2 # Production
Sucrose—what we call "sugar"—is an organic chemical of the carbohydrate family. It can be commercially extracted from various plant sources, and it occurs in all green plants.1 A plant food manufactured photosynthetically from carbon dioxide and water, sucrose is thus a fundamental feature of the chemical architecture of living things.
The two most important sources of processed sucrose—of the refined carbohydrate product we consume and call "sugar"—are the sugar cane and the sugar beet. Sugar beets were not economically important as a source of sucrose until the middle of the nineteenth century, but sugar cane has been the prime source of sucrose for more than a millennium—perhaps for much longer.
The sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum L.) was first domesticated in New Guinea, and very anciently. The botanists Artschwager and Brandes believe that there were three diffusions of sugar cane from New Guinea, the first taking place around 8000 b.c. Perhaps two thousand years later, the cane was carried to the Philippines and India, and possibly to Indonesia (though some authorities regard Indonesia as yet another locus of domestication).2
References to sugar making do not appear until well into the Christian era. There are some earlier references in Indian literature. The Mahäbbäshya of Patanjali, for instance, a commentary on Pa-nini's study of Sanskrit, the first grammar of a language ever written (probably around 400—350 B.c.), mentions sugar repeatedly in particular food combinations (rice pudding with milk and sugar; barley
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meal and sugar; fermented drinks flavored with ginger and sugar); if one assumes that what was meant was some nonliquid product as least partially crystallized from the juice of the sugar cane, this would be the earliest such mention we have. But it is open to doubt, because there is no sure evidence that the product was crystallized. A little later, in 327 b.c., Nearchus, Alexander's general, sailing from the mouth of the Indus River to the mouth of the Euphrates, asserted that "a reed in India brings forth honey without the help of bees, from which an intoxicating drink is made though the plant bears no fruit."3 The sugar engineer and historian Noel Deerr accepts this as a reference to sugar cane, but his citations from Greek and Roman authorities are not entirely convincing. The term sak-charon or saccharon—(ráKxotpov—used by Dioscorides, Pliny, Galen, and others, is not translatable as some single specific substance. The historian of food R. J. Forbes, carefully reviewing the evidence from pre-Christian Greece and from Rome, concluded that saccharon was available in India "and even known, though imperfectly, to the Hellenistic visitors to this country [India]"; and here he does mean sugar made from the juice of the sugar cane. He accepts Dioscorides, who wrote: "There is a kind of concreted honey, called saccharon, found in reeds in India and Arabia Felix, like in consistence to salt, and brittle to be broken between the teeth, as salt is. It is good for the belly and the stomach being dissolved in water and so drank, helping the pained bladder and the reins." To which Forbes adds: "Sugar was therefore produced, at least in small quantities, in India and was just becoming known to the Roman world in Pliny's day"—that is, during the first century A.D.4 He reminds us, however, that terms like saccharon and even "manna" were used for a variety of sweet substances, including plant secretions, the excreta of plant lice, the mannite exudation of Fraxinus ornus (the so-called manna ash tree), etc.5
Some students of sugar history suppose that saccharon referred to an entirely different substance, the so-called sugar of bamboo, or tahashir, a gum that accumulates in the stems of certain bamboos and has a sweet taste.6 Obscure though this controversy is, it highlights a vital feature in the history of sugar: sugar must be crystal-
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lized from liquid. What we call "sugar" is the end product of an ancient, complex, and difficult process.
One begins with the sugar-cane plant itself, a large grass of the family Gramineae. There are six known species of sugar cane, of which Sacchamm officinarum—"sugar of the apothecaries"—has been important throughout history. Though other species besides Sacchamm officinarum have been used to breed new varieties in recent decades, the source of genes for sucrose accumulation has continued to be this species above all, the so-called noble cane, with soft, sweet, juicy stalks that grow as thick as two inches, and twelve to fifteen feet high, when mature. Cane is propagated asexually from cuttings of the stem having at least one bud.7 Once planted, the cane sprouts and with adequate heat and moisture may grow an inch a day for six weeks. It becomes ripe—and reaches the optimum condition for extraction—in a dry season after anywhere from nine to eighteen months. "Ratoon" cane, grown from the stubble of the preceding crop without replanting, is normally cut about every twelve months. Seed cane cuttings in the tropics take longer to reach maturity. In all cases cane must be cut when ready so as not to lose its juice or the proportion of sucrose in this juice; and once it is cut, the juice must be rapidly extracted to avoid rot, desiccation, inversion, or fermentation.
The intrinsic nature of sugar cane fundamentally affected its cultivation and processing. "Though we speak of sugar factories," writes one scholar, "what actually takes place there is not a manufacturing process but a series of liquid-solid operations to isolate the sucrose made by nature in the plant."8 The practice of crushing or comminuting the cane fibers so their liquid content can be extracted must be almost as old as the discovery that the cane was sweet. This extraction can be accomplished in a number of different ways. The cane can be chopped, then ground, pressed, pounded, or soaked in liquid. Heating the liquid containing the sucrose causes evaporation and a resulting sucrose concentration. As the liquid becomes supersaturated, crystals begin to appear. In effect, crystallization requires the concentration of a supersaturated solution in which sucrose is contained in liquid form. While cooling and
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crystallizing, low-grade massecuites leave "final" or "blackstrap" molasses. This molasses, or treacle, cannot be crystallized further by conventional methods. It is, of course, quite sweet, and can be used for sweetening food; in the English diet, it was for more than a century at least as important as any crystalline form of sugar; in refined forms, it remains important to this day.
This much of the process is ancient. Supplementary steps leading to sugars that are less dark, chemically purer, or more refined (the latter two are not the same thing), and to an ever-increasing differentiation of final products, including alcoholic beverages and many different syrups, have developed over the centuries. But the basic process is very old. In fact, there is no other practical means by which to "make" sugar from the cane than by "a series of liquid-solid operations'5 accompanied by heating and cooling; and maintaining proper temperatures, while keeping the investment in heating methods and fuels affordable, has been a serious technical problem throughout most of sugar's history.
The sugar eventually fabricated from the sucrose magma differs strikingly from both sugar-cane juice and from the various sucrose-rich syrups used in candy making and food preparation. In certain respects there is nothing that refined white sugar resembles so much as salt: white, granular, brittle, and nearly 99 percent pure: "the only chemical substance to be consumed in practically pure form as a staple food."9 Thus there are two remarkable different end products of sugar making. Even though both are sugars and nearly perfectly pure, one is liquid and usually golden, the other granular and usually white. Pure and refined sugars may be made in any color, of course. But at one time their whiteness served as evidence of their fineness and purity. The idea that the finest and purest sucrose would also be the whitest is probably a symbolically potent ' aspect of sugar's early European history; but the fact that sucrose can be prepared in many usable forms, one of which resembles honey, is also significant. The honeylike "treacle" or "golden syrup," so important in the making of the modern English diet, gradually won out over the ancient competitor, honey, which it mimicked. It even carried off some of the poetic imagery formerly associated with
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honey.10 We shall have reason to return to both of these features of sugar's history.
It is not until about 500 A.D. that we get unmistakable written evidence of sugar making. The Buddbagosa, or Discourse on Moral Consciousness, a Hindu religious document, describes by way of analogy the boiling of juice, the making of molasses, and the rolling of balls of sugar. (It is likely that the first sugars—sufficiently crystallized to be nonliquid, but probably not yet intentionally crystallized into solids—were taffylike rather than brittle.11) But the references are few, and puzzling. In a report by the Byzantine emperor Heraclius in 627, when he seized a palace dwelling of the Persian king Chosroes II near Baghdad, sugar is described as an "Indian" luxury. Between the fourth and eighth centuries, the major sugar-fabrication centers seem to have been the coast to the west of the Indus delta (coastal Baluchistan), and the head of the Persian Gulf, on the Tigris-Euphrates delta. Only after the eighth century was sugar known and consumed in Europe itself; and only from that same time do references to cane growing and sugar making around the eastern Mediterranean begin to appear. Sucrose was practically unknown in northern Europe before perhaps 1000 A.D., and only barely known for another century or two. Still, sketching in some crude "periods" or "stages" may provide some guide to the discussion that follows.
The Arab expansion westward marked a turning point in the European experience of sugar. Between the defeat of Heraclius in 636 and the invasion of Spain in 711, in less than a single century, the Arabs established the caliphate at Baghdad, conquered North Africa, and began their occupation of major parts of Europe itself. Sugar making, which in Egypt may have preceded the Arab conquest, spread in the Mediterranean basin after that conquest. In Sicily, Cyprus, Malta, briefly in Rhodes, much of the Maghrib (especially in Morocco), and Spain itself (especially on its south coast), the Arabs introduced the sugar cane, its cultivation, the art of sugar making, and a taste for this different sweetness.12 One scholar claims that sugar did not reach Venice until 996, whence it was exported
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northward; but this date is perhaps late.13 By then sugar cane was being grown across North Africa and on several Mediterranean islands, including Sicily, as well as being the subject of agricultural experimentation in Spain itself. But before that, and even before Venice became a major re-exporting center for Europe, sugar in many forms was reaching Europe from the Middle East. Persia and India, the regions that had known sugar making for the longest time, were probably where the fundamental processes associated with sugar making had been invented. From the Mediterranean basin, sugar was supplied to North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe for many centuries. Production there ceased only when production in New World colonies became dominant, after the late sixteenth century. During the Mediterranean epoch, western Europe very slowly became accustomed to sugar. From the Mediterranean, the industry then shifted to the Atlantic islands of Spain and Portugal, including Madeira, the Canaries, and Säo Tomé; but this relatively brief phase came to an end when the American industries. began to grow.
Only in recent years have the civilizational accomplishments of the Arab world begun to receive fair attention in the West. The Europe-centered historical view most of us share tends to exclude interest in the rest of the world's technical accomplishments, which we seem to recognize best when we "explain" them by reference to great inputs of labor (the Pyramids, the Great Wall, the Temple to the Sun, Machu Picchu, etc.); our warmest compliments are saved for the aesthetic, not the technical, achievements of those we regard as technically inferior, whether we admit it or not. Though we never quite bring ourselves to say so baldly, the western view is one of amazement that the aesthetic capacities of other peoples are not confined by their technical limitations. Yet anyone even casually interested in the history of southern Europe knows that the Moorish conquest of Spain was only the terminus of a brilliantly rapid westward expansion, as much technical and military as economic, political, and religious.
The Moors were not halted in their outward movement until they reached Poitiers in 732, where Charles Martel turned their flank. That year marked only the hundredth anniversary of the death of
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Mohammed and of the installation of the first caliph, Abu Bakr. After 759, the Moors withdrew from Toulouse and southern France and entrenched themselves behind the Pyrenees; but it would be seven hundred years before the Spain they had conquered in only seven would once again become completely Christian. Some portions of the Mediterranean world fell to Islam after Spain herself had fallen. Crete, for instance, was not taken until 823; Malta not until 870. And wherever they went, the Arabs brought with them sugar, the product and the technology of its production; sugar, we are told, followed the Koran.
Though the unusual demands of sugar cultivation slowed its development as a commercial crop throughout the Islamic Mediterranean, its perfection as far north as central Spain was a great technical achievement. The Mediterranean's Arab conquerors were synthesists, innovators transporting the diverse cultural riches of the lands they subjugated back and forth across portions of three continents, combining, intermixing, and inventing, creating new adaptations. And many significant crops—rice, sorghum, hard wheat, cotton, eggplant, citrus fruits, plantains, mangoes, and sugar cane—were diffused by the spread of Islam.14 But it was not so much, or exclusively, new crops that mattered; with the Arab conquerors there also traveled phalanxes of subordinate administrators (predominantly non-Arab), policies of administration and taxation, technologies of irrigation, production, and processing, and the impulses to expand production.
The spread of sugar cane and the technology required for its cultivation and conversion encountered obstacles—mostly rain and seasonal temperature fluctuations. As we have seen, sugar cane is a tropical and subtropical crop with a growing season that may be in excess of twelve months; it requires large amounts of water and labor. Though it can flourish without irrigation, it does far better (and increases its sugar content) when it is watered regularly and when its growing season is not subject to sharp and sudden declines in temperature.
