On Easter Sunday in 2001, a sensational story caught the attention of international media. Authorities in West Africa were hunting for the MV Etireno, alleged to be a “slave ship” carrying child workers to cocoa farms in the region.Footnote 1 While the Etireno turned out to be laden with migrants of all ages, there was plenty of prior evidence of coerced labor on cocoa farms, and the link between slavery and the Easter chocolate binge made for irresistible headlines in following weeks. “Chocolate slavery leaves rancid taste,” cried one paper, while another promised to detail the “Cocoa industry's bitter secret.”Footnote 2
“Fair trade” and anti-slavery organizations responded by endorsing “free labor” cocoa products, and activists called for boycotts of “slave chocolate.” Politicians scolded industry heads, West African governments promised reform, and little was accomplished.Footnote 3 Historians might feel a touch of déjà-vu in all this. The story of “tainted” chocolate enjoyed by children in the West at the expense of African labor had played out a century before in the Portuguese colony of São Tomé and Príncipe, and at least one writer connected the contemporary controversy to the case of Portuguese “slave cocoa,” employing history as a morality play.Footnote 4 On the surface, there are useful parallels between the two cases: each featured malfeasance by capitalist firms operating in a global marketplace, and each posed serious ethical problems to consumers of cocoa.
This article uses the “slave cocoa” case to explore consumer-centered activism in the past, and it challenges the idea that consumers were, by virtue of their place on the terminal end of the commodity chain, best suited to effect change. I argue that alternative understandings of consumption were used to identify other sites of action in global networks of agriculture, manufacturing, distribution, and consumption. I follow the career of E. D. Morel, a British journalist and humanitarian activist who was intimately involved with the cocoa scandal as well as the contemporaneous “red rubber” affair in the Congo Free State.Footnote 5 Despite working in the midst of a blossoming consumer age, one that saw the proliferation of consumer groups and the politicization of consumption, Morel explicitly rejected consumerism as a basis for organization. His skeptical view of consumer agency led him to identify other, more influential agents for reform.
CONSUMPTION AND CONSUMERISM
Over the last two decades, historians have examined consumption and consumers as serious subjects in their own right. Consumption has been described as a kind of social and political space in modern societies, an area of activity from which individuals can negotiate and contest their relationships with capital, labor, and the state. Writing about the British experience, historian Matthew Hilton called consumerism “a mobilising force at the heart of twentieth-century social and political history.”Footnote 6 The birth of a “consumer society” has been pushed steadily backward, past what Gary Cross called the “all-consuming” twentieth centuryFootnote 7 into the nineteenth and even eighteenth centuries. Scholars have found vibrant political agents in consumers of sugar,Footnote 8 bread,Footnote 9 clothing,Footnote 10 and even municipal water.Footnote 11
Part of this new research into consumption emphasizes ethical consumption, the use of purchasing power to accomplish a social objective. The practice of ethical consumption experienced a renaissance in the 1980s, a revival visibly marked by the proliferation of Max Havelaar, Fairtrade, Equal Exchange, and other certifications on store merchandise. Scholars have since traced the roots of this behavior, showing how consumption was used as a tool for social change in campaigns ranging from the battle against “slave sugar” to boycotts of sweatshop garments.Footnote 12 From this perspective, consumption is an individual or collective decision that can achieve goals beyond the satisfaction of personal needs and desires. The implication is that ethically guided consumption is a morally superior choice to “normal” consumption.
The second and more recent direction in the scholarship sees consumption through the lens of consumerism. “Consumerism” often carries a negative connotation, indicative of a society where consumption has replaced production as “the principal propelling and operating force of society.”Footnote 13 Scholars have recast the term, arguing that a consumer-centered politics “captures the desire for self-empowerment” that can be achieved through consumption.Footnote 14 Surveying the new literature, Alan Aldridge concludes that consumption is, from the “consumerist” perspective, fundamentally “about the empowerment of consumers as citizens.”Footnote 15
Both the “new consumerism” and the ethical consumption approaches represent limited understandings of consumption. Both reduce local, national, and global processes to a simple producer-consumer dichotomy. Primary producers are, at best, victims to be saved through ethical consumption; end-consumers appear as the only individuals with agency. Intermediary producers and consumers fade into the background, usually identified as villainous corporations guilty of exploiting workers, or hawking inferior products to consumers.
