Sugar Read online

  Sugar poured into France from its booming colonies in the Caribbean – from Guadeloupe and Martinique but, above all, from St Domingue (later named Haiti). Like all the major European maritime and colonial powers, France had developed important outposts in the Americas. Although not the pioneers, the French had rapidly caught up with the Portuguese, Spaniards, Dutch and British in the Americas. It was accepted that the key to rising French colonial fortunes lay in India and the Americas, and French rivalry with the British for global ascendancy would be played out in both those regions. In the Americas, but especially in the Caribbean islands, the critical ingredient for local success was labour provided by African slaves, with all the complexities of shipping enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. In the islands, enslaved Africans laboured to produce a variety of tropical commodities, with sugar dominating.

  In the early eighteenth century, Jamaica was the Caribbean’s main sugar producer but, by 1770, France’s major Caribbean colony had become the world’s largest exporter of sugar. By then, St Domingue produced 60,000 tons a year (compared to Jamaica’s 36,000 tons) and all was made possible by massive importations of Africans. By the time slavery in St Domingue – and the economy which it sustained – were destroyed by the great slave upheaval after 1791, no fewer than 790,000 Africans had been imported into St Domingue. The sugar and, at higher altitudes, coffee produced by the Africans was the source of both French wealth and French dental troubles. It was the cause and occasion of the sunken, hollow cheeks, the slack jaws, the toothless heads and the rotten teeth. It was as if the enslaved were getting their revenge for the abominations heaped upon them in the Caribbean.8 Thanks to events 5,000 miles away, sweet coffee became a national French drink, most strikingly in the cities. As the volumes of slave-grown commodities increased, the cost of sweet coffee fell. In Paris, cafés multiplied and coffee-drinking established itself as part of public and private social life (the word ‘café’ is itself a giveaway to the entire story). But coffee (like tea) was a naturally bitter drink, and Europeans (and Americans) added sugar as an antidote to the bitterness; they liked their coffee sweet. One English visitor thought that the French heaped so much sugar into their coffee that the spoon could stand up in the cup. Sweet coffee was everywhere, served in royal palaces and sold by Parisian street vendors working from a wooden bench. By the late eighteenth century, an enormous variety of Parisian coffee shops catered for all sorts and conditions, from the costly and fashionable down to the lowest of dives offering a cup of hot, sugary coffee and shelter for the poor. Female street peddlers sold a cheap drink made from coffee dregs mixed with warm milk to people setting out for work in the early morning.9 But everywhere, in palaces and on the streets, the accompanying sugar burrowed into, and rotted, the teeth and gums of the coffee-drinkers.

  It is no surprise then that French portraits failed to show the sitters’ teeth. Whatever the contemporary convention about facial appearances – the fear of being considered unbecoming (especially for men) – smiles were more likely to reveal a miserable dental condition. The modern (especially the American) ideal of lavish displays of rows of sparkling teeth (sometimes more akin to piano keys than teeth) had to await the rise of modern and costly dentistry and the skills of the orthodontist. Cost permitting, late twentieth-century dentistry and medicine can make good whatever ravages diet had inflicted on the teeth of earlier generations.

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  It is an enormous irony (and scandal) that, in 2015, a study of the dental health of modern British children revealed a fact that would have been familiar to French aristocrats three centuries earlier. Large numbers of those children do not like to laugh or smile because of the poor condition of their teeth. More than one third of twelve-year-olds, and more than a quarter of fifteen-year-olds, claimed to be embarrassed when laughing or smiling because of their teeth. Of course, this simple fact masks a complexity of issues, but it caught the eye of the British media. Sensational headlines conveyed a simple message. The Times thundered: ‘ROTTEN TEETH ARE SECRET REASON WHY TEENS DON’T SMILE’.10 Louis XIV would have felt at home.

