Slavery in Small Things E-Book

James Walvin

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 439

Beschreibung

Slavery in Small Things: Slavery and Modern Cultural Habits isthe first book to explore the long-range cultural legacy of slavery through commonplace daily objects. * Offers a new and original approach to the history of slavery by an acknowledged expert on the topic * Traces the relationship between slavery and modern cultural habits through an analysis of commonplace objects that include sugar, tobacco, tea, maps, portraiture, print, and more * Represents the only study that utilizes common objects to illustrate the cultural impact and legacy of the Atlantic slave trade * Makes the topic of slavery accessible to a wider public audience

Leseprobe

Slavery in Small Things

Slavery and Modern Cultural Habits

James Walvin

This edition first published 2017 © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Cover image: Arne Thaysen/Gettyimages

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Slavery in Western Life

Notes

1 A Sugar Bowl: Sugar and Slavery

Notes

2 Cowrie Shells: Slavery and Global Trade

Notes

3 Tobacco: The Slave Origins of a Global Epidemic

Notes

4 Mahogany: Fashion and Slavery

Notes

5 Stately Homes and Mansions: The Architecture of Slavery

Notes

6 Maps: Revealing Slavery

Notes

7 A Portrait: Pictures in Black and White

Notes

8 The Brooks: Slave Ships

Notes

9 A Book: Slavery and the World of Print

Notes

10 Chains: The Ironware of Slavery

Notes

11 Cotton: Slavery and Industrial Change

Notes

Conclusion

Note

Index

EULA

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

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Acknowledgments

The idea for this book germinated at two places in the USA. When I was researching the history of one particular painting (J.M.W. Turner's The Slave Ship) I encountered the astonishing riches housed in Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. At much the same time, I was working in the collections of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia. The books, manuscripts, furnishings, tableware, and portraits housed in the Rockefeller Library and various locations around Williamsburg (and in storage) provide a lavish version of life in colonial America. The longer I worked in Williamsburg, however, on what became annual visits, the clearer it became that there was a ‘back-story’ – a context – to many of the artifacts on display, but one which often goes unnoticed. So many of the material objects derived directly or indirectly from the efforts of African slaves, or provided an entrée into the story of the lives of enslaved Africans in the Americas. Yet who thinks of slaves when looking at a beautiful 18th-century sugar bowl, or a piece of mahogany furniture?

This simple question applies not only to North America but is equally relevant (and perhaps even more so) in Britain itself. Galleries, museum, private collections, stately homes, and palaces – all these and more boast of and display items which belong not merely to the story of wealth, style, and fashionable taste, but to the astonishing history of African slavery in the Atlantic world. The link – between voguish taste and brutal slavery – generally goes unnoticed. This simple point set me off in search of the background. What is the connection between African slavery in the Americas and the development of key features of Western taste and style from the 17th century onward? This book tries to offer an answer.

Like all my earlier books, what follows has been made possible by the help, co-operation – and friendship – of people on both sides of the Atlantic. At the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation James Horn proved a stout friend and supporter over many years. He and his colleagues, notably Inge Flester and more recently Ted Maris Wolfe, but above all the staff in the Rockefeller Library, have always made my visits fruitful and enjoyable.

I made an initial effort to explain my ideas at a Conference on ‘Visualizing Slavery and British Culture in the 18th century’ at Yale University in November 2014. There, David Blight and his colleagues at the Gilder Lehrman Center provided their traditional warm welcome, and an invigorating forum for what I said. Richard Rabinowitz again showed that his friendship does not obstruct his critical and imaginative approach to the study of history. Over many years, my work in the USA has been made possible – and worthwhile – by the kindness of a number of friends: Tolly and Ann Taylor, and Marlene and Bill Davis in Williamsburg, Bill and Elizabeth Bernhardt in New York City, and Fred Croton and Selma Holo in Los Angeles. Caryl Phillips, always willing to listen and to lend invaluable support, seems untroubled by my tendency to talk as much about football as history. Through thick and thin, all these friends have listened more patiently than I have a right to expect. Above all others, and as on so many other occasions, Jenny Walvin has lived at close quarters with my current interests, and makes everything possible.

In Hull, John Oldfield and David Richardson, and Richard Huzzey in Liverpool have proved great supporters. Most important of all, Peter Coveney at Wiley accepted the initial proposal for this book, and was hugely influential in seeing it through, though he had moved on before it appeared. The anonymous reviewers he commissioned to read the draft manuscript provided invaluable help in making what follows an infinitely better book than the one they read initially. This book was also improved by the efforts of Fiona Screen, an exemplary copy editor.

For years, Katie Campbell and Michael Davenport have provided a welcoming home-from-home in London. This time, Michael did not live to see the book materialize. I would have given a copy to him, but now, alas, I can only dedicate it fondly to his memory, echoing his favorite phrase, as we topped up his whisky glass, ‘Un tout, tout petit peu.’

