Nature's Evil

In 1791, a slave rebellion began in Saint-Domingue (Haiti). Black slaves and free mulattos joined forces in their hatred of the sugar planters. After many battles, Haiti declared independence from France in 1804. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who was born a slave, became Jacques I, emperor of Haiti. The extraordinary news about the revolution led by black slaves was a burning topic of discussion in the coffeehouses of Europe. After reading the newspaper reports from Saint-Domingue, a Prussian professor of philosophy, G. W. F. Hegel, formulated his master–slave dialectic, which sowed the seeds of the later revolutions. 11 Dessalines abolished slavery, but he could not outlaw racism. He massacred several thousand whites, but the mulattos continued to exploit the blacks. Soon a new uprising began and Dessalines was assassinated. Dividing the land into smallholdings, the former slaves destroyed the hateful plantations. The slaves became peasant farmers, but the country had to pay vast sums of compensation to France. Formerly the most profitable of the French colonies, Haiti became one of the poorest states in the world.

The reason for the ultimate fall of sugar prices was a scientific discovery that helped produce a cheap, widely available alternative to cane. Andreas Sigismund Marggraf was the son of a Berlin apothecary who studied metals in the spirit of the old alchemist tradition. In 1747, he discovered that sugar could be obtained from beetroot juice. The taste was identical, but the sugar content was low, less than 2 per cent. Hoping to fill a hole in his budget, Frederick II ordered his scientists to breed new kinds of beet, and this was duly achieved: another Berliner, the Huguenot Franz Karl Achard, bred a commercially viable beet plant. Napoleon also supported such experiments: France ran short of sugar because of the revolution in Saint-Domingue and then again during the British naval blockade. In 1811 Napoleon obliged all the departments in France to allocate land to growing sugar beet and promised subsidies for the sugar-processing factories. Selective breeding raised the sugar content of the beet to 20 per cent, equalling cane. Now sugar beet could be grown on almost any field in Europe. After 1815, two competing sugar markets arose in France, the local and the colonial. Beet and cane each had their own lobby in Parliament. The future prime minister François Guizot, an Anglophile and a Calvinist, had such sympathy for the colonies that in 1843 he proposed an outright ban on growing sugar beet. But Napoleon III spoke in favour of sugar beet and against cane. 12 There was a certain logic in these swings of policy: the more nationalistic and anti-British the leader, the greater the enthusiasm for sugar beet. Slavery was abolished in the English plantations in 1833. After the revolution of 1848, Guizot stood down and slavery was abolished on the French islands. With free trade, sugar cane was no competition for sugar beet. In England the Navigation Acts were repealed in 1849; they had remained in force for almost 200 years, pumping capital from the colonies to the British Isles.

But sugar is still with us. In fact, it is a biochemical battery that stores the sun’s energy with extraordinary efficiency. Today 1 acre of subtropical land produces 8 million calories from sugar cane; to get the same number of calories from potatoes would take 4 acres, from wheat, about 10 acres and, from beef, as much as 135 acres. The global consumption of sugar per capita continues to grow.

Opium

The milky latex that seeps out of the unripe seed capsules of the poppy contains alkaloids which work on the human nervous system. These give a feeling of well-being and create dependency. The more one uses this drug, the more one wants it. People get more pleasure out of using it in the company of other users, so opium use spreads like an epidemic. The consumption of increasingly high doses of opium leads to loss of appetite, apathy and degradation – the user loses interest in anything other than opium.