by James Walvin
The sugar plantations were highly organised systems. The enslaved labour force, like every acre of land, was tabulated and regulated. Plantation paperwork – the large ledgers that were the stock-in-trade of plantation bookkeepers – documented every aspect of plantation life. The lists of slaves – their names, ages, health and value – were all tabulated alongside the same details for the plantations’ livestock and material objects. Everything had a cost and a value, from the tools in the carpenter’s box to the ranks of Africans slashing their way through the swaying sugar cane.
Where planters lived abroad (it was the ambition of the more successful ones to retire, and go ‘home’ to France or Britain), the attorneys left in charge of a property dispatched bundles of detailed letters back and forth across the Atlantic explaining each and every move of the property and its inhabitants. This was not only a world of enslaved people, but it was an international world shaped and fashioned by literate people. Traders, merchants, shippers, ships’ captains, planters and their scribes – all wrote copiously to each other, advising, ordering, buying, selling, instructing. The wheels of this Atlantic sugar trade were lubricated by a vast literate and numerate culture. In the British case, this was greatly helped by the remarkable role played by educated Scots, both in the sugar islands and in their metropolitan homes.
While it may seem perverse to modern eyes, few questioned this system of slavery. Not until the mid- and late eighteenth century did substantial, then widespread, doubts emerge about the morality of slavery and slave trading. The reason was straightforward enough: here was a system, driven forward by sugar, which yielded abundant wealth and well-being for everyone – except, of course, the Africans. Although the focal points of slavery were on the African coast, on the Atlantic slave ships and the plantations – and although Europeans might easily imagine that slavery was a distant, ‘colonial’ issue – its benefits and consequences were clear enough in the European heartlands. It was obvious on European docksides where ships were loaded and emptied, which ones were bound for Africa or landed with slave-grown produce. It was obvious in the array of industries that constructed the thousands of ships and filled them with a variety of cargoes bound for the African slave markets, and it was clear enough in the factories and warehouses which processed slave-grown produce, such as the sugar distilleries of Amsterdam and Liverpool, and the tobacco warehouses of Glasgow. And it was obvious in the black people who found their way to live and settle in Europe.
The benefits of slavery were at their most visible and impressive in the grand homes of successful slave traders and merchants (in Bordeaux, Bristol and Bath, for example) or in the rural mansions of the major sugar barons. And it was present, of course, in the simple pleasures of a sweet cup of tea or coffee in the humblest of homes. The fruits of slave labour had thoroughly permeated the Western world, and had become so entangled in the social and physical fabric of Western life that it was hard even to notice it. Who could doubt or question slavery when it brought such benefits and simple pleasures to the ‘civilised’ world? Slavery went unchallenged and unquestioned in very large part because it yielded such benefits and pleasures to so many people. Any pain or misery it inflicted on millions of Africans were largely invisible to Europeans, because they lurked somewhere over the horizon, out of sight, and out of mind.
Slavery thrived. Ever more Africans were loaded on to the Atlantic slave ships, ever more of them endured the hellish oceanic ordeal, and vast numbers of them were marshalled into the ranks of plantation labourers to endure a life of bondage – all for the benefit of a Western world about which they knew little, if anything. All went largely unchallenged effectively until the 1770s. Then a series of legal cases in England and Scotland, which wrestled with the problem of slavery in Britain itself, began to tug at the fabric of Atlantic slavery. Was slavery legal in England or Scotland? Was it legal to oblige a person to return from Britain to the slave colonies against their will? And, even more spectacular in its murderous consequences, could slave traders claim insurance for Africans thrown overboard from slave ships in times of shipboard distress?
These small points of law exposed both the reality of slavery and slave trading, both in the courtroom and among the wider reading and politicised public. All this, at a time of heightened radical agitation, ushered in by the American and then the French Revolutions, generated a new and unprecedented political and moral debate about slavery. The irony, however, was that this debate came at a time when the slave trade and slavery boomed. Before then, however, the benefits of slavery throughout the Western world had far outweighed any doubts about basic human suffering and oppression – criticism went unheard.