James Walvin March 2016

Introduction: Slavery in Western Life

Our understanding of slavery has been totally transformed in the past fifty years. Between 1960 and 1964 I studied history as a British undergraduate. Or rather I studied British political history. I still have all my undergraduate notes and essays, and looking through them, and thinking about what I was taught (and on the whole taught well), I am now struck by how curiously insular – how ‘British’ (English even) – were the historical issues on offer. What has become my major historical preoccupation – slavery – was not even mentioned. In lectures, tutorials, seminars, and essays, I can recall no mention whatsoever about slavery – not one. The book of documents used for a Special Subject on the American Revolution mentions slavery on a mere 19 of the 368 pages, and even then largely in passing.1 It was of course a very long time ago, and historical interests, trends – fads even – have changed substantially: some have simply come and mercifully gone. In large measure the curriculum we studied was a reflection of how our teachers perceived and presented the subject, and what they thought suitable for undergraduate study. At the time slavery was only one of many topics which effectively did not exist in British undergraduate studies but which, today, are in great demand. The absence of slavery, in common with other areas of history, was partly a reflection of prevailing knowledge (or lack of it) and the consequent paucity of appropriate literature. There were no obvious books or studies of British slavery that would have provided students with the necessary materials. Equally, the teaching staff were interested in other historical problems for their own research careers. Social history, for example had only begun to make its first transformative impact in Britain. It was hardly surprising, then, that slavery did not even register as a noise off-stage.

Today, fifty years later, if any history department were not offering courses on slavery this would be viewed as seriously remiss, and undergraduates and graduate students turn to the history of slavery because of its inherent interest and because of the intellectually exciting prospects available. Slavery is now accepted as a defining historical element in the shaping of the Western world in the post-Columbus period, its importance amply confirmed by a massive (and growing) accumulation of research evidence from all corners of historical enquiry. Even science (in the form of DNA) now lends itself to the study of slavery.

The story of the study and teaching of slavery in the USA in the same period has taken a very different trajectory. Moreover, what happened there was to have major consequences for the study of slavery in Britain (and the Caribbean). In the USA, slavery has an immediate presence and a powerful historical resonance, and naturally enough there has been a long, imaginative, and often fiercely contested historiography of slavery. For decades, arguments about slavery spawned distinct and sharply divided schools of historians. The slave South had its scholarly defenders, and their influence spread far beyond academe. They gave intellectual sustenance to the world of segregated US life and politics, and even helped to shape a romanticized view of the South that permeated popular culture. But all that began to sag, and eventually collapse, in the late 20th century, under the sheer weight of scholarship into the social history of slavery. By the turn of the century, it had become indisputable that slavery in the USA was not simply an interesting, regional issue – not solely a matter for the South, with consequences for the North. On the contrary, slavery was exposed as a central institution in the development of the modern USA.2 Indeed, the modern American state came into being in 1787 arguing about slavery. Inevitably, debates continue among historians, but the days have gone when slavery could be regarded as a peripheral, largely Southern issue. What has happened, in the space of an academic lifetime, is that the study of slavery has shifted from the margins to occupy a pivotal position in US historical concerns (with all the political and cultural consequences that follow).

While Americans have for decades wrestled with the question of slavery throughout their history, the British, on the other hand, suffered a prolonged bout of forgetfulness about their own entanglement with slavery, and only recently seem to have emerged from this historical amnesia. At first sight, this forgetfulness about slavery (which lasted effectively until the 1960s) seems very odd indeed, though what underpinned it now seems clear enough. Most significant perhaps, and unlike the North American version, British slavery was not a domestic matter. Whereas in 1860 the USA was home to four million people of African descent – all of them slaves or freed slaves – Britain's slave population had evolved thousands of miles away from Britain itself. There had been, it is true, a small black presence in Britain for centuries, and slavery itself had existed, however small-scale and marginal, despite various legal challenges, right up to full emancipation in 1833.

Yet the British, despite having no substantial slave population at home, had been responsible for scattering millions of enslaved Africans across their American colonies, from Demerara in South America, throughout the Caribbean, and into North America. As the leading slave trader in the North Atlantic, the British had also shipped and sold armies of Africans to other European colonies, notably those controlled by Spain. It is hard to exaggerate Britain's involvement in the Atlantic slave system. Nor should we underestimate the enormous benefits which accrued to Britain as a result – a point first effectively asserted in the 1930s and 1940s by C.L.R. James and Eric Williams. Still, the centers of gravity of British slaving activity, the regions where they engaged directly – face-to-face – with African slaves, were located thousands of miles away from Britain itself. When the British thought and talked about slavery, the images that came to mind were of slave trading on the African coast, slave ships in mid-ocean packed with Africans, or gangs of field slaves working on plantations in the Americas. Slavery took place and thrived a long way away.