This narrow view was not always the rule in English-language understandings of “consumption.” “Consume” and its derivative words had negative connotations in English before the eighteenth century, meaning the destruction or using up of things. Authors sometimes specified “the last consumer” when using the word in its modern sense, as the end-user of a product.Footnote 16 The early political economists defined consumption as the antithesis of production, and as a result they had little to say about consumption as an economic or social process. Everyone knew how to consume; creating wealth was the hard part. Adam Smith turned this thinking on its head, famously declaring that consumption was “the sole end and purpose of all production,” but most writers continued to see producers rather than consumers as the key actors in society.Footnote 17
Frank Trentmann has shown that a “more wide-ranging use of the consumer as a category of social order emerged only slowly in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.”Footnote 18 According to Trentmann, Jean-Baptiste Say “was one of the few political economists to accord consumption a special section,” recognizing “the ‘reproductive consumption’ of goods in factories.”Footnote 19 The concept of “reproductive” consumption refined economic analysis, showing how intermediary agents exercised consumer and producer relationships with individuals at both ends of a commodity chain.Footnote 20 Say's understanding of consumption reflected a simple definition of “consume” as the using up of anything: thus a textile factory was a consumer of fiber, coal, and labor, in addition to being a producer of cloth.
The understanding of industries as consumers fell out of favor in the 1920s. Radical economist J. A. Hobson, who took a keen interest in the economic and moral relationships between producers and consumers, thought Say's terminology was useless. He argued, “the use of the term ‘consumption’ to describe the wear and tear of plant and the utilisation of raw materials and semi-manufactured goods in productive processes helped to confuse the terminology of economic theory.… There is nothing in common in the process of converting cotton yarn into cotton sheeting and the process of wearing out cotton-clothing yet the term ‘consumption’ is applied indifferently to both.”Footnote 21 Hobson's complaint has merit, and it is not the goal of this article to restore older understandings of “consumption” in contemporary discourse. Rather, the purpose is to stress the importance of a broader examination of the commodity chain in discussions of consumption and the agency of consumers. As John Brewer and Trentmann observe, “Consumer goods and services are not the product of immaculate conception. Thinking about the connections between different sites of consumption and between production and consumption requires attention to physical, material places as well as to virtual ones.”Footnote 22
It was with such a broad view of consumption that British journalist E. D. Morel approached the problems posed by the “slave cocoa” and “red rubber” scandals. Morel viewed industries as a kind of consumer, one with a privileged position along the commodity chain. Trentmann notes that during the very period when “the consumer” became “an altogether more active, ubiquitous character” in the public sphere in Britain, British manufacturers took pains to demonstrate “how industries were consumers too.”Footnote 23 Like end-users, industrial consumers were sensitive to rising prices, quality problems, and ethical issues. Morel and his contemporaries agreed that end-consumers fulfilled “the last economic function in a community,” as future Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald put it, but they emphasized a network of production and consumption rather than its terminal point.Footnote 24
Morel's emphasis on the industrial consumer as an agent for ethical change struck at what Hilton calls the “central dilemma” of consumerism: the fact that “the consumer can always be everybody and yet nobody and consumption can always be everything and yet nothing.”Footnote 25 Industrial consumers, unlike end consumers, are a narrowly defined group, and they have privileged relationships with suppliers and customers. One consumer making an ethical purchasing choice has little impact on society, but a single firm or an entire industry can have much more effect.
MOREL AND “RED RUBBER”
Morel's most famous campaign was directed against the Congo Free State. On the pretense of suppressing slavery and protecting free trade along the Congo River, the Great Powers recognized King Leopold's claim over a vast swath of territory in central Africa. Leopold's concessionary companies proceeded to extract rubber, ivory, and other commodities from the inhabitants of the Congo Basin with ruthless methods, until international pressure compelled the Belgian government to seize and reform the king's private domain.Footnote 26
Missionaries and humanitarian organizations had been protesting abuses in Congo practically since the establishment of the Free State, to little effect. Morel stumbled on the case in his work as a shipping clerk, connecting suspicious trade figures with increasingly dire reports from missionaries and travelers working in the Free State. With leading politicians and humanitarians, Morel launched the Congo Reform Association (CRA) in 1904 to end what he called the “Leopoldian system.”
