The Sugar Barons

by Matthew Parker

  So the West Indies had none of the things that sustained and nourished the northern colonies: a stable and rising population, family, long lives, and even religion. Instead there was money, alcohol, sex and death. A later writer, contrasting the life of colonists in the North American settlements with the comparative luxury of the West Indian plantations, commented that emigrants to North America had brought with them the tools of culture, religion and settlement. But in the West Indian world, the founders ‘carried no Gods with them’, going instead into ‘the wilderness of mere materialism’. A later visitor would complain that Kingston, by then the largest English town in the Caribbean, had ‘not one fine building in it’, whereas Spanish Havana in Cuba was a ‘city of palaces, a city of streets, of colonnades and towers, and churches and monasteries’. ‘We English’, he ended, ‘have built in those islands as if we were but passing visitors.’

  Most were, indeed, sojourners, incomers, transients, looking not to belong in Jamaica or to be part of a viable settler society, but to make money fast and get out while still alive. This feeling was shared by almost all parts of white Jamaican society. ‘It is to Great Britain alone that our West India planters consider themselves as belonging’, wrote a historian of the West Indies at the end of the eighteenth century. ‘Even such of them as have resided in the West Indies from their birth, look on the islands as their temporary abode only, and the fond notion of being able to go home (as they emphatically term a visit to England) year after year animates their industry and alleviates their misfortune.’ Although Barbados, uniquely, developed a real Creole identity of its own, elsewhere the whites in the British West Indies were exiles who, a Nevis planter wrote, ‘incessantly sigh for a return’.

  Increasing numbers did, indeed, return to Britain, becoming absentee landlords. One third of Jamaican plantation owners were absentees by the 1740s, two thirds by 1800. Absenteeism was rare in the Leewards in the 1730s, William Codrington being an exception, but was at chronic levels less than 20 years later. In St Kitts, half the property was owned by absentees by 1745. This trend would constitute one of the greatest factors in the sugar empire’s rapid decline.

  25

  THE SUGAR LOBBY

  ‘[The West India interest] have frequently … shown themselves above parliament … Lord North used to say that they were the only masters he ever had.’

  Herald newspaper, 23 August 1797

  The story goes that George III was out riding with the Earl of Chatham, William Pitt the Elder, near Weymouth when they passed a very pretentious equipage with numerous outriders in grand liveries. To the King’s fury, it made his own carriage look rather meagre. When he learnt that it belonged to a Jamaican, he exclaimed, ‘Sugar, sugar, hey? – all that sugar! How are the duties, hey, Pitt, how are the duties?’

  Sugar was king. Imports to England, having already quadrupled in the last four decades of the seventeenth century, trebled between 1700 and 1740, and had doubled again by 1770. By then, sugar had achieved a revolution in eating habits in England. Along with coffee, tea and cocoa, jams, processed foods, chocolate and confectionery were now being consumed in much greater quantities. Treacle was spread on bread and put on porridge. Breakfast became sweet, rather than savoury. Pudding, hitherto made of fish or light meat, now embarked on its unhealthy history as a separate sweet course.

  In Hannah Glasse’s famous 1747 book, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, which was the first recipe book in English aimed at the middle classes, she assumed they would have plenty of sugar. (Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility records a moment of anxiety when impending poverty threatens the heroine’s family’s purchase of sugar.) Glasse’s recipe for ‘cake in the Spanish way’ required three pounds of ‘best moist sugar’. Marmalade, as invented by Rebecca Price, required a pound of sugar for every four oranges. Use of sugar can also be seen in the fat faces of contemporary monarchs, beauties and actresses.

  Once a luxury, sugar became an essential. The tea break had arrived, with even the poorest labourer taking sustenance from the combination of stimulant and calorie hit. ‘Sugar is so generally in use, by the assistance of tea’, read a 1774 report, ‘that even the poor wretches living in almshouses will not be without it.’ A contemporary recommended that 12 to 16 pounds of sugar be used with every pound of tea. Indeed, one of the attractions of tea, and a secret of its success, was that it could carry a large amount of sweet calories. In all, by the end of the eighteenth century, a typical poor family in England would give as much as 6 per cent of its income to sugar.