The sense that this involvement with slavery was physically very distant from Britain is itself a curious issue. After all, thousands of ships sailed from dozens of British ports on slave trading ventures, and a myriad British industries and businesses thrived on their dealings with slave ships (and with the slave-grown produce brought back by those vessels from the colonies). Major cities (most notably London, Bristol, Liverpool, and Glasgow) thrived on their commerce with slavery. Furthermore, over a period of more than three centuries, many thousands of Britons had direct experience of the Atlantic slave system: they manned the ships, they organized the purchase of slaves on Africa's Atlantic coast, and they marshalled gangs of field slaves throughout the American colonies. Less visible, but no less important, Britons master-minded the entire system from their business premises: the dock-side counting houses, the metropolitan (and increasingly provincial) centers of finance, commerce, and manufacture. By, say, 1750, it was clear enough that slavery had become part of the warp and weft of British commercial and social life. And yet….

By and large, slavery remained out of sight, thriving in distant locations which were, quite literally, over the horizon and invisible to the British eye. This physical distance between the homeland and its slave colonies had profound effects on the way the British experienced slavery. It greatly influenced what they knew – or did not know – about slavery. This geographic remove created a cultural detachment from slavery which could never have been the case in the USA itself. Put crudely, geography had a distorting effect on Britain's understanding of slavery, and therefore on the way the British subsequently constructed their historical memories about slavery. To borrow a phrase from one of Australia's most eminent historians writing about his homeland, there was a “tyranny of distance” involved in the complex relationship between Britain and slavery.3 A vast watery expanse separated the British Isles from their slave colonies, and created a sense of detachment that was more pervasive than simple geography. There was, until very recently, a gulf of understanding and appreciation which has served to divorce the British from the world of Atlantic slavery.

This geographic divide was compounded by the unfolding of historical events, especially by the story of British abolition. In large measure, the way the British ended their involvement with slavery also helped to distance them from their slaving past. Having been the undisputed masters of North Atlantic slave trading in the late 18th century, the British became the self-appointed global abolitionists in the 19th century. The campaigns to end the slave trade (1807) and then to emancipate colonial slaves (1833) were carried along by remarkable domestic popular backing. Thereafter, not only did the British lead the attack on slavery worldwide (via international treaties, often imposed on weaker partners, and by the power of the Royal Navy), but they continued to congratulate themselves on their collective virtue in being the world's pioneering and dominant abolitionist nation. It was as if the world's leading poacher had, within a mere fifty years, become the world's self-appointed game-keeper. Henceforth, the British came to think of themselves as the nation which had brought slavery to its knees. In the continuing campaigns against slavery, throughout the 19th and into the 20th century,4 the British were proud to proclaim themselves as an abolitionist people, their representatives, statesmen, and military keen to bring the benefits of freedom to people still oppressed by slavery.

The power and persistence of Britain's abolitionist activities in the 19th century generated a smokescreen behind which the British could hide their slaving past. Indeed, it was often difficult even to see the history of British slavery behind the decoy of abolition. This ideology of abolition – the sense that the British were a people characterized by a deep-seated abolition sentiment – had a remarkable impact on the writing of British history. Historians looked not to a slaving past, but to the British achievement in bringing slavery to an end. In the process, readers were presented with a historical saga that could make the British feel proud of themselves. There were strident critics, of course, most notably Eric Williams in his book Capitalism and Slavery (first published in 1944), but for decades such criticism failed to deflect the triumphalist tone of British historiography.5 What, then, are we to remember about British history? The nation's pre-eminence as an abolitionist power, or its earlier involvement with slavery itself?

Since roughly 1960 there has been a fundamental revision in the way slavery is seen. It is a complex story at both scholarly and popular levels, involving major changes in academic history, but more fundamentally, it also stems from some extraordinary transformations in the demographics of British life. What had previously been a relatively racially homogenous society was changed by large-scale immigration and the emergence of a British black population which was keen to know about its own history. Britain was also greatly influenced by events in the USA, especially by the American campaigns for full racial equality. All this paralleled independence for former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean. There, the development of new systems of higher education also created demands for a new kind of history: one which addressed local needs and interests rather than the concerns of the old imperial powers. African history, Caribbean history, African-American history, British black history: all of them critically intersected in places to create a cultural ferment which focused on the history of slavery. It was clear enough, for instance, that US slavery had important ties to Britain itself. Equally, British scholarly interest in slavery began to flourish under the influence of some innovative scholarship about slavery in the USA, and about the Atlantic slave trade. This ought not to have been surprising. After all, North American slavery had its roots both in the Atlantic (mainly British) slave ships, and in a British colonial past. Most Africans shipped to North America had been transported in British ships, while the main commodities cultivated by North American slave labor (tobacco initially and cotton later) were vital features of Britain's booming economy in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, in what was a confusion of cultural change and historical debate, it became increasingly clear that slavery was of great importance not only for the Americas but for a fuller understanding of Europe itself. It had, for example, been European colonial powers which had conceived and nurtured African slavery throughout the Americas (all with dire consequences for Africa itself). In addition, the more we learned about the detailed mechanics of slavery, the more integrated and far-reaching the world of Atlantic slavery proved to be. Thus the basis was laid for the idea that slavery was perhaps the major building block of an ‘Atlantic’ history, though even this broad concept had its limitations. Despite the enormous geographic and temporal range of the concept of Atlantic history, research revealed that the full story of slavery could not easily be accommodated within it. For all its enormity, slavery in the Atlantic formed only one region of a slaving system that spilled over, well beyond the boundaries (and definitions) of the Atlantic. Students of slavery came to appreciate that slavery had significant worldwide dimensions.