Early Islam in the Mediterranean actually added to the agricultural seasons by producing crops like sugar cane in the summer, thereby altering the round of the agricultural year and the allocation
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of labor during it. By expanding the production of sugar cane on both southern and northern fringes of the Mediterranean—as far south as Marrakech and even Agadir and Taroudant in Morocco, for instance; and as far north as Valencia in Spain and Palermo in Sicily—the Arabs tested to their limits the potentialities of these newly conquered lands. On the one hand, the danger of frosts on the northern margins meant a shorter growing season—sugar planted in February or March had to be harvested in January. Such cane required just as much labor—from preparing the fields through processing the syrup—for less yield; this eventually counted against the Mediterranean industries when American sugar began to enter Europe in large quantities. On the other hand, the lack of adequate rainfall on the southern margins—as in Egypt—meant labor-intensive irrigation; in the Egyptian case, we are told, cane got ' twenty-eight wettings from planting to cutting.15
Sugar cane—if the crop is to be used to make sugar and not just for the extraction of juice, so that proper cultivation, prompt cutting and grinding, and skilled processing are involved—has always been a labor-intensive crop, at least until well into the twentieth century. Sugar production was a challenge not only in technical and political (administrative) terms, but also in regard to the securing and use of labor.
Everywhere, the Arabs showed a lively interest in irrigation, water use, and water conservation. They took with them, wherever they went, every watering device they encountered. To existing pre-Islamic forms of irrigation in the Mediterranean, they added the Persian bucket wheel (which the Spaniards call noria, from the Arabic term for "creaking sound"), the water screw, the Persian qanat (that remarkable labor-intensive system of engineered underground tunnels serving to carry ground water to arable fields by sheer gravity, apparently brought to Spain first and thence to North Africa), and many other devices. None of these innovations by itself could have made a decisive difference; what mattered was the energy and dedication of the conquerors and their apparently skillful use of local labor—in itself a subject of the greatest importance, but concerning which we still know relatively little.
Deerr tells us that there was "one great difference between the
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sugar industry founded by the Arabs and that developed by Christian Europeans. Although Islam recognized the status of slavery, the Mediterranean industry is free from that ruthless and bloody reproach, the curse of organized slavery that for 400 years tainted the New World production."16 But this flat claim is unfounded. Slavery played a part in the Moroccan sugar industry17 and probably elsewhere; a slave revolt involving thousands of East African agricultural laborers took place in the Tigris-Euphrates delta in the mid-ninth century, and they may even have been sugar-cane-plantation workers.18 But slavery did grow more important as the European Crusaders seized the sugar plantations of the eastern Mediterranean from their predecessors; and its importance for sugar production did not diminish significantly until the Haitian Revolution, at the close of the eighteenth century.
The sugars of the Arabs were no single homogeneous substance; from the Persians and Indians, the Arabs had learned a variety of sugar types or categories. We know about these various sugars and even something about the processes of their manufacture, but the details remain vague. Milling also poses a question: some studies of the history of Arab milling have been made, but it remains an area of controversy.19 In the extraction of juice from the cane, the more efficient the process, the greater the eventual yield. High-percentage yields of cane juice date only from the late nineteenth century, although there was improvement beginning at least in the seventeenth.
A decisive step in sugar technology came with the invention of the vertical three-roller mill, powered by either water or animal traction. This mill could be operated by two or three persons, who would pass the cane back and forth through the rollers (if animal-powered rather than hydraulic, the mill required a third worker to look after the animal or animals). The origins and exact ages of such mills remain obscure. Deerr (following Lippmann) attributes their invention to Pietro Speciale, prefect of Sicily, in 1449 ;20 Soares Pereira doubts this—and with good reason, arguing instead that it was invented in Peru and came to Brazil between 1608 and 1612, then elsewhere.21 But this controversy hardly concerns us, because the Arabs9 Mediterranean sugar industry, some five centuries prior
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to Specialen alleged invention, made do with other, less efficient systems. There is sure evidence of the use of water power for cane milling at an early time in Morocco and Sicily, even if beyond that we know little.
The Crusades gave many Europeans the opportunity—though not the first, as is sometimes claimed—to familiarize themselves with many new products, sugar among them. The Crusaders learned about sugar under pressing circumstances, we are told. Albert van Aachen, who collected the reminiscences of veterans of the First Crusade (1096-99), writes:
In the fields of the plains of Tripoli can be found in abundance a honey reed which they call Zuchra; the people are accustomed to suck enthusiastically on these reeds, delighting themselves with their beneficial juices, and seem unable to sate themselves with this pleasure in spite of their sweetness. The plant is grown, presumably and with great effort, by the inhabitants.... it was on this sweet-tasting sugar cane that people sustained themselves during the sieges of Elbarieh, Marrah, and Arkah, when tormented by fearsome hunger.22
But it was not just that the Crusades taught the peoples of western Europe about sugar. Soon enough the Crusaders were supervising the production of that same sugar in the areas they had conquered, as in the kingdom of Jerusalem (1099-1187), until it fell to Saladin. They became the supervisors of sugar-cane cultivation and sugar production at the still-visible site called Tawahin A-Sukkar, "the sugar mills," scarcely a kilometer's remove from Jericho, where mills that were still in use in 1484 are documented as early as 1116.23 (Though it is not certain they were used to grind cane at the earlier of these dates, they were surely so used later.)
When Acre fell to the Saracens in 1291, the Knights of Malta were planting cane there (at a later point in history, they sought to establish plantations in the Caribbean). Meanwhile, Venetian merchants were energetically developing sugar enterprises near Tyre, on Crete, and on Cyprus. In other words, Europeans became producers of sugar (or, better, the controllers of sugar producers in conquered areas) as a consequence'of the Crusades.
The decline of the Mediterranean sugar industry has tradition-
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ally-—and for the most part correctly—been attributed to the rise of a competing sugar industry on the Atlantic islands and, later, in the New World. But in fact, as the geographer J. H. Galloway pointed out, the eastern-Mediterranean industry lost ground a century before the first sugar was produced in Madeira, and sugar production in Sicily, Spain, and Morocco actually gained ground in the fifteenth century.24 He believes that warfare and plague, with the resultant declines of population, hurt the sugar industry in Crete and Cyprus. Also, the prices of labor-costly goods like sugar rose after the Black Death. Indeed, in his opinion, it was the expanded use of slave labor to compensate for plague-connected mortality that initiated the strange and enduring relationship between sugar and slavery: "The link between sugar cultivation and slavery which was to last until the nineteenth century became firmly forged in Crete, Cyprus, and Morocco."25
The decline of the Mediterranean sugar industry that had been created by the Arabs was uneven and protracted. In some subre-gions, the successive contractions of Arab political control, often resulting in inferior local administration, put an end to effective irrigation and labor allocation. In others, the Christian challenge sometimes resulted in continued sugar production under the invader's auspices—for instance, in Sicily after the Norman conquest, and on Cyprus. Yet, though the Crusaders and the merchants from Amalfi, Genoa, and other Italian states divided among themselves the duties of administering production and trade, these arrangements did not last long. Portugal was not content to experiment with sugar-cane cultivation at home in the Algarve when better opportunities beckoned elsewhere, and Spain was not far behind.
The Christian continuation of Arab production in the eastern Mediterranean, on the one hand, and the experiments undertaken by Portugal (and soon by Spain) at the western end of that sea on the other, foretokened two rather different developments, however. In the eastern Mediterranean, production actually rose at first, even following the withdrawal of the Franks from Palestine in the thirteenth century, and the later Ottoman expansion, Crete, Cyprus, and Egypt continued to produce sugar for export.26 Yet this region became less and less important as a source of sugar; and it was the
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development of the industry by the Portuguese and Spaniards on the Atlantic islands that changed forever the character of European sugar consumption. These were the stepping stones by which the industry would move from the Old World to the New; it was in the form perfected on them that the New World industry was to find its prototype.
Even before the New World industries were established, however, the sugar industry on the Atlantic islands damaged the competitive position of Malta, Rhodes, Sicily,-and the other small Mediterranean producers. By 1580 the Sicilian industry, once flourishing, did little more than supply its domestic market, and in Spain itself, sugar production began to decline in the seventeenth century, though sugar did continue to be produced in the extreme south of the peninsula.
At the time that the Portuguese and the Spaniards set out to establish a sugar industry on the Atlantic islands they controlled, sugar was still a luxury, a medicine, and a spice in western Europe. The peoples of Greece, Italy, Spain, and North Africa were familiar with sugar cane as a crop and, to some extent, with sugar itself as a sweetener. But as sugar production in the Mediterranean waned, knowledge of sugar and the desire for it waxed in Europe. The movement of the industry to the Atlantic islands occurred when European demand was probably growing. Individual entrepreneurs were encouraged to establish sugar-cane (and other) plantations on the Atlantic islands, manned with African slaves and destined to produce sugar for Portugal and other European markets, because their presence safeguarded the extension of Portuguese trade routes around Africa and toward the Orient:
In... a series of experiments, the plantation system, now combining African slaves under the authority of European settlers in a racially mixed society, producing sugar cane and other commercial crops, spread as island after island [the Madeira Islands, including Madeira, La Palma, and Hierro; the Canary Islands, including Tenerife, Gran Canada, and Fuerteventura; the nine widely scattered islands that compose the Azores; the Cape Verde Islands, including Boa Vista, Sto. Antäo, and Säo Tiago; Säo Tomé and Principe; etc.] was integrated as part of the expanding
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kingdom. In only some of the islands did sugar cane plantations prosper.... But overall, sugar cane and the plantation did enable the government of Portugal, once it had committed itself to the policy of commercially oriented expansion, to have settled, at the expense of private citizens, island bases that gave her control of the South Atlantic and made possible the rounding of Africa and trade in the East.27
There were intimate links between the Atlantic-island experiments of the Portuguese, especially Säo Tome, and west European centers of commercial and technical power, especially Antwerp.28 It is of particular significance that from the thirteenth century onward, the refining center for European sugar was Antwerp, followed later by other great port cities such as Bristol, Bordeaux, and even London. Control of the final product moved into European hands—but not, it bears noting, into those of the same Europeans (in this instance, the Portuguese) who pioneered the production of sugar overseas. The increasing differentiation of sugars, in line with the growing differentiation of demand, was another cause of growth. The descriptive lexicon for sugars expanded, as more and more sorts became familiar to the Europeans.29
Sugar itself was now known throughout western Europe, even though it was still a product de luxe, rather than a common commodity or necessity. No longer so precious a good as musk or pearls, shipped to the courts of Europe via intermediary countries and their luxury traders, sugar was becoming a raw material whose supply and refining were managed more and more by European powers, as European populations consumed it in larger and larger quantities. The political differentiation of the western states interested in sugar proceeded apace after the fifteenth century. To a surprising degree, the way sugar figured in national policies indicated—perhaps even exercised some influence over—political futures.
Portugal's and Spain's sugar experiments in the Atlantic islands had many parallels, though later they diverged sharply. In the fifteenth century both powers looked for favorable locales for sugar production: while Portugal seized Säo Tomé and other islands, Spain captured the Canaries. After about 1450, Madeira was the leading supplier, followed by Säo Tomé; by the 1500s, the Canary Islands
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had also become important.30 And both powers experienced a growing demand for sugar (suggested, for instance, by the household accounts of Isabella the Catholic, queen of Castile from 1474 to
1504).
