The primitive people to whose needs we minister also commonly lack self-awareness, and need a little help to discover what they really want. The efforts of the Jesuits who sought to raise their Amerindian charges from "their natural condition of rudeness and barbarism...were first, and very wisely, directed to the creation of wants -- the springs of human activity," in which these creatures were so sorely lacking, Hegel learnedly explained. A century later, the US proconsul in Haiti, Financial Adviser Arthur Millspaugh, observed that "the peasants, living lives which to us seem indolent and shiftless, are enviably carefree and contented; but, if they are to be citizens of an independent self-governing nation, they must acquire, or at least a larger number of them must acquire, a new set of wants" -- which the advertising industry will be happy to stimulate, and US exporters will generously fulfill.¹⁰

Abolition of slavery raised in a sharp form the problem of creating wants, a problem that was addressed over a much longer period as peasants were driven to wage labor in the early stages of industrialization. Given the suddenness of the transition in the case of abolition, the problem had to be faced squarely, and with self-awareness. Thomas Holt has an interesting study of the case of Jamaica, where after a slave revolt, the British rulers abolished slavery in 1834. The problem was to ensure that the plantation system would be maintained without essential change. Officials understood that freedmen must be prevented from relapsing "into barbarous indolence." "Should things be left to their natural course," Colonial Secretary Lord Glenelg observed, "labour would not be attracted to the cultivation of exportable produce," meaning sugar. He therefore urged a variety of government measures to prevent freed slaves from acquiring the ample fertile lands then available, liberal doctrine notwithstanding. Another colonial official recognized that more is needed: the creation of "artificial wants," which "become in time real wants." As abolition was being prepared, a British Parliamentarian observed (1833) that "To make them labour, and give them a taste for luxuries and comforts, they must be gradually taught to desire those objects which could be attained by human labour. There was a regular progress from the possession of necessaries to the desire of luxuries; and what once were luxuries, gradually came...to be necessaries. This was the sort of progress the negroes had to go through, and this was the sort of education to which they ought to be subject in their period of probation" after emancipation. Otherwise, "they would hardly have any inducement to labour," a high-ranking colonial official, Governor Charles Metcalfe, later observed (1840). By such means, another official noted, it would be possible to attain the desired end: "to change a slavish multitude into an orderly and happy peasantry," performing essentially the same tasks as under slavery, while the "slave driving oligarchy" becomes "a natural upper class."¹¹

The same problem was faced by the United Fruit Company (UFCO) in its Central American plantations. Under conditions of free labor, workers had to be prevented somehow from retreating to a self-sustaining economy, no simple matter. People chose to work "only when forced to and that was not often, for the land would give them what little they needed," an UFCO historian wrote in 1929. To overcome the problem, UFCO sought to instill consumer values, recognizing that "The desire for goods...is something that has to be cultivated." The company was able to "arouse desires by advertising and salesmanship," the same historian wrote approvingly; this had "its effect in awakening desires, ...the same effect as in the United States," where, as industry knew well, "desires" had to be artificially stimulated and shaped. The newly-awakened desires -- for silk stockings instead of cotton, expensive Stetson hats and "a flashy silk shirt while their feet were bare," and so on -- could then be satisfied at UFCO stores. The device was "repeatedly abused" by the company, its official historian concedes, as goods were sold "at outrageous prices to the workers -- all too frequently on credit," driving them on "a straight road to peonage."¹²

The problems had been addressed on a different scale in opening China to the West. Again, it was not easy. A British mission was admitted to Beijing in 1793, offering samples of virtually everything Britain could produce. It was "the most elaborate and expensive diplomatic initiative ever undertaken by a British government," John Keay writes in his history of the East India Company, which held its monopoly on trade with China until well into the 19th century. The Emperor graciously accepted the offerings as "Tribute from the Kingdom of England," commending the "respectful spirit of submission" of the British emissary. There would be no trade however: "Our celestial empire possesses all things in prolific abundance," the Emperor informed him, though "I do not forget the lonely remoteness of your island, cut off from the world by intervening wastes of sea." European merchants made inroads in the south, but were blocked elsewhere by imperial power.

One commodity for which Britain did find a market was Bengali opium. By the early 19th century, the East India Company's revenues from opium sales to China were second only to land revenue, "showing profits high enough both to stifle any moral scruples felt by the British and to negate the prohibitions frequently invoked by the Chinese," Keay writes. A few years later China sought to halt the flow, now truly offending British moral scruples. Pleading the virtues of free trade, Britain forced China to open its doors to lethal narcotics, exploiting the great superiority in violence that so revived the spirits of British jingoists during the 1991 Gulf War. "It took the construction and despatch of an ironclad steamship, the Nemesis, to reduce the Central Kingdom to reason," military historian Geoffrey Parker comments sardonically: the guns of the Nemesis "managed to destroy, in just one day in February 1841, nine war-junks, five forts, two military stations and a shore battery in the Pearl River," and China was soon able to enjoy the benefits of liberal internationalism. The US sought to match the privileges that Britain gained, also pleading high principle. China's refusal to accept opium from Britain's Indian colony was denounced by John Quincy Adams as a violation of the Christian principle of "love thy neighbor" and "an enormous outrage upon the rights of human nature, and upon the first principles of the rights of nations," while missionaries lauded the "great design of Providence to make the wickedness of men subserve his purposes of mercy toward China, in breaking through her wall of exclusion, and bringing the empire into more immediate contact with western and christian nations."

In such ways, Britain succeeded in creating new wants in China, much as the US does today as it compels Asian countries, on pain of severe trade sanctions, to admit US-grown lethal narcotics that kill perhaps 50 to 100 times as many people a year as all hard drugs combined in the United States, and to advertise to open new markets, particularly women and children.¹³

¹⁰ Hegel, Philosophy, 82. Schmidt, US Occupation, 158.

¹¹ Holt, Problem, 45, 71ff., 54f.

¹² A. Chomsky, Plantation Society.

¹³ De Schweinitz, Rise and Fall, 165; Keay, Honorable Company, 435f., 454f. M.N. Pearson, Parker, in Tracy, Merchant Empires. DD, ch. 4; ch. 2.4, above.