Slavery's global significance emerged most clearly via research into the enforced movement of Africans from their homelands, and not merely westward into the Americas. The overland migrations of enslaved Africans northward across the Sahara, the slave trades from East Africa to Arabia or India, each formed discrete and major histories of slavery. (And this is not to include other forms of slavery in other parts of the world.) Above all, however, it was the shipping of millions of Africans to the plantations of the Americas that exposed both the enormity and the historical importance of slavery. It was both a massive enforced migration of peoples, and a system of extreme human and social complexity. European, American, and Brazilian ships carried a multitude of goods, from all corners of the globe, to exchange for African slaves on the Atlantic coast. Their African victims then endured a pestilential experience like no other, before finding themselves landed in the Americas. They were then forced onward to even more distant destinations. Finally, and often far from their first landfall, Africans were set to a lifetime's labor, overwhelmingly producing export crops for the markets of the Western world.

Not long ago, all this had been thought of, and written about, as a simple story: ‘the triangular trade’ of popular imagination. Today it is recognized as an astonishingly complex global process. Its most obvious end result was the Africanization of swathes of the Americas. David Eltis has noted that so huge were the numbers of Africans landed in the Americas that, until 1840, the Americas were an outpost, not of Europe, but of Africa. Equally, the labor of enslaved Africans served to transform the habits of the wider world. Tobacco quickly became an addiction in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Sugar made tea and coffee palatable to millions. By the time of the American Civil War, slave-grown cotton clothed the world in cheap textiles. All this, and much more besides, is now so familiar, so commonplace, that it hardly needs repeating. Yet to have made such claims in, say, 1960, would have been to invite historical derision. No longer.

Today, historians and writers face a very different challenge. We now have so much information about slavery that it is difficult to know how to take stock of so vast and sprawling a topic. It sometimes seems easier to provide a detailed case study, a microcosm of the story (the history of a single person, a place, a ship even) than to try to make sense of a topic that involves so many people, during such a prolonged period, and which spans such geographic expanse. To put the matter crudely, slavery in the Atlantic world bound together the continents, economies, and the peoples of Europe, Africa, and the Americas – with onward links to the trade routes and cultures of Asia. How can we hope to write a broad outline of that entire story?

My aim here is to tell that story by taking a very different approach, certainly different from any other book I have written about slavery. Slavery in the Americas was designed to produce commodities for the consumption and pleasure of the Western world, and many of the habits conceived and nurtured by slavery survive, in modern form, down to the present day. Similarly, a number of major artifacts (some of them so commonplace that they are unexceptional – banal even) have their origins and dissemination in the world of slavery. This book seeks to tell the story of slavery by discussing a number of those things. In recent years material culture has become of great interest to historians, in the process spawning some best-selling books (mainly when linked to exhibitions of those material artifacts).6 I am trying to follow a similar path: exploring a broader story via a range of small items, in this case, objects and customs which emerged from the world of slavery. I have chosen a number of small pegs on which to hang the very big story of slavery itself. What follows is an attempt to tell the story of slavery by looking at the history of slavery in small things.

Notes

1

. S.E. Morison,

Sources and Documents Illustrating the American Revolution, 1764

–

1788 and the Formation of the Federal Constitution

, Oxford, 1962 edn.

2

. For the discussion about the central role of slavery in the shaping of US history see Edward E. Baptist,

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery in the Making of American Capitalism

, New York, 2014; Walter Johnson,

River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom

, Cambridge MA, 2013; Sven Beckert,

Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism

, New York, 2014. But see also David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman, ‘The importance of the slave trade to industrializing Britain,’

The Journal of Economic History

, vol. 60, No. 1, March 2000.

3

. Michael Blainey,

The Tyranny of Distance

, Melbourne, 1966 edn.

4

. James Walvin,

Crossings: Africa, the Americas and the Atlantic Slave Trade

, London, 2013, Chapter 10.

5

. For a wider discussion of the relevant historiography see Gad Heuman, ‘Slavery and abolition,’ Chapter 20, and B.W. Higman, ‘The British West Indies,’ Chapter 7, in Robin Winks, ed.,

The Oxford History of the British Empire

, vol. V, Historiography, Oxford, 1999.

