THE BRITISH EMPIRE - SUGAR

In the 17th and 18th centuries, sugar was the most valuable agricultural commodity produced in the Americas. Its introduction to Barbados in 1640 transformed the fledgling colony into the wealthiest of the English Atlantic. The island’s success spurred further private and state investment, and stone mills became ubiquitous across the Caribbean. Sugar shifted British objectives in the region from privateering to settlement, creating a new context for European imperial contests. The labor involved in planting and processing cane, meanwhile, led to the unprecedented adoption of African slavery throughout the region.

Sugar plantations were large-scale enterprises, involving massive amounts of capital and labor. They were a combination of agriculture and factory that necessitated hundreds of workers in constant motion. It was painstaking, dangerous work. Traditionally, laborers planted dense fields from cuttings into hand-dug holes or trenches.

The stalks, which grow during the hot, rainy season, ripened in anywhere from 9 to 18 months. The cane was then chopped, originally by hand, in large teams using machete-like “bills” or “cutlasses.” At this point, workers collected the harvest, stripped the leaves, and then tied it into bundles. They next had to transport the heavy stalks via handcart (later by oxen or cattle) to the mills and feed it into the rollers. The mills crushed the cane and the resulting juice was transferred to the boiling house, at which point skilled artisans heated the liquid in giant “coppers,” or furnaces, and skimmed the surface with oversized ladles to clean and purify, generating a super-concentrated sucrose that formed into crystals.

Establishing a plantation in the early-modern Caribbean required several thousand pounds sterling. Estimates of the start-up costs for a Jamaican plantation in 1776, for example, put the total at £24,400, even before the considerable expense of labor (Menard 2006, 129). Nonetheless, the potential profits associated with sugar led to widespread interest in such enterprises. Backers in London and elsewhere laid out the large sums needed to buy land, labor, and supplies. A successful estate could bring a sizable annual income for planter and investor alike.

Eyeing potential tax revenues, the English government worked to expand and protect its sugar-producing colonial assets. The Invasion of Jamaica in 1655, for example, proved pivotal. With succeeding encouragement by the Crown and its governors, the island surpassed even Barbados in sugar production by the early 1700s. With the support of local militias, England battled the French, Dutch, and Spanish for control of Caribbean sugar islands, many trading hands several times in the early-modern period.

The growing economy of the Caribbean also created additional market opportunities. Some of the greatest profits from sugar came not from planting, but from providing necessities and luxury items to affluent islanders. Earnings from both sugar and associated commerce were often reinvested into manufacturing endeavors in England and longer-range colonial ventures to India and beyond.

The intensive nature of sugar processing meant that plantations demanded labor above all other commodities. Initially able to meet this need with Irish, Scottish, and English servants, as plantation projects expanded and the labor supply from Britain shrunk in the mid-1600s, Caribbean planters began purchasing African slaves to fill the void. The trans-Atlantic slave trade soon became a large-scale industry in its own right. Shippers purchased slaves in Africa with relatively cheap English manufactured goods and transported these men, women, and children en masse to the Americas where they could be sold at a significant profit. What resulted was the largest forced migration in human history.

Millions of Africans were brought to the Caribbean to work on sugar plantations. Between 1701 and 1810, traders carried nearly one million African slaves to Barbados and Jamaica alone (Mintz 1985, 53). Sugar-producing regions quickly became African-majority lands, where a small population of white owners and merchants exploited the labor of African chattel. Holding together these societies involved tremendous violence. Masters and overseers used militia forces, regular whippings, and other punishments to physically and psychologically subjugate the Africans that outnumbered them.

Along with the immense impact on African slaves and the British Empire, sugar brought massive environmental change to the Caribbean region. In particular, deforestation reshaped once densely wooded islands as colonists burned and cleared fields to plant cane. Within a decade of its introduction to Barbados, sugar planting had devastated local wildlife, especially birds. Invasive grasses and other imported flora further remade the environment, while animals like rats and quick-breeding hogs roamed the countryside, overwhelming native habitats.

The 18th century saw the apex of sugar in the British Caribbean. Production faced many challenges of oversupply, labor difficulties, and new competitors thereafter. Antislavery in the late 1700s and early 1800s challenged the basis of societies like Jamaica, while Britain’s full emancipation of all slaves in 1838 forced major adjustments. Yet, post-emancipation labor in the Caribbean continued much as it had. Black workers still planted and processed cane for a handful of wealthy whites. An owner-friendly system that contracted laborers to a single plantation for a set period of time, often in the same places they had worked as slaves, kept costs down, as production and profits increased. Today, sugar production has been, for the most part, economized, mechanized, and consolidated by large corporations.

Written by Eric J. McDonald in "The British Empire - A Historical Encyclopedia", ABC-CLIO,LLC, USA, 2018, Mark Doyle, editor, excerpts volume II, pp. 179-181. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.