by James Walvin
From the Chesapeake Bay to Charleston, throughout the Caribbean and onwards south to Rio, a steady stream of ships, from all the major European maritime nations and from the Americas, disgorged their human cargoes of enslaved labourers to push back frontiers and bring the land into cultivation. Though slaves worked in every conceivable occupation – from sailors to cowboys – the great majority were destined, at some point in their lives, to be plantation labourers.
In time, plantations developed a huge variety of agricultural activity: tobacco, rice, coffee, cotton. But it was with sugar, first in sixteenth-century Brazil, then in the Caribbean in the seventeenth century, that the plantation came to its most complete, profitable and ideal form. But it did so at enormous cost to the native ecologies of the region, and to its enslaved African labour force, though this mattered little to the men who owned, managed, supported and profited from it.
The sugar plantation became a highly successful blueprint of how to turn virgin land and an enslaved labour force to everyone’s financial advantage – everyone, of course, except the slaves themselves. It was as if the settlers had, in the sugar plantation, devised a cornucopia which spilled forth prosperity – King Sugar – on an unparalleled scale.
The ending of slavery, however, created a serious problem for sugar planters. Freed slaves looked on the plantations as houses of bondage and did not want to work on them, and simply quit. The labour vacuum was filled by a new system of ‘indentured labour’ recruited in India and shipped, through Calcutta, to the former slave colonies. Indian labourers – not quite slaves, but certainly less than free – arrived in huge numbers. The African diaspora had been replaced by an Indian diaspora.10 The mass movement of peoples in the years after slavery were from the Indian subcontinent. And most of them worked on plantations recently vacated by freed Africans, while others laboured in newer colonial settlements, where free labour was unavailable or unwilling to embark on the lifetime of drudgery that plantation labour entailed.
What had been pioneered and perfected in the sugar fields of the Americas was later transferred to many other regions, in very different agricultural activity. The cotton boom which transformed the USA in the first half of the nineteenth century was anchored in the slave plantations of the South. When the British introduced tea into India, it, too, found a home on plantations. Much the same happened in East Africa with tea and coffee, in West Africa with palm oil and cocoa, in Malaya with rubber, in Hawaii with sugar and pineapples, and in Fiji with sugar. In all these cases, and more besides, two related elements brought about massive change. The natural, existing landscape was overthrown by the introduction of a dominant alien crop for cultivation. Land was cleared, forests and other local habitats destroyed, and native peoples were subjugated to the rigours and alien dictates of plantation labour. And when local labour could not, or would not, bend to the dictates of plantation life, plantation owners and governments that backed the entire enterprise sought labour elsewhere. Once again, labour was moved enormous distances to feed the voracious appetite of the plantations. Indians were dispatched to the Caribbean islands, to the sugar islands of the Indian Ocean, to Ceylon’s coffee and tea plantations, and even further afield to the cane fields of Fiji.
Wherever sugar was planted, it set the mark of Cain on the landscape. Sugar could be grown differently – sugar regions are, after all, characterised by untold numbers of small cane-farmers’ working on just a few acres – but what happened in the Caribbean from the seventeenth century onwards established the dominance of the plantation. Those plantations demanded labour on a mass scale and workers were subject to the most arduous of conditions. The sugar plantations worked by African slaves were a realm unto themselves, yet were linked vitally to distant worlds. It was also a malleable and resilient organisation which flourished even after slavery had gone.11 It thrived in all corners of the tropical world from the days of slavery down to the present day.
What today seems natural – the orderly Caribbean landscape, home to people of African, Indian and European descent (and mixes of all of them) – is the product of particular historical circumstances. And the engine behind that historical process, an ecological and human transformation of enormous proportions, was the sugar plantation and the growing world appetite for sweetness in its food and drink.
