Remarkable Plants That Shape Our World by Helen Bynum

Author:Helen Bynum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd

Four different coloured varieties of sugar cane as featured in François Richard de Tussac’s flora of indigenous and imported exotics, Flore des Antilles (1808).

With the coming of tea, coffee and chocolate to Europe in the 17th century the demand for sugar increased markedly. Manpower was needed to work the plantations in Barbados, Jamaica, Brazil and other New World locations. Indentured labour schemes proved inadequate, and African slavery was the terrible solution. Between 1662 and 1807, when Britain’s trade was abolished, some 3 million Africans were transported in her unsanitary and overcrowded ships. The Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and Americans also had active slave transportation systems for sugar plantations in Brazil and other colonial possessions, as well as Louisiana in the United States. The journey from Africa to the Americas, known as the ‘Middle Passage’, was part of a triangular route – ships left Liverpool, London or Bristol laden with merchandise to be exchanged for slaves on the west coast of Africa; after transporting them across the Atlantic to the plantations, the ships would return with the prized cargoes. African slavers captured their unfortunate victims, mostly men but also women and children, from the interior of the continent. Survival rates were variable on the long crossing, but conditions were routinely atrocious, with little and bad food, and crowded, inhuman conditions.

The nature of sugar cane cultivation made plantation settings desirable. They varied greatly in size, and were often referred to not by their area but by the number of slaves. Slavery helped define the histories of the New World areas where it was practised, and beyond. After the abolition of slavery in the 19th century, by the French, British, Americans, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese, the importation of sugar workers from Asia, the Polynesian islands and the Mediterranean countries left an indelible mix on the ethnic compositions of the sugar-producing lands.

It has been estimated that it took one African life to produce a tonne of sugar, but such was the scale of the operation that the price of sugar in Europe and North America came down dramatically from the late 17th century, and it became a commodity within reach of most people. The final refining process was generally done outside the areas of supply, since fuel and power were more easily available there. The British even re-exported some sugar back to the producing colonies.

The basic cultivation requirements for growing cane remain the same, but the production process has changed over the past century. Cutting the cane is now done by machine, making level fields preferable, and pressing and extracting the juice are also mostly mechanized. Little is wasted: the residue of the first boiling, molasses, is used in cooking or distilled to make rum. Sugar distillation yields alcohols and biofuels, and other products include chemicals, fertilizers and animal feeds. Today, the major producers of sugar cane are Brazil and India.

A rival of the cane and another source of table sugar is sugar beet (Beta vulgaris). A German chemist, Andreas Sigismund Margraf, discovered in the

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