The sugar industries in the Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic islands were characterized by slave labor, a tradition supposedly transferred from the Mediterranean sugar plantations of the Arabs and Crusaders. But the Spanish scholar Fernández-Armesto tells us that the striking feature of the Canarian industry was its use of both free and enslaved labor, a combination that resembled more the pioneering mixed-labor systems of a later era: the seventeenth-century British and French Caribbean plantations, on which enslaved and indentured laborers would work alongside one another. Slaves were decidedly important, perhaps crucial; but a substantial amount of the labor was actually done by free wage earners paid partly in kind—some of them specialists, others temporary laborers. This system was probably not quite so atypical as it seems. But it is true that free wage earners hardly figure in sugar's history between the Atlantic island phase and the epoch of revolution and emancipation in the New World, from the start of the Haitian Revolution until emancipation in Brazil "The Canarian system," Fernández-Armesto tells us, "evokes far more the methods of the Old World, and the equal sharing of produce between owners and workers is most akin to the farming a mezzadria, which developed in late medieval northern Italy and in some parts is still practised today."31
Sugar cane was first carried to the New World by Columbus on his second voyage, in 1493; he brought it there from the Spanish Canary Islands. Cane was first grown' in the New World in Spanish Santo Domingo; it was from that point that sugar was first shipped back to Europe, beginning around 1516. Santo Domingo's pristine sugar industry was worked by enslaved Africans, the first slaves having been imported there soon after the sugar cane. Hence it was Spain that pioneered sugar cane, sugar making, African slave labor, and the plantation form in the Americas. Some scholars agree with Fernando Ortiz that these plantations were "the favored child of capitalism," and other historians quarrel with this assessment. But
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even if Spain's achievements in sugar production did not rival those of the Portuguese until centuries later, their pioneering nature has never been in doubt, though scholars of New World sugar have sometimes neglected Spain's early Caribbean accomplishments in the sugar trade because their global significance was slight. Wall-erstein and Braudel are cavalier in their disregard; Braudel has sugar cane and sugar mills not reaching Santo Domingo until after 1654, for instance.32
By 1526, Brazil was shipping sugar to Lisbon in commercial quantities, and soon the sixteenth century was the Brazilian century for sugar. Within the Spanish New World, the early achievements in Santo Domingo and the rest of the Caribbean were outstripped by developments on the mainland. In Mexico, Paraguay, the Pacific coast of South America, and in fertile valleys everywhere, sugar cane prospered.
Yet the very first experiments with sugar-cane growing and sugar making on Santo Domingo had been doomed to failure. When two planters there tried to make sugar—Aguilón in 1505—6 and Balles-ter in 1512—Spain was not yet ready to support their ambitions, nor were the skills extant in Santo Domingo able to sustain them.33 The only available milling techniques were probably modeled on tenth-century Egyptian edge-roller mill designs, originally intended for use as olive presses. Such devices were inefficient and wasteful of labor. Another serious problem was the labor supply itself. The rapid destruction of the indigenous Arawakan-speaking Taino Indians of Santo Domingo had left too little manpower even for the gold mines, let alone for the experimental sugar plantations. The first African slaves were imported before 1503, and in spite of local fears of depredations by slave runaways {cimarrones)^ the importations continued. By 1509, enslaved Africans were being imported to work the royal mines; others soon followed to power the sugar industry.
When the surgeon Gonzalo de Vellosa—perhaps taking note of the rising prices of sugar in Europe—imported skilled sugar masters from the Canary Islands in 1515, he took the first step toward creating an authentic sugar industry in the Caribbean. With the Canary Island technicians, he (and his new partners, the Tapia
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brothers) imported a mill with two vertical rollers, usable with either animal or water power and "patterned on that developed in 1449 by Pietro Speciale."34 The gold deposits in Santo Domingo were soon nearly exhausted; labor was more and more likely to be African, as the vertiginous decline of the aboriginal population continued. But the price of sugar had become high enough in Europe to compensate partly for cost of transporting it, and to encourage additional risks in production, perhaps especially in Spam's settled Caribbean colonies, where alternative opportunities (such as mining) were shrinking.
One scholar has estimated that the mill fabricated by the Canary Island engineers in Santo Domingo could grind enough cane in one season to produce 125 tons of sugar a year if water-powered, and "perhaps a third of that tonnage" if powered by animals.35 Vellosa and his associates lacked the capital to develop the infant industry by themselves. But they took advantage of the presence of three Jeronymite fathers, sent to Santo Domingo to supervise Indian labor policy, who eventually became the de facto governors of the colony. At first the Jeronymites merely endorsed the pleas of the planters for royal support. Soon, however, they made loans of state revenues they had collected to the planters.36 When the new king, Charles I, ordered the replacement of the Jeronymites by the royal judge Rodrigo de Figueroa, the policy of state assistance continued and expanded. By the 1530s, the island had a "fairly stable total" of thirty-four mills; and by 1568, "plantations owning a hundred-fifty to two hundred slaves were not uncommon. A few of the more magnificent estates possessed up to five hundred slaves, with production figures correspondingly high."37 One interesting feature of this development was the part played by the state and, indeed, by civil servants, who owned, administered, bought, and sold plantations. Not only was there no private and separate "planter class" at the outset; the commission merchants and other intermediaries who emerge in the Caribbean sugar colonies of other, rival powers were absent.
In the other Greater Antilles—Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica— Spanish settlers eventually brought in sugar cane, the methods for its cultivation, the technology of water- and animal-powered mills,
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enslaved labor, and the process for grinding, boiling, and fabricating sugars and molasses from extracted juice, as well as for distilling rum from the molasses. And yet this burgeoning Spanish American industry came to almost nothing—in spite of royal support, much intelligent experimentation, and successful production. The Portuguese planters in Brazil succeeded where the Spaniards in the Antilles failed. Within only a century, the French, and even more the British (though with Dutch help from the outset), became the western world's great sugar makers and exporters. One wonders why the early phase of the Hispanic sugar industry stagnated so swiftly after such promising beginnings, and the explanations we have are not entirely satisfactory. The flight of island colonists to the Mexican mainland after the conquest of Tenochtitlán (1519—21); the Spaniards' obsession with metallic riches; the excessively authoritarian controls imposed by the crown on all productive private enterprise in the New World; the chronic lack of capital for investment; the so-called deshonor del trabajo (ignobility of [manual] labor) supposedly typical of the Spanish colonists—these factors seem reasonable, but are not entirely convincing. Probably we will not learn why such important early experiments failed until we better understand the nature of the Spanish market for Caribbean sugars, and Spain's ability or inability to export a sugar surplus. With Spain's conquests of Mexico and the Andes, a basic shift was created in policy: for more than two centuries thereafter, the Caribbean possessions served primarily as way stations and fortresses along the trade routes, signaling Spain's unproductive, tribute-taking, labor-squandering role in the Americas. The pioneering opportunity was soon lost; from about 1580 in the Greater Antilles, until the French and the English began sugar-cane planting on the smaller islands (particularly Barbados and Martinique), after 1650, the Caribbean region produced little sugar for export. By that time the European market situation had modified, and the momentum of production had passed out of Spanish hands.38
Whereas the Spaniards (and, to a lesser extent, the Portuguese)
concentrated their colonizing efforts in the New World on the extraction of precious metals, for their North European rivals trade
36*                                    SWEETNESS AND POWER
and the production of marketable commodities mattered more, and plantation products figured importantly—cotton, indigo, and, soon enough, two beverage crops: cacao, a New World cultigen and more an indigenous food than a drink, and coffee, of African origin. The costs of labor and the lack of capital held down New World plantation production at first, and gains were made at the cost of production elsewhere. "To thrive, the colonists had to catch better or cheaper fish than the Dutch in the Baltic or the North Sea, to trap or persuade the Indians to trap better or cheaper furs than the Russians, to grow better or cheaper sugar than the Javanese or Bengalis."39 The first crop in the New World to win a market for itself was tobacco, an American domesticate, swiftly transformed from a rare upper-class luxury into a working-class necessity. Tobacco made headway even against royal disapproval, and became part of the consumption of ordinary folk by the seventeenth century. But by the end of that century, sugar was outpacing tobacco in both the British and the French West Indies; by 1700, the value of sugar reaching England and Wales was double that of tobacco. The shift from tobacco to sugar was initially even more pronounced in the French Caribbean colonies than in the British, though in the long term the French market for sugar never attainec| the scale of the British market.
Certain facts stand out in the history of sugar between the early decades of the seventeenth century, when the British, Dutch, and French established Caribbean plantations, and the middle of the nineteenth century, by which time Cuba and Brazil were the major centers of New World production. Over this long period, sugar production grew steadily, as more westerners consumed sugar and each consumer used it more heavily. Yet technological changes in the field, in grinding, and even in refining itself were relatively minor. Generally speaking, the enlarged market for sugar was satisfied by a steady extension of production rather than by sharp increases in yield per acre of land or ton of cane, or in productivity per worker.
But the impulse to produce sugar, as well as to trade in it and consume it, can be traced further back in the record. Soon after Sir Walter Raleigh's first voyage to the Guianas in 1595, the English
PRODUCTION
♦37
explorer Captain Charles Leigh attempted to start a settlement on the Waiapoco (Oyapock) River (now the border between Brazil and French Guiana). Though neither effort succeeded, both were connected with an interest in sugar and other tropical products. In 1607 Jamestown—the first English colony in the New World—was founded. Sugar cane was brought there in 1619—as were the first enslaved Africans to reach an English colony—but the cane would not grow. Three years earlier, sugar cane had been planted in Bermuda, but this tiny, arid island never produced sugar. These facts indicate that even before the seventeenth century there was a lively awareness of the desirability of sugar, and of at least some of its potential market—in short, of its long-term profitability as a commodity. The aim of acquiring colonies that could produce sugar (among other things) for the metropolis hence predates the seventeenth century. And before she was able to produce sugar in her own colonies, England was not above stealing it. In 1591 a Spanish spy reported that "English booty in West India [American] produce is so great that sugar is cheaper in London than it is in Lisbon or the Indies themselves."40
The turning point for British sugar was the settlement of Barbados in 1627, an island Britain claimed after Captain John Powell's landing there in 1625, while returning to Europe from Brazil. It was not until around 1655—the same year the British invasion of Jamaica was launched as part of the Western Design—that Barbadian sugar began to affect the home market, however. (In that year, 283 tons of "clayed" sugars and 6,667 tons of "muscovado" sugars were produced in Barbados;41 meanwhile, other Caribbean acquisitions also began to contribute to homeland consumption, and to make of sugar an imperial source of profit.) After 1655 and until the mid-nineteenth century, the sugar supply of the English people would be provided substantially within the skein of the empire. From the establishment of the first British colonies that succeeded by exporting unfinished products—-particularly sugar—to the metropolis, imperial laws were passed to control the flow of such goods, and of the goods for which they were exchanged.42
At the consumption end, changes were both numerous and diverse. Sugar steadily changed from being a specialized—medicinal.
38*
SWEETNESS AND POWER
condimental, ritual, or display—commodity into an ever more common food. This insertion of an essentially new product within popular European tastes and preferences was irreversible, though the cost of sugar at times certainly braked consumption.
The seventeenth century was of course one of tremendous activity for English sailors, merchants, adventurers, and royal agents. Many more individual English colonies were established in the New World than Dutch or French; and the English settler population, including African slaves, far exceeded that of either of her two principal North European rivals. From 1492 until 1625, the Spanish Caribbean, though weakened by smuggling and raids, remained intact; but when St. Kitts was settled, an irreversible process of English territorial expansion began there, which reached its climax only thirty years later with the invasion of Jamaica. The seventeenth century was also the century of European naval wars in the Caribbean, as north European powers defined their stakes; their scale varied from hit-and-run piracy and town burning to large-scale naval encounters. Several different but related processes were occurring at once, but Spain was everyone's enemy, for it was upon her predefined colonial empire that they all fed.
