by James Walvin
In the case of these new canned foods, whatever loss of nutrition may have been incurred in the technical processing – along with the addition of sugar – was more than compensated by the ease of purchasing, preparing and consumption. It also made the kitchen a less laborious place, promoting the short cuts to cooking via a welter of pamphlets and cookbooks which concentrated not only on a company’s own products, but on the most convenient methods available to cook and feed a family.11
What had emerged, by the early years of the twentieth century, was a totally new culinary and commercial phenomenon – the cult of cooking convenience. Within the space of fifty years, the diet and the cooking of the world’s most important and dynamic economy – the USA – had been successfully won over to the ideal of convenience. Food and drink was available cheaply, in a variety of convenient formats – in bottles, cans and packages. They were within the reach of everyone and, above all, they offered the irresistible promise of easy preparation to the womenfolk who were the traditional providers of meals everywhere.
More than that, the stage was set for a much more thorough and radical industrialisation of food production and marketing throughout the next stage of the twentieth century. In the process of creating these early convenience foods, sugar had been the vital helpmate. In the twentieth century, sugar – and, later, artificial sweeteners – were to change not only American habits, but the diets of millions of people the world over.
11
Power Shifts in the New World
FROM THE SEVENTEENTH century onwards, sugar was a source of controversy in domestic politics, a contentious issue in fiscal matters and even the cause of strategic, diplomatic and military conflicts. Sugar taxes were a bone of contention in the eighteenth century and, above all, a source of conflict between Britain and her American colonies. For the best part of two centuries, sugar-producing islands were also the source of conflict between feuding colonial powers. Indeed, Europeans shaped their foreign policies around their determination to acquire sugar colonies – or to prevent their rivals from doing so. In the process, major conflicts were launched, sometimes with disastrous effects, and global power tilted one way and then the other. The European struggle for sugar-based power in the Caribbean reached its extraordinary climax in the years of the French Revolution.
The value of the Caribbean to the Europeans was enormous. On the eve of the French Revolution, Britain’s islands exported produce worth £4.5 million to Britain, and this at a time when Britain’s own exports totalled £14 million. The French case was even more striking. France exported £11.5 million of goods, while their Caribbean colonies exported goods to the value of £8.25 million. This involved, of course, a range of tropical goods (cotton and coffee, for example), but sugar dominated in bulk and value.
France’s Caribbean colonies were supremely important by the late eighteenth century. St Domingue (Haiti) had become the world largest sugar producer by 1770. And although the French loved their sugar, they re-exported 70 per cent of the Caribbean sugar, mainly to Holland and Germany. To this day, the impact of France’s sugar economy can still be seen in the city that became the beating heart of France’s Caribbean trade – Bordeaux – with its lavish buildings and elegant streets, and its industrial and commercial activity stretching along the Garonne and deep into the wine-producing hinterland. A similar story can be told of Nantes, the centre of the French slave trade, and Le Havre. Even in distant Marseille, one fifth of that city’s trade was with the Caribbean. In 1791, Rochefoucauld calculated that more than 700,000 French families owed their livelihoods to sugar. Unlike the British trade, however, the French sugar trade was fragmented and, like the sugar islands themselves, individual French ports viewed other sugar ports as rivals. And all of them viewed the French state – with its taxes and restrictions – as an obstacle to be overcome, not as a co-operative partner. Much the same was also true of French sugar refineries; they, too, were pitched one against another. The end result was that the French sugar industry did not develop, as the British did, into a powerful and influential lobby able to influence government and policy. It was a fiercely divided business.1
For all that, the French domestic demand for sugar was widespread and growing, with sugar widely used as a basic ingredient in French cooking, in beverages, as a preservative, in brewing, in medicine and alcohol. The centre of French sugar consumption was in and around Paris, and Parisians consumed anywhere between 30lb and 50lb of sugar each year. More refined sugars were favoured by the rich, cruder sugars by the poor.2 On the eve of the French Revolution, in both France and in Britain, commentators were united in feeling that there was an untapped demand for yet more sugar. The market seemed boundless. With sugar firmly at the heart of both British and French life and politics, any conflict between the two nations in the Caribbean had complex ramifications. Threats to each nation’s sugar trade, disruption of shipping – of goods and African slaves – attacks on opponent’s sugar colonies or, worst of all, from everyone’s viewpoint, revolt by the slaves, was much more than a colonial issue. Interruption of the sugar supply meant serious damage to colonial power, domestic prosperity and well-being, and neither France not Britain could afford, nor even contemplate, disruption to their sugar economies.
