Sugar, like many other tradeable goods, was circulated through a variety of regions for over a thousand years. As trade and transportation created opportunities for more interactions between locations, sugar was introduced to places that it had been previously unknown. In the sixteenth century, Europe, specifically England, took a large interest in sugar, first serving as a luxury for the elite class but eventually evolving into a good available to all social classes. The high demand for sugar led to the expansion of sugar production, an increase in African slavery, and implemented a significant system of trade.
The high demand for sugar expanded its production. Dr. Frederick Slare, an English chemist and physician, understood the important
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The British West Indies provided ideal conditions and climate for sugar growth. Richard Ligon, like many other English men during this time, saw sugar plantations as an opportunity for quick wealth. He owned part of a sugar plantation in Barbados in the late 1640’s before returning to England a few years later due to illness. Having experienced life on a sugar plantation from an English perspective, Ligon described the dominance of sugar production in those locations. As stated in his writings regarding his experiences, “this commodity, sugar, hath gotten so much that start of all the rest of those, that were held the staple commodities of the land, and so much overtopped them, as they were for the most part slighted and neglected…[The] work of sugar making…is now grown the sole of trade in this island” (The True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes, 1673). Sugar production was prioritized over other crops such as tobacco and indigo because sugar was being sold in such staggering amounts and producing large …show more content…
Producing sugar was a difficult and extensive process that required constant hard work. In order to meet the labor needs, African slaves were transported and sold to work on plantations. Slave imports to the British West Indies grew from being a maximum of 18,700 in the mid 1600’s to reaching numbers as high as 77,100 by 1700 (Importation and Population Statistics for the British West Indies in the 18th Century). The drastic increase in slave imports conveyed the rapid growth of sugar demand and production in a short amount of
Slave labor is the final factor that drove the sugar trade and made it so successful. Slaves were the manual laborers on the plantations, doing the actual harvesting and boiling because the owner wasn’t there to do so (Document 8). Without the slaves working the farm, everything was pretty much useless. There is also a direct correlation between the number of slaves and the tons of sugar produced. This is shown in Document 9, where the island of Jamaica starts out with 45,000 slaves, and produces 4,782 tons of sugar. When the number of slaves increases by less than half to 74,500, the amount of sugar produced is more than tripled at 15, 972 tons. This clearly exhibits how slaves were essential to sugar
The Sugar Trade was drove by labor, land & consumer demand. In document 10, it tells how the British traded a little for a lot, this means the British traded finished goods that the African people didn't have, like powder, bullets, iron bars, copper bars, brass pans, british malt spirits etc… for slaves “but in the main, with very little that is not of our own growth or manufacture”.
Sugar in its many forms is as old as the Earth itself. It is a sweet tasting thing for which humans have a natural desire. However there is more to sugar than its sweet taste, rather cane sugar has been shown historically to have generated a complex process of cultural change altering the lives of all those it has touched, both the people who grew the commodity and those for whom it was grown. Suprisingly, for something so desireable knowledge of sugar cane spread vey slow. First found in Guinea and first farmed in India (sources vary on this), knowledge of it would only arrive in Europe thousands of years later. However, there is more to the history of sugar cane than a simple story of how something was adopted piecemeal into various cultures. Rather the history of sugar, with regards to this question, really only takes off with its introduction to Europe. First exposed to the delights of sugar cane during the crusades, Europeans quickly acquired a taste for this sweet substance. This essay is really a legacy of that introduction, as it is this event which foreshadowed the sugar related explosion of trade in slaves. Indeed Henry Hobhouse in `Seeds of Change' goes so far as to say that "Sugar was the first dependance upon which led Europeans to establish tropical mono cultures to satisfy their own addiction." I wish, then, to show the repurcussions of sugar's introduction into Europe and consequently into the New World, and outline especially that parallel between the suga...
As a high calorie alimentation characterized by “perfect sweetness,” sugar was in high demand worldwide. The fourth document outlines the value of sugar in the workforce during the industrial revolution of the 1800s, helping workers with the transition from easy working hours on farms, to the taxing habits of
The Sugar Act of 1764, also known as the Revenue Act, was the first attempt by the British Parliament to raise revenue from the colonists. This act was basically a tax on trade––items that were brought into the colonies including: sugar, tea, coffee, wine, etc. The Act also allowed British officials, without court approval, to take goods they believed to be smug...