England fought the most, conquered the most colonies, imported the most slaves (to her own colonies and, in absolute numbers, in her own bottoms), and went furthest and fastest in creating a plantation system. The most important product of that system was sugar. Coffee, chocolate (cacao), nutmeg, and coconut were among the other products; but the amount of sugar produced, the numbers of its users, and the range of its uses exceeded the others; and it remained the principal product for centuries. In 1625, Portugal was supplying nearly all of Europe with sugar from Brazil. But the English soon developed their sources in Barbados and then in Jamaica, as well as in other "sugar islands." The English learned methods of producing sugar and its kindred substances from the Dutch, whose experiments with plantation agriculture on the Guiana coast the Portuguese had thwarted. From humble beginnings on the island of Barbados in the 1640s, the British sugar industry expanded with astounding rapidity, engulfing first that island and, soon after, Jamaica—the first territorial conquest from Spain in the Greater An-
PRODUCTION
♦39
tilles, and nearly thirty times the size of Barbados. As English sugar became price-competitive with Portuguese sugar, England was able to drive Portugal out of the north European trade. From the resulting monopoly came monopoly prices, however, and then stiff competition from the French.43 In 1660, sugar was enumerated (and taxed); but the West India colonies were given a virtual monopoly of Britain's national market. In France, restrictive policies kept English sugars competitive until about 1740, when French rivalry won out. Britain never again retrieved the European markets, but her planters and merchantmen consoled themselves with the domestic market. In 1660, England consumed 1,000 hogsheads of sugar and exported 2,000. In 1700, she imported about 50,000 hogsheads and exported about 18,000. By 1730, 100,000 hogsheads were imported and 18,000 exported, and by 1753, when England imported 110,000 hogsheads, she re-exported only 6,000. "As the supply from the British West Indies increased, England's demand kept pace with it, and from the middle of the eighteenth century these islands seem never to have been able to produce much more sugar than was needed for consumption in the mother country."44
The steps by which England shifted from buying modest quantities of sugar from Mediterranean shippers; to importing in her own bottoms a somewhat larger supply; to buying yet larger quantities from the Portuguese, first in the Atlantic islands and then in Brazil, but refined outside England; to establishing her own sugar colonies—first to feed herself and to vie with Portugal for customers and then, with time, simply to feed herself, finishing the processing in her own refineries—-are complex, but they followed in so orderly a fashion as to seem almost inevitable. On the one hand, they represent an extension of empire outward, but on the other, they mark an absorption, a kind of swallowing up, of sugar consumption as a national habit. Like tea, sugar came to define English "character."
The vision of an expanding consumers' market at home was grasped quite early. Sir Josiah Child, a pioneering mercantilist ("That all Colonies or Plantations do endamage their Mother-Kingdoms, whereof the Trades of such Plantations are not confined by severe Laws, and good execution of those Laws, to the Mother-Kingdom"),
40*
SWEETNESS AND POWER
stressed the need to control the colonies so that their trade could be confined to the profit of the metropolis:
It is in his Majesty's power, and the Parliament's, if they please, by taking off all charges from Sugar, to make it more entirely an Engiisb Commodity, than White Herrings are a Dutch Commodity; and to draw more Profit to the Kingdom thereby, than the Dutch do by that. And that in consequence thereof all Plantations of other Nations, must in a few Years sink to little or nothing.45
Sir Dalby Thomas, governor of Jamaica and a sugar planter himself in the late seventeenth century, was an early booster of sugar production. He also envisioned how flourishing sugar colonies might
be consumers of the mother country's products as well:
1.  The greatest consumption of Sugar is made by themselves [the legislators of Parliament] and the rest of the rich and opulent People of the Nation.
2.   The Quantity yearly produc'd is not less than 45,000 tuns [he is presumably speaking of all sugars produced in British colonies at the time, circa 1690].
3.  The Moiety of this is consum'd in England, and amounts to about £800,000 in Value. The other Moiety is exported, and after it has employed Seamen, is sold for as much, and consequently brings back to the Nation in Money, or useful Goods, £800,000. Add to this, That before Sugars were produc'd in our Colonies, it bore four times the Price it does now; and by the same Consumption at the same Price, except we make it our selves, we should be forc'd to give in Money or Money's worth, as Native Commodities and Labour, £240,000 for the Sugar we spend.
To which the historian Oldmixon warmly adds, " 'Tis certain we bought as much Sugar of Portugal as amounted to £400,000 yearly, which is sav'd by our making it."46 Thomas continues: "We must consider too the Spirits arising from Melasses, which is sent from the Sugar Colonies to the other Colonies and to England-, which if all were sold in England, and turn'd into Spirits, it would amount annually to above £500,000 at half the Price the like Quantity of Brandy from France would cost." He recognized not only the dif-
PRODUCTION
♦41
férent sources of mercantile profit to be had from the sugar colonies, but also the vast and incompletely fulfilled promise of these colonies as buyers of the finished goods of the metropolis. In arguing that America's mainland southern colonies resembled more closely the Antilles than New England, he put this part of the case eloquently:
...could they readily get Negroes from Guinea, every one of which consumes yearly two Hilling-Hoes, two Weeding-Hoes, two Grubbing-Hoes, besides Axes, Saws, Wimbles, Nails, and other Iron Tools and Materials, consum'd in Building and other Uses, to the Value of at least £120,000 in only Iron-Work. The Cloaths, Guns, Cordage, Anchors, Sails, and Materials for Shipping, besides Beds and other Houshold Goods, consum'd and us'd by them is infinite: Nor is the Benefit of them to the Kingdom sufficiently to be explained, therefore, let it suffice, in a Word, to Say, that the Produce and Consumption, with the Shipping they give Employment to, is of an infinite deal more Benefit to the Wealth, Honour, and Strength of the Nation, than four times the same Number of Hands, the best employ'd at home can be.47
Thomas grasped the unfolding of what was to be Europe's greatest mass market for a foreign luxury. And he saw that because the whole process—from the establishment of colonies, the seizure of slaves, the amassing of capital, the protection of shipping, and all else to actual consumption—took shape under the wing of the state, such undertakings were at every point as meaningful politically as they were economically. Like all of the eloquent sugar touts to follow him, Thomas made his arguments both economic and political (he was not above making them medicinal and ceremonial as well):
The Europeans 500 years since, were perfect strangers to the use of it [sugar], and scarcely knew its name...but the Physitians soon found [it] to answer all the ends of honey, without many of its ill effects: So. that it quickly became a Commodity in mighty esteem, and though the price then was ten times more than now, yet it prevailed so fast, and the Consumption of it became so great....
The Vertues of Mellasses formerly sold only in Apothecary's Shops by the name of Treacle being now so well known both to the Distiller and Brewer... nor can it be imagined how many new
42*                                    SWEETNESS AND POWER
ways are found dayly for Venting and Consuming usefully the various products of a Sugar-Plantation: The severall Shapes it appears in at Christenings, Banquets and Rich mens Tables, being but the least of its good qualities, tho' of great Delight as well as Ornament, and should the art of making it be so discouraged as to take its next flight to the Dutch or French, as it did from Portugall to Us, the loss would prove of the like Consequence, which is no less than the decay of the greatest part of their Shipping, and the fall of half their Revenues__48
We can see that Englishmen understood well the benefits of having their own sugar-producing colonies, and that they also understood better and better the growth potential of the British market for sugar. Hence it is no surprise that later centuries saw the production of tropical commodities in the colonies tied ever more closely to British consumption—and to the production of British shops and factories. Production and consumption—at least with regard to the product we are considering here—were not simply opposite sides of the same coin, but neatly interdigitated; it is difficult to imagine one without the other.
One hundred and fifty years after Thomas rhapsodized on sugar and the sugar trade, another Englishman commented on the colonies and their products in illuminating fashion. "There is a class of trading and exporting communities," John Stuart Mill wrote, "on which a few words of explanation seem to be required."
These are hardly to be looked upon as countries, carrying on an exchange of commodities with other countries, but more properly as outlying agricultural or manufacturing estates belonging to a larger community. Our West Indian colonies, for example, cannot be regarded as countries with a productive capital of their own... [but are, rather,] the place where England finds it convenient to carry on the production of sugar, coffee and a few other tropical commodities. All the capital employed is English capital; almost all the industry is carried on for English uses; there is little production of anything except for staple commodities, and these are sent to England, not to be exchanged for things exported to the colony and consumed by its inhabitants, but to be sold in England for the benefit of the proprietors there. The trade with the West Indies is hardly to be considered an external trade, but more resembles the traffic between town and country.49
PRODUCTION
♦43
While it is true that these tropical commodities were not exchanged in the United Kingdom, but were sold instead for the profit of the plantation proprietors, it is also true that nearly everything consumed in the West Indian colonies came from England. There were no direct exchanges between the motherland and the colonies, but the patterns of exchange worked to the long-term benefit of imperial enterprise.
There grew up, in effect, two so-called triangles of trade, both of which arose in the seventeenth century and matured in the eighteenth. The first and most famous triangle linked Britain to Africa and to the New World: finished goods were sold to Africa, African slaves to the Americas, and American tropical commodities (especially sugar) to the mother country and her importing neighbors. The second triangle functioned in a manner contradictory to the mercantilist ideal. From New England went rum to Africa, whence slaves to the West Indies, whence molasses back to New England (with which to make rum). The maturation of this second triangle put the New England colonies on a political collision course with Britain, but the underlying problems were economic, taking on political import precisely because they brought divergent economic interests into confrontation.
The important feature of these triangles is that human cargoes figured vitally in their operation. It was not just that sugar, rum, and molasses were not being traded directly for European finished goods; in both transatlantic triangles the only "false commodity"-— yet absolutely essential to the system—was human beings. Slaves were a "false commodity" because a human being is not an object, even when treated as one. In this instance, millions of human beings were treated as commodities. To obtain them, products were shipped to Africa; by their labor power, wealth was created in the Americas. The wealth they created mostly returned to Britain; the products they made were consumed in Britain; and the products made by Britons—cloth, tools, torture instruments—were consumed by slaves who were themselves consumed in the creation of wealth.
In the seventeenth century, English society was very slowly evolving toward a system of free labor, by which I mean the creation of a labor force that, lacking any access to productive property such
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as land, would have to sell its labor to the owners of the means of production. Yet in that same century, England was adapting a system of mostly coerced labor in her colonies to satisfy her needs there. These two radically different patterns of labor exaction were growing in two ecologically different settings and were critically different in form. Yet they served the same overarching economic goals, and were created—albeit in such different form—by the evolution of a single economic and political system.
So much has been written of the rise of British Caribbean sugar that no brief summary would be satisfactory. But enough should be said, at least, so that the qualitative changes that mark the differences between the Spanish plantation experiments of the late sixteenth century and the English achievements of the mid-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be grasped. Those differences have to do with changes in the scale not only of plantation operations, but also of the market. As we have seen, England's entry into the plantation production of sugar in its colonies first served to supply the domestic (British) consumers' market, but meant competing for the growing European market as well. After outselling the Portuguese (and later the French) on the Continent in the 1680s, the English soon relinquished the Continental market again, the better to supply their own growing needs. "After 1660, England's sugar imports always exceeded its combined imports of all other colonial produce."50 These changes were paralleled by a steady expansion of plantation production, with more plantations in mature colonies, and added new colonies as well; and by a growing differentiation of the products themselves—first sugar and molasses; soon after, ram; then a multiplication of crystalline sugar varieties and of syrup types—-redifferentiations that were accompanied by (or, better, responded to) more elaborate and heterogeneous consumer demand at home.
Meanwhile, the fates of individual sugar colonies (and even of different sectors of the plantation economy in any one colony) were anything but predictable. Plantations were highly speculative enterprises. While they eventuated in enormous profits for fortunate investors, bankruptcies were common; some of the most daring plantation entrepreneurs ended their days in debtors' prison. Sugar
production                                     *45
was never a sure thing, despite the unfailingly optimistic predictions of its protagonists. But the risks taken by individual investors and planters in particular colonies were counterbalanced, over time, by the unceasing increases in demand. Those who foresaw the increases included, as always, both eventual winners and losers. Overall, the British imperial system was able to gorge itself on an ever-growing demand for sugar that accompanied both a declining unit price for sugar and increases in worker productivity at home.
A mass market for sugar emerged rather tardily. Until the eighteenth century, sugar was really the monopoly of a privileged minority, and its uses were still primarily as a medicine, as a spice, or as a decorative (display) substance. "An entirely new taste for sweetness manifested itself," Davis declares, "as soon as the means to satisfy it became available... by 1750 the poorest English farm labourer's wife took sugar in her tea."51 From the mid-eighteenth century onward, sugar production in the imperial economy became more and more important to England's rulers and ruling classes. This is only an apparent contradiction. As the production of sugar became significant economically, so that it could affect political and military (as well'as economic) decisions, its consumption by the powerful came to matter less; at the same time, the production of sugar acquired that importance precisely because the masses of English people were now steadily consuming more of it, and desiring more of it than they could afford.