From one Caribbean island to another, a twin process transformed the natural and human face of each location. As the population became increasingly African, the original, natural environment succumbed to the march of sugar cultivation. And this happened even in places where sugar was not the dominant local crop. In fact, the two processes were linked, because it was the vast numbers of imported Africans who were used as the shock troops not merely for sugar cultivation, but also for the transformation of the land itself. It was Africans who hacked away at the bush, who burned the rainforest and took axes to the blackened stumps, and it was they who then tilled the fields and brought them into orderly shape, creating space for the cultivation of sugar and other export crops. And for all those Western consumers of sugar, the slaves’ plight – and that of the land they were compelled to change for ever – was very much a world away. Out of sight, and very much out of mind.
5
Shopping for Sugar
WHEN THE MODERN British Co-operative Movement was founded in 1844 in Rochdale, the founding members, a group of local weavers, set aside £28 to buy the first essential groceries for their enterprise. Alongside the butter, flour and oats, they bought some sugar. By then, sugar had become a basic of everyday life, available in various forms, cheap and costly, across the world. But how did people acquire their sugar, a commodity grown and produced in distant corners of the world? How did they shop for sugar? Today, in a world which often seems shaped and paced around a culture of shops and shopping, it is hard to envisage how earlier societies acquired life’s essentials – and its luxuries.
Before the emergence of modern shops, people of all social strata depended largely on local goods. They traded, cultivated or fabricated life’s essentials in the locality or region. Shops as we know them are relatively new phenomena, so where and how did people acquire sugar – and other commodities – which were not local but which had been brought thousands of miles to the consumer?
Those who were prosperous had labourers and artisans to cultivate and prepare their food, and to make their shoes and clothing and their household essentials. Poorer sorts scratched a living as best they could, clothing and feeding themselves by their own labours. But everyone needed a local trading place – a market – or itinerant traders for foodstuffs and clothing, or to acquire materials to make into clothes and shoes. Most of this activity was very local, though a range of items travelled relatively long distances to sustain family and community life – timber and coal, salt fish from the nearest coast and, for the rich, luxury items from further afield, such as wines, oils, spices and costly textiles from France and Italy. All these goods found their way to the local market, and the marketplaces formed a spider’s web of distribution across the face of medieval Europe.
Markets were at the heart of urban and civic life. They were regulated and inspected, and they occupied a vital role in local and regional social and economic life. Thousands of them linked towns to their rural and agricultural hinterlands, and even to the wider world. In the years 1200–1349, an estimated 2,000 new markets were established in England alone. The medieval market square became – and in many places has remained to this day – ‘a defining feature of the urban landscape’.1
On market day, the place buzzed with commercial and social life. Butchers and fishwives offered their wares alongside linen drapers and tanners. At first, market traders used temporary stalls which were then removed when the market closed but, by the mid-thirteenth century, many of these had become permanent structures. In time, market stalls became more elaborate and, led by fishmongers and butchers, evolved into small, permanent buildings – shops, or ‘shambles’ – where foodstuffs would be p
rotected and prevented from spoiling. (York’s famous Shambles survives to this day, though is now regarded more as a tourist attraction, and is perhaps the best example in England.) Gradually, open-air trading places had begun to give way to enclosed trading halls, and to enclosed shops.2
Most customers went to markets to buy their goods, but some items – small-scale, sometimes affordable luxuries – could be bought from travelling peddlers. Rival traders tended to dislike peddlers, who had acquired a bad reputation, despite fulfilling an important role; their travelling boxes and satchels contained a range of cheap goods which people wanted. By the late sixteenth century, peddlers were the conduit for providing customers with more exotic, luxury goods from distant places, tobacco being an early example.
At the more lavish end of the scale were the fairs which had flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By the end of the Middle Ages, there were an estimated 2,700 fairs, some of them very specialised (such as goose, cheese or horse fairs – again, some of which survive today), but others brought together commodities from across the country, and from distant places in Europe. People travelled great distances both to sell and to buy at the fairs. European merchants came to buy, bringing with them goods which had travelled north from the markets of southern Europe and the Mediterranean, crossing the Channel with olive oil, furs, wines – and now sugar – from distant European markets.3 It was at such fairs that the stewards from royal, aristocratic and religious houses stocked up with luxury goods and foodstuffs. Here, too, the more impoverished shoppers first encountered luxuries they might covet but could only dream of buying.4
Fairs were important for larger households that needed to store up essentials and luxuries to cater for the large numbers living there, or for the large groups who might be invited to visit and dine. Fashionable travellers to London, or their servants travelling on their behalf to London’s major fairs, bought and placed orders for exotic goods that were unobtainable in rural and provincial society.