One of the most significant causes that came out of sugar production was the Atlantic Slave Trade. “The vast majority of the African captives transported across the Atlantic, some 80 percent or more, ended up in Brazil and the Caribbean (Strayer 568).” Once the Portuguese and British brought sugar to the Americas, they came to the realization that the land was fertile. This opened up a vast array of possibilities that could not progress without the aid of increased labor. Out of this need for increased labor, slavery arises and proceeds to spread. Slaves worked on sugar-producing estates or plantations in horrible conditions. The extensive use of African slave labor gave these plantation colonies an extremely different ethnic makeup in comparison to that of Spanish America. The search for slaves leads to Africa where the “trade triangle” is produced. This triangle of trade includes the Americas, Africa, and Britain. First, Africa provides slaves for the Americas. In the Americas, the slaves are then used to cultivate the sugar production. The Americas have greater sugar production which then enables them to transport sugar to Britain in exchange for other goods and services such as silver and spices. Britain continued to trade with Africa in order to keep the cycle functioning. This triangle of trade allowed commerce to expand and
In 1627 the first Englishmen landed on the uninhabited Caribbean island of Barbados. Twenty years later, Richard Ligon, a royalist fleeing political turmoil during the English Revolution of 1647-1649, arrived on the island and purchased half of a functioning sugar plantation with several colleagues. He remained on the island for three years, writing A True & Exact History after his return to
usiness institutions and increased economic growth. Welfare and urbanization blossomed with the introduction of sugar and potatoes in massive quantities to the working class in Europe. Depopulation plus increased demand for crops in the Americas gave rise to the transatlantic slave trade. Devastating political, social, and economic consequences for the African continent. Search for precious metals by the Spanish, in a sequential over exploitation fashion, pushed the Spanish inland, but not as fast as their diseases, plants, and animals (Grennes 2012)
Sugar plantations have a field where sugar cane stalks are cut and grown and then there are boiling house where sugar cane stalks are crushed and boiled which is all runned by slave labor. Because slaves planted the cane stalks, harvested sugar stalks, crushed them, and boiled the sugar stalks sugar was made(8). According to David richardson the slave Trade, Sugar, and British Economic growth, “An Average purchase price of adult male slave on west African coast in 1748 was 14£ and in 1768 was 16£”(9a).Because slaves were so cheap slave traders may profit by, selling adult male slaves to sugar plantation owners for twice as much as they bought them in Africa. John Campbell Candid and Impartial Considerations on the Nature of the Sugar Trade describes the slaves as “so necessary Negro slaves purchased in Africa by English merchants”(11). Because africa trade slaves to English merchants Africans got things they did not
Sugar growers continue to benefit from favorable economic conditions provided by the U.S. government. Yet empirical data reveal a decrease in the aggregate support for sugar legislation in recent years. In 1978, there were 9,187 full or part owners of sugar cane and sugar beet farms, compared to 7,799 farms in 1987. The level of sugar subsidy allocated to the farmers, however, has increased and even favored certain sugar growers disproportionately over others. Such empirical findings suggests that politics, as much as economics, affect the level of sugar subsidy. This paper examines why an increasingly smaller number of sugar farmers receive a steadily larger government subsidy.
Slavery existed long before colonial times. Beginning in the 15 century, Portuguese slave traders adopted the slavery and plantation system, followed by the Spanish who virtually developed and perfected the two (Johnson 14). In 1452, the Portuguese colony of Madeira became the biggest exporter and supplier of sugar for Europe in the west (Johnson 14). Ultimately, the wealth they had made attracted thousands to the industry. For this reason, servants and slaves existed before Europeans came to North America. However, the difference between servants and slaves was based on economical and social factors. Between 1619 and 1750, racism and immeasurable profit from agricultural commerce together, became an incentive
The Sugar Act was passed in 1764 after the French and Indian war. The taxes brought about by the Sugar Act were different than the previous colonial taxes because they were not put in place to support the British economy but to replenish Parliament’s empty treasury. According to Revolution, an article written by Eric Foner and John Garraty, the act was intended “to prevent trade with the French West Indies” because Parliament “passed a prohibitive tariff on sugar, molasses, and other
The Slave Revolution in the Caribbean Colonists in the eighteenth century created plantations that produced goods such as tobacco, cotton, indigo, and more importantly, sugar. These plantations required forced labor, and thus slaves were shipped from Africa to the new world. “The Caribbean was a major plantation that was a big source of Europe’s sugar, and increasing economic expansion. The French had many colonies, including its most prized possession Saint- Domingue (Haiti). ”
Slave labour supplied the most coveted and important items in Atlantic and European commerce: the sugar, coffee, cotton and cacao of the Caribbean; the tobacco, rice and indigo of North America; the gold and sugar of Portuguese and Spanish South America. These commodities comprised about a third of the value of European commerce, a figure inflated by regulations that obliged colonial products to be brought to the metropolis prior to their re-export to other destinations. Atlantic navigation and European settlement of the New World made the Americas Europe's most convenient and practical source of tropical and sub-tropical produce. The rate of growth of Atlantic trade in the eighteenth century had outstripped all other branches of European commerce and created fabulous fortunes. An estimate of the slave population in the British Caribbean in Robin Blackburn's study, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery: 1776-1848, puts the slave numbers at 428,000 out of a population of 500,000, so the number of slaves vastly exceeded the number of white owners and overseers.
Saint-Domingue, a French colony located on the western third of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti) was developing so rapidly that by the 1750’s colony was the world’s leading producer of sugar; 40 percent of the world’s sugar trading belonged to France. “Under French rule, cultivation of coffee, sugarcane, cotton, and indigo turned Haiti into the richest European colony in the Western Hemisphere” (Girard). The French were so focused on the production of sugar that “most necessities, including food, were imported” (Rosenburg). Not only was Saint-Domigue dense in its exports, it also had around 500,000 slaves, almost half the entire population of slaves in the Caribbean. The Caribbean as a whole was described as being “dominated by the 1680s and 1690s by African slaves” (Slavery). New slaves from Africa were constantly being brought in due to the colonies rapid growth and horrible conditions of living which led to higher death rates among the slaves already there; there more slaves born on the continent of Africa than in colonies. Along with agricultural contribution to France’s economy, there were also other economic contributions to the global economy. For every ship of slaves transported captains had to be paid, “wood, water, and other provisions from shore” (Behrendt), as well as the ship’s crew. This distributed money all over Europe. It is said that “British West Indian production