Not surprisingly, as the quantities of sugar consumed rose, the loci of production came into ever-closer alignment with the domestic British economy. Thus, for instance, until nearly the middle of the sixteenth century, sugar refining was carried on mainly in the Low Countries, especially in Antwerp, before it was sacked at the order of Philip II (1576). From 1544, England began refining her own sugar; "after 1585, London was the important refining center for the European trade."52 The same shift occurred in shipping. The first documented shipload of sugar sent directly to England was in 1319. In 1551, however, Captain Thomas Wyndham, merchant-adventurer on the west African coast, returned to England from Agadir, Morocco, with a cargo of sugar, "perhaps being the first to be brought to England in an English ship without break of cargo
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SWEETNESS AND POWER
and direct from country of origin."53 By 1675, four hundred English vessels with average 150-ton cargoes were carrying sugar to England; at that time, as much as half was being re-exported.
Eventually the mercantilist viewpoint embodied in the imperial sugar trade was crushed by an aggressive new economic philosophy labeled "free trade." But the importance of the mercantilist dogma to Britain's development was at least threefold: it guaranteed her supply of sugar (and other tropical commodities) and the profits made from processing and re-exporting them; it secured a large overseas market for finished British goods; and it supported the growth of the civil (and military) marine. Buy no finished goods elsewhere, sell none of your- (tropical) products elsewhere, ship everything in British bottoms: during nearly two centuries these injunctions, only slightly less sacred than Holy Writ, bound planters and refiners, merchantmen and dreadnaughts, Jamaican slave and Liverpudlian stevedore, monarch and citizen together. . But mercantilist injunctions did not always serve the same classes. If at one point mercantilism protected the planters' market from foreign sugar producers, at another it protected the factory owners from the foreign producers of finished goods. Overall, however, the two hundred years during which mercantilism persisted were marked by a gradual decline in the position of the planter classes, after their swift and early rise to power within the national state—and a more or less steady improvement in the position of the industrial capitalists and their interests at home. Mercantilism was finally dealt its quietus in the mid-nineteenth century, and the sugar market and its potential played a part. By then, sugar and consumer items like it had become too important to permit an archaic protectionism to jeopardize future metropolitan supplies. Sugar surrendered its place as luxury and rarity and became the first mass-produced exotic necessity of a proletarian working class.
Before turning to the last period in the history of sugar production, it might be useful to look more intently at the plantations, those tropical enterprises that were the seats of sugar production. These were, of course, agricultural undertakings, but because so much of the industrial processing of the cane was also carried out
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♦47
on the plantations, it makes good sense to view the plantations as a synthesis of field and factory. Thus approached, they were really quite unlike anything known in mainland Europe at the time.
We have already observed that sugar cane must be cut when it is ripe, and ground as soon as it is cut. These simple facts give a special character to any enterprise dedicated to the production of sugar, as opposed to the simple expression of cane juice. The history of sugar making and refining has been one of irregular improvement of the level of chemical purity, with many consumers (in different cultures, and in different historical periods) developing preferences for one or another degree of purity, color, form, granule size, and so on. But without boiling and skimming and reducing juice there is no way to make granular sugar. It cannot be done without solid technical mastery, particularly in the control of heat. Just as factory and field are wedded in sugar making, brute field labor and skilled artisanal knowledge are both necessary.
The early Spanish plantations of Santo Domingo probably consisted of about 125 acres of land, manned by as many as two hundred slaves and freemen. The needed technical skills were imported, principally from the Canaries. Perhaps only a tenth of the labor force was required in the mill and the boiling house, but their operations and those of the cutting crews had to be coordinated, while the field labor had to be divided not only seasonally but also between the cane and the subsistence crops. The specialization by skill and jobs, and the division of labor by age, gender, and condition into crews, shifts, and "gangs," together with the stress upon punctuality and discipline, are features associated more with industry than with agriculture-—at least in the sixteenth century.
Most like a factory was the boiling house, where the juice from the crushed cane was transferred for reduction, clarification, and crystallization. The Barbadian colonist Thomas Tryon—whose complaints must be viewed with some skepticism, since he was a planter himself—nonetheless conveys well the modern-sounding quality of the mill in this seventeenth-century description:
In short, 'tis to live in a perpetual Noise and Hurry, and the only way to render a person Angry, and Tyrannical, too; since the
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SWEETNESS AND POWER
Climate is so hot, and the labor so constant, that the Servants [or slaves] night and day stand in great Boyling Houses, where there are Six or Seven large Coppers or Furnaces kept perpetually Boyling; and from which with heavy Ladies and Scummers they Skim off the excrementitious parts of the Canes, till it comes to its perfection and cleanness, while other as Stoakers, Broil as it were, alive, in managing the Fires; and one part is constantly at the Mill, to supply it with Canes, night and day, during the whole Season of making Sugar, which is about six Months of the year; so that what with these things, the number of the Family, and many other Losses and Disappointments of bad Crops, which often happens, a Master Planter has no such easy life as Some may imagine, nor Riches flow upon him with that insensibility, as it does upon many in England.54
One supposes that the riches flowed even less abundantly upon the slaves and servants.
The seventeenth century was preindustrial; and the idea that there might have been "industry" on the colonial plantation before it existed in the homeland may seem heretical. First, it has been conceived of as predominantly agricultural because it was a colonial enterprise and manned mostly by coerced, rather than free, labor. Second, it produced a consumable food—rather than textiles, say, or tools, or some other machined nonfood. Finally, scholars interested in the history of western industry quite predictably began with the artisans and craftsmen of Europe and the putting-out shops that followed them, rather than with overseas ventures. It followed naturally that plantations were seen as by-products of European endeavor rather than as an integral part of the growth from shop to factory. But it is not clear why such preconceptions should interfere with a recognition of the industrial aspects of plantation development. It may seem a topsy-turvy view of the West to find its factories' elsewhere at so early a period. But the sugar-cane plantation is gradually winning recognition as an unusual combination of agricultural and industrial forms, and I believe it was probably the closest thing to industry that was typical of the seventeenth century.
Strangely, historians have also paid insufficient attention to the scale of plantation enterprises. The planters of the British Caribbean certainly were large-scale entrepreneurs for their time: a "combi-
PRODUCTION
♦49
nation farmer-manufacturer" with a work force of perhaps a hundred could have eighty acres put to cane and expect to produce eighty tons of sugar after the harvest. To make sugar he needed one mill or two, a boiling house to clean and reduce the juice, a curing house to drain the molasses and dry the sugar heads, a distillery to make rum, and a storehouse to hold his raw sugar for shipment—representing an investment of thousands of pounds sterling.55
The subtropical environments of the plantation required planters to adjust to seasonal schedules wholly different from those of temperate climes. Sugar crops needed up to a year and a half to mature, so that planting and harvesting schedules were elaborate and novel for Englishmen. On Barbados, English planters soon divided their lands into equal portions of about ten acres each so that they could be planted and harvested seriatim, assuring a steady flow of cane to the mill.
Boiling and "striking"—transferring the liquid, and arresting its boiling when it was ready—required great skill, and sugar boilers were artisans who worked under difficult conditions. The heat and noise were overpowering, there was considerable danger involved, and time was of the essence throughout, from the moment when the cane was perfect for cutting until the semicrystalline product was poured into molds to drain and be dried. During the harvest the mills operated unceasingly, and the labor requirements were horrendous. Writing of the eighteenth-century picture, Mathieson tells us, "The production of sugar was the most onerous of West Indian industries."56 From the first of the year until about the end of May, cane cutting, grinding, boiling, and potting were conducted simultaneously. Weather was a continuing concern—fear of droughts at the outset of the cutting season, when lack of rain reduced the sugar (or liquid) content of the cane, fear of heavy rain toward late spring, which could rot cane in the ground or immediately on cutting. But the work pressure also came from the somewhat misleading idea that sugar syrup, once boiling, should not be permitted to cool until "struck." The only break in the work week was from Saturday night till Monday morning. Otherwise, the twenty-five men and women in the factory worked continuously in shifts lasting all day and part of the night, or the whole of every second or third night:
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So rapid was the motion of the mill, and so rapid also the combustion of the dried canes or "trash" used as fuel in the boiling house that the work of the millers and firemen, though light enough in itself, was exhausting. A French writer described as "prodigious" the galloping of the mules attached to the sweeps of the mill; but "still more surprising" in his opinion was the ceaseless celerity with which the firemen kept up a full blaze of cane-trash. Those who fed the mill were liable, especially when tired or half-asleep, to have their fingers caught between the rollers. A hatchet was kept in readiness to sever the arm, which in such cases was always drawn in; and this no doubt explains the number of maimed watchmen. The negroes employed as boil-ermen had a less exacting, but a heavier task. Standing barefoot for hours on the stones or hard ground and without seats for their intermissions of duty, they frequently developed "disorders of the legs." The ladle suspended on a pole which transferred the • sugar from one cauldron to another was "in itself particularly heavy"; and, as the strainers were placed at a considerable height above the cauldrons, it had to be raised as well as swung.57
The   relationship   between   the   cultivation   of  cane   and   its
mechanical/chemical transformation into sugar—the final steps of which have never been commonly undertaken in the tropical zone, where the plant itself is grown—springs from the inherent perishability of the crop. Because of the links between cutting and grinding, and between boiling and crystallization, land and mill must be coordinated, their labor synchronized. A major consequence is that sugar-cane plantations have not usually been divided upon inheritance, since their value (except under special conditions of change) depends upon keeping intact the land-and-factory combination. But other consequences have been careful scheduling at the top, and the application of iron discipline at the base. Without overall control of land and mill, such scheduling and discipline would not have been possible.
It is in terms like these that one can see that the sugar-cane plantation, very early in its career as a form of productive organization, was an industrial enterprise. When it is remembered that the plantation form probably first developed in the eastern Mediterranean, was perfected (mostly with enslaved labor) by the Cru-
PRODUCTiON
♦51
saders after 1000, was transferred to (and in part, perhaps, reinvented on) the Atlantic islands by 1450, and was thereupon re-established in the New World colonies, the significance of their industrialism— at a time when industry itself was largely based on home labor, except for shipbuilding and some textiles in Europe itself—becomes more persuasive. Since cane growing and even sugar making were, at least until the nineteenth century, activities in which mechanical force was only an imperfect and incomplete substitute for manual labor, "industry" may seem a questionable descriptive term. Also, most plantation development was based on coerced labor of various sorts, which likewise seems to run counter to our ideas of industry. We are inclined instead to think of industry in postfeudal Europe, replacing the guild system and the artisan by the factory and by a free but unskilled labor force, divested of its tools and mass-producing commodities previously produced by hand.
All the more reason to specify what is meant by "industry" here. Today we speak of "agro-industry," and the term usually implies heavy substitution of machinery for human labor, mass production on large holdings, intensive use of scientific methods and products (fertilizer, herbicides, the breeding of hybrid varieties, irrigation), and the like. What made the early plantation system agro-industrial was the combination of agriculture and processing under one authority: discipline was probably its first essential feature. This was because neither mill nor field could be separately (independently) productive. Second was the organization of the labor force itself, part skilled, part unskilled, and organized in terms of the plantation's overall productive goals. To the extent possible, the labor force was composed of interchangeable units—much of the labor was homogeneous, in the eyes of the producers—characteristic of a lengthy middle period much later in the history of capitalism. Third, the system was time-conscious. This time-consciousness was dictated by the nature of the sugar cane and its processing requirements, but it permeated all phases of plantation life and accorded well with the emphasis on time that was later to become a central feature of capitalist industry. The combination of field and factory, of skilled workers with unskilled, and the strictness of scheduling
52*
SWEETNESS AND POWER
together gave an industrial cast to plantation enterprises, even though the use of coercion to exact labor might have seemed somewhat unfamiliar to latter-day capitalists.58
There were at least two other regards in which these plantation enterprises were industrial: the separation of production from consumption, and the separation of the worker from his tools. Such features help us to define the lives of the working people, mostly unfree, who powered plantation enterprises between the sixteenth and the late nineteenth centuries in the New World. They call our attention to the remarkably early functioning of industry in European history (overseas colonial history, at that). They throw rather provocative light on the common assertion that Europe "developed" the colonial world after the European heartland. They also afford us an idea of the life of plantation laborers, to contrast with that of European agricultural workers and peasants of the same era.
