Plantations, Slavery and Proto-Industrialism: Sugarcane in the Colonial British West

Indies

Llowell Williams

Through the examination of the history and processes that began nearly 400 years ago, I

will demonstrate how a single commodity became central to everything in the colonial Caribbean

world from the population content, to economics, to social structure, and more. This commodity

is, of course, sugar, grown and processed for many years primarily on and in sugar plantations in

the Caribbean, to be consumed all around the world. This unique form of agriculture, I will

argue, was a form of early industrialization preceding what we traditionally understand to be the

Industrial Revolution, and was the central institution around which constructs of power and

domination arose.

Soon after Christopher Columbus' expeditions to the Americas, European powers began

to invest in the colonization of the various Caribbean Islands. Portugal and Spain were among

the first to establish colonies, but soon after other European colonial powers moved into the

region, including the British, Dutch, Danish, and French. For the purpose of this paper, I will

focus mainly on sugar production as it existed in the British West Indies, and offer both a micro

and macro level of analysis of British sugar cane plantation life. I will attempt to illustrate the

link between an institutionalized form of chattel slavery (the rise of the “planter class” and their

social domination), the economics and trade within the British West Indies as it related to Europe

and the wider sugar market, and the proto-industrial and pre-globalist aspects of these

institutions.

Once non-Spanish powers began settling and developing their Caribbean colonies, they

quickly surpassed the Spanish development in the Caribbean, Spain's attention having been

shifted more towards the mainlands of the Americas in search of mineral wealth. Initially the

primary cash crops grown here were tobacco and cotton, in imitation of the British plantations in

North America. Among the first to switch to growing sugar cane were British plantation owners

in Barbados, when it was realized that sugar cane was much more suited for the island's tropical

climate than tobacco or cotton. The timing of this switch couldn't have been better for

Barbadians: conflict between Portugal and Holland in Brazil was largely disruptive toward its

former domination of the sugar cane market (Mitchell 1963:4), and no other Caribbean island

had yet switched to sugar cane agriculture. Needless to say, these factors lead to a huge sugar

cane production boom that spread from Barbados to most of the rest of the Caribbean. Such

radical changes lead to the rise of the dominate “planter class” out of what had formerly been

middle/lower class English peasants (Dunn 1973:62).

Before delving directly into the formation and history of the planter class, it is crucial to

first examine the slave trade as it related to sugar cane production in the English West Indies.

Early during the course of the Caribbean's colonial occupation, while it was still under the

control of the Spanish, African slave imports had already begun. However, the Spanish imported

African slaves in low numbers and used the slaves mainly as domestic servants. Britain began

increasing its importation of African slaves to Barbados and other colonies soon after their

acquisition, as explained by Mintz: “the English connection between sugar production and sugar

consumption was welded in the seventeenth century, when Britain acquired Barbados, Jamaica,

and other sugar islands, vastly expanded her trade in African slaves, made inroads into the

Portuguese domination of the Continental sugar trade, and first began to build a broad internal

consumer market” (Mintz 1985:61).

The planters in the British sugar colonies were eager to embrace African slave labor as

chattel slavery became more and more the standard process in which agriculture was practiced in

the British colonies, leading to the unprecedented swell of the African slave population

throughout the Caribbean: in Antigua, “by 1767 every taxpayer in St. Mary was a slave owner; a

third of the taxpayers were very large sugar planters; the planters held an average of 86 Negroes

each and one slave for every two acres—the Barbados ratio.” (Dunn 1973:143). Dunn cites

Professor Curtin's estimate that roughly 42 percent of the 9.5 million enslaved Africans sent to

the Americas ended up in the Caribbean Islands (1973:229) to work on sugar cane plantations.

Despite having an extremely high slave-to-master ratio, the elite/power class of planters rose to

dominance quickly and managed to maintain order and control for many years (until large scale

slave uprisings occurred much later; they will not be discussed here).

Sugar cane growth and processing was very different from other cash crops, and these

unique characteristics “fundamentally affected its cultivation and processes” (Mintz 1985:21).

Sugar cane is heavily land consuming, very labor intensive, and requires expensive extraction

and processing machinery. To be turned into a useable good, sugar cane has to be cut when it is

ripe and then immediately ground. The processing facilities in which the cane was ground and

boiled were almost always located on-plantation; in the past the processing of harvested cash

crops were usually done separate from the site of harvest (if processing was required at all). The

practice of processing sugar cane was, like the harvesting, very labor intensive and dangerous

work. Unlike harvesting, though, it also required expert knowledge and skill of the processes

involved in transforming cane sugar into syrup, and then into granules; prerequisites that limited

the types of workers planters could assign to the mills and boiling houses. About ten percent of

the total labor force on the plantation worked in these facilities, and they were usually limited to

the most skilled slaves and servants, who were sometimes specially “imported” for such valuable

abilities. Because of sugar cane's nature, and the complicated process involved in turning it into a

tradable good, the obvious and necessary solution was to integrate harvest and processing to

form what was essentially a proto-industrial operation; something that would not be applied to

other areas of manufacture until the Industrial Revolution in mainland Europe many years later

(Mintz 1985:47-49).