6

. Neil McGregor,

A History of the World In 100 Objects

, London, 2012 edn., and

Germany: Memories of a Nation

, London, 2014. See also Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Ivan Gaskell, Sara J. Schechner, Sarah Anne Carter,

Tangible Things: Making History Through Objects

, New York, 2015.

1A Sugar Bowl: Sugar and Slavery

In November 2014 a sugar bowl sold at Christie's in London for £3,500. True, it wasn't an ordinary sugar bowl. This one was a piece of Sèvres, a Vincennes blue lapis (Pot à sucre ‘Herbert’ et couvercle, 2me grandeur) – an exquisite piece of 18th-century craftsmanship from the porcelain workers and artists at the French factory in Sèvres. The company had been founded in 1738, moving to Sèvres, close to Madame de Pompadour's palace (today the Elysée Palace), in 1756, and becoming a royal factory three years later. Its porcelain ware quickly established itself as the most desirable of luxury items for wealthy elites across Western Europe. Prosperous Britons traveled to Paris simply to acquire their own Sèvres. In 1756–1757 Horace Walpole, for example, (though not so prosperous) spent £400 on Sèvres porcelain during a trip to Paris. A decade later the actor-manager David Garrick returned from Paris with his own Sèvres tea set. The sugar bowl from that collection eventually found its way into the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. There, it jostles for space with numerous other 18th-century sugar bowls; in porcelain, earthen ware, silver and pewter, all of them testimony not merely to fashionable table ware, but to the astonishing Western addiction to sugar.

Sèvres porcelain was (and is) so beautiful, so exquisite in design and decorative finish, that it created its own voracious demand among wealthy people anxious to display their taste and opulence. Yet behind the Sèvres factory (and similar companies – notably Dresden, Meissen, Worcester, and Wedgwood) there lies a more complex history. At first glance the story of European porcelain in the 18th century seems but one aspect of the remarkable expansion of material and luxurious consumption during that century. But it was also directly related to the much less obvious story of global trade, empire – and slavery.

Sèvres sugar bowls were normally manufactured as integral items of larger sets of table ware – tea and coffee sets – all aimed at the appetite for tea and coffee. Tea (from China) and coffee (from the Horn of Africa, from Arabia and later from newly acquired European tropical colonies, from Java to Jamaica) had, by the 1700s, established themselves as fashionable drinks of the wealthy. Soon they also became the ubiquitous drinks of ordinary people. But tea and coffee (like chocolate – the other emerging drink) had a naturally bitter taste, and were enjoyed in their native regions in their bitter form. Western consumers, however, came to expect their drinks to be sweetened by the addition of cane sugar. This was no accident: the transformation from bitter to sweet drinks took place when sugar from Europe's slave colonies began to flow back to Europe in remarkable volumes. The tea and coffee sets, disgorged in ever growing numbers from the factories and workshops of Western Europe and North America, provided all the accessories familiar today: tea and coffee pots, cups and saucers – and beautiful and delicate sugar bowls. It is, at the very least, an astonishing curiosity that this single fashionable item – porcelain sugar bowls from Sèvres and other manufacturers – were filled with a commodity cultivated in the most brutal and degrading of circumstances: sugar from the slave colonies of the Americas. Here was one of the paradoxes of slavery: callous oppression bringing forth Western fashion and luxury.

  *  *  *  

At the time Louis XV designated Sèvres a royal factory, France's major Caribbean colony had become the world's largest exporter of sugar. By 1770, St. Domingue (later Haiti) produced 60,000 tons a year (compared to Jamaica's 36,000 tons.1) All this was made possible by massive importations of Africans. By the time slavery in that colony, and the economy which it sustained, were destroyed by the great slave upheaval after 1791, no fewer than 790,000 Africans had been imported into St. Domingue. Of course, by then the West's addiction to sweetness in all things was well established. But who, even at the time, made the link? Who realized that the refinement of the Sèvres tea and coffee services, and their sugar bowls, was connected to the brutalization of armies of Africans in the Americas? It is a curious story which needs further explanation. But so too do many other historical artifacts: everyday items of 18th-century life, common today in museums and galleries, and all related to slavery.

The history of the world's taste for sweetness in food and drink is intimately linked to the story of African slavery.2 Before the development of plantation societies in the Americas, cane sugar had been rare and costly. Though honey had been the traditional sweetener in the West, small quantities of sugar had reached Europe from early plantations in the Mediterranean. Sugar cane cultivation had spread slowly from New Guinea, across Asia, each stage characterized by improvements in cultivation and sugar technology. This geographic spread of cultivation and consumption gathered pace under the wing of Arab expansion and trade. When Europeans moved outside the traditional center of their trading world, in the Mediterranean, and into the Atlantic, settling islands and making maritime contact with the Atlantic coast of Africa, sugar traveled with them. Long before Europeans crossed the Atlantic, they were cultivating sugar cane in Madeira, the Azores, Cape Verde, and on Sao Tome in the Gulf of Guinea.

