by James Walvin
Yet all this went hand in hand with the expansion of slave labour. In 1827, some 27,000 slaves worked in Louisiana’s sugar fields; by 1850, the figure stood at 125,000. In addition, the slave gangs employed on Louisiana’s sugar estates grew significantly. The average slave gang in 1830 numbered fifty-two but, by the Civil War, it was upwards of 110.10 On the smaller, less modernised sugar plantations employing slave gangs of twelve or so, the enslaved endured perhaps the worst conditions, sometimes living in buildings no better than ox sheds. Set alongside sugar estates in the Caribbean and Brazil, these were relatively small numbers, but compared to the typical slave-holdings elsewhere in the USA, they were large. Even so, the images of slaves at work in the cane fields of Louisiana would have been recognizable to sugar planters a century before – lines of bent backs slashing at a wall of tall, waving sugar cane, using that universal tool of sugar cultivation – the machete. Theirs was a daily working routine characterised by extreme hardship, and always under the threat of violence by overseers and managers. The irony, however, was that now, in the nineteenth century, the most modern machines available were kept at their steam-driven routines by field slaves. Cane which lay in the fields too long, or machinery with no cane to process, meant inefficiency and financial loss. Machines in the sugar factory demanded a regular flow of sugar cane to keep the process in motion and sugar planters and their managers had to find new and ever-more persuasive means of keeping the field gangs hard at work. Planters and outside observers began to admire the efficiency of the Louisiana system. Few seemed to notice that the real price was paid by an enslaved labour force pushed to the extremes of physical endurance.
These nineteenth-century sugar estates were distinguished by their efficiency and their profitability. Modern machines worked hand in hand with a new form of slave management, and sugar planters came to pride themselves on the resourceful management of their sugar estates; some even viewed the plantation as a machine itself. It all served to yield lavish returns to successful planters and, like Caribbean sugar planters before them, US sugar men were keen to flaunt the fruits of their efforts by building the most elaborate homes. Their residences, at the heart of the plantations, adopted the extravagant styles of self-made men on both sides of the Atlantic. Sweeping driveways, Palladian entrances, the finest of domestic furnishings and fittings (an image perhaps best represented by Tara, the cotton plantation in the movie Gone with the Wind). All this sat precariously cheek by jowl with impoverished slave quarters and an enslaved labour force obliged to endure misery on an epic scale.
The benefits also fell to American consumers who added the sweet product of slave labour to the huge volumes of imported Brazilian coffee, itself cultivated by slaves. In what was an uncanny reprise of the European experience in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, slavery continued to shape the sweet habits of the Western world.
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As with many other areas of American life, the Civil War laid waste to Louisiana’s sugar industry. By 1864, the number of plantations had fallen from 1,200 to 231 and the peak production of 264,000 tons of sugar had collapsed to 6,000 tons. But it brought freedom for the slaves, though many were reduced to abject conditions. Like other slaves throughout the Americas, when freedom came in Louisiana, few wanted to return to their old employment. The industry (and its former workers) were on their knees. Within a decade, however, Louisiana sugar had begun a major recovery. Northern money moved in, and nine tenths of the sugar lands changed hands.11 New systems of cultivation and manufacture, central sugar factories, producers’ organizations, research schools – all and more totally transformed a moribund industry. This modernized US sugar industry sought to make the most of the expanding demand for sugar both in the US and abroad. By the last years of the century, Louisiana’s sugar industry was thriving and produced 302,778 tons in 1900.12
The world’s sugar economy had changed fundamentally by then. America’s expanding population, eager for ever more sugar in its food and drink, had a host of worldwide sugar producers, all keen to satisfy the American sweet tooth. Most importantly, some of them were very close to hand, in what was increasingly regarded as Uncle Sam’s backyard, in the Caribbean. This combination – of American hunger for sugar and the proximity of sugar producers in the Caribbean – was largely responsible for establishing the US political and strategic interest in the Caribbean that was to last, in varying degrees, from that day to this.
