Frozen modernity: the US-India ice trade and the cultures of colonialism

Introduction

Four months after the clipper ship, The Tuscany, set sail from Boston Harbor in May 1833, a crowd gathered thousands of miles away at Brightman’s Ghat, one of the many jetties along the import zone of Calcutta’s bustling port. The crowd, comprised of Company clerks, commercial agents, Indian laborers, and members of the emergent bhadralok, the Anglicized Bengali intelligentsia, reflected the social heterogeneity of the port city that had transformed the East India Company from a chartered monopoly to a territorial empire. As the Tuscany delicately sailed through the Hooghly River’s treacherous sandbanks, shoals, and bends ¹ in the moments before dawn, the strict hierarchies that defined the asymmetries of colonial power relations momentarily ebbed amongst the crowd, as they all united to catch a glimpse of the ship. Just as it cast anchor, laborers descended into the darkness of the ship’s hold. Those that remained on shore jostled to touch the precious cargo they carried back with them, the 100 tons of ice harvested from New England’s freshwater ponds. ²

American ice’s appearance in Calcutta offered evidence of what would become one of the 19th century’s enduring features, the seemingly limitless creation and boundless global circulation of commodities across colonial centers and peripheries. The Tuscany inaugurated the arrival of freshwater ice to India in 1833, and the market for American ice expanded over that decade. Between the 1840s and 1870s, approximately 70,000 tons of ice was exported annually from the United States to markets in India. ³ The demand for ice became so insatiable, and its uses so varied, that at the height of its trade in 1856, 146,000 tons of ice were sent from Boston to India. ⁴

The ice trade was marginal in relation to the 19th century’s commodity trade in wheat, cotton, sugar, and tea. Yet, I show how encased in imported ice were powerful conceptions of colonial modernity, with its ideas about nature, race, and disease. Ice, I argue, reinforced cultures of colonialism by consolidating its imaginative geographies, namely, the demarcation of colonial and colonized space, the tropics from the temperate, and the European from the Indian body. As I detail, the emergence of US ice capital, itself an instance of the commodification of nature and the creation of exchange value through its global circulation, helped to shape the overlapping material and discursive elements that comprised India’s colonial modernity in the early-to-mid 19th century. In the sections that follow, I show how the ice trade entailed nature’s commodification in which exchange and cultural value became embedded in this substance as it circulated across a colonial network and functioning as a mundane but revealing component of colonial power. As we will see, ice projected colonial anxieties about the tropics and the desires to transform Calcutta into a modern city governed above all by the colonial body whose health relied on the importation of this perishable substance.

Ice: mediating tropical nature and colonial culture

Today ice has returned as a subject of concern, with the melting ice caps revealing the fundamental significance of this substance to our very existence. Yet ice has had an important cultural history, one that Klaus Dodds, in his magisterial account of ice’s power as a natural, social, and physical substance, briefly noted. Dodds pointed out that in its trade, ‘New England ice created something of a stir in India’. ⁵ My investigation of the U.S.-India ice trade aims to extend Dodds’s account by further delving into all that was culturally stirred by ice’s appearance in Calcutta. Scholarship on the U.S.-India ice trade has charted its development, focusing particularly on the process of ice harvesting and its spectacle like appearance in Calcutta. ⁶ Elizabeth David’s global history of ice devotes a chapter to the India ice trade and discusses its reception as an item of luxury by the British expatriate elite, while David Dickason’s economic history focuses on the supply side of the ice trade, charting its rise with Frederic Tudor’s business ventures and its precipitous decline with the advent of refrigeration technology in the 1870s. Marc Herold’s comparison of the trade of American ice in Brazil and India emphasizes this commodity’s status as a marker of colonial grandeur across the tropics. ⁷ Building on these works, I contend that the significance of the ice trade lies not just in its novelty as a commodity, but rather, in its ability to shape and reflect colonial discourses of modernity.

While following sections will detail how the market for American ice in Calcutta reinforced colonial cultural conceptions of race, modernity, and disease, my focus in this section is to advance three contributions that my analysis of the U.S.-India ice trade makes to scholarship situated at the intersection of the mobilities turn in (post-)colonial studies, global history, and cultural geography. First, the development of the ice trade illuminates the expansive and multi-sited terrain that produced colonial landscapes. Second, as a commodity, ice’s preservation, presentation, and prescription draws attention to the multiple spaces through which this substance came to hold value as an item of exchange. Third, the ice trade enabled colonial discourses to permeate across colonial Calcutta, with ice signifying the importance of the condition of coldness in enforcing divisions between colonizer and colonized.

