SUGAR

SUGAR. The expansion of European involvement in the sugar industry mirrored western Europe's expansion and domination of the Atlantic basin. Sugar, which had long been considered a luxury available only to the elites of medieval and renaissance Europe, was transformed into a household staple by the colonization of the New World. The combination of conquered tropical and subtropical lands, African slave labor, and capital advanced by northern European merchants transformed the European diet. Furthermore, sugar's importance to overseas trade is reflected in contemporary observations that proclaimed the sugar industry to be at the heart of national wealth; it was often noted that the plantation trade created enormous profits for sugar planters and merchants, employment for European laborers, and significant tax revenues for the mother countries. Although it is clear that sugar did indeed dominate colonial policy of the major powers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, economic historians have recently questioned the extent to which sugar generated national riches.

Muslims first introduced sugarcane to the Mediterranean region in the seventh century. While the soils of the Levant, Sicily, Cyprus, Crete, and Malta supported this early cane cultivation, the actual export of sugar to Continental markets did not take place until the Crusades, when Venetian merchants provided the capital and mercantile connections required for regular trade. The historian Noel Deerr has suggested that this coordination of European credit and trade "may be seen [as] the germ of the colonial system" that was fully developed in the Americas during the early modern period.

The center of the European sugar supply moved west with Portuguese exploration of the Atlantic basin. Iberian settlers on the island of Madeira established commercial sugar production in 1432, as well as on the African coastal island of São Tomé, where African slave labor was used exclusively to produce sugar in the early sixteenth century. During the next hundred years, Portuguese settlers in Brazil replicated this slave-based business plan after briefly experimenting with indigenous labor. With the assistance of Dutch financiers, the Portuguese planters and mill owners of northeastern Brazil developed the most productive sugar-producing region in the world. This symbiotic relationship between the two imperial powers helped generate the lion's share of sugar consumed in Europe, but in 1624 the Dutch gained tighter financial control over the industry by using military force, capturing the richest sugar-growing regions of Brazil. Although the Dutch were eventually expelled, the chaos inflicted by war disrupted Brazilian sugar production, thereby providing an opportunity for English and French West Indian sugar growers to emerge as important competitors in supplying Europe's increasing demand for sugar.

The leading sugar-producing nations expended tremendous resources protecting their colonists and their plantation trade. Laws similar to Britain's Navigation Acts or France's Colonial Pact were implemented by every colonial power as a means of ensuring that the benefits of imperialism would be maximized. Adherents to this political philosophy believed that the colonists' role in the larger economy was subordinate to the home country's drive for riches and power. Thus, each nation's set of mercantilist laws was designed to control colonial trade so that the commerce from the colonies would provide home governments with valuable tax revenues while stimulating each respective nation's merchant navy.

The major sugar-planting zones of Brazil and the Caribbean littoral had an enormous appetite for slave labor. The growing demand for sugar in Europe, combined with the negative natural population growth, fueled an unprecedented demand for labor. Throughout the early modern period, European planters expanded total production while simultaneously ignoring the poor nutrition, diseaseinfested living conditions, and excessive work endured by their slaves. The relatively low cost of importing new African slaves permitted planters to maintain healthy profits despite the regular loss of life. To illustrate the human cost of supplying the European craving for sugar, over half of the 5.7 million slaves transported to the Americas during the eighteenth century were destined to work in the cane fields or in related branches of the industry.

The sheer volume of the slave trade, the capital-intensive nature of sugar planting, and the contemporary assumptions about the importance of sugar colonies have led some modern historians to conclude that sugar and slavery were essential to the economic development of the metropole. Eric Williams, an Oxford-trained West Indian historian, did the most to promote this thesis in Capitalism and Slavery (1944). In this monumental work, Williams argued that the demand for sugar created a highly profitable colonial trade, which enabled slavers from Bristol and Liverpool to dominate the forced migration of Africans during the peak years of the slave trade. He posited that the slave trade generated an important stream of British capital accumulation, and that these funds, combined with the profits generated from the sugar industry, fueled Britain's industrial revolution.

Scholarship since Capitalism and Slavery has revised Williams's estimate that the slave trade produced 30 percent returns to investors. Although there were, indeed, examples of slave traders earning significant sums of money on individual voyages, the slaving business was a very risky and competitive lottery, with many investors losing money. If, therefore, one considers the whole range of returns on slave trading, the average is calculated to have been somewhere between 5 and 10 percent during the eighteenth century. With this more realistic view of slave-trading profits, the economic historian Stanley Engerman calculated that the net national return on the British slave trade represented less than 1 percent of total British income. This deflated view of the slave trade's importance to the British economy has been matched by more moderate assessments of the effect the total sugar industry had on the home country. The most recent research describes the colonial sugar industry as an important sector that contributed to the economic growth of the major sugar-growing nations, but was not essential to the industrial transformation of England or Europe.

See also Portuguese Colonies: Brazil ; Slavery and the Slave Trade ; Trading Companies ; Triangular Trade Pattern .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Curtin, Philip D. The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History. Cambridge, U.K., 1990.

Deerr, Noel. The History of Sugar. Vols. 1 and 2. London, 1949–1950.

Eltis, David, and Stanley L. Engerman. "The Importance of Slavery and the Slave Trade to Industrializing Britain." Journal of Economic History 60 (2000): 123–144.

Klein, Herbert S. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge, U.K., 1999.

Morgan, Kenneth. Slavery, Atlantic Trade, and the British Economy, 1660–1800. Cambridge, U.K., 2000.

Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill, N.C., 1944.

David Ryden