Chapter 3: The Sugar Revolution
The disastrous 17th century was a ugly environment for mankind, and the people who survived and prospered in it were correspondingly tough and ruthless. But if that brutality was suited to war, conquest, looting and slavery, it needed a particular set of technological demands to shape that mayhem into the global system linking finance the chattel slavery practiced in the West Indies.
Sugar production demanded that technology.
It is natural to envisage Barbados slavemasters whipping chattel slaves into hard, but brainless, toil. The very words ‘slave-labour’ conjure up only such work. Whilst that image fits much of the slavery Africans were put to in the Americas, where growing and harvesting cotton and tobacco is and was relatively simple backbreaking work, it was never adequate to describe growing and refining sugar.
Every stage of the sugar industry is tricky, easier to mess up than to complete successfully. Matthew Parker summarizes in ‘The Sugar Barons’:
‘This was an immensely sophisticated production unit for the seventeenth century, at a time when agriculture at home in England remained hidebound and moribund.’ The first British sugar-pioneers in the 1640s ‘mastered a process that has more in common with modern assembly lines than any sort of farming carried out in Europe at that time, and required a labour force much more complex than, for example, an English estate’.
[For details of the sugar-producing process I am heavily indebted to Matthew Parker’s book, which I heartily recommend.]
What Barbados’ sugar barons achieved in the 17th century was nothing less than an agro/industrial revolution, and it was manned largely by slaves at all levels of the production process.
Planting, growing and harvesting sugar cane in Barbados fits the notion of slave-labour well enough. Problems need to be overcome which can be dealt with only through back-breaking labour, of which the first and most perennially troubling was Barbados’s astonishing fertility. Stick almost any plant in Barbados soil and watch it grow. If the national symbol of Hong Kong ought to be the jackhammer, the symbol of Barbados is the strimmer. Bajans strim obsessively, because if they don’t, within days you’ve got long untidy grass, within weeks the false tamarinds are shooting up, and within a year, it’s back to impenetrable scrubland best cleared using a bulldozer. Leave it any longer, and the jungle sees its opportunity.
The speed and density of growth is unlike anything Europeans could have imagined.
The early years of Barbados saw the mainly white indentured servants attempting to subdue the landscape, clearing enough space to grow simple crops such as tobacco, cotton and subsistence foods. Initially that meant clearing strips of jungle around the coast, using the cut timber to build shelter. But the hard work of cutting down the jungle gave way in the interior to simply burning it down: the available labour force (mainly white, often drunk) had neither the numbers, nor the inclination, to do otherwise.
Tobacco and cotton was simple agriculture, but the hard work scarcely kept the Barbados colony alive. It was not until the early 1640s that adventurers such as James Drax got hold of sugar-industry technology, courtesy of Dutch slave-owing industrialists in Brazil, whose operations were then breaking down through a combination of conflicts with Brazil’s Portuguese colonists, poor harvests and general agricultural agitation.
The Dutch, then, were quite happy to teach the technology to Drax in the hope of extending acreage under sugar cane, to feed their merchant marine, and the world’s leading sugar refineries back in Holland. So they also arranged financing for this technology transfer.
Even so, Drax rapidly discovered that growing and refining sugar was no simple task. At first, he harvested too early and made such a mess of subsequent manufacture that the results were barely worth shipping to London.
Drax’s initial mistake was to plant his cane vertically in the ground. Certainly, they shot up, but such rapid growth was made at the expense of a roots system that would allow the canes to survive Barbados’ winds. To develop enough roots, the canes had to be planted horizontally, in trenches. Then the immediate task was to counter the equally enthusiastic growth of weeds, and the voracious appetite of rats for the sweet sugar-laden pith they discovered in the canes. As the soil became exhausted, the soil also needed fertilizing heavily with whatever could be found (dung usually).