Assessing the significance of ice’s transformation into a commodity and the creation of an ice market in Calcutta draws on scholarship in global and transnational history that traces the production of colonial landscapes from a complex geography of networks and the overlapping and contested entanglements of multiple powers. ⁸ Although American influence paled in comparison to that of the British, French, Portuguese, and Dutch scramble for power in South Asia, American political and economic relations with India began just as the ink dried on the 1783 Treaty of Paris, revealing an entanglement with India that dates to the end of the American Revolutionary War. ⁹ In hopes of thwarting the East India Company’s monopoly on Indian exports, two American ships landed at the ports of Bombay and Calcutta in 1784. ¹⁰ Half a century later, the ice trade supplied the commodity through which American participation in colonialism in South Asia acquired the features of what Mona Domosh has characterized as the ‘informal imperialism’ of American empire. ¹¹ The traffic in ice was accompanied by the traffic in discourses of race and the ushering of modernity to the tropics.

This article also draws on the maritime turn in history and geography that has broken from the strictures of area studies by looking across territories and turning to oceanic networks and the multiple spaces that drove 19th century globalization. ¹² The ice trade’s network encompassed the Indian and Atlantic Ocean worlds and in its movement across space, this substance acquired new meaning and value. Ice brought together New England’s freshwater ponds from which laborers cut large blocks of ice before it was taken to Boston’s port and loaded onto specially fitted ships that would carry this delicate substance to Calcutta’s docks, where it would be preserved and traded in its own warehouse just steps from the ghats that dotted the Hooghly River. Ice would be presented in the bazaars, watering holes, and homes of Europeans and prescribed as relief from the maladies of the tropics. Across Calcutta, ice served as a sign of the tastes and sensibilities of the ‘white town’, an imaginative space contrasted from the ‘black town’ and undercut the complexity of the city’s socio-spatial relations. ¹³

Furthermore, the analysis that follows draws closer attention to the temporalities required to get the delicate substance of ice to India as well as the geographies produced by bringing commodified coldness to the tropics. In doing so, this paper attends to the geographies in which the cold became a domain for global domination, control, and distribution, which recent scholarship has dubbed ‘cryopolitics’. ¹⁴ As the historian Rebecca Woods has shown, artificial refrigeration produced a ‘complex cryopolitical landscape’ in the late 19th century, in which science transformed the cold into an object that became significant to the British Empire’s quest to ‘seemlessly unite the hemispheres. . . transcendent of climatological, cultural, or even seasonal differences’. ¹⁵ The US-India ice trade takes us to an earlier moment in the movement of cold across the world and its impact on colonial culture.

Ice’s power lied in its ability to shape the physicality of colonialism, the bodily and sensorial experiences that enforced the power of colonial authority in its demarcation and production racial distinctions amongst people. ¹⁶ Resonating with James Duncan’s work on race in colonial Ceylon that showed how the reproduction of whiteness governed practices of clothing, diet, and sexual relations, ice seemingly held the power to preserve the health of the European body in India. It functioned as an ameliorative salve intended to soothe fears of white racial degeneration resulting from the relentless heat of the tropics. Within the vast range of colonial projects designed to insulate the colonizer’s body from the deleterious effects of India’s climate whose grandest expression was perhaps found in the development of hill stations, the ice trade was a rather prosaic element that contributed to the mapping of climatic differences onto racial hierarchies. ¹⁷

This article’s analysis draws from the American Tudor Company archives that contain the records of Frederic Tudor, the New England entrepreneur who initiated and maintained a virtual monopoly over the U.S. ice trade with India; the newspaper, Friend of India, which was the forerunner to The Statesman, the Calcutta Monthly Journal; and the letters of Colesworthy Grant, a British colonial official in Calcutta. I bring these sources together to emphasize the historical and cultural geographies that this trade generated along four intersecting lines that I expand upon in the following sections – the production of ice as a commodity, the ice trade as one of discovery and destruction, its symbol as a material manifestation of modernity, and as securing the health of the colonizer. In the next section, I examine how ice was transformed into a commodity by the desires of prominent colonial officials in Calcutta and the labor involved in bringing this substance to Calcutta.