Sugar plantations on islands like Barbados were quickly becoming efficient and

profitable enterprises, but only for certain limited group of people. According to Thompson, “the

Caribbean became, by far, the most lucrative area of investment of merchant capital [for

colonials], yielding the highest returns. Unfortunately for this area, the profits accruing from the

trade which was set in motion through the agency of the slaving were not retained in the

Caribbean but expatriated to Europe” (1990:4). This was because of the system of production

and trade that was carefully created by the planter class and those back home in England. Eric

Williams describes this system as a “triangular trade” in which the British industry was given a

triple stimulus. (1944:52)

The triangular trade Williams speaks of was a unique system of trade established between

England and her Caribbean sugar colonies (although such similar trade networks certainly

existed for other European countries with Caribbean colonies). This network basically followed a

cyclical path, starting with an English slave ship in Europe, its holds filled with manufactured

goods. These goods would be taken down to the West African coast, where they would be

exchanged, at a profit, for another commodity: Africans. These African slaves would then be

taken by the slave ship across the Atlantic to the Caribbean sugar isles where they would, again

at a profit, be exchanged for colonially produced goods and materials (in this case, mostly sugar).

These goods would then be transported back to Europe where they would be sold or exchanged

for European manufactured goods, starting the trade triangle over again. This mercantilist

network proved to be extremely profitable to those planters who had managed to establish a

successful sugar cane plantation in the Caribbean, but even more so to England herself; because

of the strict laws dictating that colonies trade only with the mother country, England was assured

the best prices and a steady supply of sugar, which was turned around and sold both in and

outside of England at quite a profit (Williams 1944:51-4; 98-108).

Thompson also talks about such controlled trade networks, suggesting that it was very

carefully set up by those in the mother country to maintain colonial domination and to maximize

profits for those in Europe: “In general, specific metropolitan legislation forbade the Caribbean

territories from developing any but the most rudimentary industrial skills...the rationale behind

such restriction was to ensure that the spinoff effects of cash-crop production benefited Europe

and not the Caribbean.” (1990:5). And that is exactly how it came to be. Although planters in the

Caribbean became wealthy, they were a very small group of individuals, and it did not compare

to the profits being made back in Europe.

On most of the sugar islands rose a small group of white power elites, which I've been

referring to as the planter class. These men (and they were always men) owned huge lots of land

which was worked by their slaves and indentured white servants (detailed later). Unlike back in

Europe and in North American plantations, this master class rose swiftly in social standing and

resulted in “a few big landholders [having] monopolized all the best sugar acreage, reaped most

of the profits, managed island politics, and dominated their society in every way” (Dunn

1973:46-7). By way of example, by 1680 in Barbados only 7 percent of planters controlled at

least 54 percent of the island's property (Dunn 1973:96-7). This hugely unequal distribution was

something fairly unique to the British West Indies colonies; the nature of which Williams has

speculated as to being signs and characteristics of early capitalism and free trade (Williams

1944:154-60), as it was to soon reach Europe and mainland Americas. This planter class, the

Caribbean economic elite, was something that was never to really be replicated in any

comparable way by other colonies outside of the sugar islands. Nowhere else did such a small,

but wealthy and powerful class emerge like it did in the Caribbean.

African slaves, however, weren't the only laborers in the sugar cane fields. Many white

indentured servants were brought to the sugar islands, most voluntarily. Although these people

were very low in the social hierarchy, they considered themselves at least a step above African

slaves; this lead to them becoming “wild and unruly in the extreme” (Dunn 1973:69) after being

put in the fields to work side by side with a group of people they considered below them:

African slaves. Planters quickly realized that this organization of labor was going to be

potentially disastrous, so several things were done, including segregating labor gangs and in

some places an agreement was made to grant a small plot of land to indentured whites, once their

debt was repaid and they were freed so as to help reinforce these whites' notions of superiority to

the African slaves and to help promote a more stable social system in the plantations.

As I've shown, a network of stratified power developed in the Caribbean sugar islands

involving the domination and exploitation of huge numbers of African slaves and white

indentured servants, controlled and organized by a small elite planter class. As powerful as these

planters were, they were themselves dominated by the economic systems legislated and enforced

by their countrymen back in England, for their own profit.

Annotated bibilography:

Mintz, Sidney. 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Penguin.

Mintz provides a very in-depth view of the rise and fall of the Caribbean sugar trade in her book. He

explains the processes of sugarcane manufacture, and the history that surrounds it, including its modern day

significance in not only the Caribbean, but the world.

Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. 1944, 1994. University of North Carolina Press.

This book talks about the nature of the slave trade during colonial times. This, naturally, went hand-in-

hand with the process of manufacturing sugarcane and the two institutions were inseparably intertwined for

hundreds of years. Williams discusses how slavery resulted in capitalism, how that capitalism transformed and

made obsolete slavery; the stories of most Caribbean nations surround such events.

Dunn, Richard S. 1973. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West

Indies, 1624-1713. New York: W. W. Norton

Dunn's book details the birth of the sugarcane plantations in the West Indies. He explains how slavery

was brought in for slavery, and how that shaped power relations in the region. The book also talks about the

economics of plantations and how that too affected the social structures.