by James Walvin
* * *
At the heart of this tangled web of Atlantic trade and commerce lay Caribbean slave-grown sugar. It had spawned, in rum, a vital source of income, a means of paying for imports to the islands. In the process, it had established massive markets of rum drinkers in America and Europe and it had served – like sugar itself – to fortify and strengthen vast numbers of labouring people on land and at sea. Behind it all lay the acres of sugar cane cultivated by enslaved Africans.
Rum’s influence could also be found in some unlikely places. Most surprising, perhaps, was its impact in Africa. Europeans shipped an enormous variety of items to Africa’s Atlantic coast in exchange for slaves. Textiles from Asia, cowrie shells from the Indian Ocean, hardware and guns from Europe, French wines, glass beads from Italy, textiles and ironware from Britain and Northern Europe – all and more passed from the holds of inbound slave ships to African markets. There they were exchanged for enslaved Africans. Those ships also transported commodities produced by colonial economies in the Americas. It is no small irony that goods cultivated by African slaves in the Americas should find favour with African middlemen on the Slave Coast, and thence into the interior economies. Tobacco from Bahia (some of it soaked in molasses), and from Barbados and Virginia found a ready market among slave traders. So, too, did rum.
Local alcohol had long been important in any number of African societies; in religious ceremonies and social customs, as well as simply for pleasure. Imported alcohol, especially French wines and brandies, had also become favourites in West Africa, and were often handed over to influential Africans as gifts to facilitate trade and as part of a barter system. In 1680, a merchant from Barbados discovered that rum sold better than brandy on parts of the African coast, and the pattern was set. Now, prodigious volumes of rum were being shipped across the South Atlantic by Brazilian merchants, and by New England slave traders to West Africa – an estimated 300,000 gallons in each case. By the early eighteenth century, about one in seven British slave voyages started out from the Americas, and they carried rum, rather than the variety of goods shipped by traders leaving from British ports.
It is true that the popularity of rum on the African coast varied from place to place. In some locations, it was in great demand: parts of the Gold Coast imported 48,000 gallons a year c. 1700.19 Along with other imported alcohols, rum entered African societies which had their own existing alcoholic drinks. But these imported drinks had (like tobacco) an astonishingly ironic twist. It was, after all, a commodity produced in the Americas by Africans who had been shipped across the Atlantic in the opposite direction. Slaves cultivated the very item now being traded in Africa, for yet more slaves.
The people who actually made the rum – the enslaved Africans – naturally drank rum as part of their regular diet. Rum was doled out by planters as part of the slaves’ regular allocation, with extra rations given out as a reward, and on high days and holidays. On Worthy Park Estate in Jamaica, slaves received upwards of three gallons of rum each year in the last fifty years of slavery.20 Rum eased their burdens, rendered their breaks and free time more tolerable, and fortified them against life’s miseries. In their turn, slaves so liked the drink that they also bartered for it, exchanging goods produced on their plots and gardens, or for items they had made in their free time. Some received rum in return for sexual favours. In towns throughout the slave societies, rum shops (often run by freed slaves, by people of colour and, most notably, by women) were common. Rum was a prominent item for sale over the counter by slaves with an entrepreneurial bent.
On both sides of the Atlantic, huge numbers of people of all ranks were rum-drinkers by the mid-eighteenth century. It was fundamental to the work of sugar plantations, its revenue vital to planters and to the colonial state alike. Rum constituted a major element of trade across the Atlantic – in all directions – and had established a distinctive niche for itself in a wide range of communities, from the slave quarters of the Americas to the slave markets of West Africa. It was vital to the way the Royal Navy conducted its business at sea, and to the lives of soldiers everywhere. Grog shops dispensed rum in abundance – from Boston to Sydney. Rum was consumed, often in astonishing volumes, by native peoples in Brazil, the Caribbean islands and in North America. It had, in effect, become a universal drink of common people throughout the Atlantic world. And this had come about from a by-product of sugar production. The pleasures afforded by sugar were mirrored by the relaxation and resolve derived from rum. It strengthened, emboldened – and sometimes corrupted – its legions of consumers on both sides of the Atlantic.