Near the mid-seventeenth century, when British and French colonists first considered producing sugar in the Caribbean, the European market for tobacco had become saturated, and the price for
this curious, addictive new commodity had fallen sharply. The colonists were, for the most part, small-scale cultivators of limited means. Many of them employed on their farms freshly arrived settlers from the mother countries who were contracted to labor for a fixed period of years. These workers were debt servants, petty criminals, political and religious nonconformists, labor organizers, Irish revolutionaries—political prisoners of different sorts. Many were simply kidnapped; to "barbadoes" someone became a seventeenth-century verb for stealing humans.59 Both Britain and France used this system to rid themselves of "undesirables," in a period when there was more labor than the domestic economies could absorb.
These contracted English laborers, called indentured servants (in French engages), represented a vital contribution to the labor needs of the colonies, on the mainland as well. At the termination of their contracts in the islands, such persons were to be given tracts of land of their own, and by this process, the new colonies would presumably fill up with settlers over time. But the colonists in places such
PRODUCTION
♦53
as Barbados and Martinique needed more labor than they could readily obtain. Sometimes they were able to lay hands on some enslaved Native Americans who might work alongside the contracted Europeans. But soon enough, the island planters began to acquire enslaved Africans. Hence the early labor patterns in the so-called sugar islands were mixed, combining European smallholders, indentured laborers, and African and Indian slaves.
The shift to sugar production required substantial capital, which, as I have mentioned, was supplied by Dutch investors, men already familiar with the cultivation of sugar cane and the manufacture of sugar. In English Barbados, as the more successful planters bought their neighbors' lands and built new mills and boiling and drying houses, the shift from tobacco to sugar created larger estates. At the same time, the pattern enabling indentured servants to acquire land at the end of their terms disappeared. Small farms were replaced by plantations, and by the late seventeenth century and thereafter, the number of enslaved Africans rose sharply. Slavery emerged as the preferred form of labor exaction, even though it required substantial investment in human "stock." A young teacher named Downing, writing from Barbados in 1645 as the plantation system took hold there, recounted that the Barbadians "have bought this yeare no less than a thousand negroes, and the more they buie, the more they are able to buie, for in a yeare and a hälfe they will earn with God's blessing as much as they cost." The success of slavery in pioneering islands like Barbados and Martinique marked the beginning of the Africanization of the British and French Caribbean. From 1701 to 1810 Barbados, a mere 166 square miles in area, received 252,500 African slaves. Jamaica, which in 1655 had been invaded by the British, followed the same pattern of "economic development"; in the same 109 years, it received 662,400 slaves.60
The eighteenth century was the apogee of the British and French slave-based sugar plantations. The first, Spanish period of Caribbean plantation history saw a "mixed" form of labor; the second, • 1650-1850, with the Danes, Dutch, English, and French, embraced three quite different forms of labor exaction, and actually changed before the exclusively "slave" form ended with emancipation (1838 for the English, 1848 for the French). The third, "contract" form
_54*
SWEETNESS AND POWER
of plantation life in the Caribbean, which began with a new arrangement using imported labor to soften the effects of emancipation and to keep labor costs down, ended by the 1870s; in 1876, slavery ended in Puerto Rico and, in 1884, in Cuba. Thereafter Caribbean labor (with few exceptions) was entirely "free."
From the point of view of the English consumers of commodities like sugar, such changes were perhaps not of great importance. Yet changing metropolitan attitudes toward the treatment of labor in the colonies certainly had an economic coefficient. When slave-based plantations were evolving on the Caribbean islands, Europe itself was witnessing the emergence of free proletarian labor, along the very lines Karl Marx employed in describing capitalism. "We have seen," he writes, "that the expropriation of the mass of the people from the soil forms the basis of the capitalist mode of production." And "so-called primitive accumulation... is nothing less than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production."61 The European laborers who had been dispossessed by profound social and economic alterations of their countrysides would eventually become the urban factory workers—the proletariat—whose emergence so fascinated Marx when he was writing in the mid-nineteenth century. But in the seventeenth century that transformation had but barely begun.
At the same time, in the newly acquired Caribbean colonies of Britain and France, labor was being exacted from massive populations of similarly dispossessed persons. But they were slaves, not free landless workers. These displaced and enchatteled Africans,, who did not own their own bodies, let alone their own labor, were being reunited with the means of production, from which enslavement and transportation had separated them, but by the lash, rather than through the operation of the market. The differences between these laboring populations give rise to odd questions. Were those Caribbean colonies, the planters who ran them and the slaves who worked them, part of the same system that embraced the free and dispossessed workers of western Europe? In the period before factory capitalism had become typical of western Europe, how do we describe the Caribbean plantations and their mode of operation?
PRODUCTION
*55
What sort of economic system were they part of, since capitalism, as it is commonly conceived, had not yet even appeared?
Most students of capitalism (though not all) believe that capitalism itself became a governing economic form in the late eighteenth century and not before. But the rise of capitalism involved the destruction of economic systems that had preceded it—notably, European feudalism—and the creation of a system of world trade. It also involved the creation of colonies, the establishment of experimental economic enterprises in various world areas, and the development of new forms of slave-based production in the New World, using imported slaves—perhaps Europe's biggest single external contribution to its own economic growth. The Caribbean plantations were a vital part of this process, embodying all of these features, and providing both important commodities for European consumption and important markets for European production. As such they were crucial to profit making for Europe herself, even before capitalism—in the opinion of most authorities—had emerged there.
The reader may see that this line of argument harks back to my discussion of the plantation as an early form of industrial organization, for it, too, stresses a precocious development outside the European heartland. Both in its labor forms and in its organization, then, the plantation is an oddity. Yet its existence was predicated on European intent, and in its own way it became vital to European development over time. If it was not "capitalistic," it was still an important step toward capitalism.
The' early sugar planters of Barbados and then Jamaica measured their worth in the profit their plantations brought them; their plantations were judged in the same way by their creditors. The owners of these plantations were usually businessmen, often absentee, and the capital they invested was commonly borrowed, mostly from metropolitan banks.
These planters were in every way of great financial benefit to
England. The mortgages on their estates, because of the high rate of interest which they paid for the loan of capital, were a most desirable investment for English capitalists. Money invested in
56*
SWEETNESS AND POWER
the plantations, moreover, was of much more value to the mother country than if it had been put out at interest at home, for it became a means of retaining settlers in the colonies who in every way increased the consumption of English manufactures. One thousand pounds spent by a planter in Jamaica produced in the end better results and greater advantages to England than twice that sum expended by the same family in London.62
Though a few students of the imperial economy have concluded that the West Indian colonies represented a net loss to Britain because of the costs of protectionism to the consumers, it must be remembered that the sugar eater's loss was the sugar planter's gain— while the duties enriched the crown, no matter who paid them. At the same time, these colonies were an enormous market for finished goods. During the eighteenth century, English combined exports to the North American and West Indian colonies expanded by 2,300 percent! As Thomas and McCloskey point out, there is a difference between social and private profitability:
It is obvious that the colonial plantations and farms were privately profitable to their owners. The costs of the sugar preferences were borne by the British consumer and the costs of administration and protection by the British tax payer. The costs were widely diffused, but the benefits accrued to a small group of owners who happened to be well represented in Parliament. British mercantilism during the eighteenth century was not a consistent national policy designed to maximise the wealth of Britain; nor was it a preview of the alleged enrichment of capitalist nations by nineteenth-century empires. It was instead, as Ralph Davis suggests, a means to provide revenue to the government and a device to enrich special interest groups. The truth of the matter is that what was in the interest of the Manchester textile manufacturer or the Bristol slave trader or the West Indian planter was usually not in the interest of the British economy as a whole.63
That early prophet of free trade, Adam Smith, understood this well: "To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers, may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers."64 But it was the "shop-
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♦57
keepers" who won out, and sugar was one of their favorite weapons. To understand them, we need to understand the peculiar appeal of sugar. It then becomes important both to explain how and why the market for sugar and like commodities grew at such a pace in the homeland between 1650, when the first "sugar islands" were acquired, and the mid-nineteenth century; and to describe a little more fully what this odd colonial agricultural system had to do with capitalism.
But first some more must be said of the plantation system itself, grounded as it was in the use of forced labor, even though the stimulus to its growth originated with far-off European entrepreneurs. Like proletarians, slaves are separated from the means of production (tools, land, etc.). But proletarians can exercise some influence over where they work, how much they work, for whom they work, and what they do with their wages. Under some conditions, they may even possess a great deal of influence. Of course, slaves, too, may have some freedom of maneuver, depending upon the nature of the system they live in. Yet because they were themselves chattels—property—slaves in the New World during the period when plantations operated with feverish intensity could exercise their will only in the interstices of the system. Slaves and forced laborers, unlike free workers, have nothing to sell, not even. their labor; instead, they have themselves been bought and sold and traded. Like the proletarians, however, they stand in dramatic contrast to the serfs of European feudalism, and they are propertyless.
These two great masses of workers had noticeably different histories, and the forms of labor exaction they embodied, during most of the 380-year period concerning us here, evolved in different parts of the world. At the same time, their economic functions in the world trade system, especially from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, were overlapping, even interdependent. The linkage between Caribbean slaves and European free laborers was a linkage of production and hence also of consumption, created by the single system of which they were both parts. Neither group had much to offer productively but its labor. Both produced; both consumed little of what they produced. Both were divested of their tools. In the views of some authorities, they really form one group,
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SWEETNESS AND POWER
differing only in how they fit into the worldwide division of labor others created for them.65
Putting things this way may oversimplify what was the complex evolution of a modern world labor force, let alone the diversified capitalistic economy that both created it and was serviced by it. The maturing of a plantation system based on slavery in the Caribbean region came with, and was partly preconditioned on, the development of powerful commercial and military navies in western Europe. It meant the funneli-ng of great quantities of commodities (rum, arms, cloth, jewelry, iron) into Africa for the purchase of slaves— an investment that did nothing for Africa's development but only stimulated more slave raiding. It led to enormous outputs of wealth in the metropolises to garrison the colonies and to ensure the coercion and control of the slaves. To maintain the mercantilist premises of the system—that the colonies buy from and sell to the motherland only, and that trade be carried only in the motherland's ships— was expensive for each national system, though of course certain groups inside each system profited greatly from it, as we have seen. The creation and consolidation of a colonial, subordinate plantation economy based on coerced labor stretched over four centuries. But the system in the colonies changed little, relative to the tremendous changes in the European centers that had created it.
It is common to describe the period 1650-1750 as one of mercantile, trading, or commercial expansion, and to treat only the industrial phase beginning with the late eighteenth century as "real capitalism."66 But would this mean that capitalism somehow existed before the capitalist mode of production? The plantations that supplied Europe with sugar, tobacco, etc., were presumably noncapi-talist, for their labor force was enslaved, not proletarian. But this way of putting things is not entirely satisfactory, either, for it leaves us in the uncomfortable position of being unable to specify what sort of economic order gave rise to the plantation system.
Banaji, in a stimulating critique, points out that many Marxist writers, even including some classical figures such as Lenin and Kautsky, had trouble making sense of modern slave economies and their place in world economic history.67 Marx himself did not always seem to know how to fit slave plantations into his picture of cap-
PRODUCTION                                              *59
italism. Of the West Indian colonies, he wrote that their settlers acted "like people who, driven by motives of bourgeois production, wanted to produce commodities...."68 The plantations were enterprises of "commercial speculation," in which "a capitalist mode of
production exists, if only in a formal sense___The business in which
slaves are used is conducted by capitalists."69 Yet elsewhere he wrote, "The fact that we now not only call the plantation owners in America capitalists, but that they are capitalists, is based on their existence as anomalies within a world market based on free labour."70 Later writers attacking the same issue showed some of the same uncertainties. Eugene Genovese, for instance, says at one point that "the slave regime in the British Caribbean bore the clear stamp of capitalist enterprise," and that sugar was grown on "large plantations of a decidedly bourgeois type" operated by "capitalist slaveholders."71 But Genovese's earlier work (dealing, to be sure, not with West Indian plantation sugar makers but with U.S. plantation cotton growers) says "the planters were not mere capitalists, they were pre-capitalist, quasi-aristocratic landowners who had to adjust their economy and ways of thinking to a capitalist world market."72
One might ask what difference it makes whether one calls the plantation system "capitalistic" or not. The question matters because it has to do with the ways economic systems grow and change, and with the chain of causation that leads from one stage of development to another. I have argued that the plantations were themselves precocious cases of industrialization. But this does not necessarily mean that the European economy that gave rise to these plantations was capitalist. As we have seen, slave labor is so contrary a form of labor power to be associated with "the capitalist mode of production," which is always described as based on free labor, that even Marx himself seems uncertain how to treat it. Yet there is no question of the importance of plantations to the metropolitan economies, or of the tremendous economic activity they stimulated, both by their production and by the market their consumption needs afforded the metropolis.
