, financier and politician John Ebden (1787–1873), it rapidly established itself as an important civic institution. Although many of the matters it dealt with were of local significance
85 B. Hack, A History of the Patent Profession in Colonial Australia (Melbourne: Clement
Hack and Co., 1984), pp. 11–15; Magee, Knowledge Generation, pp. 16–19.
86 A. Curthoys and M. Lake, ‘Introduction’, in Curthoys and Lake (eds.), Connected
Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective (Canberra: Australian National University
Press, 2005), pp. 5–20 (p. 5).
87 B. M. King, Silk and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 85.
146only, the Cape Chamber exchanged information on markets and prices with other colonial Chambers, and sent representatives to commercial gatherings in London and Canada – practices that gained momentum over time.88 Similarly, the Melbourne Chamber of Commerce, founded the previous decade in 1851, was an influential force in the city’s history. Its first president, William Westgarth (1815–89), was another merchant, financier and politician, one of the most respected men in the infant colony of Victoria. Westgarth formed the Melbourne Chamber almost single-handedly, and later helped to found the London Chamber of Commerce in 1881. He was well-known for his support of good causes, his advocacy of manhood suffrage, the secret ballot and state education, and the quality of his writings on early Australia. Following his return to England to establish a stockbroking firm in 1857, he was an influential adviser to those Australian colonies trying to float loans and strengthen their City borrowing credentials.89 Like the Cape Chamber, the Melbourne Chamber was very much outward-looking. Imperial communications were a consistent concern.90 The Chamber campaigned vigorously for a fortnightly mail service with Europe, for the extension of the telegraph from Ceylon to Australia, and for an imperial postal union, arguing that the progress and development of colonial trade were being retarded for want of such things. It also pressed for the formation of a Colonial Wool Merchants’ Association in London to improve the mode of warehousing Australian wools in the United Kingdom – this was eventually set up in 1868–9. British and Colonial Chambers of Commerce were first brought together in London in 1886 for the Congress of Chambers of Commerce of the Empire (CCCE).91 This self-declared ‘true Parliament of British Commerce’ met again in London in 1892, 1896 and 1900, and then in Montreal in 1903. In 1911, the Federation of Chambers of Commerce of the British Empire was formed. The Federation’s headquarters were
88 R. F. M. Immelman, Men of Good Hope: The Romantic Story of the Cape Town Chamber
of Commerce, 1804–1954 (Cape Town: Cape Town Chamber of Commerce, 1955),
pp. 179–86, 259–62.
89 W. Westgarth, Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne and Victoria (Sydney: G. Robertson
and Co., 1888). See also J. B. Cooper, Victorian Commerce, 1834–1934 (Melbourne:
Robertson and Mullens, 1934); and G. Serle, ‘Westgarth, William (1815–89)’, in
H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison (eds.), The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
90 See especially the memoir of its long-standing secretary, B. Cowderoy, Melbourne’s
Commercial Jubilee: Notes from the Records of Fifty Years’ Work of the Melbourne Chamber
of Commerce (Melbourne: Mason, Firth and M’Cutcheon, 1901), pp. 12–23, 34–43,
61–75, 97–8, 133, 143.
91 B. H. Brown, The Tariff Reform Movement in Great Britain, 1881–95 (New York: Routledge,
1943), pp. 92–3.
147Markets and consumer cultures in London. It organised biennial conferences, held alternately in London and the dominions.92 Intent upon improving commercial relations across the empire, the Federation’s proceedings make it clear that it was nonetheless primarily concerned with settler states. So much is apparent from the many resolutions it passed on preferential trade. Opinion was divided as to their desirability, with Canadian delegates coming out strongly in favour, and Manchester delegates remaining resolutely opposed. This stand-off highlighted the starkly differing perspectives between cotton manufacturers tied predominantly to the Indian market, and other sections of the business community with commercial interests stretching across the self-governing dominions. The latter tended to feel more threatened by Germany and the United States, and were thus more sympathetic to measures calculated to protect colonial markets from foreign competition.
The majority of delegates, however, adopted a pragmatic position on the subject of preferential tariffs: namely, that whatever their pros and cons, there was little mileage in a policy of fiscal reform until all the settler colonies could confidently subscribe to it. Indeed, although the Federation provided a major forum for the business community to debate tariffs, much more of its time was spent discussing a raft of more practical and pressing commercial questions. These ranged from the codification of commercial law and procedures for bills of exchange; to postal and telegraphic facilities, routes and rates; to the liability of shipowners for damage to cargo; to charges for maintaining lighthouses, buoys and beacons (and who should bear them); to questions of labour conciliation and arbitration (where advances in Australia and New Zealand were of particular interest to delegates); to emigration (where government was encouraged to use every means available to encourage people to go to the colonies); to the need to adopt more uniform (metric) systems of weights, measures and currency. Significantly, the majority of the resolutions on these subjects were co-sponsored by British and dominion delegates, and virtually all were adopted unanimously after they had been carefully and constructively examined.93 It would take a much longer and more intensive study of the Federation to evaluate its contribution to commercial reform across the British World, but the evidence adduced here suggests that it played a major, if hitherto neglected, role.
Among the glaring omissions in the proceedings of the Federation is that of the impact of colonisation upon ‘coloured’ or indigenous
92 Copies of the Official Reports of the Congress can be consulted at the Guildhall Library,
London, MS 18.278/1.