Sao Tome, only 320km from the African coast, was a well-watered location, and ideally placed for replenishing ships' supplies as they explored and traded up and down the African coast. It proved an ideal location for sugar cultivation. Moreover, close by, on the coast of Africa, there were plentiful supplies of slaves to toil in the labor-intensive work of the sugar plantations. Clearing land, planting cane, harvesting the sugar cane, all demanded regular and plentiful supplies of labor, and Africa offered labor in abundance. Plantations in the Mediterranean had traditionally used a combination of free and unfree labor, but on Sao Tome in the 15th century, the pattern began to change. As that island's landscape came to be dotted with plantation settlements, its laboring population became predominantly African – and enslaved.

The capital needed for these pioneering settlements was available from Italian and Spanish merchants, keen to find new outlets for their money. To round off this increasingly complex commercial nexus, the finished product – raw sugar – required further refinement in distant refineries. Starting in Antwerp, but soon spreading to a growing number of major European port cities, sugar refineries were constructed to provide the finishing touches. Cane sugar was then dispatched for sale to the increasing number of European shops and outlets, via traveling salesmen and peddlers. Sugar thus passed to consumers across the length and breadth of Europe, and all this was in place beforeEuropean explorers and settlers put down roots in the tropical Americas. What had emerged was a remarkable commercial and laboring network which drew together the continents of Africa and Europe. It was a system lubricated by the sweat of a burgeoning population of enslaved Africans.

Sao Tome's planters were easily persuaded of the benefits of slave labor because African slaves regularly passed through the island on a slave route between Kongo, Old Calabar, and the Gold Coast. In the early 16th century, Sao Tome boomed, with a population of 100,000, dominated by Portuguese planters, and its landscape dotted by as many as 200 sugar mills. But the island went into rapid decline when Portugal began to settle the apparently unlimited bounty that was Brazil and by 1700 the Sao Tome sugar industry had all but vanished. Compared to what was to follow in the Americas, the numbers of Africans involved looks insignificant (except for the individuals concerned). Perhaps 2,000 Africans were landed as slaves each year in Sao Tome. Yet those figures tell only part of the story.

What had happened on the Atlantic coast of Africa, in the Atlantic islands, and in Sao Tome had established an economic and social pattern, and a highly profitable one at that, which became a blueprint for pioneers and settlers on the far side of the Atlantic. Even before Columbus crossed the Atlantic, Europeans became accustomed to acquiring Africans to work as slaves on plantations. Europeans also recognized that the plantation provided a social and economic tool for bringing untapped but luxuriant lands into profitable cultivation. Behind it lay European consumers with their apparently insatiable appetite for sugar. Sugar from Madeira, the Canaries, and then Sao Tome whetted the European appetite for sweetness.

Like many other exotic products, sugar had gained an initial foothold in Western societies as a medicine. Long a part of Arab pharmacology and medicine, it was prescribed for a host of ailments and cures. Along with other exotic crops from the East, sugar arrived via trade routes from societies influenced by Arabic science and medicine (themselves well ahead of their European counterparts). Sugar had long been advocated as an important medicine in a handful of Arabic scientific writings. Those medical texts, translated from Arabic into Latin, encouraged the use of sugar in Western medicine. Crusaders, for example, returning from the Eastern Mediterranean brought with them not only cane sugar itself, but knowledge of the way sugar was used for medical purposes. Greek and Byzantine physicians and writers thus incorporated sugar as an ingredient in contemporary pharmacology and medicine, and their influence spread throughout Europe in the late Middle Ages. Though some scientists and philosophers disputed its benefits, sugar rode the controversies to maintain a niche in Western medicine through to the apogee of slave-grown sugars and beyond.

When in the 16th and 17th centuries cane sugar began to arrive in Europe in ever greater (and cheaper) volumes, it became a familiar aspect of contemporary medical practice and learning. It was to be counted among the standard items found in European apothecary shops. Like other medicines, however, it had its opponents: doctors and writers who challenged its alleged medical virtues and who argued that sugar was actually harmful. Yet sugar was to triumph not as a medical ingredient but as a sweetener. The medical harm of mass and massive sugar consumption belongs to a more modern era, by which time sugar had long since lost its medical pretensions.3

The European settlement in the tropical Americas, especially in Brazil and the Caribbean, transformed everything. Brazil led the way, with early sugar plantations in Bahia and Pernambuco copying the patterns of Portuguese planters in Sao Tome. As Brazilian sugar production grew, so too did the importation of African slaves. By the mid-17th century, the Dutch were carrying tens of thousands of Africans across the South Atlantic. (By the time the Dutch abolished their slave trade, they had shipped more than half a million Africans to the Americas.4) As early as 1630, more than one quarter of a million Africans had been loaded onto slave ships bound for Brazil, setting a pattern in the South Atlantic that was to dwarf all other regions of Atlantic slave trading. By the time the trade to Brazil ended, Brazilian and Portuguese slave traders had carried more than six million Africans across the South Atlantic.5 No less astonishing is the fact that 2.8 million Africans were loaded onto slave ships from a single African port: Luanda in Angola. Brazil was, then, the first and the last: the first to establish a slave-based sugar economy in the Americas, and the last to abolish it – in 1888.