Planting and looking after the canes was basic agricultural work enough, back-breaking and mind-numbing at best, but the pace quickened very sharply during harvest, for several reasons not seen in European agriculture. Assuming that the planter judged the right time to harvest - and this remains a skill/judgement call rather than a science, with canes today harvested anything from around 15 months up to three years from planting - the canes had to be processed very rapidly. (It took Drax years of failure to judge correctly when to harvest).
The need then was to crush the canes as soon as possible, to extract the sweet juice from the pith. That meant getting the canes to the wind-powered crushing mill quickly. The crushing mill - of which hundreds still stand idle today all over Barbados - was a major capital expense for the planter. This capital expense in turn dictated that finance needed to be available, and that the cane plantation needed to be big enough to keep the mill profitably occupied. It implies, in other words, a connection to international markets, and to scale, greater than was required for cotton or tobacco. Chattel slaves would feed the cane into the crushers: hard work which produced the inevitable crop of injuries, maimings and deaths.
Once the juice had been extracted, it again needed to be processed quickly, or it would start to ferment. The refining process was recognizably industrial: the juice was boiled down and refined in a succession of copper kettles or pans. At the bottom of the process, the largest boiling pan would separate the initial crop of impurities, before the liquid was transferred to the next, slightly smaller, and slightly hotter, kettle. And so on. With each successive boiling impurities were lost and the sugary liquid refined and concentrated as the heat intensified. This industrial process of repeated boilings was both skilled and dangerous, and the chattel slaves doing the work can be seen as skilled technicians rather than whipped manual labourers.
The result of these multiple boilings was not yet sugar, but rather a ‘thick, ropey and dark brown’ syrup. At this point, the head boiler added quicklime in order to start that liquid breaking into crystals. Barbados is a limestone island, so quicklime was easy to produce, but knowing just how much needed to add, and when, was a skill no sugar-producer could do without. Again, the head-boiler was a highly skilled position, demanding knowledge and judgement won only by experience.
Still the process was not complete: what had been produced so far was a mixture of raw brown sugar called muscovado, and a liquid called molasses. This mixture was then stored in earthernware pots for up to a month, allowing the molasses to drain away. The remaining brown sugar would then be dried in the sun before being packed for shipping.
But white sugar sold better in London than brown sugar, and to achieve that a further process of ‘claying’ was developed, in which the brown sugar was set in a sugar mould smeared with moist clay. As water percolated through the clay, it carried away impurities. Done multiple times, the brown sugar bled out eventually into white.
Barbados’s sugar industry, from the 1640s onwards, was something quite new to the British world. It demanded heavy capital investment, available initially from Amsterdam, and then increasingly from London. That capital investment also demanded scale - the average size of a Barbados plantation practically doubled in 1640-50s. It demanded not only a disciplined, regular (and cheap) manual labour force, but also a clear demarcation between skilled and non-skilled jobs. It demanded urgent and efficient logistics and coordination between all the processes of production. And then global shipping.
It also demanded term-finance and trade-finance because the production process from cane-planting to arrival at market could easily be two years or more. And that, in turn, demanded assets upon which finance could be secured. And since approximately a third of the assets included on a plantation’s balance sheet were human slaves, that implied the development of not merely slavery, but chattel-slavery in which humans could not only be worked to death, but could be mortgaged too.
Apologists for Britain’s West Indian slavery are stress that slavery has been a common feature of mankind since records began. The crime of West Indian slavery is therefore not unique, nor indeed the worst seen in recent or contemporary history. And that is true: the scale of Portuguese African slavery in Brazil is truly of an altogether different scale and persistence.
But what this ignores is the way in which for the first time, chattel slavery became the lynch-pin of international finance, of national and government finance, and ultimately of global power-relations. The development from what one might call ‘personal slavery’ to internationally-financed ‘chattel slavery’ is crucial and a unique aspect of the emerging agricultural/industrial revolution erupting in Britain. It was uniquely productive, and, I think, Britain’s unique contribution to the history of slavery.