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Relationship of slavery to sugar production
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The cultivation of sugar was a lucrative enterprise as a result of the increased in sugar consumption in Europe. The increased demand for Barbadian sugar on the English market prompted planters with largest plantations to devote more than 80% of their estates to the production of sugar. As a result, Barbados and its planter class imported cheese, clothing, shoes, boots, butter, nags and other goods to sustain the plantation population. These commodities were manufactured at English factories and transported on English merchant vessels. Richard Ligon, a Barbados resident, reported that at least 100 ships entered Barbados yearly and brought tools for tradesmen, locks, knives, cloth, olives, capers, linen, swords, timbers, steel and other goods. …show more content…
English factories exported massive quantity of commodities to Barbados and West Africa on yearly basis. On July 23, 1653, during a council meeting at Whitehall, the council granted permission for a number of desired good to be exported annually to Barbados. The list included “12,000 doz. of shoes, there being at least 25,000 Christians in the island; shirts, drawers, caps, arms, ammunition, horses, tools and implements, all sorts of provisions and liquors.” The annual exports of goods are likely to have increased as the number of slaves increased in Barbados. In addition to these goods, planters imported a number of horses, ammunition, arms, pistols, gun powder, medicine, cheese, and butter per annum from …show more content…
The sugar cultivation created a demand for labor. Planters, though, spent money importing goods to maintain the plantation workforce, in the grand scheme of things; they still earned higher and steadier returns on sugar production because of the “unfree” labor of African slaves. When taken into account the cost and the amount of servants it would have required to maintain a successful sugar production operation, it would have been nearly impossible for planters to generate the amount of wealth they did in the decades following the introduction of sugar in
Sugar plantations have a field where sugar cane stalks are cut and grown and then there are boiling house where sugar cane stalks are crushed and boiled which is all runned by slave labor. Because slaves planted the cane stalks, harvested sugar stalks, crushed them, and boiled the sugar stalks sugar was made(8). According to David richardson the slave Trade, Sugar, and British Economic growth, “An Average purchase price of adult male slave on west African coast in 1748 was 14£ and in 1768 was 16£”(9a).Because slaves were so cheap slave traders may profit by, selling adult male slaves to sugar plantation owners for twice as much as they bought them in Africa. John Campbell Candid and Impartial Considerations on the Nature of the Sugar Trade describes the slaves as “so necessary Negro slaves purchased in Africa by English merchants”(11). Because africa trade slaves to English merchants Africans got things they did not
Slave labor is the final factor that drove the sugar trade and made it so successful. Slaves were the manual laborers on the plantations, doing the actual harvesting and boiling because the owner wasn’t there to do so (Document 8). Without the slaves working the farm, everything was pretty much useless. There is also a direct correlation between the number of slaves and the tons of sugar produced. This is shown in Document 9, where the island of Jamaica starts out with 45,000 slaves, and produces 4,782 tons of sugar. When the number of slaves increases by less than half to 74,500, the amount of sugar produced is more than tripled at 15, 972 tons. This clearly exhibits how slaves were essential to sugar
Firstly, the Caribbean smuggling was viewed as necessary and positive in the late eighteenth century. According to William Taggart, a British sailor traveling to testify at his smuggling trial in April 1760, the illegal transportation of goods from the Spanish port of Monte Christi led to general prosperity in the area, as there were only 100 relatively poor families and that the governor had full knowledge of this and demanded a tax of one silver Spanish coin. Taggart mi...
Slavery had a big impact on the market, but most of it was centered on the main slave crop, cotton. Primarily, the south regulated the cotton distribution because it was the main source of income in the south and conditions were nearly perfect for growing it. Cheap slave labor made it that much more profitable and it grew quickly as well. Since the development in textile industry in the north and in Britain, cotton became high in demand all over the world. The south at one point, was responsible for producing “eighty percent of the world’s cotton”. Even though the South had a “labor force of eighty-four percent working, it only produced nine percent of the nations manufactured goods”, (Davidson 246). This statistic shows that the South had an complete advantage in manpower since slavery wasn’t prohibited. In the rural South, it was easy for plantation owners to hire slaves to gather cotton be...
Cotton, once a very difficult and complicated crop to grow due to its many seeds stuck to its fibers, became a smooth, factory like performance with the aid of the cotton gin. Cotton was so important it made up two thirds of all 200 million dollars. The cotton gin, thanks to Eli Whitney helped remove the seeds faster, and not as painstakingly as before, this resulted in faster and greater production. A greater product wield means that the larger the workforce needed to grow in conjunction with the labor force, in this case reffered to as “King Cotton”. The greater workforce was slaves, and the invention of the cotton gin led to greatly expanding the amount of slavery in the South. The more slaves brought in to cultivate the cotton the more involucrate the Southern planters had become with agriculture, this strong attachment and dependency for cotton led to the South’s poor establishment of Industry. The total value of textiles from the South for example, made about 4.5 million dollars in the 1860’s, that may sound impressive but it is r...
