Sugar as the Most Important Strategic Product in the World
Sugar is a commodity that has been so ingrained in our daily lives. By 1650, Europeans had been exposed to sugar for food and medicine and were still inveterate sugar eaters, thus sugar is deeply rooted in history. Sugar has played an important role in the history of Atlantic islands like Barbados and Jamaica, but it also has shaped our history’s narrative through sugar's role in exploiting people in the slave trade for labor. With the massive popularity and sugar production growth, the demand for cheap labor during the 17th and 18th centuries led to a significant response from British landowners in the Caribbean. Because of the substantial production growth, there was a greater need for cheap labor and the formation of “large-scale capitalist plantations” where sugar cane was harvested from the land and proceeded to be refined in the mill in a rigorous and structured fashion. To meet Europe’s unprecedented demand for sugar, British sugar plantation owners disciplined easily coercible labor in the form of slavery and indentured labor to make the land and mill system work efficiently in the Caribbean islands to ensure a maximum capital gain.
In Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, Sidney Mintz acknowledges that the early 17th century predated the industrial revolution, however, sugar production in the Caribbean islands was organized like an industrial process due to the rapid demand for a commodity. The process of sugar production in the Caribbean islands was well structured and controlled at every level, similar to how current industrialism occurs with mechanization with human labor with structure and control. Having structure in the mill system was necessary because harvesting sugar cane from the land and refining it in the mill occurred concurrently, where both depended on the other’s process efficiency. Mintz describes the sugar industry by stating that “the system was a time-conscious” process. As a result, the production of sugar followed strict scheduling of the field and factory components in the land and mill system to ensure demands were met and maximum capital gains were made.
The British aimed to make the system as cost and time-efficient by instilling discipline into the process to maximize sugar products for the Europeans. Unfortunately, the British achieved the mass production of sugar through the exploitation of slave laborers, as coerced labor would allow for discipline to be easily attained by the British colonial landowners through corporal treatment. The conduct of all plantation operations, including its workers, was dictated by powerful colonial oppressors, and they were completely expendable if they could not work in an efficient manner. The land and mill systems were synchronous because the British practiced discipline on the slaves or indentured laborers on the British Caribbean islands for sugar production. Due to power and racial hierarchies in the colonial period, it endorsed slaves being exploited and forced to do these sorts of jobs. Sugar was consumed and enjoyed by England’s nobility and the wealthy and was so commonly consumed that by the 1900s, that Mintz states” “sugar was supplying nearly one-fifth of the calories in the English diet,” indicating that the slaves were laboring for the benefit of a fraction of consumers. Due to this effective yet cruel structure of the land and mill system using slaves and indentured laborers, British Caribbean plantations were ultimately able to produce more sugar.
In addition, with the unprecedented and growing demand for sugar from Europe in the late 17th century, the number of natural resources available impacted the continued success of the land and mill system. Therefore, this leads to the increased number of plantation owners to being acquiring more land for a larger estate for larger crops and new mills. This consequently leads to smaller farms being gradually replaced by plantations looking to enlarge and gain more capital to meet the influx of demand. Thus, more labor was required in islands like Barbados and Martinique to maintain the land and mill system. The number of enslaved Africans increased significantly in the late 17th century as the number of slaves being brought into the Atlantic islands was extraordinary, at 252,500 and 662,400 slaves being received in Barbados and Jamaica, respectively, from 1701 to 1810. British sugar plantation owners were able to capitalize on Europe’s extraordinary demand for sugar by ensuring the land and mill system worked with perfect synchronization.
Although the Spaniards were the first to use slave labor to produce sugar in the Caribbean, the British became the world’s leading producer in the colonial era. The British were successful in producing sugar through their efforts in turning the commodity’s land and mill production system into an efficient and synchronized process. Through this effective system, British Caribbean possessions like Barbados became “powerful economic forces” which would shape the direction of Atlantic trade throughout the colonial period. The terrible consequence of the industrialization of the land and mill system was the increase of reliance on slavery and indentured labor to meet the increasing needs of the growing sugar plantations. It also increased because coerced labor was a way to achieve discipline to ensure the land and mill system was a regulated and controlled process. The sugar trade redefined diets and profoundly impacted the history of colonization of the Caribbean islands but it came at the cost of enslaving millions of Africans to support the taste buds of their colonial oppressors.
Bibliography
- Curtin, Philip. The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
- Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. London, UK: Penguin Books, 1986.
- Smith, Frederick and Karl Watson. “Urbanity, Sociability, and Commercial Exchange in the Barbados Sugar Trade: A Comparative Colonial Archaeological Perspective on Bridgetown, Barbados in the Seventeenth Century.” International Journal History 13 (March 2009): 63-79. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10761-008-0072-8.