Morel saw in the Free State a doctrine of colonial rule that merged coercive state power with commercial exploitation. According to Leopold, all land in Congo and the resources it contained were state property. Inhabitants were forced to collect rubber, and those who failed to meet quotas were often brutally punished with mutilation, rape, or murder. Morel was appalled by these atrocities, but he concluded that they were a necessary outcome of Leopold's original sin: “the reduction of millions of men to a condition of absolute slavery, by a system of legalised robbery enforced by violence.”Footnote 27
The CRA dramatically publicized the abuses, using technologies like the lantern lecture to reach audiences around the world. Speakers at these multimedia presentations bombarded viewers with images of amputated limbs and corpses, appealing to audiences through “the lantern slide image of atrocity.”Footnote 28 Literary figures like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Mark Twain contributed scathing attacks on King Leopold, and politicians hurled torrents of abuse at Leopold and the Congo Free State.
Given the rich context of consumer activism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is puzzling that the CRA did not use a consumer boycott as an economic weapon. A single commodity, rubber, connected individuals around the world to the plight of Leopold's victims, and one refrain (attributed to inhabitants of the Upper Congo) appeared over and over in publications: “Rubber is Death.”Footnote 29 Morel invoked the idea of a “tainted” commodity in the title of his book-length assault on the Free State, Red Rubber, but he never appealed to readers as users of rubber. He did not call for a boycott of Congo rubber or firms associated with it, nor did he even contact major industrial consumers of rubber about their connections to Congo.Footnote 30 Instead he focused on what he thought was the weakest link in the chain of rubber production and Leopold's rule in the Congo: the illegality under international law of Leopold's economic policies.
According to Morel, Leopold had effected “a complete revolution of accepted economics” by abolishing free trade, which was for Morel the primary “material factor governing the relationship of peoples.”Footnote 31 That the inhabitants of the Congo were being tortured, mutilated, and killed was a secondary effect of their loss of economic rights. Morel argued that even “an overwhelming case made out as to the atrocities even on a scale of unparalleled magnitude” would be “met by promises and protestations of reform: by the punishment of a few scapegoats; by the promulgation of new laws breathing the quintessence of philanthropy.” He was convinced that “The appeal must be to the mind as well as the heart.”Footnote 32
This approach came to typify Morel's thinking on social and political issues. He did not seek systematic explanations for colonialism, capitalism, or anything else. Rather, he displayed “a wholehearted intellectual commitment to a particular analysis of the roots of the abuses” he campaigned against.Footnote 33 Having identified Leopold and his economic policies as the central cause of the Congo's suffering, Morel passionately believed nothing less than “a sweeping removal of the cause of the evil by cauterising the evil at its roots” would suffice to end the humanitarian disaster.Footnote 34
The problem was that King Leopold was not about to hand his private domain over to the Belgian state or anyone else. Finding someone who could compel Leopold to give up control proved more difficult than Morel imagined. Public opinion, it seemed, was irrelevant to Leopold, and Morel showed a real skepticism toward the political clout of the masses. At the height of the campaign, Morel lamented, “The rubber slave-trade flourishes, unchecked, unimpaired, unaltered by all the talk and ink-spilling of the last four years.” He feared that public criticism even “stimulated” abuses in the Congo, since the regime felt “a sense of precariousness in the future.”Footnote 35
The successful conclusion of the Congo campaign did nothing to change Morel's view of mass political mobilization. In his unfinished memoir of the CRA, Morel complained that it took six years of public outrage before “the Congo Free State ceased to pollute the map of Africa.” “Six years during which the language of indignant and even violent denunciation indulged in by statesmen of the first rank and by eminent divines served, as it often (unjustly perhaps) seemed to us, only to satirise the inaction of the former and to demonstrate the powerlessness of religion as a lever to move mankind. Six years of talk, while Leopoldianism swept like a pestilence through the Equatorial Forest.”Footnote 36
