Sugar redefined the socio-economic structures of the early
modern period. But, it was this
commodity that was the first to be produced and used for global consumption. At
first it was just a luxury for the aristocracy. Of course, with sugar, coffee,
tea, and cocoa became synonymous with the sugar trade. It’s strange to think of
items like coffee, tea, sugar, and tobacco as drugs because today we consume
these things and they are not illegal. However, according to Pomeranz and
Topic, in their seminal work, “The economic culture of drugs,” they were
historically considered drugs because of “the altered states of being upon ingestion.”
We wouldn’t however consider candy or sweetened coffee drugs today.
I never realized that sugar existed in Asia before reading
this handout. I was always under the impression that it never existed in the
ancient world, that it was only discovered and consumed after the discovery of
the new world. But, apparently the Greeks encountered sugar in India in the
fourth century B.C.E. Although, the rest
of Europe knew nothing of this spice. The Europeans thought sugar was only
rumored to exist before The Crusades. It
was the Muslims who introduced sugar to Europeans, but even then it was grown
in limited quantities. I always knew the
Venetians gained a lot of wealth because the city was built upon marshes with
unlimited salt supplies as a preservative. But, I was not aware that the
Venetians also had a lucrative business trading sugar. The Venetians apparently
thought sugar had medicinal value, which seems contrary to nutritional values
we know today.
Apparently Columbus was the first to introduce sugar to the
new world. However, the Portugese were the first civilization that were the
first to introduce sugar production first on their Atlantic islands then to the
West Indies and Brazil. The Dutch, British, French, and Spanish also tried to
get into the modes and means of sugar production and trade by the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. By the 18th century the sugar industry made
many very rich due to its high demand by consumers. Queen Elizabeth I was
perhaps one of the first persons notable in history to have a “sweet tooth” for
sugar, and had dental problems as a consequence. It wasn’t until after 1660
that the middle and lower classes began to consumer sugar in larger quantities.
By the 18th century, it was the most common sweetener used in
coffeehouses.
It seems odd that people in the early modern period actually
thought a sugar-laden beverage could replace a whole meal; they thought beer
and bread weren’t healthy enough, when in fact there were more nutrition in
beer and bread than in sugar. I confess this is not the first time I’d heard of
the triangle trades. I learned about the triangle trades in a Latin American
history course in 2012. We know of the Boston Tea Party, but probably most
Americans haven’t heard of the Navigation Acts, meant to tax Americans
producing rum (a by-product of sugar) being one of the causes of the American
Revolution.
Sugar was so bulky in its raw, unprocessed form that it had
to be broken down in series of steps by slaves on or near the plantation in an
agro-industrial scale. It had to be crushed, then the sugar juice was extracted
and shipped and then the final leg of the manufacturing process took place in
Europe or America. Most of the profits earned on sugar were in Europe not in
Brazil or the West Indies where it was produced in the highest quantities and
broken down into by-products such as molasses and rum. The production of sugar
had the highest mortality rate of any commodity produced by African slaves.
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