  Yet the teeth of British children today ought to be excellent. Today’s children are born into a wealthy society which aims to provide healthcare from the cradle to the grave. Their health and well-being are monitored from the moment they are born. Moreover, the National Health Service (despite its recurring difficulties) offers this lifetime range of healthcare free. For all that, it has become clear that the teeth of large numbers of British children are in a poor state. Perhaps understandably, the teeth of children from poorer homes are worse than those from more prosperous backgrounds. Even so, the long-term trends are alarming.

  Starting in 1973, a survey was launched of the dental health of children in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and has been repeated every ten years. It has shown that upwards of one fifth of the children reported having trouble eating – because of dental problems. Almost a quarter of the parents involved had to take time off work to attend to their children’s dental care. One child in seven between the ages of five and fifteen suffered from severe or extensive decay. At its most extreme, these dental problems arrive as medical emergencies at the nearest hospital. In 2011–2014, almost 26,000 children, aged five to nine, were admitted to hospital in England for extensive tooth extraction under general anaesthetic, an increase of 14 per cent from 2011. Clearly, this was no longer a simple dental matter; the Royal College of Surgeons expressed alarm both at the problem itself (not least because most of it was preventable) and because of the strain placed on hospitals.11

  Despite the NHS, and despite the extensive and costly publicity about dental hygiene, large numbers of British children suffer from alarming dental problems. The medical staff most closely involved in monitoring and dealing with the problem are in no doubt about the cause. Dr Sandra White, England’s Director of Dental Health for Public Health England in 2016, was blunt. She stated that although tooth decay among the young was slowing down, there remained an urgent need to reduce the amount of sugar in children’s diets.12 It is an irony of enormous proportions that modern British children find themselves confronting the same problem that beset Louis XIV – too much sugar.

  3

  Sugar and Slavery

  CANE SUGAR SPREAD from plantations in the Mediterranean into northern Europe largely via major trading dynasties in Catalonia, Genoa and Venice. Compared to what followed, the volumes of sugar traded to Germany, the Low Countries and England were tiny. Sugar was a small-scale luxury trade, but it proved astonishingly influential. It created a taste for sweetness, and a commercial and financial system to satisfy that taste. It was also clear that the cultivation of sugar cane, and new systems of processing the cane in the Mediterranean (using rollers to crush more juice from the cane), provided the basis for a lucrative commercial venture, which was largely the work of the financial and commercial acumen of Italian merchants and financiers. All this was in place before Europeans began to trade and settle outside the Mediterranean, on the Atlantic islands, and long before the settlement in the Americas.

  The labour used on early Mediterranean sugar plantations had been a mix of free and slave labour. Slaves were procured from warfare on the edges of Europe, notably between Christians and Muslims, and from conquests in North Africa, but sugar plantations also involved costly investment, with the money provided by Spanish and Italian city merchants. The resulting crude sugar often needed further refinement, initially in Antwerp, but later in many of Europe’s major ports.

  The broad outlines of the modern sugar economy were thus in place long before Europeans embarked on their American adventures. Sugar was cultivated and processed on plantations financed by European merchants and bankers, and used slaves and free labour working side by side. The end product – cane sugar – was then refined in northern European cities before being marketed and sold to wealthy consumers across Europe. In time, this simple sugar economy was to become a mass market, and sugar itself was transforme
d.

  That transformation began when Europeans embarked on their remarkable age of maritime exploration in the fifteenth century. Led by the Portuguese, Europeans began to edge their way into the Atlantic, then south along the African coastline (initially in search of gold and spices, ultimately seeking sea routes to Asia). En route, Spain and Portugal settled the Atlantic islands – Madeira and the Canaries first, then São Tomé and Principe, both much further south in the Gulf of Guinea. Sugar cultivation was an obvious line of commercial development and land settlement.

