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Relating sugar and slavery today
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The plantation systems in the Caribbean were its most distinctive and characteristic economic form. These plantation systems were created in the New World during the early years of the sixteenth century and were mostly staffed with slaves imported from Africa. It was Spain that pioneered sugar cane, sugar making, African slave labour, and the plantation form in the Caribbean. Before long, within a century, the French and British became the world’s greatest makers and exporters of sugar. The film, Sugar Cane Alley, depicts the essence of a key transitional moment in French Caribbean history. It highlights the tribulations (daily efforts and working conditions) of many Noir sugar plantation workers in Martinique in the early 1930s. Hence, …show more content…
Sugar plantations in the French Caribbean began in the era of the slave trade and continued well onto the remaining years of colonialism. In the mid-seventeenth century, when the French colonists first considered producing sugar in the Caribbean, they were only small-scale cultivators with limited means. Therefore, many of them had to employ freshly arrived settlers from the mother country (France) who were contracted to labour for a fixed number of years. Often, these workers were servants in debt, petty criminals, political and religious nonconformists, labour organizers, and different types of political prisoners. These contracted French labourers, called engagés (indentured servants) , represented a vital contribution to the labour needs of the colonies; however, for the colonists in Martinique, more labour than was readily available was needed. Sometimes they were able to acquire some enslaved natives of the Indigenous population who would work alongside the contracted Europeans. Eventually, the island planters began to procure enslaved Africans. Hence the early labour patterns in the French Caribbean colonies were a mixed bunch; comprised of European smallholders, indentured labourers, and African and Indigenous …show more content…
For years, the sugar plantations of the French colony of Martinique have been a major contribution to their economy. The amount of labour needed for the continued production of sugar lead to the immigration of contracted French labourers, enslavement of the remaining Indigenous population, and importation of enslaved Africans. The procurement of slaves was one of the methods used to curb the large capital required for the operation of these plantations. Although these slaves were emancipated in 1948, they still remained the majority of labourers working in the sugar plantations, even as ‘freed men’. The plantation systems are a huge part of Martinique’s economic history. Sugar plantation systems constituted a significant facet of France’s colonization of
Scarano, Francisco. "Sugar and Slavery in Puerto Rico, 1815-1849: An Overview," from Scarano ,Sugar and Slavery in Puerto Rico: Plantation Economy of Ponce,1800-1850(Madison :U of Wisconsin Press,1984) 3-34.
The intriguing concept of supply and demand in the Louisiana sugar cane industry would be described as resilience. Louisiana’s sugar industry dates back to the turn of the 18th century. How can such a bountiful crop have such a stagnant return? One example of resilience is the sugar factory M.A. Patout and sons. This is the oldest and largest sugar factory in Louisiana that is still family owned and operated. The factory was originally founded in 1825 as a wine vineyard, being later converted to a sugar plantation due to south Louisiana’s subtropical climate. It has seen the rise and fall of sugar prices that have plagued area mills and farmers, forcing many out of business.
During the American Revolution and the civil war, the North and the South experienced development of different socio-political and cultural environmental conditions. The North became an industrial and manufacturing powerhouse as a result of rise of movements like abolitionism and women’s right while the South became a cotton kingdom whose labor was sourced from slavery (Spark notes, 2011).
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...
In Barbados and Jamaica (the sugar islands) sugar was a major crop. The owners of these sugar plantations were badly in need of laborers to work for them year round, and because the natives died off so speedily, they needed to bring in someone to do the grueling tasks for them. They tried to use indentured servants, but this was extremely difficult because sugar is a year round, demanding sort of crop and nobody sought after work on those plantations. Any person who had any other kind of alternative would choose to go anywhere else.
French occupation of Haiti began in the mid seventeenth century. For the next century and a half, the people of Haiti were forced to abandon their livelihoods and instead take up residence on namely sugar, indigo or cacao plantations in order to generate exports for the French market. Conditions on these plantations were often so cruel and oppressive that the common cause of death was exhaustion. No longer able to yield to the terms of their exploitation, Haitians participated in a string of slave revolts, the most prominent of which was led by Toussaint Louverture from 1791, which paved the road for Haitian emancipation. This essay will advance the idea that colonialism has impeded the political stability of Haiti during the nineteenth century, particularly from when Haiti formally declared independence in 1804. It will cover how issues such as; despotism, conflicting economic institutions, the militarization of the political system and racial supremacy, have negatively affected nineteenth century Haitian politics. Moreover, it will also elaborate on how these issues are, in effect, actually insidious derivatives of French rule during pre-independent Haiti.