French colonial power was thrown into turmoil by the Revolution in 1789 and by the subsequent slave uprisings in the French islands. A trail of destruction swept through the French Caribbean, but what happened in St Domingue was the stuff of nightmares for slaveholders everywhere. Insurgent slaves destroyed hundreds of sugar and coffee plantations and 10,000 slave-holders and refugees fled, mainly to Jamaica and the USA. The end result was the devastation of the French sugar industry. In 1791, St Domingue, at that time the world’s largest producer of coffee, had also produced 80,000 tons of sugar. Within a decade, all that had collapsed, with sugar down to 10,000 tons, while Jamaica’s had risen to 100,000 tons. France’s booming sugar industry and its major source of tropical trade had disintegrated.3
France now had to look elsewhere for its sugar supplies, or seek alternative sources of sweetness. Eventually, Napoleon ordered the promotion of beet sugar production, although this was not as revolutionary as it sounds. Cooks had long known that the boiled juice of beet was similar to the syrup from sugar and, in the early seventeenth century, scientists had confirmed that boiled beet produced a sweet syrup.
But it was a German scientist, Andreas Sigismund Marggraf, who managed to produce sugar crystals from beet in 1747. One of his students, Karl Franz Achard, financed by King Wilhelm III of Prussia, took the process much further, showing how beet could be converted to sugar in large volumes, as well as being produced commercially. Achard’s work continued after his death at experimental factories in Silesia and then Paris, but the turning point was France’s Caribbean disaster and Napoleon’s anxiety to find a new source of sugar.
Sugar beet was an innovation with enormous consequences. The French hoped (and the British worried) that beet sugar would undermine the British sugar industry. European consumers saw it as an alternative to their dependence on imported sugar from other nations’ tropical colonies.4
Napoleon lavished praise on the initial product, predicted the end of Britain’s sugar dominance, and ordered 100 students to be sent to newly established sugar-beet schools. He compelled farmers to turn to beet cultivation and made available 80,000 acres of land, experimental facilities and 1 million francs for the development of sugar beet by French farmers and manufacturers. The outcome was remarkable. By 1812, forty French factories converted 98,813 tons of beet into 3.3 million pounds of sugar. The cultivation of beet and the manufacture of beet sugar was quickly taken up by other European nations, notably in Germany.
The end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, and the re-opening of European ports to cheap sugar imports from the colonies, saw the collapse of the fledgling beet industry. Though beet sugar simply could not compete commercially with slave-grown cane sugar, a breakthrough had been made; it now se
emed possible that the world’s sweet tooth might be satisfied without recourse to cane sugar shipped vast distances from the tropics with all the logistical and political difficulties involved. A new science and industry emerged devoted to sugar beet, all of it located in temperate countries. Scientific innovations led to major improvements in the processing of beet, but as long as cane sugar was cultivated by slave labour (which was not ended by the French until 1848), cane sugar retained its commercial edge. In addition, the colonial sugar producers held considerable political power in Europe’s capitals and were usually able to secure legislation to support their cause.