  By this time, sugar, along with other New World luxuries such as chocolate, coffee, tea, rum and tobacco, had helped shape a consumer mentality among ordinary people, more pliant and willing to accept factory discipline in order to afford their luxury stimulants.

  Some saw the expenditure on tea and sugar – brought from so far away – as a diversion of wealth; but many others saw it as an incentive for extra effort: a cotton manufacturer observed: ‘Among the lower orders … industry can only be found, where artificial wants have crept in, and have acquired the character of necessities.’

  In sugar consumption Britain now led the world by a large margin, importing more than twice the amount as much more populous France, where tea was shunned in favour of wine. Sugar’s ugly sister rum also failed to catch on in France, where brandy reigned supreme, but in Britain and Ireland it was another story.

  Wine and brandy consumption had fallen off in England when, at the outbreak of war in 1689, commerce with France had been banned. Thereafter distillers of malt and molasses spirits benefited from legal restrictions on French spirits. This led to a boom in new types of distilling, and, from about 1713, what became known as the ‘Gin Craze’. When this turned ugly and gin-making was curbed by the government, the British consumer, now used to drinking spirits, looked for an alternative. The West India lobby was ready with a pamphlet campaign that extolled the health benefits of rum and reminded the consumer that British livelihoods in the West Indies colonies depended on it. It was a patriotic tipple. The fashionable served it as punch in elaborately decorated bowls. A contemporary observer wrote of the merchants of Liverpool: ‘their rum is excellent of which they consume large quantities in punch, made when the West India fleets come in mostly with limes, which are very cooling, and afford a delicious flavour’.

  Rum consumption, like that of sugar, grew almost exponentially. Soon ‘Kill Devil’ had invaded almost all areas of English social life. Eighteenth-century elections, notorious for their bribery and drunkenness, saw rum freely distributed, so much so that at election time the price went up. From 2,000 gallons a year in 1700, by 1773 rum imports into England and Wales had risen to two million gallons, further swelling the coffers of the sugar barons.

  The sugar empire was now undisputedly Britain’s most important possession. Sugar was the most valuable import into Britain, worth more than the total exports of all the North American mainland colonies combined. Towards the end of the century, the younger Pitt estimated that four fifths of British incomes derived from overseas came from the West Indies. The islands also took far more English-manufactured goods than the North Americans, even though there were many fewer settlers there. Jamaica was described as ‘a constant Mine whence Britain draws prodigious Riches’, and as a ‘necessary appendage to our present refined manner of living’.

  One economist concluded that the labours of the people settled in the West Indies doubled and perhaps trebled the activity of all Europe. ‘They may be considered’, he wrote, ‘as the principal cause of the rapid motion which now agitates the universe.’ Sugar was a driving force and an important part of Britain’s rapidly expanding and now global commerce. Its sister trade, of course, was in slaves.

  By the 1750s, the English were pre-eminent in the slave trade, shipping some 200,000 during the decade. Bristol had boomed on the back of slavery during the first decades of the eighteenth century, as its rich, elegant architecture of that time testifies. But after about
1740, Liverpool, with its superior port facilities and easy access to the manufacturing heartlands of the country, reigned supreme. The population of Liverpool, only 5,000 in 1700, had grown to 34,000 by 1773, by which time it was sending 100 ships a year to Africa.

  Banks, insurance companies, shipbuilders and brokers all participated in and benefited from the trade, and profits were invested in manufacturing. Manchester, in particular, thrived, producing textiles that the Liverpool shippers took to Africa to pay for the slaves. Manufacturers of tools and guns also found a ready market.

  The operation on the Slave Coast became more efficient, with one planter partnership with Scottish roots even buying an island (Bunce Island) off the coast of Sierra Leone to act as a collection point (for the whites there was a golf course with African caddies in kilts). After 1750, an organisation was formed of British slave traders, which maintained the forts on the coast.

