Nature's Evil

The anthropologist Sydney Mintz showed that the sugar plantation was a pre-industrial factory, which combined the field and the processing facility into a single enterprise. These large plantations, with up to 500 slaves on each, were organised differently from arable farms. They consisted of a series of specialised premises, and the product went from one to another as if on a conveyor belt. Hundreds of slaves worked in the fields while a minimum of twenty-five people, black and white, worked on the processing. While the former used only their machetes, the latter operated equipment that cost thousands of pounds. As in a factory, there was a division of labour; a worker didn’t own his tools and work was subject to a schedule. However, the work rhythm was defined by nature – by the crop’s tendency to spoil quickly and by dependence on the weather for all stages of production.

As with many factories, the economy of scale was crucially important here. The shift from tobacco to sugar entailed the enlargement of plantations and the ruin of many farmers. Small plantations were uneconomic; the need for rapid processing meant that a large workforce was needed. The production process didn’t involve deep specialisation as was the case with grain, where the farmer owned the field and the miller owned the mill. Unlike grain, the raw cane was unsuitable for transportation and needed primary processing on the spot. The natural characteristics of a raw material not only defined the biology of its cultivation and the chemistry of its processing – they also shaped the institutions that specialised in it. Europe believed that it was developing the colonial world in its own image, spreading farming skills to the Americas and the Indias. In fact, the colonies, with their commercial factorias and specialised slave labour, purged of tradition and obedient to instrumental rationality, were true ‘laboratories of modernity’.

Unlike the proto-industrial treatment of sugar and cotton, the primary processing of tobacco involved typical agricultural processes: harvesting, cleaning, drying, packing. When the first colonists grew tobacco on smallholdings in the West Indies, their workforces were not slaves but hired hands. Then tobacco growing was introduced in Virginia. Tobacco needed more care and skill than sugar, was profitable on smaller plantations, and did not need massive processing facilities close to the fields. Tobacco from different plantations had brand names, like wines from different estates. The price reflected quality, and small farms did well out of this system. Conversely, sugar from different plantations was mixed together. The sugar trade developed the hierarchical system of ‘sorts’, which was later adopted by cotton and then oil traders. In a word, tobacco is a branded commodity , while sugar is a sorted commodity .

Tea had been known in the West since the beginning of the seventeenth century. It was used as a medicine, and the market was small. Later, people started drinking tea with sugar – a combination that became the most successful marketing ploy in history. The Dutch imported tea from India, but in the middle of the eighteenth century the Europeans succeeded in opening up Canton for trade. British and Dutch traders competed there along with the French, the Swedes and the Danes. The price of tea fell tenfold, and the consumption of tea per capita in England increased 400 times over a century. The influx of sugar from the Western Atlantic and tea from the Pacific met and mingled on the sceptred isle. With imperial elegance, this encounter took place at the exact midpoint – in the millions of cups served by British ladies during the daily ritual of high tea, a pale imitation of the Japanese tea ceremony, just as the tea cups were an imitation of Chinese porcelain. But the tea and sugar were real, as were the cotton tablecloths, and the tobacco and port which were the male version of the ceremony.