It was, for years, possible to minimise the negative aspects of slavery. The excesses of exploitation and oppression ushered in by modern industrial change in the nineteenth century seemed to overshadow what had gone before. Yet we need to remember that until the late eighteenth century, the sugar distribution network – above all of the Caribbean and Brazil – embraced some of the largest commercial enterprises operating anywhere in the world. They were the most capitalised, the most productive, and involved the largest labour forces.11 It was no wonder, then, that all the European imperial powers valued their Caribbean sugar islands, and fought for them throughout the era of slave-grown sugar. The Africans had made possible the sugar revolution, and that revolution had made the islands the jewel in the imperial crown.
What this upsurge in Caribbean sugar production made possible was the massive consumption of sugar throughout the Western world. As Europeans settled distant colonial outposts and colonies – in North America, India, Africa and, after 1787, Australia, they took with them an attachment to sweetness. The end result was that sugar, produced by Africans in the Americas, then shipped to Europe for refining, was sold on wherever Europeans set up home, established trading or military posts – or simply camped on the very edge of the imperial frontiers. Sugar, once the privileged luxury of a wealthy elite, was now being consumed all over the world. By the end of the eighteenth century, sugar was available everywhere; it was sold in marketplaces, corner shops, fashionable emporiums and even in the simplest of village stores. The world had become addicted to sugar.
4
Environmental Impact
THE MASSIVE INCREASE in sugar output in the course of the eighteenth century was made possible not by improvements in agricultural or sugar processing, but by sugar planters moving on to new sugar lands. There were, it is true, some minor improvements in methods, but the real change was the simple expansion of sugar cultivation.
This expansion had a massive impact on the Caribbean environment. As new lands were brought into cultivation, the natural habitat was cut back and destroyed, usually by the favoured local system of ‘slash and burn’. Here was the latest twist in the ecological transformation wrought by sugar – the destruction of great swathes of the natural environment, notably the local rainforest, and the creation of man-made orderly fields which formed the regular, geometrical shapes of plantation agriculture.
The ‘sugar revolution’ looks peaceful enough when we glance at the methodically surveyed and neatly arranged field systems of sugar plantations at their height, with their well-manicured fields and crops, paths and roads slicing through the countryside to make easier the movement of people and goods to and from the coast, and then to and from Africa or Europe. What is easily overlooked – for the simple reason that it had been erased – was the natural world that existed before the sugar revolution. The indigenous rainforests effectively disappeared, replaced by fields of sugar cane – orderly and growing or receding as the season progressed – which dominated a landscape which had, to the first arrivals, seemed dense and impenetrable. Sugar created a new natural world that seemed to have been brought into being by geometry: land apportioned into squares and rectangles, and all sectioned and carved up by walls and fences. It was a landscape created by humans, and shaped by generations of meticulous surveyors, their mathem
atical and technical skills reducing what had once been a teeming and seemingly impassable forest and bush into an orderly and manageable agricultural system.
Looking at a surviving sugar plantation today, the landscape seems natural. But, in 1750 say, it was new and revolutionary, an orderly vision of nature brought forth by the demands of the need to cultivate ever more sugar cane. In its wake, it left irreparable change and human damage, which was recognized even by the mid-1700s, when mahogany trees, themselves valuable for furniture-making in Europe, had been destroyed by earlier slash-and-burn systems to clear the way for sugar.