By the late Middle Ages, however, fairs went into decline, although many of the exotic items they once offered could now be more easily obtained in London. Sugar, as we have seen, had found its way into the major households across the country, and whatever route it took – via fairs, markets or London outlets – substantial supplies of sugar were stored in aristocratic households by the late thirteenth century. Two such examples were the kitchens of the Countess of Leicester in 1265 and the Bishop of Swinfield in 1289, both well stocked with sugar.5
By then, major English cities boasted an array of shops. There were, for example, 270 in Chester by 1300. Cheapside in London alone had 400, and even small towns had their own shops. They often clustered close to the town’s marketplace, while others grew up close to river crossings, or along major thoroughfares, or at important street crossings wherever people had to congregate and gather. What had emerged, using today’s parlance, were shopping centres, although the shops looked nothing like their modern counterparts. In the main, they were little more than the front room in a house, sometimes with a low window sill which opened and acted as a counter for the customers outside. Shop windows came much later, with the development of new, cheap glass, and a new style both for the promoting and selling of goods. Most shops, especially outside London, remained small and cramped, and although they might specialise in a certain line of goods, they often sold a fair range of items.
Sugar began to appear at these outlets in the late Middle Ages; it was available in London grocers’ shops in the late fourteenth century. But it was the development of the sugar plantations, first in the Atlantic islands, then, more spectacularly, in Brazil, which saw sugar finding its way in substantial volumes on to the shelves of English shops. As the amount of slave-grown sugar increased, the price of sugar fell across Europe, and sugar became a common item in shops up and down the land. It was, of course, readily available in the major port cities of London, Bristol and Liverpool, but quickly spread out across the country.
London – with its trade links to European ports and markets and, by the late sixteenth century, onwards to a wider world – became the marketplace for all sorts of exotic produce. It did not, however, yet rival the scale of Lisbon and Amsterdam, whose long-distance trading vessels brought the exotic commodities of Asia, Africa and the Americas to local consumers. Many of those goods were traded onwards from Lisbon and Amsterdam to merchants who shipped them into England – especially to the south and east of the country. Sugar was among the earliest and most valued of those commodities and, as more and more of it flowed from the slave plantations, sugar began to appear in the humblest of shops across England.
Among the stock left by a London grocer in 1573 were ‘seventeen sugar and five candy chests’.6 By the early seventeenth century, sugar was even available in the smallest and remotest of towns; it was sold in Macclesfield in 1635 and Rochdale in 1649. An ironmonger in the Cheshire village of Tarpoley in 1683 also sold sugar and molasses.7 Fifty years later, the inventory of goods owned by Richard Johnson, a Kentish ‘tallow chandler’ contained a ‘small parcel of penny sugars’.8 Sugar was now available everywhere, and was sold in what today seems unlikely outlets.
By the late seventeenth century, sugar had become a ubiquitous feature of the social and dietary life across Europe. Grocers who traded with wealthy English customers in the seventeenth century stocked the luxuries they craved, notably coffee and, increasingly, tea – but above all they sold sugar. Some merchants went to elaborate efforts to ensure that sugar reached deep into the most remote rural heartlands of their trade. When Thomas Wootton, a grocer in Bewdley, Worcestershire, died in 1667, his trade in sugar (and other commodities) extended into six counties. Distant shopkeepers owed him money for goods he had dispatched to them. Much further north, Braham Dent of Kirkby Stephen in Westmoreland secured his supplies of sugar from across the north of England, and even as far south as London.