The nearest sugar island, Cuba, was only a few miles south of Florida, although sugar had been a marginal crop throughout much of Cuba’s history. That had changed rapidly in the early nineteenth century with the collapse of sugar in post-revolution Haiti, the emergence of an independent USA freed from restrictive British colonial controls, and the steep decline of British Caribbean sugar in the mid-nineteenth century. In the spirit of free trade, the British had abolished their sugar duties in 1846, and sugar from other regions was now allowed into Britain. British consumers were now able to buy sugar at lower prices, and Cuba, which was already selling half its sugar production to Britain, was ready to meet the increased demand.
Cubans hurried to convert ever more land to sugar cultivation but – once again – the labourers on Cuba’s sugar plantations were African slaves. Despite the British and American abolition of the slave trade between 1807 and 1808, Africans continued to be shipped into Cuba and Brazil in unprecedented numbers. In the fifty years following British abolition, more than 500,000 Africans were landed in Cuba.13 The end result was that consumers in the USA and Britain were still buying slave-grown sugar.
In the last years of the eighteenth century, Cuba had produced a mere 19,000 tons of sugar. Fifty years later, the output reached 446,000 tons from 1,439 plantations, and sugar had become a major driving force behind the transformation of Cuba itself. Its prime market was now the USA and its financial backing was American – but its labour force was African.
Like the sugar planters in Louisiana before the Civil War, Cuba’s sugar planters set out to establish a modern, efficient industry, making the most of new machinery, using steam power to run their large, central factories, and operating steam trains to transport the sugar cane and the refined sugar and rum. Mid-century, the island was producing one quarter of the world’s sugar output – all made possible by slavery. In the thirty years before the last Africans landed in Cuba in 1867, Cuba received more than 300,000 enslaved Africans. All this was greatly helped by US finance and by US ships – albeit illicitly. Cuba was slowly succumbing to the power of US finance and influence, and US politicians and governments reacted testily to outsiders – notably the abolitionist British – intervening in Cuban affairs. Despite the formal commitment of the USA to abolition, there was money to be made from slave trading to Cuba, and the US took a dim view of British efforts to interdict or board American vessels suspected of slave trading. This ambiguity ended in 1860 with the election of Lincoln, the outbreak of the US Civil War and the ending of slavery in the USA, and of American slave trading to Cuba.14
There is, however, a real paradox at the heart of this story. Just when the West – led by Britain and the USA – was formally committed to ending the Atlantic slave trade, and were deploying their navies to stop it, the development of the Cuban sugar economy and the rapid spread of other plantation commodities in Brazil created a new and ravenous appetite for enslaved Africans. Spain, in control of Cuba until 1898, simply turned a blind eye to slave trading, for the simple reason that it seemed good for the Cuban economy. Some years saw upwards of 30,000 Africans land in the island. Over the entire history of the Atlantic slave trade, Cuba received twice as many enslaved Africans as North America.15 And behind this continuing migration of Africans there lay two interrelated factors – African slave labour and North American consumption. US investment underpinned Cuban sugar plantations and many of the slave ships, and US customers clamoured for ever more slave-grown Cuban sugar.
Cuba’s sugar plantations were large and highly mechanised. C
uban tobacco and coffee also thrived, until the take-off of Brazilian slave-grown coffee from the 1840s, and by 1850 Cuba had become one of the world’s wealthiest colonies. Yet this rising slave-based wealth was out of kilter with the erosion of slavery across the Americas. Cuban slavery was ultimately undermined by the struggle for independence from Spain. During a destructive decade of warfare between 1868 and 1878, growing numbers of slaves simply voted with their feet and walked away from the sugar plantations. The fighting, especially by ex-slaves, inflicted great damage on the island’s sugar regions, and huge numbers of slaves escaped to freedom in the confusion of warfare. It proved ever more difficult to keep slavery in place and Spain reluctantly conceded. Cuban slavery was finally abolished in 1886. Only Brazil clung on longer to slavery, abolishing it in 1888.
Throughout its long history in the Americas, slavery seemed the very foundation of sugar prosperity. Like their predecessors in the French and British islands before them, Cuba’s sugar planters found it hard to imagine sugar without slave labour. Now they, too, were forced to look elsewhere for labour. They turned to distant locations. By 1873, more than 150,000 indentured Chinese had been shipped to Cuba; poor Europeans also arrived, alongside the dispossessed poor from other Caribbean islands. But all of them recoiled and fled the harsh conditions of life on the sugar plantations. And although Cuban sugar planters received little comfort or support from their Spanish rulers (officials were corrupt and Spanish politicians unsympathetic), the buoyant market of the USA was close to hand, and was deeply committed to the island via investments and trade. There was even talk, among the wilder fringe of Cuban planters, of joining the US in a more formal political arrangement.