Both slave trade and West Indies slavery were essential for the prosperity of France (“French Slavery.”). Over five million French men re...
In Haiti existed a system of degradation and denial of humanity itself towards human beings only because they were born with a black skin. While emphasis is made on the fact that the blacks were the majority of the population at the time of the revolution, it is brought up that at the outset the white indentured or contracted servants "worked and lived side by side in near equal numbers with black slaves" (Fick 15). This suggests that if we consider an indentured worker or worker under contract to be a financial slave living in the same condition as a black slave, that slaves did not necessarily have to be black. Slavery began because there was the need for labor to work on plantations of sugar and tobacco. Once the black slave took the place of the white indentured worker, a system of classes emerged. The middle class white man was the absentee planter enjoying the amassed fortune in France. The middle class were also the agents or managers of the absentee planter striving and sometimes at...
The 1600’s were a time of expansion in the new world. Unfortunately the development of this area led slavery to be the main source of labor. As history teaches us slavery was used extensively in the new world. The main areas of concern of this paper are how slavery in the Caribbean carried over its practice in the American South. The slave system was implemented in the Caribbean on a larger scale before the South implemented their system. The slave plantations of the Caribbean served as a learning platform for the slavery system in the south. The development of Caribbean slave laws, slave revolts, transfer of information on this practice to the South and the South’s implementation of these slave laws, and the slave issues in check.
Slave trade grew gradually when it began in 1600's. As the demand for labor in the colonies increased, a number of plantation owners resorted to slave labor. These plantation owners used s...
Haiti was the only nation to gain independence from a slave revolt. Haiti was the second independent country in the western hemisphere, after the U.S had a successful revolution which occurred in 1776. The louisiana purchase was a possible move due to the nation revolution. Slaves started to come to haiti by the french in the 1500s . About 1 million African slaves would die from being abused and hard labor. There were four main groups in the late 1700s. The whites, the free persons of color, the black slaves, and the maroons. It was about 20,000 whites were split into two groups the planters and the less wealthy.
Scarano, Franciso. Sugar and Slavery in Puerto Rico, 1815-1849: An Overview from: Scarano, Sugar and Slavery in Puerto Rico: "The Plantation Economy of Ponce, 1800-1850. (Madison U. of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 3-34.
Some of the earliest records of slavery date back to 1760 BC; Within such societies, slavery worked in a system of social stratification (Slavery in the United States, 2011), meaning inequality among different groups of people in a population (Sajjadi, 2008). After the establishment of Jamestown in 1607 as the first permanent English Chesapeake colony in the New World that was agriculturally-based; Tobacco became the colonies chief crop, requiring time consuming and intensive labor (Slavery in colonial America, 2011). Due to the headlight system established in Maryland in 1640, tobacco farmers looked for laborers primarily in England, as each farmer could obtain workers as well as land from importing English laborers. The farmers could then use such profits to purchase the passage of more laborers, thus gaining more land. Indentured servants, mostly male laborers and a few women immigrated to Colonial America and contracted to work from four to seven years in exchange for their passage (Norton, 41). Once services ended after the allotted amount of time, th...
The results of colonization can be considered an act of pleasantry for some while not the same for others. In 1492, Christopher Columbus landed on an island in the Atlantic Ocean, known today as Cuba. History states that after chief Hatuey a cacique from one of the aboriginal native tribes was burned at the stake in 1912, and the Indian resistance collapsed - colonization of Cuba took full effect and quickly spread throughout the island. Exploitation began and freedom was forbidden to the natives and its people from afar (slaves). Cuba had now become the property of the Spaniards provoking the will to resist, from which revolts were born. A resistance that resulted finally in the ousting of Spanish governance in 1898, the first step to became an independent republic in 1902.
Author Clare Johnson starts the review of the literature by explaining to the reader that when she was in middle and high school, the only areas of black history that she was taught was about captives running away from the harsh and inhumane treatment of their oppressors while working in the fields. She also explains to the reader that her none of her educators or any of the other literatures that she read in junior or high school ever discussed or even briefly introduced various approaches of resistance to enslavement that were done by both genders of slaves who were being held captive. It was not uncommon for black women slaves to commit murder against their white captors. Women have also been found to figure prominently in such events as