Nature's Evil

Holland and France had their own mercantile legislation, but their trade regimes were not as consistent as that in England. The French colonies, such as Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe, were producing sugar more cheaply, using fewer slaves and less land per sack. The French legislation in the islands, based on the Code Noir established by Louis XIV, was more humane than the English. The French planters weren’t protected by a group monopoly; they had to compete among themselves, which kept prices low and focused on productivity. Selling for half the price of the English product, French sugar conquered the European markets. All this led to the Seven Years’ War, which ended in an English victory. But the outcome was paradoxical. The English seized the big sugar islands of French Guadeloupe and Spanish Cuba but did not annexe them: this would have caused sugar prices to crash. Instead, the English preferred French Canada and Spanish Florida. The control over prices was more important than an increase in sales. Nevertheless, sugar prices fell because of competition with Brazil and the record growth in the number of plantations on Jamaica. The planters were the first to learn an important lesson of capitalism: luxury items generate profit, but only mass consumption brings super-profits.

From being a luxury, sugar became an everyday item. Without it there would be no rum, no jam, no puddings or cakes. The per capita consumption of sugar in England grew more quickly than the consumption of bread or meat. According to Sidney Mintz, 8 in the eighteenth century the annual consumption of sugar increased from 4 to 18 lbs per person. Millions of people were now working in factories, and a cup of tea with sugar replaced their customary ration of gin and beer. In poor families people derived a fifth of their energy calories from sugar. As with alcohol, people feel they can’t have too much sugar: the more you eat, the more you want. Together with oriental luxuries, which had come down in price dramatically in the eighteenth century – porcelain cups, cotton tablecloths, soft furnishings – sugar, tea and coffee played a leading role in shaping the new way of life. Its substance was social pleasures, its output the public sphere, its first locations the coffeehouse and the club. The first London coffeehouse was opened by a Turkish merchant in 1652; soon coffeehouses and tea shops spread across Europe. In eighteenth-century London, chocolate clubs became fashionable. These were pricey establishments with a closed membership, and they did not admit women. Aristocrats met there to play cards and sneer at the neighbouring coffeehouses, where anyone could enter to drink coffee, read newspapers and engage in debates. In 1777, David Hume wrote: ‘An author is little to be valued, who tells us nothing but what we can learn from every coffee-house conversation.’ 9 Two hundred years later, his fellow philosopher Jürgen Habermas linked the history of the Western public sphere with the development of coffeehouses. 10

But the most popular drink was tea, always with sugar. In 1840 the British East India Company was the biggest employer in the empire. It harvested tea from 2 million acres in India, employing a million people in this activity. Everyone drank tea, from the royal family to the poorest peasants. Obviously, the cheaper the quality of tea, the more the drink became just a hot sugar solution. Social historians believe that the quality of the English diet deteriorated at this time; there was a shortage of bread, wages had not risen in decades, and millions of people were short of protein and calories. Calories from sugar were cheaper than calories from bread, and much cheaper than calories from milk. Unable to earn their living by farming, people migrated to the towns, where their wages would allow them to drink tea with sugar.

Aftertaste