Transforming ice into a commodity

This section examines ice’s commodification in which a natural substance was transformed into a cultural one that was sold and profited from. As I argue, the transformation of ice into ‘second nature’, whereby nature is crafted for human consumption and profit, occurred through a series of stages – harvesting, shipping, preserving, storing, selling, and consuming. Ice’s value, moreover, was not simply one of transporting a resource where it lied in abundance to where it was scarce. Rather, the commodification of ice was realized as an instance of colonial attempts to overcome difference and cultivate a sense of taste promoted by colonial elites and American traders.

Ice’s importation to India was facilitated by Longueville Clarke, the prominent barrister whose ‘hot head, unbridled tongue and a temper that it would not be unjust to describe as cantankerous’ made him an influential, if not also reviled, presence on the many committees that championed the cultivation of British culture in Calcutta, from books to mutton. ¹⁸ Clarke organized and served as the chair of Calcutta’s ice committee, which also included a coterie of colonial officials including Chief Justice of Bengal Edward Ryan, James Prinsep, the Orientalist in the Asiatic Society and Deputy Assay Master at the Calcutta Mint, and Calcutta High Court Judge James Pattle. ¹⁹ The committee encouraged the New England merchant Frederic Tudor (1783–1864) to expand his ice trade that had been operating since 1814 and created a network of warm weather ports that straddled Charleston, New Orleans, Fort-de-France, and Havana. In debt from a failed coffee venture, Tudor entered into a partnership with fellow New England merchant Samuel Austin to export ice to India. ²⁰ To further entice Tudor, the committee and the Anglo-Indian press underscored ice’s exemption from import duties in the West Indies, given that ice was ‘as free as water’, while colonial authorities in Havana treated ice as vital to their administration. ²¹ These appeals proved successful, and the Customs Office in Calcutta allowed ice to enter the market duty free. ²²

Despite the exuberance with which ice’s arrival was greeted in the pages of Anglo-Indian newspapers, for Tudor, profits were tinged with frustrations, as he made clear in an 1838 letter to the ice committee. ‘The profits at best are very small – expenditures, of every kind, very heavy. After a shipment of twelve cargoes, and the consumption of 4 years of time, the debtor side of the ice accounts to India exceeded the credit side, and it is still a business of hope and expectations’. ²³ By the mid-1840s, however, the Indian ice trade supplied Tudor with the wealth that elevated his status as a member of the ‘Brahmin Caste of New England’, novelist Oliver Wendell Holmes’s classification for the handful of elite families whose insular world of kinship ties and tightly bound social networks dominated the region. ²⁴ Branded as the ‘ice king’, Tudor’s novel commodity found its global market in the wide swath of the world unified more by a colonial market than simply by ice’s scarcity.

Ice started to acquire value in its extraction from the ponds of Massachusetts and the Kennebec and Penobscot rivers of Maine. Henry David Thoreau’s sojourn with nature at Walden Pond, had his ruminations on self-reliance and transcendentalism informed by the newfound value of his ‘pure Walden water’. As it ‘mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges’ and brought ‘the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, to drink at [his] well’, ice fostered new intimacies between East and West. ²⁵ This value, whether it be in the exchange of ice or in its trade as ushering in a collective humanity, emerged through the regimented work of laborers. Composed of Irish immigrants and surveilled by native-born American foremen, these workers would spend their winters on the banks of the pond, cutting into its frozen surface to extract blocks of ice in a manner that closely mirrored the harvesting of crops. ²⁶ From the fields to the ponds, labor provided the global connections that for Thoreau went beyond the materiality of ice as a commodity. Rather, ice’s global movement was but a manifestation of an emerging global community.

From across New England, tons of harvested ice, like other commodities that transformed the region into an industrial and commercial center, made its way to Boston Harbor where it would be loaded onto ships bound for foreign ports. Given ice’s ephemeral and fragile nature, preserving this future commodity during the 4-month transit time from Boston to Calcutta gave value to the waste from New England’s industrialization. At the very moment when water’s value as a source of power was being replaced by steam, frozen water acquired value as ice, packed in pine sawdust from New England’s lumber mills and oak bark from tanners’ pits. This waste functioned as valuable non-conductors that insulated the ice in the ship’s hold, freezing its value until it reached South Asia’s port cities under the control of the East India Company. ²⁷ Waste enabled ice to be realized as a new kind of object, a commodity that, following its long journey, would emerge in Calcutta ready for exchange.