These two provincial merchants were just small, regional examples of a nationwide pattern of trading links. A grocer or merchant, often close to a port or major city, distributed goods far into the interior and hinterland.9 Shopkeepers, merchants and traders bought, sold and borrowed, sending packages via trusted friends and colleagues. Quakers fared especially well here, because they were known to be reliable; shopkeepers and merchants trusted them with goods and with credit – knowing that their word was their bond – and that they would always pay. Hence the success of the major Quaker businesses from the late eighteenth century onwards.10
By the end of the eighteenth century, shops were to be found even in small, rural communities. ‘Country shops’ were now selling what had, a century before, been ‘luxury goods’ and even the rural poor had come to expect their sweet drinks. By then, too, in the bigger towns, more successful grocers’ shops had evolved into a recognizably modern form, with lavish interiors, counters, drawers, canisters, jars and costly wooden fittings to house sugar and other goods.11 And in all likelihood, the rich mahogany often used in such fittings was yet another by-product of the sugar industry, having been cut down and dragged to the ships by teams of African slaves. Shop signs and trade cards announced a shop’s sugar business via images of sugar loaves.12
By the mid-eighteenth century, sugar was everywhere. It was part of a family’s regular shopping routines, and a major ingredient in their everyday diet. Fashionable shoppers in York could buy their sugar (in 1766) from Nicholas Sequin, a French confectioner, who sold a large range of luxuries – ‘Confits of all Kinds’ – alongside sugars, pastes and cakes, various syrups, and sweet decorations to grace fashionable dining tables.13
For poor customers, a local grocer chipped a few ounces from a crude, cheap sugar loaf, grinding it into granules before wrapping it in paper. For the more discerning and prosperous, sugars were branded by the name of their island or place of origin. Customers had obviously learned to appreciate distinctions between sugars, and to know the better sugars from the poorer kinds. Sugar could be bought as a powder
, in lumps, in loaves, raw or moist, or it was known by its place of origin – Barbados, Jamaica or Lisbon (for Brazilian).14 As the eighteenth century advanced, and as the slave islands disgorged ever more sugar destined for Europe, sugar (alongside coffee, then tea) came to form a substantial part of what people spent on their weekly groceries. When women shopped and bought goods from a grocer, they were likely to buy sugar – along with tea.15 Anyone unsure where to buy sugar could always head to the nearest apothecary shop. There, it was displayed in jars, bottles and chests with the name ‘SUGAR’ emblazoned on the front. In time, such bottles and jars were even displayed in the window to catch the attention of passers-by. Much the same was true across Europe. In Geneva, a local apothecary shop displayed sugar in an attractive porcelain pot – ‘sucre candi’.16 Here was an ingredient to be mixed with other medicines and cures, to sweeten a bitter taste or, according to contemporary medical wisdom, to impart physical qualities of its own. Sugar had established itself as a basic ingredient on the shelves of the apothecary shop everywhere by the late eighteenth century – a reminder of sugar’s ancient role in medicine – but, more importantly perhaps, it was now universally available as an ingredient in the food and drink of people in all sectors of society. A commodity produced 5,000 miles away by Africans labouring on plantations in the Americas was now a staple on the shelves of the most commonplace of shops in the remotest of communities – an indispensable aspect of everyone’s daily diet, and an ingredient dispensed by England’s apothecaries.
Not only was sugar now available in abundance for rich and poor via all sorts of shops and outlets, but there was another, related feature of the West’s addiction to sugar which tends to go unnoticed. So common had sugar become in domestic life that, by the mid-eighteenth century, manufacturers were producing sugar bowls by the tens of thousands. The sugar bowl became a common object on dining, coffee and tea tables on both sides of the Atlantic. The Chinese porcelain industry (Europeans did not know how to work with porcelain until the 1720s) disgorged hundreds of thousands of items for the West’s appetite for sweet tea and coffee. In the process, they also learned to provide sugar bowls to match. European (later North American) craftsmen and manufacturers copied the Chinese in whatever material suited the market – porcelain (after Europeans learned how to make it) and silver items for the rich, pewter and basic pottery for less affluent customers. Fashionable eighteenth-century houses now displayed costly and incredibly beautiful porcelain sets from Sèvres, Meissen and Dresden, and later from Worcester, Derby and Wedgwood. And all of them manufactured sugar bowls. Today, the most beautiful are displayed in the world’s museums and palaces, delightful reminders of the way sugar had established itself in Western life.17