THE “SLAVE COCOA” SCANDAL
Shortly after the creation of the CRA, another humanitarian crisis in western Africa came to Morel's attention, this time concerning allegations of slavery and deadly working conditions on the cocoa-producing islands of São Tomé and Príncipe. Portuguese planters had replaced chattel slavery on the islands with contract labor in the late nineteenth century, but the terms of the contracts were harsh. Plantation owners regularly filled out re-enlistment paperwork without the consent of workers, and a fund for repatriating workers at the end of their service turned out to be an administrative fiction. According to official records, not a single worker returned from the islands to Angola, the main source of workers, before 1908.Footnote 37
William A. Cadbury, buying manager for the giant Cadbury Brothers cocoa company, first heard rumors about “slave cocoa” during a 1901 visit to Trinidad. A traveler there pressed William over his firm's purchases from São Tomé, saying that William “was buying S. Thome cocoa and thus indirectly supporting a labour system that was virtually slavery.”Footnote 38 This was a serious ethical problem for the Cadbury firm. The Cadbury family were devout Quakers, and the firm's brand image connected a reputation for religious philanthropy with the idea that cocoa was a healthy, nutritious food. Cadbury Brothers paid a “living wage” to workers in its model factory town, Bournville, and the firm stated that it was “in the habit of making enquiry as to the labour conditions in the mines from which we bought our coal.” In 1906 the Cadbury board formally approved an “ethical purchasing policy” to weed out exploitative suppliers, requiring that all “contracts for machinery and sundries … state that the contract must be carried out by labour paid at proper trade rates.”Footnote 39 Consumers seemed to agree, as Cadbury Brothers claimed in advertisements, that its cocoa was “Absolutely pure, therefore best.”Footnote 40
The juxtaposition of Cadbury Brothers with slavery in Africa captivated contemporaries, and the case continues to interest writers, especially in light of recent “slave cocoa” allegations in West Africa.Footnote 41 William Cadbury wrote, “It would have been ridiculous if we had attempted to ignore the conditions under which cocoa was produced,” but the firm moved very slowly on the case.Footnote 42 Convinced that the cocoa firms could “bear better than anyone else on the question,” William tried to organize an industry-wide campaign to pressure Portugal to reform labor standards or to boycott the islands in early 1903.Footnote 43 He was only able to convince British firms (also run by Quakers) and Stollwerck Brothers of Germany to cooperate. The firms could not simply switch suppliers, however, since new plantations growing comparable grades of cocoa would have taken about six years to produce commercial crops.Footnote 44 Instead they agreed to fund an investigation of labor conditions on São Tomé, with the aim of convincing planters and the Portuguese government to reform labor policies.Footnote 45
Their report was preempted by British journalist and political campaigner Henry Nevinson.Footnote 46 He toured Portuguese West Africa and in 1905–1906 produced a series of articles and a book that sensationally linked wholesome cocoa to brutal slavery.Footnote 47 As a contemporary reviewer put it, Nevinson confronted “ordinary consumers” with the fact that “one-fifth of all the cocoa and chocolate we take is now produced for us by a form of black labour which is truly slavery.” Nevinson found it ironic that “philanthropic manufacturers with the most scrupulous care for the welfare of their employees” would buy raw materials “grown under the most infamous and revolting conditions of murderous slavery.”Footnote 48
Political opponents of the Liberal-leaning Cadbury family used the cocoa issue as a weapon, criticizing those “Quaker houses who largely advertize their preparations of cocoa but singularly enough never mention that the main ingredient is obtained by slave labour.”Footnote 49 Cadbury Brothers eventually issued its own report on labor conditions and switched from São Tomé cocoa to new supplies from Britain's Gold Coast colony, but the firm had to fight an ugly libel case over the controversy.Footnote 50
THE INDUSTRIAL CONSUMER AS AN ETHICAL AGENT
