Nature's Evil

The century of the Enlightenment enthusiastically embraced these drugs. Initially exotic and luxurious, they became affordable items of mass consumption. They increased sociability, filled the stomach, created dependency, gave rise to profit and, usually, escaped the censure of church and state. 5 While opium in England remained the preserve of libertines, tea with sugar, a pinch of tobacco, or a cup of coffee or chocolate were available to everyone. Sugar was at the core of this addictive bundle. Thomas Dalby openly advised the colonies of the American South to follow the example of the West Indies rather than New England: they just needed to produce more sugar and import more slaves. However, sugar cane didn’t thrive in the continental colonies – even in Louisiana the winters were too cold. In that sweet era, the main function of America was to keep the West Indies supplied. On the islands where black slaves produced white sugar, there was no spare land available to grow food crops. The mainland colonies supplied the sugar islands with all the salt fish they needed and most of the oats, grain and flour, lumber, horses and sheep. The planters paid the American farmers, fishermen and blacksmiths with sugar, rum and molasses. Launching unparalleled capital flows from their tiny territories, the sugar islands financed the American colonies, the English textile industry and the British Royal Navy.

While enjoying their good fortune, the West Indies planters yearned to return to England. There they bought London townhouses or country estates from the old aristocracy. Many a stately home in England and Scotland, with its classical portico, ceremonial staircase and ballroom, was built by a sugar plantation owner. Public schools such as Harrow and Eton were full of pupils from the West Indies. Later these children, some of them the descendants of pirates or convicts, married into the aristocracy. They became members of parliament, ministers, mayors. When King George III came across a carriage that was grander than his own, he said to his prime minister, ‘Sugar, sugar eh? … how are the duties, eh Pitt, how are the duties?’ 6 The wealthiest sugar producers managed their plantations in absentia: they lived in England and appointed bailiffs, sending them their written instructions by mail. One of these fortunate men was William Beckford, a grandson of a governor of Jamaica. Known as the richest subject of the British crown, Beckford was elected Lord Mayor of London twice. John Gladstone, a Scottish merchant and member of Parliament, owned a company in Liverpool which traded sugar and slaves with the West Indies, hemp with Russia, cotton with India and grain with the American colonies. The owner of several plantations in Jamaica, he continued to live in Liverpool and later returned to Scotland, where he bought a huge estate. His son became prime minister of England. As Montesquieu said, this really was ‘la commerce douce’ – sweet trade.

It was the sugar trade that engendered the policy and practice of British mercantilism. * In accordance with the Navigation Acts, all goods had to be transported on British ships; colonies could trade in raw materials with each other but could not export them; they could only buy manufactured goods produced in England; and no industry could develop in the colonies apart from the primary processing of raw materials. Thus the mercantile regime underwrote the supply of sugar to the metropole, guaranteed the markets for manufactured goods in the colonies, created profits for the merchants and supported the commercial fleet. The mercantile regime drew a sharp distinction between manufactured goods and raw materials, linking these economic categories to the political difference between the colonies and the metropole: raw materials are sourced in the colonies, goods are manufactured in the metropole, and that is how it must ever be. Members of the British parliament openly cited ‘the West India interest’ in their speeches. On the eve of the Seven Years’ War there were fifty to sixty votes representing this interest, and they supported the mercantile laws and the sugar monopoly. 7 William Pitt the elder, the Whig leader and prime minister, fought honourably for the privileges of the West Indies; William Beckford was his friend and financial sponsor.