In Banaji's view, plantations were capitalist enterprises, all right— linked to European centers, fueled by European wealth, returning some portion of that wealth to metropolitan investors in various
60*                                    SWEETNESS AND POWER
forms, and functioning as centers of "commercial speculation," in Marx's words. Yet the investment they represented took a fairly static form—so much for land, for slaves, for equipment—that did not significantly vary for centuries. They generated profit, which could be increased by increasing the scale of the enterprise—two produce twice as much as one, or possibly more—but only in very limited fashion by improving the technology or by raising productivity. Hence they were at once speculative enterprises and conservative enterprises: one gambled on making money from sugar production, but the way one produced sugar was virtually unchanged, including the coercion of the labor force, for centuries. Of this curious blend of slavery and the expanding world market for plantation commodities—what the Trinidadian historian Eric Williams once called a system combining the sins of feudalism with those of capitalism, and without the virtues of either73—Banaji writes, 'This heterogeneous and, as it appears, disarticulated nature of the slave plantation generated a series of contradictory images when the early Marxist tradition, not equipped with the same abundance of material available today, attempted its first characterizations."74 My own sense of it is that those "contradictory images" persist. It is true that much of the wealth invested in the plantation system did not result in high levels of accumulation, and that for centuries the relations among land, labor, and technology on the estates did not much vary. In these ways the plantation system surely differed from capitalism in its late, productive, and industrial phase. It is also true that the plantation mode of production before 1850, based as it was on slave labor, differs greatly from the so-called capitalist mode of production, the labor power of which is purchased on an impersonal market, as are the other factors of production, and it would be wrong to treat the plantation system as "capitalistic" in the same way that the British factory system of the nineteenth century was capitalistic. Yet to detach the plantations from the emergent world economy that spawned them, or to rule out their contribution to the accumulation of capital in world centers, would be equally mistaken, I believe. Scholars who demonstrate that the European capital invested in the West Indies might actually have earned more if invested elsewhere or otherwise—who conclude that
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♦61
the whole plantation phenomenon ended up losing money for the English economy, say—are usually ready to admit that this phenomenon nonetheless made an immense amount of money for some Englishmen, even if it proved prohibitively expensive for others.75 Nor did that money stop "working" once it was made. And perhaps that is the principal point. Early in the seventeenth century, some people in power in Britain became convinced that commodities like sugar mattered so much to their well-being that they would politick fiercely for the rights of capital invested in developing the plantations and all that went with them. If these people were not capitalists, if the slaves were not proletarians, if mercantilism rather than a free economy prevailed, if the rate of accumulation of profit was low and the organic composition of capital static—if all of these things were true, it also remains true that these curious agro-industrial enterprises nourished certain capitalist classes at home as they were becoming more capitalistic. Later we shall see how they also nourished the emerging proletarian classes, who found sugar and kindred drug foods profound consolations in the mines and in the factories.
The English connection between sugar production and sugar consumption was welded in the seventeenth century, when Britain acquired Barbados, Jamaica, and other "sugar islands," vastly expanded her trade in African slaves, made inroads into the Portuguese domination of the Continental sugar trade, and first began to build a broad internal consumer market. That connection, once created, survived most attacks by other classes in the metropolis, at least until the mid-nineteenth century. Thereafter it was supplanted by arrangements that could guarantee an abundant but cheaper supply of the same goods to English consumers, without special West Indian privileges. The middle of the nineteenth century was a period of important transition from the so-called protectionism under the Navigation Acts to so-called free trade. Actually, this transition began before 1850, and was not wholly accomplished, as far as sugar was concerned, until the 1870s.
The debates that marked this transition are tangled and difficult to summarize, because many different motives lay behind the po-
62 ♦                                    SWEETNESS AND POWER
sitions taken by the protagonists. Some were concerned mainly with preventing any economic encouragement to those foreign colonies where slavery still obtained, and hence opposed the admission of slave-grown produce into Britain without penalties. Yet others— the "Manchester School"—were unconcerned with slavery but wanted the indiscriminate admission of the cheapest produce to Great Britain at any cost. The West Indian planters, of course, demanded special-entry privileges for their sugars against all sugars produced either within or outside the empire, as well as the right to import contracted labor to the colonies, once slavery ended (1834-38). it would be foolish to suppose that these and the many other contending interest groups were prepared to be candid about why they wanted one or another outcome; the debates over free trade made a parliamentary high-water mark for disingenuousness. Viscount Palmerston's concluding ironies in the 1841 debates on a government initiative to lower the duties on foreign sugars in order to raise revenues by encouraging increased consumption of sugar— that is, to push down the price of sugar for the British consumer to the benefit of the exchequer—are deliciously revealing:
We say to these Brazilians we can supply you with cotton goods cheaper than you can buy them elsewhere. Will you buy them? By all means, say the Brazilians, and we will pay you with our sugar and coffee. No, say we, your sugar and coffee are produced by slave labour; we are men of principle and our consciences will not allow us to consume the product of slave labour. Well, anyone would imagine that the matter ended there, and we left the Brazilians to consume their own sugar and coffee. No such thing. We are men of principle, but we are also men of business, and we try to help the Brazilians out of their difficulty. We say to them: Close to us and near at hand live some 40,000,000 industrious and thriving Germans, who are not as conscientious as we are; take your sugar to them; they will buy it from you, and you can pay us for our cottons with the money you thus receive. But the Brazilians represent that there will be some difficulty with this. The Germans live on the other side of the Atlantic; we must send them our sugar in ships; now our ships are few and ill-fitted to cope with the waters of the great ocean. Our reply is ready. We have plenty of ships and they are at your service. It is true
PRODUCTION                                              * 63
that slave-labour sugar would contaminate our warehouses, but ships are different things. But the Brazilians have another difficulty. They say the Germans are particular and have a fancy for refined sugar. It is not easy to refine sugar in Brazil, and these Germans do not like the trouble of refining it themselves. Again we step in with an expedient. We will not only carry your sugar but we will refine it for you too. It is sinful to consume slave-grown sugar, but there can be no harm in refining it, which in fact is to cleanse it from part of its original impurity. The Brazilians are at us again. Say they, we produce a great deal of sugar more than the Germans will buy. Our goqdness is infinite; we ourselves will buy your surplus. It cannot be consumed at home, because the people of this country are men of conscience, but we will send it to the West Indies and Australia. The people who live there are only negroes and colonists, and what right have they to consciences? And now that you may plague us no more about these matters, we tell you at once, that, if the price of our own sugar should rise above a certain value, we will buy more of your slave-grown sugar and we will eat it ourselves.76
The hottest debates came in the 1840s, as the West Indian planters, fattened on slavery and protectionism, found themselves unable to compete in a widening market, while the free-trade advocates at home saw a chance that the government's motives and their own might coincide for a change.
Between 1660—-when Barbados was already producing considerable sugar and Jamaica had fallen into British hands—and 1700, English foreign trade had been transformed, as woolen cloth was displaced by other products. A re-export trade, based largely on tropical commodities, had begun to take over, with 30 percent of imports coming from either the East or the New World. Such expansion occurred partly because new sources of supply had been opened up, but also because "vast new sources of demand were being opened in England and Europe—-demand created by a sudden cheapness when these English plantation goods brought a collapse in prices which introduced the middle classes and the poor to novel habits of consumption; demand which, once realized, was not shaken by subsequent vicissitudes in prices, but continued to grow rapidly throughout the century.??77 This change was seen perhaps most dra-
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matically in the case of tobacco, A luxury at the end of the sixteenth century, in a hundred years it had become "the general solace of all classes." The case of sugar was similar:
The development of English production was part of an international movement which brought prices down. At the beginning
of the seventeenth century Portuguese (i.e., Brazilian) production was already growing fast and reducing prices sharply and the English West Indian islands, when they turned to sugar production, had this large established New World producer to contend with. They came late into the field—Barbados in the 1640s, Jamaica, as a substantial grower, after 1660—and in the early 1660s they were still contending with the Portuguese, even for the English market. But already their competition had caused a considerable decline in prices, and prices continued to fall, on the whole, until about 1685, by which time the English product had driven Brazilian sugar from the North European as well as from the English market. West Indies sugar imports to London, negligible before the Civil War, rose from 148,000 cwt. in 1663/ 69 to 371,000 cwt. in 1699/71—and a third of this latter total was re-exported. The plantation price of sugar reached a low point in 1685 of 12s. 6d. per cwt.; the retail price was halved between 1630 and 1680.78
Davis argues convincingly that it was not only the establishment of English colonies and entrepots outside Europe that mattered, but the sudden cheapness of the commodities they dealt in. "In this respect," he says, this expansion "bears a striking similarity to the technological revolution which, getting under way a century latei", developed new consumption habits in English and foreign populations with the cheap product of the machine."79 In terms of production, these changes were only analogous; sugar-producing plantations are not the same as steam-driven textile mills. But in terms of consumption, they were homologous, because they made visible, perhaps for the first time in history, a critical connection between the will to work and the will to consume. The introduction of growing quantities of consumer goods to masses of people who had never had them before gave the privileged classes the opportunity to imagine that such people might respond to the promise of enlarged consumption with more effort.
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*65
Before the diversification of industry had made a substantial impact on foreign trade, and four generations before technical changes created an entirely new basis for commercial expansion, the English merchant class was able to grow rich, to accumulate capital, on middlemen's profits and on the growing shipping industry which was needed to carry cheap sugar and tobacco, pepper and saltpetre on the ocean routes. Because these sources made their great contribution to English foreign trade in the century after 1660, and in that century made great demands on the nation's capital, perhaps we should look with a little more favour on those historians of the past who dubbed this century with the title of "The Commercial Revolution."80
This so-called Commercial Revolution, which many Marxist writers have refused to consider fully capitalistic, nonetheless plainly underlay the events that followed it a century later. For Marx, this was the process of accumulation that would make capitalism possible:
The different momenta of primitive accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and England. In England at the end of the seventeenth century, they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But they all employ the power of the State, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hothouse fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition....
The veiled slavery of the wage-workers of Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.81
How intimately related to what was to come were the slave-labor plantations of the New World, producing their shiploads of stimulants, drugs, and sweeteners for the growing urban populations of Europe, is suggested by another assertion of Marx:
Freedom and slavery constitute an antagonism.... We are not dealing with the indirect slavery, the slavery of the proletariat [sic], but with direct slavery, the slavery of the black races in Surinam, in Brazil, in the Southern States of North America.
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Direct slavery is as much the pivot of our industrialism today as machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery, no cotton; without cotton, no modern industry. Slavery has given their value to the colonies; the colonies have created world trade; world trade is the necessary condition of large-scale machine industry. Before the traffic in Negroes began, the colonies only supplied the Old World with very few products and made no visible change in the face of the earth. Thus slavery is an economic category of the highest importance.82
Hobsbawm has shown how increases in the consumption of sugar and like commodities were predicated upon a basic structural realignment of European economic activity. In his view, a lengthy period of economic contraction in Europe—a "general crisis"— marked the seventeenth century. This crisis, a last phase of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, wrecked the earlier Mediterranean and Baltic trade systems, and they were soon replaced by North Atlantic centers. This shift meant a fundamental reordering of the flow patterns of world exchange. "The powerful, growing and accelerating current of overseas trade which swept the infant industries of Europe with it—which, in fact, sometimes actually created them—was hardly conceivable without this change."83 Such a change, Hobsbawm argues, rested on three new conditions: the growth of an ex pandable consumers' market in Europe itself, tied to changes in production elsewhere; the seizure of colonies abroad for European "development"; and the creation of colonial enterprises (such as plantations) to produce consumer goods (and to soak up a substantial portion of the products of the homeland). As the organization of European economic activity shifted toward the United Kingdom and away from both the Mediterranean and the Baltic, the upward spurts in the production and consumption of tropical commodities like sugar were both a consequence and a cause of the growing importance of the United Kingdom in world trade.