Ice also expanded the commodity trade of foodstuffs that in Calcutta fostered the appetite for the culinary novelties that were becoming increasingly popular in London, Paris, and Boston. Ice’s arrival in India drove an interest in cold drinks, ice cream, and most significantly, a range of perishable items, such as seasonal fruits, raisins, sausage, apples, salmon, ham, butter, and cheese. ²⁸ During the long voyage, these commodities, preserved in ice, carried new discourses on freshness that resulted from the reduction of time between production and consumption. This value encased in ice was not lost by a contributor to the Friend of India newspaper, who boasted that the apples ‘appeared as fresh, and the flavor of one we tasted was as good as the day they were picked from the tree’. ²⁹ The popularity of these other commodities led Tudor’s agent in Calcutta, Caleb Ladd, to demand increasing the size of Calcutta’s icehouse, enabling it to hold two cargoes, one for ice and the other for selling ice cream since ‘there is nothing more profitable here’ as well as fruits, given that ‘there is not a gentleman that comes in but asking for apples’. ³⁰ That same year, the ship, The Warsaw, not only brought 250 tons of ice, but with it apples, cider, cheese, hams, smoked salmon, and cranberries. ³¹ The selling of apples grown in the United States, including New England’s Baldwin apples, ³² arrived ‘in the freshest bloom’ generated more profit than the ice, with the Friend of India marveling at the new abundance of Western goods in Calcutta by asking ‘who would have thought 5 years ago that we should have been enjoying luxury of ice imported fourteen thousand miles in the scorching month of March, and that apples as fresh and delicious as any procurable in England, would have been exposed for sale in the metropolis of the East?’ ³³

This section detailed the methods through which ice was transformed into a commodity and in which this natural substance started to acquire meaning and value. Its circulation to India cemented Tudor’s status as a Boston Brahmin, while also quenching the desires of colonial officials in Calcutta. Its value was interwoven with its circulation across the world that relied upon utilizing waste for ice’s preservation and that in turn would also enable the importation of commodities previously unavailable in colonial Calcutta. As I will discuss in the next section, ice also symbolized the cultural meaning of a world connected by commodities, as a substance that reflected the twinned tropes of discovery and destruction that were so central to colonial modernity.

Discovery and destruction

The Anglo-American press hailed ice’s 14,000-mile journey from Boston to Calcutta as evidence of the capitalist spirit’s ingenuity and technological modernity so characteristic of the age. Tudor himself underscored this point when in a letter to Captain Littlefield, who had commanded the transportation of ice across the world on the ‘the first ship that has ever carried ice to the East Indies’. Evoking the twinned colonial tropes of exploration and profit, Tudor imparted the true significance of ice as a global commodity. ‘As soon as you have arrived in the latitude twelve north, you will have carried ice as far south as it has ever been carried before, and your ship becomes a discovery ship’. ³⁴ Tudor’s zeal suggests that the significance of ice’s mobility through its commodified form lied in its transgression of an imaginative divide that science located with the precision of latitude and longitude. The Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal depicted ice’s arrival as reshaping Calcutta into an environment inhabitable for Europeans, no less than their ‘more fortunate country-men in the upper provinces’. ³⁵ Years later, Mechanics Magazine, a London weekly that reported on innovations in manufacturing and trade, extolled American enterprise and the world’s indebtedness to their intrepid risk taking by marveling that it had once been unthinkable that ‘a body of ice may be easily conveyed from one side of the globe to the other, crossing the line twice’. ³⁶

The lines that were crossed, be it the 12th parallel north or the equator, advanced the discourse of lofty adventurousness associated with capitalism’s expansion as trans-hemispheric commerce and increasingly complex colonial networks. What these narratives tend to elide, however, is that the ice trade, and American trade with India more broadly, did not merely rely on consumption by Europeans, but required the work of native brokers and European agents, not to mention the work of laborers unloading and storing ice from the ship to the warehouse. Like the Portuguese and the EIC, who relied on advances from Indian bankers until 1820, American traders stepped into this well-established system and used Indian merchants for money lending and cultural knowledge about the subcontinent. ³⁷