William Cadbury began corresponding with Morel in late 1903, having taken an interest in Morel's reporting on the Congo Free State. William gave generously to the CRA when it formed in 1904, and he even began paying Morel a stipend in 1905 to support the journalist's humanitarian work.Footnote 51 The chocolate manufacturer asked that Morel keep this “a private understanding,” alluding to the need to settle the problem in São Tomé before publically joining the fight against the Congo Free State.Footnote 52 Morel gratefully took the money, and he began to take a keen interest in São Tomé and Portuguese West Africa alongside his Congo crusade.Footnote 53
As Morel and William corresponded about both ongoing crises, Morel worked out a pragmatic view of ethical consumption, one that privileged the industrial consumer as an agent for change. From Morel's perspective, steeped in the classical economic faith of his merchant friends in Liverpool, the merchant or manufacturer's job was to practice capitalism, which by definition required free trade, free labor, and private property. Capitalists who defended these tenets in the name of commerce were, by default, also carrying out an ethical mission against slavery and oppression. Unfortunately, no such capitalist stepped forward to lead the campaign against Congo rubber. Morel desperately hoped that Sir Alfred Jones, his patron and former employer at the Elder Dempster shipping firm, would take a stand against Leopold's policies in the Congo, but Jones flatly rejected his appeals.Footnote 54
Next in line was John Holt, a Liverpool merchant with a trading empire the stretched across western Africa. He was a fervent Christian and a passionate believer in the doctrines of free trade and property, and his two faiths often intermingled in his correspondence with Morel. Holt was a bitter commercial rival of Jones, but when Morel tried to enlist Holt's leadership, the businessman replied: “So far as I am able to discern, my destiny arranged by Providence is to be a distributor of merchandise. Have I the capacity or mental qualification for any other role? How can I voice the wrongs of these helpless millions, and by what means can I bring about their redemption?”Footnote 55 Holt did serve on the CRA executive committee, but Morel struggled to enlist other important merchants in his campaign.Footnote 56 The rubber firms stayed as far as possible from the public eye, “although the whole world rang with the iniquity of the methods by which that rubber was put on the market.”Footnote 57
After these disappointments, William Cadbury's interest in investigating Portuguese labor abuses was a refreshing sign that capitalists could make a positive difference in the world. Ten years after the end of Cadbury Brothers’ involvement with São Tomé, Morel wrote: “The chocolate manufacturers of the world bought the raw material on the open market. They had no more to do with the methods of its production than the manufacturers of rubber tyres or toys, who bought Congo rubber on the market had to do with the systems under which rubber was produced in the Congo.” The difference was that the cocoa makers were capitalists with consciences, and Morel thought their attitude “typifies what ought to be the attitude of public opinion generally on these questions.”Footnote 58 George Cadbury, William's uncle and head of the firm, shared this view, writing that he “longed that some great india-rubber manufacturer would take the same course” that William adopted. He thought “it might have had years ago some influence in bringing public opinion in Belgium to bear on the awful conditions existing in the Congo.”Footnote 59
In hindsight, Morel concluded that Cadbury Brothers and its allies were the exception rather than the rule in modern business. He asserted, “This is the only case I have ever heard of in which manufacturers in Europe have recognised that it would be wrong of them not to investigate reports as to the ill-treatment of the distant coloured peoples producing the raw material … and not only to spend considerable sums in investigation, but to take action and refuse to buy the raw material so long as the conditions under which it was produced remained substantially unaltered.”Footnote 60
Morel also believed that the actions of the cocoa firms could actually make a difference where humanitarian groups and governments had failed. The Portuguese government had in fact issued a number of decrees ending the façade of involuntary “recruitment,” but reforms were “cheerfully ignored in Africa.”Footnote 61 The cocoa companies, on the other hand, had real power to change the labor system, because they were the only customers of the plantations. They could punish or reward planters through the marketplace.