93 For a flavour of the topics and the discussion surrounding them, see, for example, Official
Report of the 3rd Congress of the Chambers of Commerce of the British Empire, 9–12 June
1896 (1896), MS 18.278/1.
148peoples. Indeed, if racial exclusion has been an ‘inevitable counterpart’ of globalisation,94 then the Chambers of Commerce offer insights into how imperial networks, while linking up markets through the spread of information and technology, marginalised particular subordinate groups by depriving them of access to the very structures that might have helped to empower them. The moment one begins to think of the British World as a series of overlapping networks through which knowledge and ideas were exchanged, goods traded and people travelled, then questions of who belonged to them and who did not, and of the implications of being included or excluded, need to be addressed. South Africa provides a useful case study. The Cape Town Chamber excluded people on grounds of wealth, status and colour. Unlike Nigeria, where Africans were not excluded from commercial life until after 1897, Cape merchants were predominantly white and European for most of our period, allowing perhaps for a small number of individuals who may have been light-skinned descendants of white slaveowners and probably non-African slaves.95 The Cape Chamber consisted of an established mercantile elite (or ‘grand bourgeoisie’) with a long history of engagement with the imperial economy and personal links with metropolitan capital: sixty or so men who would all have known (or known of) each other.96 They can be contrasted with the less prosperous and colonially oriented middle-class businessmen, retailers and merchants (English- and Dutch-Afrikaans-speaking) who looked instead to municipal institutions to establish their identity and press their claims.97 Initially, therefore, there does not appear to have been any active racial exclusion on the part of the Cape Chamber. Rather, in keeping with many ‘elite’ civic institutions of this period, it was not felt necessary to stipulate that blacks could not be members. There was an annual subscription of £5, which was high enough to have put off small traders of whatever ethnic background.98 In general, it seems to have been more a question of Africans preferring accumulation in cattle and land, while lacking access to the necessary credit (provided on the basis of social class as much as colour) and transportation to engage in mercantile activity. In
94 A. Hoogvelt, Globalisation and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy of
Development, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 130.
95 We are grateful to Vivian Bickford-Smith for steering us through the complexities of
commercial life in the nineteenth-century Cape and African involvement in it.
96 Immelman, Men of Good Hope, pp. 178, 184.
97 T. Keegan, Colonial South Africa and the Origins of the Racial Order (Cape Town: New
Africa Books, 1996), pp. 164–7.
98 Racial exclusion may have been more apparent in the Eastern Cape where Chambers
were formed in Port Elizabeth in 1864, East London in 1873 and Graaff-Reinet in 1875,
but further research is required to confirm whether this was so.
149Markets and consumer cultures those places where indigenous entrepreneurs did gain a foothold – such as the Eastern Cape where transport riding became a field for coloured and Black enterprise, especially among the Khoikhoi who fell under missionary influence – technological development (in this case, the railways) destroyed livelihoods, as did lack of access to credit and the ability to buy land outside cramped reserve areas.99 What is not in doubt is that, for a small number of affluent and privileged Europeans, membership of the Cape Chamber brought the benefits of access to commercial bodies in Britain promoting Cape trade,100 of contact with other colonial Chambers, and, from 1879, of representation at the regular collective gatherings of the empire’s Chambers of Commerce in London.
Meanwhile, in Natal, there was a sizeable and successful Indian merchant community.101 It was made up partly of the larger and wealthier Muslim merchant groups, originating from Surat and Porbandar, and joined together by family and kinship ties. These merchants defended their privileges and status as ‘British Indians’ and enjoyed relatively good trading relations with white wholesale merchants and retail customers who valued their business and reputation for punctual payment. The other section of Natal’s Indian merchant community, the so-called ‘dukawallahs’, were small storekeepers or shopkeepers, either ex-indentured Hindu labourers or Muslim ‘passenger Indians’, operating in semi-urban and rural areas. They were resented by the smaller English shopkeepers, who later began to rail against the entire Indian merchant class. After the grant of responsible government to Natal in 1893, pressure upon parliamentarians mounted from white residents and businesses to pass discriminatory legislation. The bigger Indian merchants and storekeepers were forced out of Durban’s commercial district, licence-renewal applications were refused and the number of Indian-owned shops on West Street fell dramatically. Faced by such pressures, Natal’s Indian merchants felt compelled to organise commercially to defend their interests. Whereas previously they had formed themselves into associations for the purpose of protecting and celebrating their religious, cultural and social distinctions, they now initiated political campaigns to protest against discrimination in trade. This culminated in the formation of a
99 See here R. Bouch, ‘Mercantile Activity and Investment in the Eastern Cape: The Case
of Queenstown, 1853–1886’, South African Journal of Economic History 6 (1991), 18–37;
A. Muller, ‘The Economic History of the Port Elizabeth–Uitenhage region’, South
African Journal of Economic History 15 (2000), 20–47.
100 For example, the Cape of Good Hope Trade Society, the South African Association,
and the South African Merchants Committee.
101 See especially V. Padayachee and R. Morrell, ‘Indian Merchants and Dukawallahs in
the Natal Economy, c. 1875–1914’, JSAS 17 (1991), 71–102, from which the rest of
this paragraph is drawn.