The sale of ice in Calcutta provides a contrasting image of capitalism’s expansion in everyday life, where Indian middlemen were a constant source of consternation for Tudor’s agent, Caleb Ladd. In his letters to Tudor, Ladd repeated the hallmark of colonial anxiety, distrust and the need for brute force as the only means of maintaining order. In one letter, before ending with his customary request for a replacement, Ladd lamented that he found himself in ‘a strange land and all alone’, surrounded by ‘devils that I have to watch as close as if I new [sic] they would cut my throat’. Ladd detailed that upon being cheated, he would grab the native ‘by the hair of his head and send him down’. ³⁸ Colonialism’s routine violence practiced by Ladd positively resonated in the press, with an 1850 article cautioning ice consumers to beware of the ‘roguery of their servants’ whose knowledge about the local fluctuations in the ice market would lead them to steal a portion of the monies given to them for the purchase of ice. ³⁹ These statements expressed the colonial trope in which the legibility of colonial subjects emerged only in their untrustworthiness and unknowability, with force as the most appropriate means of securing their subordination. Furthermore, these moments dispute contemporary evaluations of the US-India encounter through trade as transcending racial divides in the name of profit. ⁴⁰ Rather, it affirms that at their best, indigenous and Western relations were composed of a mutualism borne from short-term shared interests that maintained suspicion and low-level conflict. ⁴¹

As the modernizing force of New England ice saturated Calcutta’s market, it eroded the commercial viability of the local ‘Hooghly slush’, the cooling agent composed of water that had been cooled by the wind and harvested from the Hooghly River’s banks 40 miles north of Calcutta, with the city of Chinsurah as the center of production. Hooghly slush fascinated Thomas Alexander Wise (1802–1889), the Indian Medical Service physician best known for his text, Commentary on the Hindu System of Medicine. ⁴² In that text, Wise cited Ayurvedic knowledge as evidence for the Orientalist evaluation of Hindu civilization’s once advanced status, but which suffered a precipitous decline at the hands of Muslim invaders. Much like his positioning of Ayurvedic texts, Wise’s detailed account of local modes of ice production documented indigenous practices through an empiricism that sought to provide a scientific explanation for the making of Hooghly slush.

As Wise observed, the riverbank was dotted with shallow rectangular pits roughly twice the size of a cricket pitch. Each pit contained a series of small pans that laborers, typically seven or eight women assigned to each pit, would fill with water and replenish as needed during the evening. At night, winds from the north and west would cool the pans sufficiently to yield a film of ice. The laborers would then mix the cool water from the pans and delicately pour the film of ice on top of the water. By dawn, this process would typically produce ice about half-an-inch thick where it was then placed with other small chips of ice in deep circular wells and covered in straw. As Wise wrote of his observations on Indian methods of producing ice, daybreak resulted in ‘upwards of two hundred and fifty persons, of all ages, actively employed in securing ice, and this forms one of the most animated scenes to be witnessed in Bengal’. ⁴³ The ice would then be taken to Calcutta by ship at night to ensure its preservation.

The displacement of Hooghly slush by American ice was owed to the price and purity of American ice, the first containing capital’s measurement of value, distance, and labor, while the second element containing the virtues of coldness and freshness that colonial discourse held to be alien to the Indian subcontinent. American ice was sold at four annas per seer, which amounted to half the price of Hooghly slush at its cheapest, while also marketed as having higher quality than Hooghly slush. ⁴⁴ Advertised as ‘crystal blocks of Yankee coldness’, ⁴⁵ imported ice conjured the taste of the pristine waters of a distant New England, a precursor to contemporary strategies in the marketing of bottled water. ⁴⁶ American ice’s value was also found as a coolant for food and drinks, thereby solidifying the cold as an attribute of New England and underscoring its contrast to the tropics. The juxtaposition of Yankee/Hooghly and crystal/slush reveals all that was contained in ice, namely, the powerful force of modernity that replaced slush from the tropics with a clear and solid substance from the temperate zones, along with the notions of civilization underpinned by environmentalist thought.

Tastes and visions of modernity

Despite the ice trade becoming relatively routine by the close of the 1830s, a Western traveler marveled at the commodity spectacle that centered on ice. As ice was unloaded from a ship that docked in Calcutta in 1841, our observer reported to the London newspaper, The Odd Fellow, the other-worldly quality ice acquired when encountered by Indians. ⁴⁷ Three ayahs (maid servants), whose labor in Company homes and child care were brought them intimately into the seemingly foreign world of the colonizer, found the ice to be beyond their comprehension. Though ‘eager to touch the novelty’, our narrator claimed that that the ayahs recoiled at the ice’s cold, exclaiming ‘burra gurram’ (very hot) as they retreated from the basket. Meanwhile, a child who touched the ice cried to his mother that the ‘English glass had burnt his fingers’. ⁴⁸ The extreme tactile sensation that failed to be articulated, as suggested by the apparent confusion between ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ and ‘ice’ and ‘glass’ underscores the uncanny quality that ice took on as it sailed across the world. The narrative provided of ice’s arrival in Calcutta is perhaps nothing other than an instance of the Orientalist framing of the West as modern, but it nevertheless reveals the ways in which ice was positioned as a commodity with a quality that went beyond the novel and unique, but rather symptomatic of the disjuncture produced by modernity’s very arrival through the commodity form. In this section, I detail the ways in which ice was immersed in discourses of colonial modernity, from its contribution to the city’s built environment, everyday practices, and discourses of health and disease.