  The huge demand for slaves – and the importation of tens of thousands of guns a year – led to constant war over large areas of West Africa. When prisoners could not be acquired this way, West Africans started looking for new excuses to condemn someone to slavery, including twins and mothers of twins.

  In England, it was fashionable for aristocratic women to be accompanied by a black boy, who was treated as a sort of toy (when he outgrew this role, he was usually sent to the Caribbean). Blacks started appearing in art and caricature by, for instance, Hogarth and Cruikshank. In other ways the West Indies was becoming more highly visible in English society. The ample sugar profits could now fund absentee proprietorship on an ever-increasing scale. Many of the sugar barons were back in England, spending money ostentatiously.

  Alderman William Beckford would continue to expand his interests in Jamaica: in 1762 he bought Drax Hall, in a manner, reported some, ‘that excited the indignation of every honest man who became acquainted with the transaction’. Apparently Beckford obtained the estate for far below its value by calling in a loan, or possibly a gambling debt. This appears to have been a favourite tactic of his. (Drax Hall would make a great deal of money for the Beckfords.) But after about 1744, he was mostly in England, expanding his merchant interests and investing in the cloth industry, property, moneylending and government bonds.

  While becoming a big name in the City of London, Beckford was first a local magistrate for the area near his manor at Fonthill in Wiltshire, then, in 1747, MP for Shaftesbury. Five years later he was admitted to the Ironmongers’ Livery company, and became alderman of the Billingsgate ward in the City. The following year he was Master of the Ironmongers, then, in spring 1754, he was returned as MP for the City of London.

  William’s generation of Beckfords represented the pinnacle of the sugar planters’ power and wealth. With the help of his elder brother, Richard Beckford secured election as MP for Bristol in 1754, which took considerable effort, as he was in Jamaica at the time. Richard also acquired property in England before his death in 1756. His estate was held by his younger brother Julines in trust for his ‘natural son’ William, known, to differentiate him from other William Beckfords, as ‘William of Somerly’. Somerly was only 12 at the time, and still at school in England, where he had been sent from Jamaica at the age of five.

  Julines Beckford was by the 1750s established as a West India merchant in London. In 1754 he became MP for Salisbury. Their sister Elizabeth married the second Earl of Effingham, and their younger brother Francis married a daughter of the Duke of Ancaster. By the time of his death in 1768, Francis owned lands in Hampshire and Surrey, as well as a house in Albermarle Street, London.

  The West India planters who returned home were the most conspicuous rich men of their time. ‘As wealthy as a West Indian’ was proverbial. They soon acquired a reputation for hospitality, extraordinary consumption and slavish imitation of the landed aristocracy. They were mocked in some quarters as vulgar Creoles, or ‘pepperpots’, nonetheless their conspicuous success helped give an impression that empire was worth creating and defending.

  Having made their fortunes, the planters now wanted landed aristocrat status: it was boom time for the designers and builders of stately homes. Among those families purchasing great estates and building vast new mansions were the Lascelles. Henry’s heir Edwin built the enormous Hare-wood House in Yorkshire, designed by John Carr, with interiors by John Adam and furniture by Thomas Chippendale. The mansion also contained a 70-foot-long gallery to display family portraits of the Lascelles by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Edwin would subsequently become the first Baron Hare-wood. At Dodington in Gloucestershire, the Codrington family seat, a new garden was laid out by Capability Brown, and James Wyatt constructed a lavish mansion with a huge Corinthian portico.

  Many other returning West India nabobs followed suit. By the late 1770s ‘there were scarcely ten miles together throughout the country where the house and estate of a rich West Indian was not to be seen’, as Lord Shel-burne, later Prime Minister, declared in the House of Commons. Most had a London residence as well, with many buying up houses in the fashionable new development around Marylebone, particularly on Wimpole Street.