Germany, on the other hand, had no sugar-producing colonies, and enjoyed a steady development of local beet sugar. In 1836, there were 122 sugar-beet factories in Germany, and consumption rose steadily throughout the nineteenth century. By 1886, the German industry produced 1 million tons of sugar, more than doubling again by 1906. By then, the sugar-beet industry had taken off across Western Europe, from Belgium to Russia, with many hundreds of factories producing beet sugar for local consumption.5
The development of sugar from beet was initially a European project with countries across the continent striving to cater for the sweet tooth of their expanding populations. The USA followed suit. Sweet food and drink were vital factors in the diet of America’s expanding population. Huge volumes of cane sugar continued to flow north from the Caribbean, notably from Cuba and the other Spanish islands and, later still, from Hawaii. But beet sugar offered the USA the tantalising prospect of home-grown sweetness. There were, moreover, enormous expanses of the USA which seemed ideally suited to beet cultivation.
There were early attempts to develop sugar beet in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts and, later, by Mormons in Utah (with equipment bought in Liverpool). Further trials followed in Illinois, Wisconsin and California, with factory machinery shifted from one location to another as the beet experiments moved around the country. Most failed to make money until, in the late 1880s, factories in California became profitable. By the end of the century, new enterprises in both Nebraska and California firmly established US sugar beet as a profitable and thriving business.
Encouraged by new taxes on imported sugars, American-grown beet sugar boomed. In 1892, there were six factories in the USA producing 13,000 tons of sugar. Ten years later, forty-one factories were disgorging more than 2 million tons. By the mid-twentieth century, the US sugar-beet industry was a highly mechanised affair, producing 3.5 million tons of sugar, around one quarter of America’s needs. It was, by then, dominated by major corporations with sixty plants scattered across eighteen different states, and producing 100 varieties of refined sugar. In the early years of the twenty-first century, it received government support to the tune of an estimated $ 1.6 billion.6 Yet for all the importance of sugar beet, the USA in the late nineteenth century continued to devour cane sugar from tropical growers, especially from the Spanish islands in the Caribbean.
Despite the science and modern processing techniques used in the production of beet sugar, the cultivating and harvesting of the beet itself involved miserable, physical toil. Not on a par with slavery in the sugar fields, it was nonetheless miserable work in harsh conditions. It was yet another illustration of the paradox at the heart of sugar – harsh labour was needed to produce a commodity which was essentially a luxury item. Until the seventeenth century, people had managed without sweetness in their food and drink, but now, thanks to the rise of sugar slavery in the Americas, the world had become dependent on sweetness in all things, whatever the cost to the labourers who endured hardship to produce the agricultural crops involved.
At every turn of this story – cane or beet – the cultivation and processing of sugar remained a hotly contested issue. Long after the demise of the old colonial powers and the rise to dominance of the USA, sugar remained a highly politicised commodity. In many respects, the USA followed in the footsteps of Europe’s old colonial powers and, in time, came to exercise its own (even greater) power in pursuit of its strategic sugar policies in the Caribbean and, later, in the Pacific. However sweet to the tongue, sugar was responsible for a bitter political aftertaste. Americans, like Europeans before them, became wedded to sweet food and drink, and their politicians sought to defend and promote American sugar interests.
Sugar was playing an important role in US politics by the late nineteenth century – even in foreign and strategic affairs. Like Europe in the eighteenth century, sugar was deemed so important to American well-being, so vital to what Americans ate and drank, that any threat to US sugar interests became a weighty political issue. US foreign policy developed a special interest in sugar-cultivating regions (especially in the neighbouring Caribbean islands) and even in the Pacific. Hence, at critical junctures, key US foreign policy issues were shaped around the question of sugar.
In 1897, a major US journal commented that sugar had become ‘the American question of the day’. The article stated, ‘To sugar or not to sugar seems to be the present issue in the United States Senate.’7 Questions of sugar cultivation, of sugar imports and refining, the problem of sugar supplies and prices – all these had, by the 1890s, forced the commodity to the top of the US political agenda. And there it was promoted by a powerful commercial lobby whose influence reached far beyond US borders, and whose political power was hard to ignore in Washington. But everything hinged on one simple fact – the American people consumed sugar in vast and increasing volumes. Unlike the old European powers, though, the USA had the capacity to grow its own sugar.