In 1835, The American Ice Committee raised the funds for the construction of Calcutta’s ice house, with Madras to follow in 1841, and Bombay in 1843. ⁴⁹ The ice house’s prominent location in Calcutta’s thriving commercial center, at the intersection of Hare and Strand Streets, steps from the Small Cause Court and the Opium Godown (warehouse), near the Writer’s Building, and directly opposite Metcalfe Hall, the city’s library completed in 1844 (Figure 1). ⁵⁰

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Figure 1.

Location of ice house along Calcutta’s waterfront.

Tudor’s wealth came less from ice as a commodity in itself and more from the value of the warehouses he acquired in order to store the ice in each of the cities that his trade encompassed. ⁵¹ In an 1838 letter to the American Ice Committee, Tudor insisted on repaying local investors in order to assume ownership of the ice house, and if objections were raised by any party, he would not hesitate to ‘make my own arrangements, such as the country does not afford, correct the errors in the present house and build one for myself’ and modeled on his ice houses in Havana and New Orleans. ⁵² Ownership of the ice house and its primary beneficiaries should be was the subject of debate throughout the entirety of the ice trade. The Friend of India bristled against Tudor’s monopoly, and by extension, the ice committee for stifling competition, calling the former a ‘freezing despotism’ ⁵³ and assailing the latter’s work for stifling competition which would ‘to the public in England would appear incredible’. ⁵⁴

Frederick Fiebig, whose panoramic photographs of mid-19th century Calcutta provided early depictions of the city’s emerging colonial landscape, captures the colonial desire to not only render the city visible, but to display authority through the transparent objectivity of the image. Attempting to firmly implant modernity’s quality of legibility to city space extended to the icehouse, which was the subject of an 1851–2 lithograph by Fiebig (Figure 2). ⁵⁵

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Figure 2.

Frederick Fiebig, Calcutta icehouse (1851).

The red sandstone wall, barely able to contain the overflowing abundance of nature in the tropics, leads to the white colored ice house, whose imposing figure stands in sharp relief to a carriage and the faint outlines of the sole human in the image. The ice house serves as the stage for representing the city’s colonial modernity as one of order, of depopulated streets relatively unscathed by native culture. With the ice house rising stories above the street and therefore, beyond the space of everyday life, it represented colonial modernity’s conceit that strove to lift Calcutta up from its swampy morass. By storing and preserving ice, the ice house also ensured ice’s circulation in Calcutta and was crucial to the colonial production of the healthy city.

Representations of the ice house as modernity’s edifice was expressed by the Calcutta-based writer and artist Colesworthy Grant in a series of letters to his mother back home in England. Grant fondly referred to the ice house as ‘our Crystal Palace’, ⁵⁶ a colonial counterpart to the glass and iron structure that housed the first World’s Fair in London’s Hyde Park in 1851. Inside London’s Crystal Palace, India occupied a central position within the exhibit and the Indian objects displayed, from robes to weapons, acquired value by suturing the individual body with the body politic. ⁵⁷ The ice stockpiled in Calcutta’s Crystal Palace likewise acquired value by linking the corporeal with the desire for taming the colony through an entrepreneurial globalization that brought the familiar senses of home. ⁵⁸ In June 1837, A Friend of India essay compared the success of ice’s importation with the visions of a ‘man who should have talked of an iron bridge across the Thames in the Parliament of Charles the Second’. Yet, the author continues, ‘both events have actually occurred’, with a prosaic indifference to the ‘matchless progress of modern improvement’, in which ‘the most singular enterprizes [sic] appear only as ordinary occurrences’. ⁵⁹

Beyond the ice house, and into the spaces of colonial social activity, ice became a fixture and a sign of the continuation of European culture in the colonies. In the club bar and dining table, ice brought cold drinks and meat dishes to be served with greater regularity. ⁶⁰ In the colonial home, ice became the centerpiece to the dining table as though it was ‘the greatest possible luxury, and handed round to persons to mix with their wine’. ⁶¹ The abdar (Figure 3), the servant tasked with cooling bottled beverages by keeping them in a mixture of saltpeter and water as well as fanning earthen jugs filled with Hooghly slush, became the keepers of ice with the start of the ice trade. ⁶²

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Figure 3.