9
Sugar Goes Global
WHEN THE BRITISH ended slavery in 1833, the patterns of sugar production on plantations and the culture of sugar consumption in food and drink were well-established features of the Western world. Wherever Europeans and Americans travelled, settled and put down local roots, they took with them the eating and drinking habits forged elsewhere, often adapting their diets to local conditions. Their attachment to sweetness in all things proved to be a persistent – and even a necessary – feature of life. Americans and Europeans needed their sweet coffee, while the British and their emigrant offspring needed their sweet tea or coffee wherever they lived, be it in on the American Great Plains, in Cape Town, Calcutta or Melbourne. These same people also insisted on sugary sweetness in their cooking and baking across the vast expanses of the Americas, in colonial outposts in India, Asia and Africa, or in the new settler societies of Australasia.
The century which followed the end of slavery in the Americas (which took place between 1833 and 1888) was, of course, characterised by new waves of imperial expansion of Europeans in Asia and Africa, of Americans in the Americas and the Pacific, and everywhere the essential military might of Western nations was sustained by the drinks and foods of their homelands. No army – or navy – could be sustained in its distant posting without heaps of sugar in the familiar drink and foodstuffs of their homelands. Armies, as Napoleon famously noted, march on their bellies; they also liked those bellies to be sweetened. Sugar was a basic ingredient for every US Army soldier from the time of the Revolutionary War to the present day. When the Continental Congress ordered food for the Continental Army, it included molasses and sugar. (Rum was added after the war, in 1790.) In the American Civil War, sugar was among the rations which sustained the Union Army.
And so it continued, in different forms, down to the present day. Candies – made largely of sugar – were supplied to American troops on the Western Front, and all the combat rations (C, D and K-rations) of subsequent wars – the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf War – included sugar as part of the essential foodstuffs to maintain men in the field.1 To this day, British Army rations include plentiful supplies of sugar.2 The love of sugar, and of sweetness generally, simply spread round the world in the wake of migrating humanity, and their armies.
The rising demand for sugar was driven principally by the massive increase in the global population. It almost doubled (from 978 million to 1.65 billion) between 1800 and 1900. There were ever more millions of mouths to feed, and tens of millions of people, now weaned on sweetened foods and drinks, required sugar (and other sweeteners) as part of their daily diet. In Europe, the home to sugar’s modern popularity, the population increased by 76 million in the first half of the nineteenth century. By 1900, it had doubled in the space of a century.
The growth of the North American population was even more spectacular – in 1800, it stood at more than 5 million; by 1900, it was 76 million.3 Sustaining this rising population was, of course, one of the major tasks facing governments everywhere. How to feed an expanding nation became a pressing political as well as a commercial and agricultural issue. Hunger and starvation were to become, in the twentieth century, important weapons in military conflicts. At critical junctures in both the First and Second World Wars, the combatants’ ability to feed their populations – or starve their opponents into submission – became
critical military tactics. Food was, obviously, a matter of life and death, and sugar was integral to the entire issue.
To provide the world’s growing population with its necessary sugar required new systems and new areas of sugar cultivation. We shall see how the lands of the American Midwest were converted to beet production, but that alone was insufficient, even for the needs of the USA. Sugar cultivation and production spilled out into regions of the globe previously untouched by the commercial sugar industry.