The change in human diet brought about by the rise of the sugar economy since c. 1600 is easily described. But less well known are the dramatic human and environmental upheavals brought about by sugar. The human and physical face of the sugar-growing regions was transformed by the arrival of alien labour imported in huge numbers to work in the sugar fields. Sugar plantations – which quickly established themselves as the critical means of cultivating sugar – were also responsible for transforming the natural physical landscape. The appearance of the natural environment of sugar production seems unremarkable, and seems at first glance to be merely a reflection of the overall natural setting. So, too, the local populations. In fact, both the human and physical face of sugar regions had been brought into being specifically to cultivate sugar. Sugar brought about an upheaval in both the environment and in the nature of the people working within that environment.
The post-Columbus settlement in the Americas by alien humans, animals, flora and fauna set in train a complex process of human and natural upheaval. Best known, and the most obvious, were the disasters which befell the native peoples. That started long before the onset of the ‘sugar revolution’, but the coming of sugar, especially the rapid development of large sugar plantations, rounded off a process of seismic human and environmental change heralded by the first European landfall in the Caribbean in 1492. A century later, Las Casas wrote perhaps the most poignant contemporary account of what happened to the people of the region:
We should remember that we found the island full of people, whom we erased from the face of the earth, filling it with dogs and beasts.1
The Taino people, who had settled the Caribbean islands from South America, had brought about no great upheaval to the local ecologies. The Europeans, however, brought something totally different. Theirs was an invasion which viewed native peoples as a major obstacle to successful settlement and colonisation, and the animals, plants and systems they introduced utterly transformed the island’s ecological systems.
The exact numbers of people in the Caribbean on the eve of the European arrivals remain elusive, but the broad outline of what happened is undisputable. On the eve of the European invasions, all of the larger Caribbean islands were populated and productive. Hispaniola may have contained more than 1 million people, Puerto Rico upwards of half a million. Cuba between 100,000 and 150,000, Jamaica fewer than 100,000, with 40,000 scattered around the Bahamas. There were some 2 million people living in the Caribbean.
Within less than a century, all had vanished. This population was comfortably adapted to the resources and the environment of the islands, and had readily adopted plants and knowledge from South America. True, they had faced periodic natural disasters – volcanoes, earthquakes, even tsunamis (1498 and 1530) – although hurricanes, as they are today, were the most common. Yet all these natural dangers were as nothing compared to what followed the arrival of Columbus in 1492. What seemed a puny human intervention . . . was to prove catastrophic’. The finest modern historian of the Caribbean describes the process under the blunt heading ‘Columbian Cataclysm’.2
The years after 1492 saw the arrival in the Caribbean of peoples from Europe and Africa, along with their plants, animals and technologies – some of which originated even further afield. Soon, Africans were being fed in the Caribbean islands on fish from the North Atlantic to enable them to cultivate crops from North America, Arabia and Asia – and all to flatter the taste of the Western world. New animals, and new agricultural systems which demanded large expanses of land – much of which was originally rainforest – transformed everything. Crowning all this – literally, in the case of European monarchical government – the political control imposed on the Caribbean peoples was a form of violent, military power totally unknown by the indigenous populations. Again, Las Casas captures the point:
How can a people who go about naked, have no weapons other than a bow and arrow and a kind of wooden lance, and no fortification besides straw huts, attack or defend themselves against a people armed with steel weapons and firearms, horses and lances, who in two hours could pierce thousands and rip open as many bellies as they wished.3
The Caribbean islands became in effect the crucible for the creation of totally new cultures and peoples. The Taino peoples disappeared, their place taken by Creole cultures dominated by Africans but controlled by Europeans. And they were driven forward, from the 1640s, by the engine that was the sugar industry.
The pioneering settlers in the islands had first to scratch a living from the land they brought into cultivation. But the cultivation of export crops – tobacco and cotton at first, then sugar – demanded a herculean task of clearing scrub and forest. Axes – and axemen – were in short supply and the easiest and most common system was simple slash and burn. Both in St Kitts and Barbados, it was slow progress for twenty years. The arrival of sugar and the creation of the first small plantations and landholdings hastened the process. As sugar thrived, and as export increased (in parallel with the numbers of imported Africans), ever more land fell victim to the march of sugar cultivation. With sugar cane, and experience from Brazil, sugar took hold in Barbados by 1640. The first sugar planters made good profits from their sugar, invested in more Africans, more land and more sugar cultivation. Good, useful timbers were kept for construction and export, but large tracts of woodland were simply destroyed to create cultivable land.
