Nature's Evil

Antwerp was the first centre for refining sugar, but later this ‘sweet trade’ switched to Bristol and Bordeaux. When the mines that had lured the conquistadors were exhausted, sugar became the main source of colonial wealth. The planters felled forests and imported slaves, taking over vast territories in South America, from Mexico to Paraguay, to grow sugar and other exotic commodities – indigo, tobacco, cotton, cocoa. These luxury items that were previously unknown in Europe contributed to the refined, urban way of life. Conspicuous and delicious signs of progress, they depended on the invisible – for the Europeans – labour of black slaves, on the massive use of force and on mounting inequality: on political evil.

The turning point in this story was the colonisation of Barbados, a little island five times smaller than modern-day Luxembourg. On Barbados, planters made fortunes within the course of one generation; in 1666 it cost seventeen times more to buy a plantation there than it had in 1643. Specialisation secured growth, and the whole economy focused on the monoculture of sugar. In exchange, England supplied the island with slaves, food and goods. The much larger island of Jamaica and other Antillean islands followed in Barbados’s footsteps. France developed sugar production on Saint-Domingue, Martinique and Guadeloupe. By the beginning of the seventeenth century the importation of sugar had already outstripped that of tobacco: the demand for sugar grew faster. A sixteenth-century German traveller who had an audience with Elizabeth I noted her sparkling eyes and bad teeth, which, he wrote, were characteristic of all English people – they ate too much sugar. The Spanish, who had discovered sugar earlier, were astonished that the English added it to everything, even wine and meat. Transportation and security services kept pace with the trade. Convoys from the Royal Navy escorted the commercial ships in their transatlantic voyages. By 1675 a fleet of 400 ships sailed between the West Indies and the British Isles; at this point the sugar imported into England exceeded the total of all other colonial goods. In 1731 the sailors of the Royal Navy received a half-pint daily tot of rum; by the end of the century this ration had doubled. By 1750 the poorest agricultural labourers in England were drinking tea with sugar. Even in English almshouses the old men and women each received 23 lb of sugar per year. In 1775 the average Englishman consumed ten times more sugar than the average Frenchman. Sugar had turned from a rare oriental luxury into an item of mass consumption – a working man’s treat. 3

Innovation and labour have created myriad goods made from non-addictive materials such as salt. But the wealth of this world relied on narcotic commodities such as sugar. There was something sugary and addictive in the baroque forms of the European architecture of this period. Commerce is sweet, capital fruitful, money slavery – there was no time in history when these truths were so clear. For getting people hooked on non-stop consumption, only petroleum compares in toxicity to sugar and other soft drugs. By supplying the body with a great number of easily absorbed calories, sugar and its derivatives blunt the appetite and take the place of protein-rich foods. The profits from sugar, tobacco, tea, cocoa and coffee stimulated the slave trade, the annexation of colonies and the engagement in wars. They created millions of ‘ghost acres’ which were added to the limited territory of the Old World. They also encouraged rural families to abandon the ‘idiocy of rural life’ and shaped the familiar features of modernity – the division of labour, mass consumption, urbanisation and a nine-to-five culture. Grain formed the peasantry; textiles made the proletariat. The bourgeoisie was created by tea and sugar.

Islands in the ocean

The cluster of sugar-producing Caribbean islands known as the West Indies inspired fierce rivalry among the European empires. Small in size, these islands were immensely profitable. By the end of the seventeenth century, English trade produced an annual revenue of £2 million sterling, about half of which came from the West Indies. A century later, William Pitt estimated the annual revenue from plantations in the West Indies at £4 million and the revenue from all other colonies at £1 million. Dalby Thomas, a slave trader and popular author, believed that every worker, black or white, on the sugar islands of the West Indies produced as much value as 130 workers in the British Isles. Before the American Revolution the revenue of the British West Indies was twice that of British America. The revenue from these tiny islands greatly exceeded the income from the Indian subcontinent. Adam Smith wrote without surprise: ‘The profits of a sugar-plantation in any of our West Indian colonies are generally much greater than those of any other cultivation that is known either in Europe or America.’ 4