Sugar cane could be cultivated in a number of tropical locations but, in 1800, its commercial concentration was effectively restricted to that scattering of Caribbean islands and Brazil. A century later, however, sugar was cultivated commercially on a huge scale, in all corners of the tropical and semi-tropical world. By 2000, more than 100 countries cultivated sugar cane.4 The sugar plantation had been the pioneer of a new form of agriculture but, in the course of the nineteenth century, the plantation was transformed by the coming of modern mechanisation. The development of steam power and the establishment of central, highly mechanised sugar factories created not only a more efficient means of processing sugar cane, but those factories speeded up the whole process of sugar production. These new factories devoured increasing volumes of cane and therefore dictated work patterns in the cane fields. In order to keep the factories at peak capacity and performance, the acreages of land under cane increased substantially, and sugar plantations became bigger. In the mid-eighteenth century, a substantial sugar plantation might boast some 2,000 acres. By 1900, 10,000 acres represented a large plantation.5 Much depended on topography, of course. Not every sugar-growing region was ideally suited for such massive operations, but where suitable land was available in large expanses, it was possible to develop very large sugar plantations.
Sugar thus crept into a great variety of tropical locations. Indeed, it was assumed by settlers and pioneers in many newly settled regions that the sugar plantation offered the best prospect for profitable agricultural development. The world wanted sugar, and history seemed to show that sugar was best cultivated on plantations. Once again, sugar became the key venture as new tropical lands were turned to commercial cultivation. There remained, however, one major problem, which had plagued sugar planters from the early days of Brazilian settlement in the sixteenth century – the thorny question of labour.
For all the mechanisation of sugar in the nineteenth century, sugar remained a labour-intensive crop. Before the very recent advances in mechanised cane-cutting (and even that was only suitable on large expanses of relatively flat land), the cane fields remained the preserve of back-breaking manual labour – gangs of men and women, bent double, toiling at the onerous work of planting, weeding, fertilizing and finally cutting the sugar cane. Whoever undertook that work – slaves or the freed labour that followed – it was physically extremely demanding.
It was also ill-rewarded, both by planters and by the corporations that came to dominate many of the sugar industries. Sugar-cane workers toiled hard for very little. It was no surprise when emancipation came for slaves in the sugar colonies that large numbers simply quit the plantations, ideally heading for their own small plots of land to work as free peasants, where they often produced sugar cane for the nearest sugar factory. Work in the sugar fields remained as difficult and punitive as ever, and labourers generally stayed on their old plantations only when there were few alternatives. As long as slavery survived (in the Caribbean, the USA and Brazil), sugar planters could find ways of augmenting the workers in the fields by buying more slaves.
Freedom created problems of a different kind for sugar planters. When planters, colonial officials and imperial governments turned their back on slavery (and often boasted about their virtue in doing so), they turned to a new form of imported manpower – indentured labour – which was itself much less than free. The new source of that labour was not Africa, but India. These labourers from India were shipped across the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic to plug the labour-force gaps in the Caribbean colonies. Again, the numbers were astonishing. In the ninety years to 1924, European powers, led by the British, had shipped almost 1.5 million Indians as indentured labourers to the old sugar colonies and to some new settlements. More than 250,000 went to British Guiana, and almost 150,000 to Trinidad. Large numbers were also transported to work on new sugar schemes in other parts of the world.6 After 1879, for example, Indians were shipped to Fiji to work the new sugar plantations which had been established by Australians. A century later, by which time sugar dominated the Fijian economy, the descendants of those labourers formed half of the local population. A new ethnic hierarchy had emerged – but so, too, had deep-seated enmity between the indigenous peoples and the descendants of the indentured workers. Sugar cane, once again, scattered the spores of animosity far and wide; it created social and ethnic divisions and hostility from the Caribbean to the remotest of the Pacific Ocean islands.
A similar pattern unfolded in the Indian Ocean. In Mauritius (which was British after 1810), 455,187 Indians replaced former slaves in the cane fields. There, sugar planters, like their contemporaries in the Americas, increased their output by constructing large centralised factories, but their Indian labourers disliked the plantations and tended to move away when their indentures expired. Planters persisted, and continued to turn to India for still more labourers and, by the mid-twentieth century, their descendants had become a majority of the local population. Much the same happened in British Guiana and, to a less marked degree, in Trinidad. In all those places, Indian labour stepped into the jobs vacated by freed slaves on existing sugar plantations.
