Sugar: the Atlantic’s most valuable crop

Where was sugar grown in 1715?

Sugar cane needs heat, rain and rich soil, and the islands of the Caribbean had all three. English planters on Barbados began growing it in the 1640s, and the French on Guadeloupe at about the same time. By 1715 sugar covered most of Barbados and the smaller English islands of Antigua, St Kitts, Nevis and Montserrat, and it was spreading fast across Port Royal’s island of Jamaica.

This was a time of change. Around 1720 Jamaica overtook Barbados as the biggest British sugar producer. At the same time the French colony of Saint-Domingue, today’s Haiti, was growing fast, and from about 1717 cheaper French sugar began pushing British sugar out of European markets. Portuguese Brazil, which had once led the world in sugar, still grew a great deal of it. Spanish Cuba grew only a little until much later.

How was sugar made on a plantation?

Making sugar was hard, hot and dangerous work, and it was done in a hurry, because cut cane spoils within a day or two.

• Planting. Cane was planted in the autumn and took about 15 to 18 months to ripen.
• Crushing. At harvest the cane was cut and fed between heavy rollers in a mill turned by cattle, horses, wind or water, squeezing out the juice.
• Boiling. In the boiling house the juice was cleaned with lime and boiled in a row of copper kettles, each smaller and hotter than the last, until it was thick enough to form crystals as it cooled.
• Curing. The cooling sugar went into pots or barrels with holes in the bottom. Over several weeks a dark syrup, molasses, dripped out. What was left was raw brown sugar called muscovado.
• Shipping. The sugar was packed into hogsheads, huge barrels that each held hundreds of pounds of sugar, and carried down to the harbour.

During harvest the mill and boiling house ran day and night. French planters often went a step further and “clayed” their sugar, letting water from wet clay wash more molasses out, which made it whiter and more valuable.

Who did the work?

Almost all of it was done by enslaved Africans: men, women, and children, too. Sugar was the main reason for the transatlantic slave trade. Historians estimate that about four out of five Africans carried across the Atlantic were taken to places that grew sugar. Between 1701 and 1725 alone, ships of all nations carried more than a million captives from Africa.

Life on a sugar estate was brutal. About one in three newly arrived Africans died within three years. In Jamaica more people died than were born, so planters kept buying new captives instead of improving conditions. The laws were built to keep it that way. Barbados passed a slave code in 1661 that treated enslaved people as property with almost no rights, and it strongly influenced the slave laws of Jamaica, South Carolina, Antigua and other colonies. Across the English colonies, children born to an enslaved mother were enslaved for life.

Enslaved people resisted in every way they could. Many ran away. In Jamaica, communities of people who had escaped, called Maroons, held the mountains for decades and forced the colony to sign treaties in 1739 and 1740. On Antigua in 1736 the authorities claimed to uncover a great plan for an uprising, led by a man the English called Court, who is remembered in Antigua today as Prince Klaas, and executed 88 people; historians still debate how much of the plan was real.

Where did sugar go, and what came back?

Most British sugar sailed to London, Bristol and other British ports, where refiners in “sugar houses” turned it into white loaves. British law said sugar from British islands had to go to Britain or another British colony. French sugar went to French ports such as Bordeaux and Nantes.

The sugar islands grew so much cane that they grew little food, so they depended on imports. Ships from North America brought flour, salt fish, lumber and barrel staves; ships from Britain brought cloth, tools, nails and guns. The islands paid with sugar, molasses and rum.

What was the triangle trade?

Many schoolbooks describe a “triangle trade”: ships carried goods from Europe to Africa, enslaved people from Africa to the Americas, and sugar from the Americas back to Europe. That picture shows how the whole system fitted together, but real voyages were messier. Most ships went back and forth on two-way routes, and many slave ships sailed home with little or no sugar. North American ships ran a shuttle trade to the islands, swapping food and lumber for molasses. It is better to think of it as a web of routes than a single triangle.

Why did Europeans want so much sugar?

In the 1600s sugar was a luxury for the rich. In the 1700s it became something ordinary families bought, to sweeten the new hot drinks of the age, above all tea in Britain, along with coffee and chocolate. One historian estimates that the average person in England ate about 4 pounds of sugar a year around 1704 and about 18 pounds by 1800. From the early 1700s until about 1820, sugar was the single most valuable thing Britain imported. That demand is what made the sugar islands so rich, and why so many people were enslaved to grow it.

What were molasses and rum?

Molasses was the dark syrup that drained out of raw sugar as it cured. Planters fermented it, together with the scum skimmed off the boiling kettles, and distilled it into a strong spirit. On Barbados around 1650 people called it “kill-devil”, and soon “rum”. France banned rum imports to protect its brandy makers, so French islands sold their molasses cheaply to New England, where distillers turned it into rum. British planters hated this trade, and in 1733 Parliament put a tax on foreign molasses, which merchants mostly avoided by smuggling.