The sugar islands

In the eighteenth century a few small Caribbean islands were worth more to their European owners than the whole North American mainland. The reason was a grass.

Why sugar organised everything around it

Sugar cane must be crushed within hours of cutting, or the juice begins to ferment. That means the field and the factory must be in the same place, and that harvesting and milling must happen simultaneously, around the clock, for months.

No other crop imposes that. It is why sugar was organised in plantations with a fixed, large and controlled labour force — and why the system was built on slavery in a form harsher than almost anywhere else in the Americas.

Timeline

1640

Barbados converts from tobacco to sugar

1655

England takes Jamaica from Spain

1660

Barbados is the richest colony in the world per head

1700

Saint-Domingue begins its rise

1750

the sugar islands account for a third of France's foreign trade

1780

Saint-Domingue produces 40 per cent of the world's sugar

1791

the rising on Saint-Domingue begins

1807

Britain bans the slave trade

1834

slavery is abolished in British colonies

1848

slavery is abolished in French colonies

The mortality that was built in

This is what separates the Caribbean from North America. On the sugar islands more enslaved people died than were born, year after year. The plantations made up the loss by buying more people.

Around 12.5 million people were shipped across the Atlantic. The Caribbean and Brazil received the great majority. North America received around 388,000 — under four per cent — and it is there that the population nonetheless grew by birth.

The triangle that was not a triangle

The textbook figure with three arrows is too simple. The network was denser: New England sold dried fish, horses and timber to the islands and bought molasses to distil into rum. Ireland sold salt meat. British banks insured the ships. No part of the Atlantic economy stood outside it.

What remained

The islands became monocultures, and several remain so in practice — dependent on imports for food they could grow themselves. The soil was exhausted. And the population of the whole region is a direct consequence: the Caribbean today is shaped by who was carried there, and by who survived it.