It was different in South Africa, where local sugar cane had long been popular among Africans. But the British settlers introduced new, commercial varieties of cane, which they cultivated on plantations in Natal. Africans, however, proved reluctant to adapt to the rigours of plantation labour and the British, after 1860 (and following the Caribbean example), once again turned to Indian indentured workers. Natal’s sugar exports boomed, though ill-treatment and harsh working conditions remained a perennial complaint among the Indian labourers. Even so, South African sugar thrived, greatly helped by the extension of British political power across stretches of southern Africa, and by favourable terms (in land and taxes) granted to sugar planters. After the annexation of Zululand in 1897, the authorities controlling local land granted vast tracts to sugar planters. Working with local sugar millers, and sustained by British policy, the South African sugar industry became a major producer not only for South Africa itself, but for the wider British market.
Through all this, the sugar industry continued in its own distinctive, destructive ways. Even when indentured Indians quit the South African cane fields, they were replaced by different migrant workers, this time from other parts of South Africa. They, too, endured a miserable fate, made worse not only by the harshness of the cane-field labour, but by the neglect and brutality of their employers. This whole process was part of a broader South African saga, of the stark segregation of peoples – Indian, African and white – a segregation encouraged both by sugar interests and by the imperial government. Sugar, once again, proved its corrupting potential, scattering the seeds of ethnic turmoil that was to plague South Africa from that day to this. The young Gandhi, moving to South Africa, was radicalised by precisely this toxic cultural and economic mix.
Sugar was also developed in Australia’s tropical north. Queensland’s climate was ideal, and a local sugar industry would satisfy the very sweet tooth of Australia’s expanding immigrant population, needing no longer to involve importing sugar vast distances at great expense. From the late 1860s, Australian sugar expanded around the northern town of MacKay, and it, too, adopted the plantation system.
By the 1880s, after a string of setbacks, Australia’s sugar industry thrived and it, too, turned to migrant labour: Chinese, Japanese, Javanese and, above all, people from the Melanesian islands, mainly Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. Some were indentured (on
the Indian model), but that later fell away in the teeth of local white opposition. These migrations – known as ‘blackbirding’ – ranged from outright violent seizure of the labourers, to indenture and, once again, it created a form of labour for the cane fields that was less than free. It was only ended in 1904–06, but it had laid the early foundations of what became, a century later, a massive, highly mechanised Australian sugar industry. In the 1890s, Australia produced 68,924 tons of sugar. A century later, it disgorged 5.25 million tons, most of it for export. By then, Australians had established themselves among the world’s greatest consumers of sugar – they consumed 48.34kg each per year.7
Wherever sugar plantations took root, they brought about massive changes in their wake. They changed the local ecology, altered local demography and transformed the politics of society at large. It is a story which was repeated time and again from one sugar economy to another, across the centuries, and from one corner of the globe to another – from São Tomé to Brazil, from the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean, from the Pacific to Australia. Long before it was fully appreciated how sugar helped to corrupt the physical well-being of consumers, it had exercised an astonishingly corrupting influence on the environment and populations of swathes of the inhabited world. And this was in addition to the volatile, political brew generated by sugar.
By c.1900, sugar plantations had proliferated around the globe. Once, they were to be found overwhelmingly in the Americas but, by 1900, they thrived worldwide, from Mauritius to Fiji, from Hawaii to Australia. Sugar cultivation had become a truly global industry and sugar plantations had, yet again, proved their ability to tap the commercial bounty of the world’s tropical and semi-tropical regions. It was a process which continued at an even faster pace in the course of the twentieth century. Sugar was now consumed by societies the world over – and sugar was cultivated and produced wherever land and manpower could be combined to bring forth sweetness.