Cuba’s sugar trade to Europe had been badly hit by the development of European beet sugar in the late nineteenth century, but the USA came to the rescue, not only buying Cuban sugar but by buying up the island’s sugar estates and production via a string of Cuban-American commercial links and family dynasties. Huge American investments and management in large, central sugar factories and new railway systems led to the revival of Cuban sugar by the end of the century. Cuba was now producing a million tons of sugar, most of it destined for the USA, not surprisingly since much of the industry was now in American hands. Even the technical and managerial elite in the industry was American.16
By 1896, the US had an estimated $950 million invested in the island, and the US American Sugar Refining Company (1897), which refined most of America’s sugar, lobbied to maintain a flow of cheap, raw sugar into their US refineries which dotted the dockside landscape of New York, Philadelphia and Boston.17
Cuba was only the most spectacular illustration of what has been called ‘America’s Sugar Kingdom’. It was a realm forged by US political and corporate power in the Caribbean, and that power was exercised in Cuba, Puerto Rico and, later, in the Dominican Republic. By the late nineteenth century, Cuba had, in effect, become a client state, a fact confirmed by the American invasion of Cuba and the war of 1898. Subsequent legislation secured Cuba as a favoured place for US finance and business. Until the Second World War, the Cuban sugar industry was safely in the pocket of North American financiers, and most of the island’s sugar was shipped north to the USA.18 And herein lies the explanation for the growing American political interest in the Caribbean and in other sugar-production centres. Like Europeans before them, the Americans began to cast a greedy, imperial eye over sugar-producing regions. The Caribbean islands were close, but now the USA also looked across the Pacific.
The Hawaiian Islands had been a base for long-distance whalers, but the decline of that industry, due to the fall in demand for whale oil and whalebone in the 1860s and 1870s, was followed by the emergence of a local sugar industry. An American company had started cane cultivation as early as 1835, helped by missionaries who saw the sugar plantation as a means of converting the local people. After a change in the law in 1850 allowed American investors into the islands, major American companies began to dominate both the land and the sugar industry. The turning point was 1876. On 24 August, the ship City of San Francisco docked in Honolulu bringing news of the recently signed Reciprocity Treaty between the USA and Hawaii. It also brought Claus Spreckels, a San Francisco sugar refiner who was keen to take advantage of the new accord. He promptly bought up half of Hawaii’s 14,000 tons of sugar for that year, knowing the enormous profits that awaited the islands’ sugar in the USA.
After a number of false starts, it was an industry that grew quickly in the 1830s and 40s. In 1836, Hawaii produced four tons of sugar; forty years later, that yield reached 13,000 tons. But the new Reciprocity Treaty, as Spreckels realised, transformed everything. Entry to the voracious US market proved a massive boost to local sugar and, by 1886, Hawaii exported 105,000 tons and Spreckels was lauded (for a while) as the Sugar King in Hawaii. The impact on the islands was immeasurable.19
The old Hawaiian kingdom became totally dominated by sugar, which, in turn, was dependent on the American market. Hawaiian plantations and their major American owners and backers wielded enormous economic and political influence in the islands. Like sugar plantations everywhere, the new Hawaiian version needed plenty of labour, but the islands’ population was not strong enough to sustain the growing sugar industry. Estimated at between 300,000 and 600,000 at the time of Captain Cook’s arrival, it had fallen to less than 60,000 by the 1870s. Many people migrated to the American mainland, especially following the rapid development of California, but sugar badly needed labour. The solution, once again, was to import labour from distant places. Hawaiian sugar planters turned to China and Japan and, by 1890, they had transported 55,000 Chinese and Japanese indentured labourers (charging the Hawaiian monarchy for the system). By the turn of the century, native Hawaiians were a minority in their homeland, and the Japanese were the largest ethnic group in the islands.
