Sugar and Colonization
Sweetness and Power Across the Atlantic
See photo credits below.
The following is an excerpt from p. 92-96 of Chapter 2, “Sugar is the Knife: The World’s Favorite Drug” from my new book, Drugism (2022):
Christopher Columbus is widely believed to have been the first to introduce sugar cane into the western hemisphere, when, on his second voyage into “the New World,” he brought some from the Canary Islands, at the suggestion of Queen Isabella.[i] The first Spanish sugar plantation beyond the African coast was started in what is now the Dominican Republic.
The Europeans’ arrival in the Caribbean was extremely violent. The indigenous Taino people who had already been living in what is now the Dominican Republic for countless generations experienced a genocide at the hands of the Spanish. The Taino people spoke Arawakan and used a plethora of plant medicines, including the DMT-containing yopo snuff.[ii]
The process of colonization violently converted the island from a DMT-using, Arawakan-speaking, indigenous population into a sugar-using, Spanish-speaking population comprised of the few remaining Taino along with Africans who had been abducted and transported against their will, and the Europeans who had arrived in search of minerals, drugs, and land. These demographics were soon joined by migrants from the world over in search of work on Caribbean sugar plantations.
The first Spanish sugar plantation beyond the African coast was started in what is now the Dominican Republic.
The first royal license to abduct people from Africa and traffic them, against their will, to the Caribbean as forced labor came from King Charles V of Spain.[iii] He later ordered the construction of “magnificent palaces” in Spain with the taxes made from the Spanish sugar trade.[iv] Besides the Dominican Republic, the Spanish also started sugar plantations in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Mexico, Paraguay, and elsewhere along the Pacific coast of the continent-named-after-a-colonist, South America.[v]
The Portuguese started sugar plantations in Brazil in the early sixteenth century.[vi] As elsewhere, the indigenous populations of Brazil suffered enormously at the hands of the Portuguese colonizers. Portuguese sugar planters in Brazil were given money by financial investors looking to profit from the emerging sugar industry. With this financial assistance, they grew to become some of the largest sugar producers in the world.
The practice of using financial backers to fund the startup costs of sugar plantations soon spread throughout the Caribbean.[vii] Encouraged by a growing demand for sugar in Europe, Dutch, French, and English venture capitalists followed suit.
The use of financial backers to fund the startup costs of sugar plantations soon spread throughout the Caribbean.
Cane sugar first appeared in England around 1100 CE. For the next couple centuries, it was only accessible to the elite. In the thirteenth century, sugar began to show up in English apothecaries, mixed with other herbs in medicinal preparations. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, London became an “important refining center” for the British sugar industry.[viii]
At that point, Brazilian sugar, grown and sold by Portuguese colonists, dominated the Atlantic sugar trade. By the early sixteenth century, however, the demand for sugar in England had grown beyond medical use. Colonization in the Atlantic had introduced greater volumes of sugar than ever before known. Prices went down, and more people could afford to splurge on sugar and sweets. By the seventeenth century, sugar was commonly available, no longer merely a luxury of the wealthy or a specialty apothecary medicine.[ix]
The English fascination with sugar prompted their own experiments with cane plantations. Jamestown, the first English colony in what is now the US, was one such site of an early sugar plantation. The first sugar was brought to Jamestown in 1619, the same year that people forcibly trafficked from Africa were first brought there.[x] However, the temperate climate of Virginia did not lend itself to sugar cultivation, and most plantations there focused instead on tobacco, hemp, and other crops.
Colonization produced greater volumes of sugar than ever before known. Prices went down, consumption went up.
England’s colonies in the Caribbean started to compete with the Brazilian sugar industry by the mid seventeenth century. Barbados, Saint Kitts, Jamaica, and elsewhere were violently occupied by the English and all saw the creation of vast sugar plantations.[xi] Just as they had violently secured and protected their opium trade in Asia, British imperialists similarly used violence to secure and protect their sugar interests in the Caribbean.
While the British East India Company fought to establish and maintain their Asian opium market, the West India Regiment fought to protect British-owned Caribbean plantations, in which sugar was reliably the dominant crop. Many in the regiment were people of African descent who had escaped from forced labor on the very Caribbean sugar plantations they then risked—and often lost—their lives to protect.
Commenting on the parallel multinational trafficking of refined drugs, William Dufty later wrote, “opium running—like sugar pushing—became the basis for some of the great fortunes in Britain and America.”[xii] Opium and sugar have far more in common than many people realize, both historically and pharmacologically. That one is prohibited and the other is subsidized is largely the result of international relations rather than toxicity.
While the British East India Company fought to build and maintain their Asian opium market, the West India Regiment fought to protect British-owned Caribbean sugar plantations.
However not everyone in colonial-era Britain loved sugar. Some had ethical issues with its production (the violent displacement of indigenous populations; the forced labor of abductees, etc.). Some were concerned about its effects on public health. Some were concerned about all of these issues. To raise awareness of the issues around sugar, an Anti-Saccharite Society was formed in England in 1792. Some British people boycotted sugar, and the practice soon spread throughout Europe.[xiii]
In London in 1792, a pamphlet was printed titled Reasons for Abstaining from West-Indian Rum & Sugar; Suited to the Understandings of the Common People by John Valton. It described the abduction of people from Africa and the processes by which they were forced into labor on sugar plantations, all in graphic detail. Sugar, Valton wrote, grows from ground watered with “the tears, and sweat, and blood of your oppressed brethren.” He wondered whether sugar would still taste sweet for readers after learning such facts. He invited readers to “give up the use of” sugar and rum, so as not to contribute to “misery and murder.”[xiv]
The French carried on similarly to the British. As in England, the first people in France to enjoy sugar were the wealthy. By the fourteenth century, sugar had entered into French cuisine.[xv] The French grew sugar in what is now Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and elsewhere.