François Balthazar Solvyns, The Abdar. Cooler of Drinks, 1799.

Ice’s importation also brought the icebox, the precursor to the contemporary refrigerator, into colonial homes. Again, Colesworthy Grant details the prevalence of ‘ice chests’ in colonial homes, a ‘handsome item of domestic furniture. . . as common and indispensable as the sofa’. The chest, composed of mahogany, teak, or tin ‘united neatness with utility’ and held ice in a central chamber. Surrounding the chamber would be spaces for bottles, butter, and meat. ⁶³

Colonial corporeality

The pleasure contained in ice went beyond the quenching of thirst or in savoring all that it carried – ice cream, cold drinks, and fresh produce. In addition to these chilled foods that entered Indian markets, New England ice arrived in the midst of the Orientalist-Anglicist controversy surrounding the East India Company’s education policies and language of instruction for its Indian subjects. The practices that accompanied this substance found favor not just amongst Europeans, but with the Indian elite as well. Ice enabled the production of a new colonial subject, one that, in Thomas Macaulay’s words, was ‘Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste’. ⁶⁴ For the prominent entrepreneur Dwarkanath Tagore whose status led him to be dubbed ‘the prince of Calcutta society’ in the Bengali and Anglo-Indian press, ice further enmeshed him within the colonizer’s social world. His membership in the exclusive Asiatic Society to the American Ice Committee laid the groundwork for his co-founding of the trading firm Carr, Tagore, and Company. ⁶⁵ Established the year following the commencement of Calcutta’s ice trade, the firm sought to ‘introduce to the natives of India generally to more immediate participation in the objects of European enterprises’. ⁶⁶ Ice was one such object, a fixture in his daily routine, given his insistence on bathing in cold water. In doing so, Tagore’s everyday practices reflected a form of what historian Ruth Rogaski has called ‘hygienic modernity’ ⁶⁷ that, in my application to colonial India, configured the body around the creation of modern Indian subjects cleansed by the virtues of colonizing culture.

I want to now turn to the ways in which ice became a commodity for racial preservation in the tropics. Before ice appeared along the Hooghly River, James Johnson’s influential text, originally published in 1813, argued that the prevalence of disease in Calcutta also contained ‘the grand secret of counteracting the influence of tropical climate on European constitutions’. ⁶⁸ The solution lied in ‘calling in the aid of its antagonist, cold’. Indeed, ‘nothing, therefore, can be more reasonable, than that our great object is to moderate, by all possible means, the heat, and habituate ourselves from the beginning to the impressions of cold’. The colonial desire to combat tropical climate through the cold included the establishment of hill stations, the solar topee (pith helmet) and more intimately, the labor of the punkha-walla, who pulled the ropes of fans day and night in an effort to keep colonial settlers cool. ⁶⁹ Given this obsession with the climate, it seems only natural that ice would be bestowed with the biopolitical power to moderate the ravaging impact of Calcutta’s heat on the colonizer’s body.

The ice trade’s reach to colonial Calcutta was inseparable from colonial medicine’s concern with the tropical environment’s detrimental impact to the health of Europeans living in the colonies. Although tropical medicine emerged as a distinct field in the closing decades of the 19th century culminating with Patrick Manson’s founding of the London School of Tropical Medicine in 1899, the ice trade was entangled with discourses that, in the 1830s, constructed the tropics as potentially fatal difference from the temperate zone. ⁷⁰ Ice’s availability became an object through which the peril of the tropics was projected as well as successfully managed by trade within colonial networks that would ensure the steady supply of this commodity. A July 1837 article in the Friend of India, was quick to point out that ice was more than a mere ‘article of luxury’. ⁷¹ Instead, Europeans in India gained ‘possession of a powerful remedy against disease’ that in many cases served as the ‘only efficient alleviation’. ⁷²

