Sugar Read online

  At first, Brazilian settlers used Indian labour and tried to lure Indians from the Interior to their coastal sugar settlements, but no amount of cajoling and persuasion could secure local labour in the numbers required. By the 1570s, Brazilian planters were turning, like the sugar planters on São Tomé before them, to African slaves for their labour force. By 1600, more than 200,000 enslaved Africans had been shipped to Brazil. Once the Portuguese colonised Angola in 1575, they began to develop their own slave trade from Luanda. No one at the time could have predicted the astonishing outcome. This early South Atlantic trade evolved into a stunning enforced migration of Africans. All told, 2.8 million Africans were to leave Luanda as slaves bound for the Americas, overwhelmingly to Brazil.5

  The earlier settlements of some of the Atlantic islands had involved the enforced removal of people, by commercial and political interests, to cultivate sugar cane in distant lands. But Brazil set in train an altogether different process. There were, in effect, two processes at work in the late sixteenth century in Brazil, and both were to recur throughout the colonial and early national periods of history across the Americas. First, the indigenous people were removed to clear the land for settlement and cultivation; and second, foreign labourers were shipped in to bring that land into profitable cultivation. Indian peoples were driven from their lands, and Africans replaced them. In Brazil in the late sixteenth century, the numbers involved were small. But they formed, in essence, the initial landing party of a subsequent migration that was to transform the demographic face of the Americas. It was the beginning of the Africanisation of swathes of the continent. And this process had its origins – and its culmination – in the urge to cultivate sugar cane.

  Despite all the other commercial possibilities, sugar quickly became Brazil’s main export crop and it was not to be dislodged until the nineteenth century. Brazilian sugar began to arrive in volume in Europe in the mid-sixteenth century, initially via Lisbon and other Portuguese ports. By the end of that century, sugar was being shipped direct to northern Europe, especially to Antwerp (later to Amsterdam). The sugar economy of Antwerp and Amsterdam (founded on imports from São Tomé) now thrived on Brazilian sugar, which also landed in Hamburg and London.

  The sugar previously grown in the Atlantic islands had passed through some simple stages of refining before being shipped to Europe, where sugar refineries took the raw sugar and refined it further into the lighter-coloured sugars most sought after by European consumers. Sugar refineries had been simple in medieval Egypt, and Marco Polo visiting China had noted them. In Europe, they were initially concentrated in Antwerp (before the city was sacked by Spanish forces in 1576). That city was the centre of the dynamic economy of the southern Netherlands (the centre of what was known as ‘the rich trades’) and served as a major distribution point for exotic goods imported by Portuguese shippers (though often financed by German, Jewish and Italian backers). Sugar was, then, just one of the many imports from distant markets, but sugar refining, with its unpleasant smoke and pollution, soon became a feature of Antwerp’s urban landscape. In 1550, there were nineteen sugar refineries in the city.

  Twenty-five years later, London, too, had become a major centre for refining sugar, along with other major European ports, as their merchants became increasingly involved in the sugar trade. By the mid-seventeenth century, Amsterdam boasted forty sugar refineries, despite local attempts to curb the coal-based pollution belching from the refineries’ chimneys.6 By then, the sugar was arriving in Europe from plantations in the Americas.

  These were the years of ascendant Dutch trade and maritime power, and much (perhaps most) of Brazil’s sugar was shipped across the Atlantic in Dutch ships. The sugar headed for northern Europe mainly because Brazil lacked the facilities to refine the sugar properly. In fact, we can gauge the exports of Brazilian sugar by the proliferation of refineries in Antwerp and Amsterdam. Amsterdam’s sugar refineries increased from 40 to 110 between 1650 and 1770; London had 80 refineries by 1753.

  In Brazil, the initial, crude system of refining created an important supply of rum which was consumed locally, although much was also shipped across the South Atlantic in return for yet more slaves.7 And while rum also found an eager market in Europe and especially in colonial North America, it was sugar which was the engine of this remarkable slave-based system. Until the 1630s, Brazilian sugar had no real competitors. Thereafter, however, new British and French European settlements in the Caribbean islands created serious competition. Sugar from St Kitts, Barbados, Jamaica and, eventually – and most significantly – from the French colony of St Domingue, transformed the sugar economy of the Western world. But all of them, from Jamaica in the north to Salvador in the south, depended on imported African labour. The pattern was set: sugar meant slavery.

  Although they came late to the imperial game, both the French and the British began to acquire tropical colonies in the knowledge that they contained great potential for commercial prosperity. Who knows what the luxuriant lands of the Caribbean might yield? And while Brazil had clinched the case for the development of sugar, there were other commercial possibilities awaiting settlers on the far side of the Atlantic.