William Cadbury was less enthusiastic than Morel about his own power as a market agent. “Sole hope was with planters,” William insisted, “and the only weapon the simple statement that unless circumstances were completely changed we should be compelled to stop our purchases.”Footnote 62 Believing that the boycott stick would be ineffective without universal participation, he preferred to dangle a carrot of closer business relationships and larger purchases in front of the Portuguese in exchange for labor reforms.Footnote 63 When colleagues in other cocoa firms urged William to declare a unilateral boycott of São Tomé cocoa, he argued that if the firms stopped buying, “we as manufacturers would have no longer any right to complain of conditions of labour in Portuguese territories.”Footnote 64
Consumption created an economic as well as a moral connection to São Tomé, one that transcended political boundaries. Only the Cadbury firm's status as a participant in a market relationship gave them the right to speak to Portuguese plantation owners about their labor practices. In effect, William wanted to exercise what economist Albert Hirschman called the “voice” option.Footnote 65 Hirschman argued that critics implicitly recognize the legitimacy of an institution when they speak from within it, encouraging opponents to see criticism in a constructive light. According to Hirschman, “exiting” the relationship by leaving a firm or ending a purchasing agreement would mean a loss for both parties.
CONSUMERS AND CAPITALISTS
After Nevinson's findings were published, British and American newspapers began to report on cocoa. Conditions seemed ripe for a popular boycott of Portuguese cocoa. Writers vividly recalled abolitionist tropes of “slave-tainted” sugar by reminding readers that “one-fifth of every cup of cocoa that we drink is mixed with the blood of slaves.”Footnote 66 One journalist used the metaphor of a commodity chain quite literally, writing that “the innocent demand for cocoa to drink or chocolate to eat by men, women and children in America is only one end of a chain which, at the other end, is shackled to a slave.”Footnote 67 Even William Cadbury thought that “the consumer in Europe will always be more fastidious about an article of food than with other articles of commerce,” suggesting that such an intimate, romanticized commodity like chocolate could easily inspire action.Footnote 68
Yet William Cadbury, like Morel, did not see the consuming public as an ally in this fight. It was not for want of familiarity with consumer boycotts on William's part: in his 1910 book on São Tomé, William directly invoked the Quaker abolitionist legacy, urging Britons to recall the great anti-slavery campaigns of past centuries. “We have been the greatest slave owning nation,” he observed, “but Englishmen … fought and won the great battle for human liberty, and the world cannot go back on that victory.”Footnote 69 Instead of borrowing the methods of the abolitionists, William insisted that “the miseries of the oppressed” obligated the business community—not the consuming public—to “make its voice heard in questions affecting human rights and freedom.”Footnote 70
It is clear that a public boycott of São Tomé cocoa would have been financially damaging to Cadbury Brothers, giving the firm an incentive to delay action and promote the idea of industry-wide reform.Footnote 71 Morel might have launched a parallel campaign to the CRA aimed at ending slavery in Portuguese West Africa, but he held back, even arguing against anti-Portuguese agitation. Morel's relationship as friend and client of William Cadbury might seem sufficient to explain the journalist's public stance on the cocoa issue, but Morel genuinely believed that the public could not change conditions in the Portuguese colonies. He dismissed the idea of a consumer boycott of cocoa by saying it would “be chiefly of a sentimental character.”Footnote 72 Most importantly, Morel and Cadbury were concerned that São Tomé would distract attention from Congo, which both considered the greater evil.Footnote 73
British firms finally boycotted Portuguese cocoa in 1909, convinced that further action from the Portuguese government or the planters was unlikely. The decision was undoubtedly influenced by the emergence of Britain's Gold Coast colony as a new supplier of high-quality cocoa. British consumers were not asked to make sacrifices to save São Tomé's workers; rather they were encouraged to continue buying Cadbury's cocoa to affirm their morality as consumers. Joseph Burtt, the cocoa firm's investigative agent, proudly told the British public: “Thanks to the refusal of large firms in England and elsewhere to buy slave-grown produce, we can now drink clean cocoa.”Footnote 74
Across the Atlantic, humanitarians tried to mobilize American consumers behind the boycott, targeting American firms that had refused to join Cadbury's investigation and boycott. Charitably stating that the “slave-grown product that the British refuse to buy is being dumped upon the United States,” activists warned, “Portuguese cocoa comes to us steeped in all the infamies of the slave trade.”Footnote 75 A letter to the New York Times in August 1909 urged the publication of a “white list of firms that have tabooed” the tainted cocoa.Footnote 76 Britain's Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society dispatched Burtt on an American tour, hoping for a repeat of the CRA's success in shocking the American public into action.Footnote 77 Quaker publications called for a boycott of American cocoa firms using “slave cocoa.”Footnote 78 One newspaper's illustrated feature asked, “Would you boycott your cup of chocolate if you knew you'd free a child slave?” No boycott movement appeared, so we may conclude that for most American cocoa consumers, the answer was “no.”