  In 1755, William Beckford’s expensively refurbished mansion, Fonthill, burnt to the ground. Beckford is reported as announcing, ‘I have an odd fifty thousand pounds in a drawer. I will build it up again!’ The result became known as Fonthill Splendens, a lavish stately pile designed in the Palladian style, stocked with the best furniture, objects and paintings that money could buy. On the ground floor was an immense Egyptian Hall, from which radiated numerous vaulted corridors. Upstairs was a suite of stately apartments, all with marble floors, and further up were found galleries filled with precious art and furniture. It was, said one visitor, a place ‘where expense has reached its utmost limits in furniture and ornaments, where every room is a gold mine and every apartment a picture gallery’. Descriptions of Splendens by contemporaries paid tribute to its lavishness while hinting at touches of vulgarity. One referred to the ‘utmost profusion of magnificence’ of the piano nobile, ‘with the appearance of immense riches, almost too tawdrily exhibited’. In fact, there were few visitors: local gentry considered Beckford a nouveau riche ‘radical’, and were unimpressed by his morals, as evidenced by his huge brood of illegitimate children.

  The house lay at the foot of a wooded valley on the western margin of an artificial lake, complete with bridge, grotto and boathouse, designed to look like a rococo basilica in miniature. Beckford also rebuilt the local church, replacing it with an ugly and pretentious building that resembled an ill-proportioned Grecian temple. Villagers were unimpressed with the new building, and regarded the fact that ancient monumental inscriptions from the previous church had been buried as an ill omen.

  The Beckfords were not the only West Indians entering Parliament. By mid-century, most of the biggest sugar names had at least one family member as an MP, including the Lascelles, the Tomlinsons and the Martins from Antigua, the Dawkins and Dickinsons from Jamaica, the Pinneys and Stapletons from Nevis, and many others. Christopher Codrington’s heir, Sir William, baronet, who had been steadily increasing his acreage in Antigua, was MP for Minehead until his death in 1738. His brother-in-law, Slingsby Bethell, managed the Codrington plantations in Antigua as a young man and then moved to London to establish a sugar factorage business, acting as a commission agent for the Byams, Martins and Tomlinsons. He was Lord Mayor of London in 1756 and represented the City in Parliament. Sir William’s son represented Tewkesbury. The Draxes of Barbados were also now English MPs, a tradition that has continued to this day.

  In 1767, Lord Chesterfield’s offer of £2,500 for a seat in Northampton was disdainfully refused by a borough jobber. His lordship was told that ‘there was no such thing as a borough to be had now, for the rich East and West Indians had secured them all, at the rate of three thousand pounds at least, and two or three that he knew at five thousand’. ‘The landed interest is beat out’, wrote another member of the aristocracy in 1768. ‘Merchants, nabobs, and those who hav
e gathered riches from the East and West Indies stand the best chance of governing this country.’

  Indeed, in 1765 it was estimated that there were more than 40 MPs who were ‘West Indians’, able to ‘turn the balance on which side they please’, as the agent for Massachusetts Bay complained. In contrast, the North Americans had no comparable lobby, causing Benjamin Franklin to bemoan that in Britain, the ‘West Indies vastly outweigh us of the Northern Colonies’.

  In 1754, Rose Fuller returned to England from Jamaica and the next year became MP for Rye. In 1764, his younger brother Stephen became Jamaica’s agent in London, a post he held for 30 years, praised above all his predecessors in the role for his ‘vigilance to the welfare of the colony represented’ and his ‘intelligent and perfect’ ‘comprehension of its essential interest’. Perhaps Stephen Fuller’s greatest coup came when he persuaded the Royal Navy to adopt rum in place of brandy. He also organised the purchase by the government of vast amounts of molasses to be distributed to Poor Houses.

  The West Indian lobby now held very considerable sway over national policy, able to persuade the government that what was good for the sugar interest was good for the empire. Congregating in the King’s Arms Tavern in Cornhill, the Mitre Coffee House in Fleet Street, or the London Tavern in Bishopsgate Street, the absentee planters planned their lobbying and wove their webs of influence. Any attempt to raise the import duty on sugar to a level nearer that for other imported products, or to open the huge British market to cheaper foreign-grown sugar, was fought tooth and nail. Efforts by sugar refiners in England to combine to fix prices, or to demand that more land in Jamaica be planted in sugar to lower the price, were successfully brushed aside, with Alderman William Beckford leading the lobby in the House.