* * *
There had been attempts to cultivate sugar in colonial North America, in Virginia, in Georgia and South Carolina, but most of those efforts had been unsuccessful or uneconomic. The most suitable region for cane cultivation was Louisiana but, even there, experiments with imported Caribbean cane in the mid-eighteenth century proved a commercial failure. Louisiana sugar only began to flourish in the 1790s in the wake of the Haitian revolution, and then, more substantially, when Louisiana was acquired by the USA. Until 1803, Louisiana had, by turns, been Spanish then French. The Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803 – for a mere $15 million – was to prove an astonishing bargain, heralded, even at the time, as a master stroke. President Jefferson was congratulated on the deal by General Horatio Gates, who said, ‘Let the Land rejoice, for you have bought Louisiana for a Song.’ The deal doubled the landmass of the USA and, among other benefits, opened the potential for enormous agricultural development in the fertile lands of the Mississippi Delta. Although the land seemed ideal for sugar cultivation, it badly needed labour for the arduous, intensive work in the sugar fields. But unlike sugar planters in the Caribbean and Brazil, the new American Republic had no need to turn to Africa for labour because there was a growing population of enslaved people scattered around the Old South. For a price, that labour could be transferred south and west to the new cotton and sugar industries along the Mississippi.
A new breed of overland US slave-traders began to move American slaves across state lines to new settlements, to develop Louisiana’s potential. Unlike General Gates, the slaves had little to rejoice about. They were to endure the miseries of a lifetime in the sweltering heat of the new cane fields and sugar factories, and to bequeath their sufferings to their children, much as their forbears had done in Brazil and the Caribbean.
This time, however, sugar slavery was different. For a start, the USA was a rapidly modernising country, able to harness new industrial technologies to innovative and intrusive management systems. The Louisiana sugar industry quickly established itself as a unique mix of old and new – old-fashioned, brutalised slave field labour, kept at work by new machinery and modern management.
In 1812, Louisiana had a mere seventy-five sugar mills, but the introduction of new types of sugar cane – better suited to the climate and ecology of Louisiana – helped to bring about a rapid increase in cultivation. Louisiana’s sugar estates also thrived thanks to the availability of capital, notably fro
m banks both in New Orleans and in Europe. In the form of their slaves, the sugar planters were able to offer substantial collateral against their loans, and Louisiana sugar planters embarked on a major campaign of investment in modern sugar equipment. By the time of the Civil War, Louisiana’s sugar planters had overseen the most heavily invested form of agriculture in the entire USA.8
Louisiana’s sugar lands, like the neighbouring cotton plantations, depended on vital steam-driven river transport, and they also harnessed steam power to the cultivation and processing of sugar. Yet at the heart of this modern sugar industry was enslaved labour. The country’s rapidly growing demand for sugar prompted a major expansion of sugar production. The number of sugar estates doubled in the late 1820s; production surged even more in the 1840s, when the older properties were joined by new sugar estates west of New Orleans. These were boom years for Louisiana sugar. One planter spoke of the sugar gold fields’. Within a mere sixty years of taking firm root in Louisiana, sugar boasted an estimated 1,536 sugar estates producing 250,000 hogsheads (about 125,000 tons) of sugar. At mid-century, they produced more than 320,000 hogsheads (about 160,000 tons) of sugar. A year later, Louisiana made one quarter of the world’s sugar exports, although natural disasters hit the industry hard in the late 1850s. The last sugar crop to be harvested entirely by slaves – in 1861 – yielded 460,000 hogsheads (about 230,000 tons) of sugar.9
Throughout these boom years, Louisiana planters had been innovative, experimenting with different types of cane, trying new cultivation systems and modern ways of processing it. They were also helped by the falling price of new equipment which resulted from innovations in the metal and engineering industries in the northern states. The outcome, on the eve of the Civil War, was that the Louisiana sugar industry, like the Lancashire cotton industry, was driven forward by steam power and the latest technical innovations.