MOREL AND MORALITY IN THE GLOBAL MARKETPLACE
Morel's campaign against “red rubber” ended in victory: the Congo Free State ceased to exist when Belgium took over and reformed the administration of the troubled territory. The cocoa affair came to a less satisfactory end, however, and it left Morel disenchanted with the power of the market to enact social change. He declared in a speech: “The fact remains that the boycott has not released a single Angolan native. Unofficial England has done what it could.” All that remained was state power, and he asked what “official England” could do to remedy the problem.Footnote 79
Morel's thinking on power and consumption evolved over the next decade. Horrified by the First World War, Morel joined pacifist activists in demanding peace and an end to “secret diplomacy.” His anti-war campaign with the Union for Democratic Control (UDC) was unpopular and earned him a stint in Pentonville prison, but working-class support for the anti-war campaign lured Morel away from Liberal politics to the Independent Labour Party.Footnote 80 In the proletariat he found a new agent for ethical change. Morel always emphasized the necessity of organization in achieving reform, and he came to view the socialist wing of the labor movement “as the only organized force making for international righteousness and peace.”Footnote 81 He was not the only Liberal-turned-Labourite to see the worker as the prime agent of twentieth-century politics. Many of his contemporaries believed that the First World War demonstrated the worker's “power and his importance,” and made the worker “conscious, as never before, of the necessity of using his power.”Footnote 82
From Morel's point of view, the political ascendency of organized labor in post-war Britain promised a new era in relations between industrialized societies and primary commodity-producing countries. “Had I known then what I know now, I should not have limited myself during the decade of the Congo agitation to approaching the statesman, the administrator, the heads of the churches, and the man in the street,” Morel wrote in 1920. “I should have gone direct to the leaders of the Labour movement.”Footnote 83
Image 1 Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, 3 August 1909, p. 7. Image courtesy of NewsBank Inc.
Without absolving capitalist firms of moral responsibility, Morel argued that the burden to police the global marketplace was “shared by Trade Unions, by Industrial Councils.”Footnote 84 In this new vision of ethical consumption, agency shifted from capitalists to workers, but the site of action remained fixed at the factory, understood as the first consumer of commodities. Morel continued to discount the agency of end-users, arguing that responsibility was shared “to a lesser degree, but distinctly, by the consumer.” The consuming public might eat and use the fruits of slavery or mass murder in everyday life, but only the worker, Morel argued, could bring the entire commodity chain grinding to a halt. Unlike the individual consumer, the worker was “a unit in an organisation which can make itself politically felt.”Footnote 85
Morel argued that knowledge was the key to activating the ethical agency of workers. “A much-needed missionary work is that of interesting the labouring classes of Europe in the human associations connected with the raw material they handle,” he wrote. Through the labor movement, Morel hoped to de-commodify commodities, attaching a human story to the cocoa, cotton, or rubber that might arrive from the tropics at British factories. “Those who might be disposed to deride the idea do not, in my humble opinion, know the working man—the British working man at any rate. The fact that the conditions he suffers from himself are often atrocious, would not deter him from becoming politically conscious, or politically active in the defence of the defenceless. I believe it is perfectly possible to arouse the interest and the sympathy of the British working man in the producers of the material he turns into candles, soap, rubber tyres, furniture, or clothing.”Footnote 86
This relationship between primary producer and industrial worker was possible because the labor process brought the worker into a physical relationship with commodities in a way that mere consumption did not: “As a fashioner of the raw material into the finished article, his professional intelligence should be easy to awaken, his sympathy would be certain to follow and, with its dawning, would come a great democratic drive for the honest, just, and humane treatment of the coloured races.”Footnote 87
The object of ethical consumption, Lawrence Glickman argues, is making “the near distant and the distant near,” creating “long-distance solidarity” between producers and consumers at disparate ends of a commodity chain.Footnote 88 In Morel's vision, workers were better positioned than consumers to accomplish this feat of the moral imagination.