The prevailing view amongst Company physicians with respect to their British counterparts was that the latter’s training did not offer the empirical and practical application that shaped the practice of Company physicians in India. ⁷³ Elements of this distinction were evident in a series of letters by prominent company physicians addressed to the editor of the Bengal Hurkaru, the Calcutta based English newspaper. ⁷⁴ Longueville Clark, the ice committee’s chairman opened the dialogue by arguing for the importance of a permanent supply of imported ice as a matter of public health. The statements from colonial doctors that followed Clarke’s request detailed the benefits of a steady supply of ice by appealing to their empirical observations drawn from the colonial laboratory. Henry Goodeve, professor of Anatomy and Medicine at Calcutta Medical College, established 2 years earlier, the then recently established Calcutta Medical College, wrote that ice’s year-round availability were ‘obvious to every medical practitioner’ since it offered ‘a comfort beyond all price to the sufferer, or as a powerful aid in promoting the cure of disease’. ⁷⁵ Goodeve, who had been at the forefront of rejecting the widespread use of mercury to treat fevers in India, ⁷⁶ concluded his letter by emphasizing ice’s value in combatting disease and implored his fellow medical practitioners ‘to use all his endeavours [sic] to ensure a never-failing supply of ice in this city’. The physicians D. Stewart found that with ‘the acute disease’ ice was ‘second only to the lancet’ and ‘not inferior to any single article of pharmacy, which can be named in the hands of an Indian practitioner’, while John Grant argued that ice’s value was ‘literally worth its weight in gold’, particularly during the hot season and in cases of hemorrhage and in fevers. For the latter, an expanded ice market would be ‘placed within reach of the poorer classes of the community’ that would block the insalubrious impact of Calcutta’s tropical climate. The Presidency Surgeon, W. Cameron contended that bringing ice to India extended the centuries long practice of using the cold as a remedial agent, a practice found in ‘all civilized countries’ that would be ‘invaluable’ in ‘a country like this’ before concluding his lengthy letter with ‘god bless the ice’. ⁷⁷

Friedberg notes that in France and the United States, the rise of refrigeration technology was accompanied by concerns about cold storage and disease, but this was not the case in Calcutta. ⁷⁸ The cold that arrived with imported ice was held to be essential to the very health of empire. Ice’s ameliorating impact on the body aimed to make the tropics temperate and combatted the devastation of disease that coursed through the European body as colonialism expanded.

Conclusion

Just as ice’s discovery signaled modernity’s arrival in the opening pages of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, so too did the ice trade help to usher in cultures of colonialism in Calcutta, particularly its conceptions of nature, race, and disease. While at the start of the ice trade, American, British, and Anglo-Indian newspapers celebrated the unparalleled luxury ice provided, with its circulation tantamount to intrepid exploration and discovery characteristic of colonial expansion and expressions of cultural superiority, it simultaneously reflected anxieties over the colonial body in the tropical city. By the early 1850s, however, the London-based weekly Leisure Hour remarked that ice’s ubiquitous presence in Calcutta’s marketplaces made it indistinguishable from ‘the trade in any other species of merchandise’. ⁷⁹ The ice trade would altogether rapidly decline with the emergence of refrigeration technology in the 1870s. ⁸⁰ In the 40-years in which ice was transformed into a commodity that circulated from New England to Calcutta, its novelty should not distract us from the ways in which ice shaped the cultures of colonialism. US ice capital’s expansion into India was owed to the colonial desire to bring the cold to the tropics, and along with it, a distinction between the colonizer and the colonized, the temperate from the tropical. American ice, supplied by Frederick Tudor and enabled by the British colonials in Calcutta, also enabled the colonial trade in a range of perishable commodities from the United States. American ice, furthermore, disrupted indigenous methods of producing and preserving the cold and offered to acclimatize the delicate European body to the tropics. The ice trade made its imprint across Calcutta’s colonial landscape, from the warehouse located on the Hooghly River’s banks, the ice house in the city’s commercial center, to the ice chests kept in the homes and clubs of colonial residents of the city.

I have argued that the ice trade illuminates a number of key features of the transformation of nature into a commodity and the cultural significance bestowed on ‘this very trivial thing’ indeed. Although coldness, that essential dimension of ice that slows and freezes movement at the molecular level, ice’s commodification and the accretion of exchange and cultural value encased in this substance rested on the ability to make the cold mobile. As I showed, ice’s exchange value was created through a series of mobilities across a colonial network, harvested from New England’s frozen ponds and rivers, transported and preserved on the ship, and to its selling and consumption in the hot and humid colonial port cities of South Asia. Colonial officials’ desire for imported ice indicates that this substance was held to be an essential modernizing force that fulfilled a basic, indeed dire, need for the health of Europeans in the tropics. The ice trade, therefore, reveals colonial modernity’s imperative to commodify nature, send it across the oceans, and cultivate demand through the politics of race, health, and climate. Ice not only brought the cold, but the imaginative geographies that characterized cultures of colonialism.