By the early eighteenth century, the pioneering overseas economic expansion of the preceding fifty years began to be reflected in the form of changes in homeland consumption. To be sure, the consumption of imported commodities like sugar remained modest by
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♦67
modern (even by nineteenth-century) standards. But the meanings of sugar in the life of the British people changed radically. Statistics on British trade compiled by Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter and interpreted by Richard Sheridan show that the percentage of imports in the "groceries" category (tea, coffee, sugar, rice, pepper, etc.), as a fraction of the total value of imports, more than doubled during the eighteenth century—from 16.9 percent in 1700 to 34.9 percent by 1800:
None of the other eight groups exceeded six per cent of total imports in 1800. Among grocery items brown sugar and molasses were the most prominent. They made up, by official value, two-thirds of the group in 1700 and two-fifths in 1800___English
sugar consumption probably increased about four-fold in the last four decades of the next century [1700—40] and more than doubled again from 1741-45 to 1771-75. If it is assumed that one-half of the imports were retained in 1663, the consumption of England and Wales increased about twenty-fold in the period from 1663 to 1775. The fact that the population increased from 4Vi million to only 7Vi million in the same period is indicative of a marked increase in per capita consumption.84
Sugar and related imports (rum, molasses, syrup) were among the leaders. Indeed, the English economic historian D. C. Coleman believes per-capita sugar consumption rose more rapidly than bread, meat, and dairy consumption between 1650 and 1750;85 Deerr estimates British per-capita annual consumption, 1700-1800, as follows:86
1700-1709      4 lbs.
1720-1729      8 lbs.
1780-1789    12 lbs.
1800-1809    18 lbs.
To be sure, eighteen pounds of sugar a year was still not very much.87 But how much that meager quantity mattered to how many people was the important thing; it represented more than a 400-percent increase in one century, and now sugar mattered to many more than before. The nineteenth century dawned for a population already accus-
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tomed to sugar—if only in small amounts—and eager for more. That century saw the end of slavery in the British Empire; soon thereafter, protectionism for sugar began to lose out to free trade. These events occurred only after pitched battles between different sectors of Britain's capitalist classes; and though sugar by itself neither caused nor explains these battles entirely, its production and consumption were important aspects of what happened.88 The slave trade to the British colonies ended in 1807; slavery itself was abolished in 1834-38; and the future of the sugar colonies (hence of sugar production itself) figured in the debates over both. It was becoming steadily clearer that the closed trade circuits typical of the previous century were not going to last forever. Though the Anglo-Caribbean sugar industry continued to supply much of Britain's sugar, its dominance shrank, because of many factors: the perfection of beet-sugar extraction on the Continent as part of Napoleon's politics, after the loss of Saint-Domingue, and the spread of the beet-sugar industry across Europe; the rise of new and competing intraimperial sugar colonies within the British system, such as Mauritius (and later Fiji, Natal, and others); and the growing production of sugar elsewhere, much of it slave-produced (as in Cuba) and often available at better prices than the sugars of the British West Indies.
More, perhaps, than any other tropical commodity, sugar became a signal of the struggles among different sectors of British capitalism, and a symbol of the dangers of a doomed commercial exclusivism. The West Indian colonies continued to be subject to the metropolis, and their populations were still compelled to provide labor to the plantations; but the metropolis soon freed itself to buy sugar when • and where it wished. Whatever archaism the use of slave labor had made for in the production of sugar, after 1838 it had to be rooted out; otherwise the industry would be kept alive only by subsidies and immobilized (if "free") labor. Eventually the Anglo-Caribbean sugar industry, the oldest in the empire, had to choose between stagnation and expensive, large-scale expansion. In most cases, it was not free to choose. As I have argued elsewhere,
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}                   The post-slavery aftermath was, in general, a period of inten-
J                   sified competition on the world sugar market. Ultimately—that
[                   is, in the very long run—the victors of this rivalry would be
J                   the planter groups who could successfully underwrite and in-
{                   corporate large-scale technical improvements. But this is viewed
f                   from a very broad perspective. On the local level—that is,
j                   colony by colony—it is true that the planter groups were sub-
stantially united in their hostility to any changes that might improve the bargaining position of labour. But of course within such groups there was competition for that labour—and there were differing capacities to reduce the dependence on that labour by technical advance— [We] may really have to deal with two intersecting and chronologically overlapping processes, which take for granted the internal differentiation of each planter group. One such process is the struggle to contain and to supplement the labour power of the "potential" peasantry; the other is the movement toward technical improvement, based on the pace of technical achievement and on availabilities of intensified capital inputs.89
j                On the one hand, the relatively minor technological changes
|            that had typified the history of the sugar industry for centuries
f            were now supplanted by important and sweeping alterations. Im-
f            mense improvements in grinding capacity, cane varieties, pest-
|            control and cultivation methods, increasing use of machinery, and
[            revolutionary changes in transportation eventuated in vast new
j            agro-industrial complexes, completely different from the smaller
[            enterprises that preceded them. The Caribbean cane-sugar industry,
;           which had been colonial, industrial, and export-oriented ever since
the Hispanic expansion, was now unquestionably absorbed into expanding overseas European capitalism. After the abolition of :           slavery in. Cuba in 1884, all Caribbean sugar was made by pro-
letarian labor.90 Though some comments have been made about the curious [           association between sugar and slavery, little attention has been
í           given to the "labor problems" created by successive emancipations
[           in the Caribbean region. Throughout, emancipation (and, in the
|           case of Haiti,, revolution) meant a sharp decrease in sugar pro-
}           duction, as those who had been freed sought to create new ways
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of life independent of the plantation. As the slaves were freed (by Denmark in 1848, England in 1834-38, France in 1848, Netherlands in 1863, Puerto Rico in 1873-76, Cuba in 1884), on the one hand, competition from imported contracted laborers forced the freedmen to work harder and for less money; on the other, since access to idle land and other local resources was shut off, the freedmen were prevented from developing alternative sources of livelihood. In effect, the planter classes sought to re-create pre-emancipation conditions—to replace the discipline of slavery with the discipline of hunger. They believed they were forced into this position—at least in the British sugar colonies—by the successive ends of the slave trade, of slavery, and of protection for their sugars. Naturally, they felt betrayed by their class equals at home.
But another way to say this would be to argue that sugar consumption, and the government income it provided, had finally become so important to British capitalist development that sugar production was no longer allowed to depend upon the mercantilist-nationalist arrangements that had formerly controlled it. By removing barriers to "free" trade—in other words, by making it possible for the world's cheapest sugars to reach the widest possible market in Britain—the leading sectors of British capitalism sold out their planter-capitalist fellows. This was precisely what the West India interest accused them of doing.
As the world sugar market opened up, labor still needed to be found, both for the more ancient colonial areas where slavery had now ended (Jamaica, Trinidad, British Guiana), and for those newer, pioneering areas (Mauritius, Natal, Fiji) that were now becoming producers. The political struggle between the metropolitan capitalist classes and the colonial planters was partly eased by recourse to external but politically accessible labor pools. In fact, the defeat of protectionism in the form of differential duties for West Indian sugar was accompanied by a victory in regard to labor importation—easier regulations, as well as funds for financing immigration. West Indian sugar was thus indirectly protected, even if West Indian working people were not. (Some cynics might see a parallel to events in the United States after the Civil War.)
At any rate, migrant labor moved within the bounds of empire.
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♦71
A portion of the contracted Indian labor in the French West Indies, for instance, came from French India, a portion of the contracted Indian labor in the British West Indies came from British India, and so on. But because many of the new sugar-producing areas needed labor as well, not all the movement was of this sort. During the nineteenth century, perhaps a hundred million people migrated in the world at large. About half came from Europe and about half from the "nonwhite" world, including India. The Europeans moved principally to areas of prior European settlement outside Europe itself, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, southern South America, and, especially, the United States, while the nonwhites moved to other places. As I have already observed,
Sugar—or rather, the great commodity market which arose demanding it—has been one of the massive demographic forces in world history. Because of it, literally millions of enslaved Africans reached the New World, particularly the American South, the Caribbean and its littorals, the Guianas and Brazil. This migration was followed by those of East Indians, both Moslem and Hindu, Javanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and many other peoples in the nineteenth century. It was sugar that sent East Indians to Natal and the Orange Free State, sugar that carried them to Mauritius and Fiji. Sugar brought a dozen different ethnic groups in staggering succession to Hawaii, and sugar still moves people about the Caribbean.91
Several factors can be seen here. For one, the link between sweated, tropical colonial labor and nonwhite labor was preserved, largely undisturbed by the end of slavery. For another, the relationship between sugar and the subtropical colonial regions was likewise maintained (though beet-sugar extraction, important from about the mid-nineteenth century onward, was a temperate-zone development—marking the first time that a temperate-zone commodity would make a serious dent in the market for subtropical and tropical production). The product in question continued to flow to the metropolises, while the products obtained in exchange—food, clothing, machinery, and nearly everything else—continued to flow to the "backward" areas. It can be contended that the "backward" areas became less backward through their economic dependence on
72 ♦                                    SWEETNESS AND POWER
the developed areas, but this assertion is vulnerable. Most less developed societies of this sort have been able to industrialize only feebly (cement, glass bottles, beer, and soft drinks are often their major "industries"). They continue to import the bulk of their finished goods and, often, have even increased their importations of food.
Also problematic is the divided migrant flow of the nineteenth century. The economist Sir W. Arthur Lewis links this two-sided demographic picture to the relatively lower productivity of tropical agriculture in the countries of origin of the migrants, when compared with the agricultural productivity of the temperate lands from which the white migrants came (Italy, Ireland, Eastern Europe, Germany, etc.).92 Presumably, migrants from the more productive countries would not be prepared to migrate for promised wages as low as those that could attract migrants from the less productive countries. But the exclusion of nonwhites from the temperate world was the clear consequence of racist policies in such countries as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. It is not merely ironical to point out that the white migrants would soon be eating more sugar, produced by the nonwhite migrants at lower wages, and producing finished goods at higher wages, to be consumed by the nonwhite migrants.
So the production of sugar continued to rise, and at a dizzying rate, even while the loci of production increased in number and dispersion, techniques of labor coercion became somewhat less naked, and the uses to which sugars were put in the developed world became steadily more differentiated. The upward climb of both production and consumption within the British Empire must be seen as part of an even larger general movement. Figures for world sugar production before the mid-nineteenth century are unreliable, and there is no way of judging the quantities of sugars produced and consumed without reaching the market. Thus we know that sugar consumption in the old sugar colonies like Jamaica was always very substantial—indeed, that slaves were given sugar, molasses, and even rum during the slavery period as part of their rations. In countries like India, the ancient hearth of sugar making, and Russia (the Soviet Union), where beet-sugar production was established within
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♦73
a decade of its achievement in western Europe, our knowledge of quantities produced and consumed is uncertain. But even if we limit ourselves to what can be confidently estimated, the figures on world production and consumption of sugar during the past two centuries or so are still quite astounding.
In 1800—by which time, as we have seen, British consumption had probably increased some 2,500 percent in 150 years—perhaps 245,000 tons of sugar reached consumers through the world market. Nearly all of those consumers were Europeans. By 1830, before beet sugar had begun to reach the world market, total production had risen to 572,000 tons, an increase of more than 233 percent in thirty years. Another thirty years later, in 1860, by which time beet-sugar production was growing rapidly, total world production of sucrose (both beet and cane) stood at an estimated 1.373 million tons, or another increase of more than 233 percent. By 1890, world production exceeded six million tons, representing a percentage increase of nearly 500 over that of thirty years earlier. It is not surprising that Dr. John (Lord Boyd) Orr should have concluded, looking back at the nineteenth century, that the single most important nutritional datum on the British people was their fivefold increase in sugar consumption.93
The actual details of consumption are, of course, much more complex. But for the present, it may be enough to say that probably no other food in world history has had a comparable performance. Why this should be so is not, however, a simple question. To get some sense of how sugar gained its place in the English diet, it will be necessary to turn back again to the beginning of the story.