Slavery was an adaptable institution which could be turned to a huge range of activities. The vastness of Brazil allowed slavery, in time, to be adapted to a wide range of economic enterprises (mining, forestry, cattle, coffee, and tobacco). But sugar led the way: the original crop which proved that the rich lands of Brazil could produce a lucrative export crop. And it was sugar which persuaded planters to turn to Africa for slave labor to make everything else possible. Brazilian sugar plantations thus established the pattern for colonial settlement and development which encouraged other settlers, in other parts of the Americas, to do the same.

The British followed in the early 17th century, settling smaller islands in the Eastern Caribbean (notably St. Kitts and Barbados), then Jamaica in 1655. Colonists there tried a range of crops, and experimented with a number of labor systems before they, like the Portuguese before them, realized that sugar cultivated by enslaved Africans on plantations offered the best chance of commercial success. As ever more Africans were shipped into the islands, increasing volumes of sugar flowed back to Britain's major ports, and thence onward throughout Britain and Western Europe. The figures involved are staggering. Eventually, almost one million Africans were landed in Jamaica (though many were promptly shipped elsewhere; some 485,000 went to the tiny island of Barbados). The French, starting slightly later, did much the same. Their Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique absorbed 290,000 Africans, and St. Domingue 750,000. On all these islands, and throughout the Americas, Africans and their enslaved descendants undertook every job imaginable – from sailor to cowboy, from seamstress to nurse, miner to craftsman. But the dominant form of slave work, throughout the tropical Americas, was sugar. Indeed, an estimated 75% of all Africans crossing the Atlantic were destined, initially at least, to work in sugar.

Slave-grown sugar was produced in enormous volumes, packed into large barrels (hogsheads) and shipped to European ports, where newly established sugar refineries converted the crude sugar into the different forms of marketable sugars which were then dispatched, as sugar cones, to commercial outlets across Europe. At first the price of sugar remained high, partly because the initial costs of cultivation, production, and shipping (over enormous distances) were high. Sugar plantations were, from first to last, dependent on the outside world, and could only function thanks to regular importations of people and goods: labor from Africa, and goods from Europe and North America. The finished products – sugar and rum – were then shipped thousands of miles by sea (with all the attendant dangers) to Europe and North America. In 1600 the only American exporter of sugar was Brazil, but from mid-century, a string of Caribbean islands were producing their own sweet product (after experimenting with a number of other crops – notably tobacco). With Spain preoccupied in Central America, it was the island colonies of Britain and France that began to export substantial volumes of sugar. In 1650 Barbados was exporting 7,000 tons. Fifty years later, British Caribbean colonies dispatched 25,000 tons – more even than was exported from Brazil (22,000 tons). By 1700, ten colonies in the Americas exported 60,000 tons of sugar (half of it from the Caribbean).6 Yet even this astonishing figure was surpassed, within a lifetime, as new colonies, and newly settled regions, turned to sugar cultivation – and slave labor. In 1750, 150,000 tons of sugar left the slave colonies. On the eve of the American War of Independence it stood at 200,000 tons (90% of it coming from the Caribbean). This huge expansion in sugar production was not due to new systems of cultivation, or of production. It was a result of the rapid expansion into new sugar lands. And that meant a need for ever more African slaves.

The fate of the Africans involved – their torments on the Atlantic slave ships, their wretched health and difficulties as they adjusted (or failed to adjust) to the new environment and work in the first years (the years of greatest mortality and sickness among newly imported Africans) – forms the grotesque backcloth to this entire story. The starkest yet most revealing evidence is the crude data. Although some 11+ million Africans stepped ashore from the slave ships, more than one million had not survived the Atlantic crossing. For the survivors, the years that followed were years of suffering – that ‘time on the cross’ most vividly etched on popular imagination (in part because the slaves' anguish became the core of fierce abolitionist agitation in print, and in politics from the late 18th century). Graphic images of slave distress became an obscene caricature in an expansive illustrative culture designed to foster hostility to slavery in all its forms. Yet the misery of the slaves stood in stark contrast to the fruits of their labor, most strikingly in the wealth and luxury of the most successful planters and slave traders. Of course, not all planters were successful, and many lived more humble lives than is often imagined. Even the prosperous could be brought down, without warning, by natural disaster, a twist of economic circumstance, or warfare. Still, the richest and most powerful, owning an assortment of estates and possessing hundreds, often thousands, of slaves, lived in considerable material splendor. Wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice they were able, in the most spectacular cases, to return ‘home’ to Europe and live in a style which befitted their wealth and status (though it often belied their humble origins). These were the ‘sugar barons’ and ‘plantocracy,’ able to hold their own in the socially competitive world of home-grown aristocrats and Indian nabobs. Often the object of derision and scorn by those to whose company they aspired, the émigré planters surrounded themselves with the lavish trappings of 18th-century wealth and splendor, often in custom-built stately homes and grand rural retreats which stood in landscaped gardens and grounds, and which they filled with treasures and paintings. They were paragons of taste and wealth. But it came courtesy of African sweat on the sugar lands.7