Morel had little time to put any of these ideas into action. Much of his attention after 1919 was consumed by the editorship of the UDC publication Foreign Affairs, which aimed to overturn the Versailles treaty.Footnote 89 Morel did successfully enter Parliament in 1922, defeating Winston Churchill in Dundee. Constituent issues and foreign politics took most of Morel's time, but he kept an eye on labor conditions in Africa. In 1923, for instance, he inquired in Parliament about commodity exports and labor conditions in British Africa, perhaps assembling evidence to demonstrate the economic and moral superiority of peasant proprietorship over capitalist plantation agriculture.Footnote 90 Up to his death in 1924, Morel argued that free working conditions and fair prices were the best way to obtain necessary commodities from colonized peoples. Speaking on the need to reverse seizures of native land in Kenya, Morel warned, “You will not get your supplies unless you have a happy contented native population of landowners producing in their own right and for their own profit.”Footnote 91 Morel died without an intellectual heir, and no one of his stature in Britain took up the torch for the rights of primary producers in distant lands. Morel's vision of a moral economy mediated by labor, government, and capital was one of many “paths not taken” in the interwar period.Footnote 92
CONCLUSION
During the height of the recent “slave chocolate” agitation, activists and sympathetic journalists stressed the intimacy of individual consumers with commodities “tainted with slavery,” piling guilt on chocolate lovers whose purchases “bring modern-day slavery into our homes.”Footnote 93 One paper warned, “There is no way to know which chocolate products taste of slavery and which do not.”Footnote 94 The producers of a television documentary about child labor on Ivoirian cocoa farms struck at the essential problem of consumer-driven reform when they rhetorically asked viewers, “did that unspeakably piercing moment [of seeing enslaved children] stop you reaching out, the next day, for your afternoon Twix or KitKat? Or did it just give you a twinge of guilt, quickly drowned out by desire?”Footnote 95
There is little evidence that ethical consumption among end-users has improved the situation of child workers on West African cocoa farms.Footnote 96 But what else is left? Morel's two industrial agents, the philanthropic capitalist and the ethically conscious worker, are absent from contemporary debates about “ethical consumption.” Philanthropic capitalists have disappeared from major cocoa firms,Footnote 97 and it is hard to imagine factory workers in Bournville or Hershey risking their own jobs for the sake of farmers in Ghana or Côte d'Ivoire.
The industrial consumer may yet have a future as an ethical agent, however. Cadbury has tried to (re-)associate its brand with humanitarian causes as part of its battle for market share in Britain. The company launched an ambitious social welfare program in Ghana to commemorate the centenary of Cadbury's purchasing relationships with cocoa growers in that country, and Cadbury's flagship product, Dairy Milk, now bears “Fairtrade” certification.Footnote 98 Cadbury returned to its traditional emphasis on ethical consumption to convince contemporary shoppers to favor its products.
After prodding by governments, major cocoa firms have funded initiatives in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire to mitigate “the worst forms of child labor” in the industry.Footnote 99 The industry-funded International Cocoa Initiative (ICI) created programs to combat human trafficking and to increase access to education among working children. Using language reminiscent of E. D. Morel, the ICI states: “The cocoa industry including local buyers, transporters and processors, manufacturers of cocoa based products, with the related trade and retail sector, bear a key part of the shared responsibility for the future of the cocoa supply chain. The industry should support the evolution of an efficient, transparent and sustainable cocoa supply chain that significantly contributes to the needs for a decent living for farmers and their families and actively supports efforts towards the elimination of child and forced labour.”Footnote 100 While it remains to be seen how these industry-led projects will transform the lives of primary producers, industrial efforts at reform should not be discounted as mere publicity stunts.
What contemporary scholars and activists should take from E. D. Morel's ideas on ethical consumption is not a blueprint for industrial-level reform in global commodity chains. Rather, it is the idea that consumption is the end of a long chain, with many sites of production and consumption separating the primary producer from the end user. Consumption may be the end of all production, but it is not the only site of action.