  The Spaniards brought a great variety of plants to the Caribbean, although not all their experiments succeeded (wheat was a notable failure), but sugar was to transform the region, despite it struggling at first against other commodities. The settlement of the smaller islands of the Eastern Caribbean was followed by attempts at varied forms of agriculture, notably tobacco, indigo and cotton. The early settlers, led by the Spaniards, at first ‘dabbed and dabbled, trying one thing after another. Quite quickly, however, they turned to sugar growing and sugar-making.’8 Sugar ushered in a fundamental and far-reaching human and ecological revolution. This was the ‘sugar revolution that was to transform the face of the Caribbean; it changed for ever the natural habitat, the face of the land and the very people who inhabited the region. Though we can calculate the changes in that arc of islands – the change in populations, the transformations in the local flora and fauna – we need to add to this complex formula the impact made on taste throughout the Western world (and later, throughout the world at large). Brazil had whetted the appetite of the Western world for sugar, but it was the shift to sugar in the Caribbean that inaugurated the corruption of the world by sugar.

  Sugar was first cultivated on smallholdings, later on larger plantations. At first, the labour was mixed – free or indentured European labour, which increasingly became dominated by enslaved Africans as plantations took root and grew to huge proportions. Sugar cultivation, and the extraction of juice from sugar cane, were, by then, all well-known agricultural and industrial procedures, and Brazil had already shown that it was a commercial venture which, with luck and good management, could be a lucrative business. Settlers in the Caribbean adopted the systems established by pioneers in Brazil and used European financial backing and markets. At first, they remained uncertain which agricultural route to take (not unlike the settlements in North America), but the drift to sugar effectively began in Barbados in the 1640s, and spread quickly to Guadeloupe, Martinique, St Kitts, Nevis, Antigua and Montserrat, and Jamaica. Everywhere, the success of sugar depended on imperial protection – and good prices in European markets.

  The eventual outcome was the emergence of the Caribbean as the world’s centre for sugar production. Barbados exported 7,000 tons of sugar by 1650. Fifty years later, sugar production in the British islands had reached 25,000 tons, and now surpassed Brazil’s 22,000 tons. In 1700, there were ten sugar exporters, all of them colonies in the Americas, dispatching 60,000 tons to the world’s markets. All of them relied on enslaved Africans.

  Within less than a century, the number of sugar exporters doubled, and they were producing 150,000 tons by 1750. In 1770, more than 200,000 tons were produced (90 per cent of it from the Caribbean). Two colonies alone – Jamaica with 36,000 tons, and St Domingue with 60,000 tons – accounted for half of the Caribbean
sugar production.9 None of this could have happened, on such a scale, without the unprecedented and brutal transportation of millions of enslaved Africans. Sugar had become synonymous with slavery.

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  Although sugar could be cultivated by small farmers, and their cane handed over to others for crushing and processing, it had quickly become clear that the best results, and the maximum returns on sugar, were on large plantations. But they were labour-intensive and required gangs of labourers working to a rhythm – and with an intensity – that was unlike other forms of agricultural work. The early sugar system of using mixed labour had effectively disappeared from the Caribbean by the mid-eighteenth century. European indentured labourers simply faded away and sugar was now dominated by plantations, and the plantations were populated by African slavery. There were simply not enough indentured labourers to satisfy the voracious labour demands of the sugar plantations.

  Throughout the Caribbean, sugar planters came to prefer African slave labour. For a start, few challenged the morality of slavery itself (until that is, the upsurge of abolition sentiment – and the related law cases in Britain – in the last quarter of the eighteenth century). Moreover, types of slavery had existed in the Americas from the early days of European settlement, notably the small-scale (and largely unsuccessful) enslavement of Indian peoples. Africans shipped across the Atlantic – if they survived the crossing and landfall (and many did not) – belonged to a sugar planter for life. So, too, did their children. In the eyes of colonial and metropolitan law, African slaves were things – chattels, objects, property – to be bought, sold, inherited and bequeathed like any other item. This property status was the basis of black slavery throughout the vast colonial lands of the Americas and, despite the obvious and inevitable confusions (especially in the law), it defined Africans and their descendants throughout the era of slavery. But it also meant that slave owners could effectively do with them as they wished. Everyone involved in the increasingly complex Atlantic sugar trade – notably planters and traders – devised a multitude of reasons for using African slave labour, such as their natural strength for hard work, and their resistance to tropical ailments. But the simple truth was economic – Africans could be recruited at relatively low cost (despite the vast distances travelled), and they could be easily replaced. This was not true of other forms of labour.

  So it was that slave ships, from all corners of the Atlantic system, from all of Europe’s major ports, and from a number of American ports, from Rhode Island to Rio, converged on the Atlantic coast of Africa, where they exchanged a huge variety of goods for cargoes of enslaved Africans. They, in their turn, endured the uniquely terrifying Atlantic crossing, often having been incarcerated for many months on a slave ship in a port on the African coast as the manifest of slaves was filled. This maritime experience was brutal, disease-ridden, marked by horrific death rates and the capricious brutality on the part of the crew, who lived in daily fear of their African prisoners. Moreover, all this took place before the enfeebled survivors stumbled ashore to begin (if they survived at all) a lifetime’s labour. Millions of them were destined for the sugar fields.