What happened to Hawaii’s sugar workers was a repeat of an old, familiar tale – harsh working conditions, crude living and social facilities, deep-seated workers’ resentment and a persistent, guerrilla-like resistance, marked by regular disputes with sugar planters. Wherever it took root, sugar seemed to breed planters who managed their properties and labour force with a draconian hand; they managed a disaffected and often oppressed labour which bridled against their lot from first to last.
The power of Hawaii’s planters also extended far beyond the cane fields. In 1887, a clique of them imposed a new constitution on the Hawaiian monarch, securing planters’ control over the government of the islands. A new, gerrymandered political system effectively delivered political power into the hands of Americans, to the exclusion of Hawaiians. Even this was not enough for the sugar men and, following changes in fiscal policy in Washington, and a dynastic change in the Hawaiian Royal Government, the US annexed the islands as part of the 1898 US war against Spain, in the Philippines and Cuba. Hawaii’s popular Queen was overthrown by American Marines – acting in the interests of the islands’ sugar planters. In 1900, Hawaii became US territory, and the sugar planters seemed to have everything they could wish for. They were now part of the USA and could trade and export freely to and from the mainland. In 1875, Hawaiian sugar accounted for a mere 1 per cent of the US market; by 1900, that had grown to 10 per cent. Hawaii’s sugar planters were now securely entrenched in the islands, with a sweet deal with the US mainland, and they were to hold sway until the Second World War.20
The planters were alarmed, however, about the rise of the Japanese population – the very population which they had brought into being. They were also unhappy, by becoming American, to lose access to indentured labour, which was now illegal. On the other hand, the Japanese workers, augmented by large numbers of Japanese women, began to organise to defend their own interests. Predictably, the sugar planters responded not merely with their traditional heavy hand, but by the importation of cheap Filipino labourers, who eventually numbered 100,000.
Here, again, was a familiar chapter in the story of sugar, with Hawaiian sug
ar repeating the experience of sugar in other corners of the world – plantations which drove off indigenous landowners, hard-nosed planters who ran exploitative labour regimes and who came to wield local – and even metropolitan – political power. It was the latest version of international sugar interests whose loyalties lay not at the point of production, but in distant offices and counting houses. Sugar was an industry which seemed to taint all involved, wherever it took root. Worse still, perhaps, the old exploitative relations between master and man on sugar plantations lived on to modern times. The USA was to become home to some of the worst examples.
Hawaii was merely the latest example of sugar’s insatiable need for labour on the most exploitative of terms. Slavery had gone, after yielding good returns for the best part of four centuries, and freed slaves simply turned their backs on what they regarded as the house of bondage – the sugar plantation. But what followed was uncomfortably familiar.
In many of the old British colonies, indentured Indian labour took over from the freed slaves. This new diaspora of indentured labour was to fill the gaps left by the departing freed slaves, or to work on new lands and in new colonies such as Guyana and Trinidad. It was, again, a massive movement of humanity which continued into the early twentieth century.
Moreover, this Indian diaspora to European colonies was not restricted to the old slave colonies of the Caribbean. In the Indian Ocean, Mauritius absorbed almost half a million Indians; Reunion, 87,000; Natal in South Africa, 152,000; and Malaya, 250,000.21 Sugar was, yet again, the main driving force behind these migrations, much as it had been with slavery. It was, once more, responsible for transforming the demography of parts of the globe.
The use of indentured labour in sugar was successful and offered a blueprint for other crops, and which led to further major migrations – indentured Chinese and Japanese labour were moved to the Caribbean, South America, Hawaii and California. Here was a supply of cheap alien labour that could be tied down to a particular location or crop – it might be sugar or pineapples, tea, palm oil or, later, rubber. Labourers were tied to an employer for a specific number of years in return for certain terms of employment. It certainly was not the same as African slavery. Nonetheless, indentured labourers were less than free. This shift from slavery to indentured servitude by the colonial powers looked, to many critics, a classic example of imperial humbug. Countries proclaimed their virtue in ending slavery – none louder than the British – but continued to consume huge volumes of sugar produced by people who had been shipped vast distances to work in oppressive conditions. Long after slavery had ended, sugar continued to provide sweet pleasure for millions at the cost of exploitative conditions for its labour forces.