Britain's major slave ports – London, Bristol, Liverpool, and Glasgow – were dotted with grand homes belonging to returned planters, but especially to merchants, traders, and shippers involved in the slave business.8 Yet it was the West Indians who caught the eye, living up, as they did, to the popular phrase, ‘As wealthy as a West Indian.’ The most prosperous planters established a reputation for conspicuous wealth and consumption. The family of Edwin Lascelles, who had once been modest farmers in North Yorkshire, acquired fabulous riches in the Caribbean, as traders, contractors to the Royal Navy, merchants, money-lenders, and finally planters, mainly in Barbados but also on other islands. Edwin Lascelles crowned the family fortunes by building Harewood House between Leeds and Harrogate. The family's status was confirmed when Edwin was made Baron Harewood.9 A similar pattern of striking opulence can be seen wherever sugar grandees put down local roots: the Codringtons of Barbados, for example, developed an estate at Dodington in Gloucester. But the grandest – and most famous by far – were the Beckfords.10 A family of Jamaican planters, they returned ‘home’ to move in high political circles and display their fabulous wealth in their lavish home at Fonthill Splendens. The Beckfords were friends to Prime Ministers, and were collectors on a grand scale, as well as hosts of legendary dinner parties. They also spawned eccentricities and eye-catching excess at home and abroad. By the time slavery was ended, the Beckford fortunes had also disappeared: swallowed by mad, spendthrift recklessness.

Others were more cautious, buttressing their British positions by political power in parliament – their access to plentiful cash guaranteed the purchase of parliamentary seats and hence political sway. By 1765, no fewer than forty MPs were ‘West Indians,’ and were able to secure and promote the interests of the slave-based sugar lobby against all-comers. Until, that is, they were outmaneuvered and out-gunned, quite suddenly, by the abolitionists in the last twenty years of the 18th century. Prior to that, the West India lobby ensured that the interests of those producing slave-grown commodities (and those providing the vital supplies of African slaves) remained a prime concern in the corridors of power in London.

It was relatively easy for the West India lobby to persuade London's political elites of the importance of the slave system. They had only to point to the crowded British quaysides, packed with vessels heading for, or returning from, West Africa and the slave colonies. In the background was a supporting chorus of financial interests, of money-lending and insurance, which underpinned everything, and a huge array of industries and manufacture which sustained Britain massive maritime fleet, and which filled outbound vessels with goods and equipment for sale and barter on the African coast and in the plantation colonies of the Americas. Here, by the mid-18th century, was a commercial cornucopia, the benefits of which seemed unchallengeable. Everyone seemed to benefit, from the rough deck hands manning the slave ships, through the workers constructing and sustaining the ships and their cargoes, right up to the greatest sugar planters returning with their extremes of wealth. Yet behind it all, out of sight and largely out of mind, lay the armies of Africans, 5,000 miles distant, literally over the horizon, toiling to make it all possible.

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Though slaves in the Americas produced a range of commodities for export, sugar dominated, at first. It employed the largest numbers of Africans, who lived and worked in the largest slave concentrations. Sugar was the cause and occasion of some of the harshest of working conditions on slave plantations. And it was sugar, directly and indirectly, that dominated the shipping patterns to and from the Caribbean and Brazil. But why had sugar become so dominant? What was so special – distinctive – about sugar?

The taste for cane sugar began as a luxury among the rich. Initially it often took the form of fashionable and elaborate creations, molded and shaped into impressive decorative forms for the tables of rulers and the wealthy. Extravagant carvings and ornate displays shaped from sugar graced the homes and social worlds of elites. These ostentatious sugary exhibitions of wealth and power were also signs that the hosts and organizers had the wherewithal to acquire exotic sugar and transform it into fanciful objects for entertainment and taste.11

From the very first, there was a stark, glaring contrast between the lives of African slaves on the sugar plantations and the extravagance of early sugar consumption which was at its most elaborate – outrageous even – among Europe's monarchs and rulers. In 1549 a feast given by Mary of Hungary in honor of Philip II included sculptures of deer, boar, birds, fish, and fruit – all fashioned from sugar. More elaborate still, in 1566 when Maria de Aviz married the Duke of Parma, the city of Antwerp gave her a gift of 3,000 sugar sculptures, which included whales, ships, and even a model of her new husband, fashioned from sugar. Courtly excesses across Europe made use of sugar to entertain, feed, and amuse the court and its guests. Queen Elizabeth – famed for her sweet (and rotten) tooth – was entertained to a ‘sugar banquet’ in 1591.12