  In 1425, Henry the Navigator equipped the early colonists to Madeira with sugar cane plants from Sicily. By the end of that century, the island was producing substantial volumes of sugar. Meanwhile, Spanish settlers overcame the resistance of indigenous people to take possession of the Canaries, and they, too, planted sugar cane. Throughout these Atlantic islands – the Azores, the Canaries, Cape Verde Islands, Madeira, São Tomé and Príncipe – the conquering European settlers planted sugar cane where it was possible. In some places, they discovered that other crops were more suitable and profitable (wine and wheat in the Azores, for example). But sugar soon proved its worth on Madeira, an uninhabited island which attracted Portuguese settlers to the prospect of land, and which they turned over to wheat and sugar cultivation (with help from Genoese and Jewish financiers). Sugar became the island’s most lucrative commodity and, by the end of the fifteenth century, Madeira was the West’s largest sugar producer. It also employed slave labour from Africa, as well as from the Canary Islands. Most sugar cultivation was in the hands of small cane farmers who sent their cane to be processed in the nearest factory, some of which used the latest water-powered technology. By 1470, Madeira was producing 20,000 arrobas (230 metric tonnes) of sugar; by 1500–1510 (the peak years of local production) that volume had risen to 230,000 arrobas (2,645 metric tonnes) of various kinds of sugar.1

  This pattern of sugar cultivation in the Canaries was to become familiar in the Americas (though on a vastly different scale). The sugar was cultivated by both male and female slaves – Africans, people of mixed race and slaves from the Canaries (although that was outlawed at the end of the century) – and all this took place on small-scale plantations or ‘engenhos.’ Compared to what was to follow in the Americas, this seems miniscule but, in essence, it formed a blueprint that sugar planters in the Americas were to follow later.

  By the early sixteenth century, sugar was considered the most important enterprise on Tenerife. A good local plantation produced about 50 tons of sugar a year and, in a fruitful year, the island produced about 1,000 tons of sugar. The labour was enslaved, and overwhelmingly male; in time, it was increasingly African, with the managerial, technical or supervisory staff made up of free Portuguese. There was also a scattering of poorer sugar cane producers who simply grew sugar cane and dispatched their cane to the nearest factory for processing. Once again, the finance for all this came from Spanish and Italian financiers, with the finished product dispatched to mainland Europe via major European commercial houses.

  Throughout the sixteenth century, sugar from the Canaries was an important export to Europe (and remained as important as the sugar exported from the Spanish Caribbean until c. 1600). Eventually, however, and under competition from sugar from the Caribbean, sugar in the Canaries gave way to wine production. The Cape Verde islands, also thought a likely sugar producer, were 400 miles off the African coast and had a dryer climate, and settlers were reluctant to move to so remote a place. The initial sugar industry never really took off. What finally undermined the islands’ fledgling sugar industry was competition elsewhere, and the fact that the Cape Verde islands became an important way station in the Atlantic slave trade; it had other commercial temptations to offer the enterprising settlers and agriculturists.

  On the eve of the settlement of the Americas, the widespread cultivation and processing of sugar was perfected in what might seem, at first, an unlikely location: two small islands lying close to the African coast in the Gulf of Guinea. The Portuguese landed on São Tomé in 1471, one of their discoveries as they made their uncertain way south along the African coast. It was uninhabited and ideally suited to settlement. The cultivation which developed followed the pattern established in Madeira and the Azores. Sugar cultivation started at once, with the help of settlers already familiar with sugar production, and with finance, again, from Italy. By the mid-sixteenth century, the sugar economy of São Tomé was booming, yielding 150,000 arrobas of sugar. At its peak, 200 sugar mills dotted the landscape and the island’s population rose to 100,000. More striking still, the labour force was increasingly African – and enslaved.2

  Enslaved Africans had previously passed through the islands along early Portuguese slaving routes which saw Africans shipped from one coastal African society to another. This early European slave trade involved selling Africans to other Africans. But São Tomé lay only 320km off the coast of Africa, and African slaves were readily available for islanders in return for the variety of goods offered by European traders. From the first days of settlement, São Tomé had been an entrepôt for the movement of goods on the routes of trade and exploration along the African coast. Now it became a destination for coffles (groups of chained slaves) of enslaved Africans destined for São Tomé’s sugar fields.3 The numbers involved (compared to what was to follow) were relatively small; in 1519, more than 4,000 Africans were delivered to the island. A few years later, the Portuguese Crown was obliged to regulate the slave trade to the island. By the middle of that century, there were some 2,000 African slaves working in the island’s sugar fields, but perhaps three times that number were waiting in pens to be transported elsewhere.