“European and New England purchases soared from 720,000 bales in 1830, to 2.85 million bales in 1850, to nearly 5 million in 1860” (Yafa). Cotton production renewed the need for slavery after the tobacco market declined in the late 18th century (Locks pg737-747, Eichhorn). “The more cotton grown, the more slaves were needed to pick the crop. By 1860, on the eve of the American Civil War, cotton accounted for almost 60% of American exports, representing a total value of nearly $200 million a year”
Sugar in its many forms is as old as the Earth itself. It is a sweet tasting thing for which humans have a natural desire. However there is more to sugar than its sweet taste, rather cane sugar has been shown historically to have generated a complex process of cultural change altering the lives of all those it has touched, both the people who grew the commodity and those for whom it was grown. Suprisingly, for something so desireable knowledge of sugar cane spread vey slow. First found in Guinea and first farmed in India (sources vary on this), knowledge of it would only arrive in Europe thousands of years later. However, there is more to the history of sugar cane than a simple story of how something was adopted piecemeal into various cultures. Rather the history of sugar, with regards to this question, really only takes off with its introduction to Europe. First exposed to the delights of sugar cane during the crusades, Europeans quickly acquired a taste for this sweet substance. This essay is really a legacy of that introduction, as it is this event which foreshadowed the sugar related explosion of trade in slaves. Indeed Henry Hobhouse in `Seeds of Change' goes so far as to say that "Sugar was the first dependance upon which led Europeans to establish tropical mono cultures to satisfy their own addiction." I wish, then, to show the repurcussions of sugar's introduction into Europe and consequently into the New World, and outline especially that parallel between the suga...
Just as the proprietors had anticipated, many of the early settlers to this new colony were from Barbados. Actually, “. . . Carolina was the only seventeenth-century English colony to be settled principally by colonists from other colonies rather than from England” (Roark). Also these Barbadian immigrants brought their slaves with them to what later became known as South Carolina. While there were indentured servants in the colony, black slaves quickly outnumbered them unlike in the Chesapeake. Soon more than a fourth of the early settlers were slaves and as the colony grew in population, attracting more settlers from Barbados, the black population multiplied (Roark). “By 1700, slaves made up about half the population of Carolina” (Roark). These slaves were needed desperately in the fields to grow the colony’s main export: rice.
Sugar growers continue to benefit from favorable economic conditions provided by the U.S. government. Yet empirical data reveal a decrease in the aggregate support for sugar legislation in recent years. In 1978, there were 9,187 full or part owners of sugar cane and sugar beet farms, compared to 7,799 farms in 1987. The level of sugar subsidy allocated to the farmers, however, has increased and even favored certain sugar growers disproportionately over others. Such empirical findings suggests that politics, as much as economics, affect the level of sugar subsidy. This paper examines why an increasingly smaller number of sugar farmers receive a steadily larger government subsidy.
Despite being held at the bottom of the social pyramid for throughout colonial times, the labor of the colonies would prove to be far from useless. While vast, open land was turned into numerous plantations in the colonies by rich planters, the plantations could not purely be run by their owners, creating a great need for labor. This lack of labor would eventually be solved through the use of African slaves, but after the first shipment of slaves to Jamestown in 1619, few were purchased due to high prices for an extended amount of time. The planters, however, would be able to fulfill their need for labor through English indentured servants. Through the use of indentured servants, basically free labor was provided to land owners, while when freed, the servants would receive “freedom dues” which would help them become relevant parts of societies. Some of these freed indentured servants would then hire their own servants, creating a cycle of servants in the colonial economy. Later, indentured servants would give way to African slaves as the most efficient form of labor, a change that would revolutionize the colonies. While the use of indentured servants helped stimulate the colonial economy throughout the 1600s through labor and addition of new landowners, African slaves would be the thriving labor force in the economy in the 1700s, up to and through the American Revolution.
The Sugar Trade was drove by labor, land & consumer demand. In document 10, it tells how the British traded a little for a lot, this means the British traded finished goods that the African people didn't have, like powder, bullets, iron bars, copper bars, brass pans, british malt spirits etc… for slaves “but in the main, with very little that is not of our own growth or manufacture”.
The debate over the economic advantages of slavery in the South has raged ever since the first slaves began working in the cotton fields of the Southern States. Initially, the wealth of the New World was in the form of raw materials and agricultural goods such as cotton, sugar, and tobacco. The continuing demand for slaves' labor arose from the development of plantation agriculture, the long-term rise in prices and consumption of sugar, and the demand for miners. Not only did Africans represent skilled laborers, but also they were a relatively cheap resource to the South. Consequently, they were well suited for plantation agriculture. Whi...
In 1627 the first Englishmen landed on the uninhabited Caribbean island of Barbados. Twenty years later, Richard Ligon, a royalist fleeing political turmoil during the English Revolution of 1647-1649, arrived on the island and purchased half of a functioning sugar plantation with several colleagues. He remained on the island for three years, writing A True & Exact History after his return to
By the 1780’s Saint Domingue’s had the largest amount of slaves in the Caribbean. This large amount of slaves can be greatly attributed to the nearly 30,000 Africans imported to the colony between 1785-1790 (Beckles 403) . This extraordinary amount of slaves allowed Saint Domingue emerge as one of the wealthiest colonies of its time, but it also made the island susceptible to a successful upheaval for the transplanted African communities. In 1789 Saint Domingue had approximately 8,000 plantations which produced crops for export which generated two fifths of Frances foreign trade, "a proportion rarely equalled in any colonial empire" (Beckles 403). The majority of crops being exported were coffee, and sugar although cotton, indigo were also part of this colonies economic prosperity.
The Slave Revolution in the Caribbean Colonists in the eighteenth century created plantations that produced goods such as tobacco, cotton, indigo, and more importantly, sugar. These plantations required forced labor, and thus slaves were shipped from Africa to the new world. “The Caribbean was a major plantation that was a big source of Europe’s sugar, and increasing economic expansion. The French had many colonies, including its most prized possession Saint- Domingue (Haiti). ”