French philosopher Claude Adrien Helvetius wrote, “no casket of sugar arrives in Europe to which blood is not sticking.”
Also as in England, some French people were aware of the conditions in which their sugar was produced. In the mid eighteenth century, French philosopher Claude Adrien Helvetius wrote, “no casket of sugar arrives in Europe to which blood is not sticking...anyone with feelings should renounce these wares and refuse the enjoyment of what is only to be bought with tears and death.”[xvi] Such language was incendiary, literally. His writing was burned by hangmen. The French court and church took opposition to his ideas, and Helvetius was forced to recant his views. But this did not change the realities of sugar production.
The French (and the British) continued to consume sugar at ever-growing rates. The drug earned a place in Pierre Pomet’s A Complete History of Drugs, written during the reign of Louis XIV. And Louis XIV was not the only French ruler with an interest in sugar. Later, Napoleon Bonaparte took great interest in the stuff when the Haitian Revolution wrested control of the former colony away from France. Haiti had been the source of most of France’s sugar, grown on cane plantations with forced labor.
Decades before the Haitian Revolution, sugar extraction from beets had been developed by German scientists, financed by another king, Wilhelm III of Prussia. After the Haitian Revolution, this knowledge was embraced enthusiastically by the French, fresh out of a sugar colony. Bonaparte ordered the development of a national beet sugar industry, including the establishment of schools devoted to sugar beet science. It was hoped that this would resuscitate the French sugar industry and simultaneously create competition for the (then booming) British cane sugar industry, still firmly rooted in the Caribbean.[xvii]
Sugar was integrally important to the larger project of colonization.
In early nineteenth-century France, a conversation about sugar and its politics was probably about as exciting and controversial as a conversation about cannabis or opioid policy in the US today might be.
“We need to remember,” writes Walvin,
the sugar distribution network [of the Caribbean] embraced some of the largest commercial enterprises operating anywhere in the world. They were the most capitalized, the most productive, and involved the largest labor forces.[xviii]
Of everything imported from the Caribbean to North America in the late eighteenth century, more than 75% of it was sugar or its byproducts (such as rum or molasses).[xix] Sugar was integrally important to the larger project of colonization. Along with other crops like tobacco, opium, hemp and cotton, sugar was one of the foundations upon which imperial fortunes rested.
As noted by MIT professor Amy Moran-Thomas, the areas most impacted by colonization historically are often the same areas most impacted by diabetes today.[xx] Colonization brings sugar; sugar brings diabetes. The connection took centuries to reveal itself but it is very real nonetheless.
Colonization brings sugar; sugar brings diabetes.
In addition to diabetes, sugar production typically brings environmental ruin. Colonial sugar production historically used exorbitant amounts of hydrocarbons (coal, oil, etc.). The trend continues today. Indeed, the rise of sugar and the rise of petroleum share many parallels, and their histories overlap in some key moments. As Moran-Thomas observes, although sugar and oil may initially seem unrelated, they are in fact closely linked, not only historically but politically, socially, and economically.[xxi] This intersection will become even more evident later in our analysis.
So, not only did colonization spread sugar production throughout the world. That sugar production then produced a myriad of byproducts, among them: violent destruction of human life, environmental ruin, countless diabetes cases, and a host of other consequences. Peering through the prism of the sugar crystal, we see numerous processes of colonization, industrialization, etc. form a fractal of activity around the precious stuff. Just as one cannot fully grasp colonization unless one understands sugar, one cannot fully grasp sugar unless one understands colonization.
Sugar production has a myriad of byproducts, including: death, diabetes, environmental ruin, and more.
[Continue reading here.]
Endnotes
[i] Dufty, 32; Mintz, 32.
[ii] Schultes, Hofmann, and Rätsch, Plants of the…, 116-117.
[iii] Galeano, Open Veins of…, 24.
[iv] Dufty, 33.
[v] Walvin, 35; Mintz, 33-34.
[vi] Mintz, 33; Walvin, 35.
[vii] Ibid., 40.
[viii] Ibid., 17; Mintz, xxix and 45.
[ix] Walvin, 15 and 39.
[x] Mintz, 37.
[xi] Walvin, 39; Mintz, 55.
[xii] Dufty, 40-41.
[xiii] Ibid., 35-36.
[xiv] Valton, 10-11.
[xv] Walvin, 10.
[xvi] Dufty, 35.
[xvii] Walvin, 143.
[xviii] Ibid., 49.
[xix] Ibid., 98.
[xx] Moran-Thomas, 16.
[xxi] Ibid., 291.
Sources
Dufty, William. Sugar Blues. Warner Books, New York, NY. 1975.
Galeano, Eduardo. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Monthly Review Press, New York, NY. 1997 [originnally published in 1973].
Mintz, Sidney. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Penguin Books, NY. 1985.
Moran-Thomas, Amy. Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic. University of California Press, Oakland, CA. 2019.
Schultes, Richard Evans, Albert Hofmann, and Christian Rätsch. Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers. Healing Arts Press, Rochester, VT. 2001.
Walvin, James. Sugar: The Word Corrupted: From Slavery to Obesity. Penguin, NY. 2018.
Photo credits
Portrait of Christopher Columbus from Wikipedia at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Portrait_of_a_Man%2C_Said_to_be_Christopher_Columbus.jpg
Portrait of Queen Isabella I from Wikipedia at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/IsabellaofCastile03.jpg
Photo of sugar cane from Black Tot Rum at https://blacktot.com/the-story/1404/sugarcane-spirits-the-extended-family-of-rum
Pages from Valton’s “Reason’s for Abstaining…” from the Wellcome Collection at https://wellcomecollection.org/works/uprstqtr/items
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