  It was so easy – and cheap – to acquire African slaves that they were used lavishly on the island’s sugar plantations. Some local properties employed large communities of Africans, upwards of 150. They came from widely scattered regions on the African coast – from Benin, Angola and Senegambia – and were subjected to an intensive labouring regime which left little free time (and some of them were assigned to cultivating foodstuffs for slave labourers). Here, in embryo, was a system that would have been recognized by observers of the Caribbean sugar economy three centuries later.4

  São Tomé was then a thriving sugar economy in the sixteenth century, its sugars destined for the refineries of Antwerp and from there to fashionable tables across Europe. But it was an industry which crashed almost as quickly as it arose, although not because of a collapse in the demand for sugar. The astonishing European growth in demand for sugar in the following centuries was satisfied by planters not close to the African coast, but thousands of miles away on the far side of the Atlantic. Brazil led the way when settlers, tempted by the apparently boundless plenty afforded by Brazilian land, migrated from São Tomé bringing their African slaves with them. By 1700, São Tomé’s sugar industry had virtually disappeared – the island even imported sugar from Brazil.

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  In a protracted journey westwards, sugar cane first crossed the Atlantic with Columbus on his second voyage in 1493. Columbus, who had lived in Madeira and worked for a Genoese company which dealt with sugar, was alert to the commercial prospects afforded by sugar. Equally, all European adventurers and pioneers in the age of discovery were looking for whatever commercial and agricultural opportunities were afforded by distant lands. They were seeking land for settlement, for agricultural experimentation and development, and they were keen to shift seeds, bulbs, plants and cuttings from one corner of the globe to another. Few seemed to yield so remarkable a bounty as sugar cane.

  Introducing sugar cane into the tropical Americas seemed an obvious thing to do. It had, after all, proved its worth in a number of different locations around the Mediterranean and more recently in the Atlantic. It yielded good returns to European investors, had been the cause and occasion of agricultural and proto-industrial development, and it had proved that it thrived well with African slave labour. It was, however, one thing to
shift Africans from their homelands to São Tomé, quite another to transport them clean across the Atlantic. The key to the entire story, however, is that sugar had found a thriving market in Europe itself. The sugar pioneers in the Americas knew that Europeans were eager for ever more sugar. They also knew that Africans were available to work in their fields.

  The first efforts at sugar cultivation by the Spaniards in Santo Domingo, Cuba and Puerto Rico produced only modest returns, mainly because Spain was interested in more lucrative corners of their empire in the Americas. Who would prefer the hard slog of sugar planting when the fabled riches of El Dorado lay on the mainland, just across the waters of the Caribbean?

  The same could not be said of Brazil, though. There, the initial commercial attraction was timber, although from the first it was clear that settlers and their Portuguese masters were interested in experimenting with sugar. The first small cargoes of Brazilian sugar were sold in Antwerp in 1519, but that began to change substantially during the 1530s when experienced planters and financial backers, equipped with sugar cane, took root in newly developed Portuguese settlements. The impetus was Portuguese imperial backing, in the form of franchises – ‘captaincies’ – given to men to settle and develop specific regions of Brazil. Sugar was transplanted from Madeira and São Tomé and, although many settlements failed, those that succeeded, notably in Pernambuco on the north-east coast, confirmed the potential of Brazilian sugar. Like the earlier migrations of sugar, this new transatlantic version was made possible by the movement of men, skills, finance and crops from older sugar-growing regions. Brazilian sugar took root and thrived on the back of the manpower, experience and finance from Europe and from the Atlantic islands. When royal control was finally and securely settled in Bahia, in Salvador, the local sugar industry was able to thrive in relative safety. All this, however, was at great cost to local Indian peoples. To enable sugar to thrive, they were moved from the rich lands they occupied and regrouped into villages under Jesuit care.