By 1650, much of the forest in central Barbados had been destroyed. A mere fifteen years later, all but the most inaccessible gulley and hillside on the island had been cleared of their forest. For the first time, the landscape of Barbados was open. Visitors sailing along the coastline, or riding into the interior, could see mile after mile of sugar plantations. In the words of Richard Ligon, writing in around 1647: ‘As we passed along near the shoare, the plantations appear’d to us one above another.’
The ecological problem was felt even by the planters. Having cut down all the trees, they had to import coal from England to boil and process their sugar crops.4 As sugar thrived, the more successful planters were able to buy out their smaller neighbours. Bigger sugar properties began to dominate the physical landscape just as the bigger planters began to dominate the social and political landscape. By the end of the seventeenth century, sugar was king, and the king’s voice was heard – and respected – in London. Yet none of this would have been possible without the Africans; by 1700, some 180,000 had been landed in Barbados.5 For all the profit and well-being this brought to the planter (and the imperial treasury), the loss of the forest had a deeply damaging impact on the island itself. Alien trees were planted and thrived, of course (coconut, guava and a host of shrubs); but so, too, did rats, who feasted on the sugar cane and became a major plague throughout the sugar-producing islands.6
What laid waste to swathes of the islands’ natural vegetation was fire. The French burned out the English in St Kitts, as well as the local vegetation in 1666–67. They did much the same in St Croix. By 1672, the forests on the lowlands of St Kitts, Nevis and Montserrat had gone up in smoke. Antigua alone seemed to have untouched areas of virgin forest. But even there, fire had consumed tracts of the island’s cover. It was no surprise that a similar pattern of land settlement and deforestation took place on other islands when local settlers turned to sugar cultivation. Jamaica, for example, was transformed in the eighteenth century. Similarly, the sugar boom of the eighteent
h century saw deforestation in Guadeloupe and St Domingue. In Antigua, sugar cane dominated every district by 1750, and very little forest remained. As Jamaica overtook Barbados sugar production by 1712, its forested landscape, too, had succumbed to plantation vistas.
Contemporary maps reveal how the early settlement along the coastal plains and inland valleys was augmented by settlement on interior locations – wherever sugar cultivation could be wrested from the luxuriant cover that formed Jamaica’ natural wilderness. The number of Jamaican sugar mills, for instance, increased from 57 in 1670, to 419 in 1739, to 1,061 in 1786. In eight years in the 1790s, 84 new sugar estates were established in the northern parish of St James alone. Not only that, but, as in Barbados earlier, sugar estates expanded significantly. In 1670, 724 sugar planters worked an average of 261 acres. By 1754, the average acreage had grown to 1,045 acres, and 4 per cent of planters owned land in excess of 5,000 acres.7 All this land had been converted to sugar cultivation from native forest by slash and burn, and by the back-breaking toil of African slaves. Some 95,000 had landed in Jamaica by 1700. In the next century, more than 800,000 would be landed, although large numbers would eventually be shipped on to other colonies.8
The pattern was similar wherever sugar told hold. The traditional wilderness and forest was replaced by neatly ordered estates; cane fields were sliced and arranged around paths and roadways leading to the local factory, and from there out towards loading points at the nearest waterside for onward shipment to Europe and North America. And the whole was managed by small cadres of white owners and their literate and numerate staff, and their hordes of African slaves. We are told that planters:
. . . Buy them out of the Ship, where they find them stark naked, and therefore cannot be deceived in any outward infirmity. They choose them as they do Horses in a Market; the strongest, youth-fullest, and most beautiful, yield the greatest prices.9