Sugar, slavery, and the plantation system

This lecture was about the inter-relationships between labour, forms of production and consumption in an Atlantic system underpinned by African slavery.

The problem of New World labour

In the Americas, Europeans elaborated a new agricultural form: the "plantation system". This was an intensified form of agricultural production, based on land seized from Native Americans and the labour of enslaved Africans to produce commodities valued in Europe: sugar, rice, tobacco, indigo, cacao, coffee. Plantation owners faced labour shortage as result of indigenous depopulation and it was believed that Europeans were not suited to physical labour in the tropics (this area was called the "torrid zone" and it was believed that a requirement to working there was to grow up in the area, in Africa or the Americas) because it was too hot and they died more quickly because of tropical diseases. From 1550 there was large scale exportation of African slaves from West Africa to the Carribbean and the Americas, a process that became a complicated chain of economic connection.

Slavery and the Atlantic World

During the sixteenth century, Spanish primarily used native labour to work their plantations in Americas, but as disease and depopulation took its toll, they began to use slaves from West Africa. By 1600 approximately 50 000 slaves were imported into the Americas. The Seventeenth century witnessed a four-fold increase of the slave trade as the plantation system was expanded, with large-scale production of sugar cane in the West Indies. Dutch, English and French also began importing large numbers of slaves into their Caribbean colonies. The period 1550-1700 was dominated by the Portuguese and the Dutch, there was an average of around 10 000 Africans per year being trasported to South and Central America and the Caribbean. In 1700-1810 however, the English & French slavers dominate: in total 6 million slaves were traded [810 000 in 1780s alone]. In the total period of 1500-1850, 11 000 000 black Africans were transported across the Atlantic.

Enslaved populations were not self-sustaining. There were fewer females than males, lower fertility levels, and high rates of morbidity and mortality: the life expectancy of a slave in the Caribbean was around 6.5 years. Huge profits were made of the back of slave labour: typically slaves cost around the amount of finished goods they produced in one year (meaning that the remainder of their labour resulted in a profit for the slave-owner). Sugar plantations, on average, turned 20% annual profit before 1700 declining to about 7% in 1790.

The Plantation System

Prior to 1650, the prime crop was tobacco, but sugar became premier crop of the Caribbean and tobacco increasingly produced in the Carolinas and Virginia. The production of these crops rested on the alienation of the basic rights of slaves: slaves were identified as property, not people. The Labour conditions in plantation systems were brutal; slave production rested on the use or threat of violence. Punishment, torture and exhausting work were key mechanisms of enforcing white control over large black populations (typically in the Caribbean there was 1 white to every 4 slaves). Slaves were atomised (individualised) in order that they not band together and revolt. The strict monitoring of time, the policing of labour and measurement of efficiency that were key features of plantation production anticipate work-discipline central to the industrial revolution. The sugar plantations were the start of modern industrial capitalism. New world slave labour - men working the fields, women as domestic slaves- reversed the gendered division of labour common in West Africa. Enslaved women were valued for their reproductive capacities, but were also targets of sexual violence. Resistance, in many forms, formed a central feature of plantation life; but the only successful large-scale slave rebellion came in Haiti in 1790.

Sugar

In the Middle Ages, sugar came to Europe from North Africa & Mediterranean, but only in small amounts and as a result, was restricted to the elite. Early European expansion in Atlantic created new centers of sugar production - especially Madeira & the Canaries. Subsequent expansion of production in the Caribbean encouraged wider use in Europe, especially for medicinal purposes. Major expansion in consumption came during the eighteenth century; in part connected to the rise of tea. This marks a crucial transition in the history of modern diet.

Sugar entering British ports per annum	Consumption per capita per annum
1650 2 000 tons	1660 2 lbs
1700 23 000 tons	1700 5 lbs
1800 245 000 tons	1720 9 lbs
	1790 22 lbs