  Until the 1840s, it was the African slave who, above all others, was the pre-eminent pioneer in the Americas. This Africanisation of the Americas was, to the modern eye, the most obvious transformation in Brazil, North America and in a string of islands that arced more than 2,000 miles from the southern tip of Florida to the north-eastern tip of South America. The numbers involved are simply staggering. We know that more than 12 million Africans were loaded on to the slave ships, and that more than 11 million survived to reach landfall in the Americas. What began as a transatlantic trickle grew into the largest pre-modern enforced movement of people the world has ever seen. In the 1570s, some 2,000 Africans were transported every year to the Americas. That had grown to 7,000 a year in the early 1600s, and 18,000 by the 1660s. The coming of sugar, however, saw those figures increase astronomically. By the 1790s, 80,000 Africans were arriving each year, with the very great majority landed in Brazil or the Caribbean. More than one million landed in Jamaica, and almost half a million in the small island of Barbados. Even the tiny island of Dominica received 127,900 Africans.10

  In time, Africans, and their children born in the Americas, undertook every conceivable kind of labour, from the dockside loading ships’ cargoes and processing the arrival of new Africans, through to the very edges of the American frontiers. They became miners, cowherds, lumberjacks and nurses, cooks and seamstresses, and many were skilled craftsmen – joiners, wheel-wrights, metalworkers, boilermen in the sugar factories, drovers in the fields and domestic servants in towns and in plantation houses. Enslaved Africans were inescapable throughout the Americas. Above all, they were to be found in the largest concentrations labouring at the back-breaking work in the sugar fields.

  There they were marshalled into ‘gangs’ – outsiders used military imagery to describe slaves working in sugar – and the first gang of the fittest slaves (both men and women) were assigned the heaviest work, cutting and hacking the cane. They were followed by the second and third gangs – men, women and children – who collected and bundled the cane and loaded it on to carts heading to the factory. There, skilled slaves took over the process of crushing, boiling and filtering the cane into the juices that ultimately became molasses and barrels of crude muscovado sugar. All this was then transported by ox and mule carts to the waterside, and on to the ships destined for distant ports and refineries – and from there to the eager consumers of Europe and the wider world.

  Slaves on sugar plantations entered the labour force as children, as soon as suitable work could be found for them. As they aged, they slipped from physical, demanding labour to other menial, less demanding chores. They worked from childhood to old age, or until incapacity, accident or sickness made them (in the unforgiving phrase of plantation ledgers) ‘old and useless’.

  Africans had become an investment long before they started work in the sugar fields. They had a value when first traded in Africa and had a price on their heads from the moment they stepped on to a slave ship. Thereafter, they were an item of trade, although there was an ironic element to this status. Because the Africans represented an investment (by slave traders, and later by planters), they needed to be managed and looked after. For all the cruelties, ill-treatment and punishments on the slave ships and plantations, slaves represented a costly investment by their owners. On the plantations, owners monitored their labourers’ health and well-being, allocating them to appropriate tasks from infancy to old age, according to their physical age and condition. By the late eighteenth century, Jamaican sugar slaves were being periodically checked by a doctor – and even vaccinated against smallpox, which was a major scourge among the slaves. Planters also provided appropriate food, shelter and clothing, although all this was supplemented by the slaves’ own efforts, working on their plots and gardens in their spare time. Such necessities were not provided for philanthropic or humanitarian motives; they were dictated by simple economic realities. To get the best from their enslaved labour force, sugar planters needed their assets to be as fit and as healthy as circumstances and finance allowed.

  So it was that the human patterns emerged which are familiar to any student of sugar slavery, or to anyone glancing at contemporary illustrations. Images became commonplace of strong, youthful male and female adults toiling at the heaviest labours in the fields, with younger, less mature or older slaves following behind, and with a small band of skilled slaves transporting and processing the cane into sugar and molasses destined for the ships. On all plantations there were scatterings of old people and women with gaggles of children, undertaking all the domestic and local tasks in and around the houses, the yards and the animal pens. Whatever their tasks, slaves worked from dawn to dusk.

  For their part, sugar planters had clear ideas of what they expected slaves to achieve, whatever their task. Slave owners and their managerial overseers developed
a keen sense of what their labour force could accomplish, in a precise time frame, at a specific job. Their paperwork, compiled year after year, season after season, in the huge ledgers imported from Europe, provide an actuarial guide to what had been successfully achieved. The accountancy of the sugar trade was exacting and unrelenting.

  The plantation ledgers provide a blueprint for running a successful sugar plantation. There had never before been such a calculated and remorseless analysis of land and labour, and never before such an unyielding system able to extract the maximum returns from the labour force. Through all this, slaves worked not simply to the tight discipline of the sugar season – cutting and processing the cane from January to midsummer, planting new cane and tending the fields thereafter for the next crop – but they worked under the threat of severe compulsion. It was not an artistic fancy that when outsiders sketched or painted slaves at work in the sugar fields, they invariably portrayed master and drivers, in the saddle, whip in hand, ready to goad the labour force to work harder. True, material rewards were built into the system – extra food, clothing, treats on high days and holidays – but sugar was produced by an unforgiving system of brutal enforcement. Yet who ever gave this a moment’s thought, or heard the sound of the lash, when spooning sugar into their tea or coffee in London or Paris?