Sugar and the New World
The Portuguese introduced sugarcane to Madeira shortly after its colonisation in the early 1420s, and it rapidly became the mainstay of the island’s economy. By 1500, Madeira was the largest sugar exporter in the world.
Processing the sugar was extremely labour intensive and this led the Portuguese to use slave labour alongside paid workers. São Tome, off Guinea, also became an important producer, again using African slave labour. Sugarcane was introduced to the new Portuguese Brazilian colony in the early sixteenth century, with the first plantation established in 1518.Sugarcane was also first cultivated in the Canary Islands in the fifteenth century following conquest by the Spanish. Meanwhile, Christopher Columbus had taken sugarcane samples with him, obtained from the Canaries on his second voyage to the Americas in 1493. In his settlement of La Isabella (in the modern Dominican Republic) he reported back to the Spanish king and queen that crops brought along on the journey grew very well in the new land, and this included sugarcane, which rooted and grew well – ‘neither is it different with the sugar-canes according to the manner in which some few that were planted have grown’.24
From these beginnings the sugarcane industry developed rapidly. It spread through the Caribbean Islands – but the native workers, enslaved by the Spanish, were ill-suited to that kind of work and succumbed to disease, dying at horrific rates. A new labour force was needed, and so the Spanish and Portuguese expanded what they had already started to do, and brought in vast numbers of slaves from Africa. Over a period of 400 years, some 12 million Africans were abducted and enslaved in the Americas.
Hispaniola was the first of the ‘sugar islands’, followed by Cuba, Jamaica and Puerto Rico in the 1520s.
It wasn’t long before the other major colonial powers joined the fray.
The Dutch established a colony at Surinam in the seventeenth century and the French in neighbouring Cayenne/French Guiana. Dutch attempts to seize Brazil were finally repulsed by the Portuguese in 1654. The Dutch also established settlements on several Caribbean islands. The French settled Martinique and Guadeloupe in 1635, and later Grenada and Dominica. The British, meanwhile, had settled a number of islands initially to prey on Spanish shipping, later as permanent settlements – St Kitts (1623), Barbados (1627), Nevis (1628), Antigua (1632), Anguilla (1650) and then in 1655, the jewel in the crown, Jamaica. Barbuda (1666), then Montserrat followed and later the Windward Islands, Turks and Caicos, etc. In practice, the European colonial period was extremely complicated, with numerous islands changing hands multiple times due to skirmishes, wars and political machinations. The common factor, however, was sugar, which had become the dominant crop in the seventeenth century, and it was feeding a growing and seemingly insatiable demand in Europe. From the mid-eighteenth century, sugar became Britain’s most valuable import and had huge value throughout Europe as it passed from being a luxury item to a necessity.
The diffusion of sugarcane through the Old and New Worlds.
In 1807, Britain formally abolished the slave trade (but not slavery); however, the practice continued in the British West Indies until 1834, the French colonies until 1848, and Brazil until 1888. The winding down of the slave trade coincided with the Industrial Revolution, which encouraged better farming methods and improved mills, mechanisation, etc., which had a number of effects. Firstly, the price of sugar came down from 10d per lb in the early 1800s to around 2d per lb at the end of the nineteenth century. Secondly, the greater availability and lower price meant that a far greater proportion of the population, of all classes, was consuming it.
It often accompanied the new imports of tea and coffee, which had also caught on throughout Europe.Another related product which saw a huge increase in popularity was rum. Despite some evidence of rum usage in ancient times, the rum that we know today originated in the Caribbean in the seventeenth century, when it was discovered that the molasses by-product of sugar refining could be fermented and distilled to produce an alcoholic drink. It quickly became popular in North America, and with the British – especially the Royal Navy, which allowed sailors a daily rum ration (or ‘tot’), a practice which continued until 1970.
While sugarcane planting was rapidly developing in the Caribbean, in India, where it had been cultivated for many hundreds of years, there was little mention of it in the literature of the early colonialists. However, sugar demand in Europe at that time could be met by more local sources. In the late sixteenth century, van Linschoten discussed it thus: ‘There are also all over India many Sugar Canes in all places, and in great numbers, but not much esteemed of: & all along the coast of Malabare there are many thicke Reeds, specially on the coast of Choramandel.’25 He went on to describe it as being much used and esteemed in Persia and Arabia. He also described a curious treatment: ‘The Indians use it against the payne in their privie members, or such like secret diseases.’ It is possible that van Linschoten (and perhaps earlier writers) was confusing his sugarcane with a species of bamboo, some of which have young shoots with sweet interiors; they both belong to the same botanical family.
Gerard was a contemporary of van Linschoten. He observed that ‘the Cane itself … is not hollow as the other Canes or Reedes are; but full, and stuffed with a spungious substance in taste exceeding sweete’.26 By this time it was growing in many places in Europe – Spain, Portugal, Sardinia, Provence, North Africa, the Canary Islands, Madeira, the East and West Indies, etc.
Gerard’s attempt to grow it in his London garden failed (‘the coldnes of our Clymate made an end of mine’). From the sugar was made ‘infinite confections, confectures, sirupes, and such like, as also preserving and conserving of sundrie fruits, herbes and flowres’.The ‘infinite confections’ that Gerard mentioned was hardly an understatement. Sugar sculptures, already perfected by the Arabs in medieval times, became a feature of European aristocratic banquets. They appeared at court ceremonies and wedding feasts, e.g. that of Ercole I d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, in 1473, at which there was a procession of 100 large plates bearing sugar confections such as castles, columns of Hercules, birds, animals, etc.27 The sculpted objects were known as ‘trionfi’ (pl.), meaning ‘triumphant processions’, and later fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian examples were increasingly elaborate. They were also popular in other European countries, including England. Elizabeth I was famously fond of sugar, to the extent that she is reputed to have used it to clean her teeth (which unsurprisingly became rotten and black). She would then surely have been impressed by the show put on by Edward Seymour, 1st Earl of Hertford, during her Progress of 1591 at Elvetham in Hampshire, which featured four days of sumptuous entertainment and a banquet with all kinds of sugary delights.
Sugar beet is a cultivar of the common beet, Beta vulgaris, that was developed in the eighteenth century. The first factory opened in Poland in 1801 and the new beet spread to other European countries, including France. Napoleon was a firm supporter of its cultivation as it provided an alternative to cane sugar, which was in danger of becoming unavailable due to the English blockades imposed at that time.28 By the late nineteenth century, sugar beet was being cultivated in America and ultimately thrived, as it did in many temperate climates across the globe. The Nazis were big advocates of the crop as it contributed to their domestic self-sufficiency. Today, sugar beet provides some 20 per cent of global sugar production – the rest is still from cane. Global sugar consumption is enormous – around 176 million tons – with average consumption per person in the order of 24 kg/year (but much higher in some developed countries).29
Sugar crystals. (Umberto Salvagnin) 9
Diverse Spices
Khan El-Khallili Spice Market, Cairo, Egypt. (Author)