Paradise Destroyed by Church Christopher M.;

Author:Church, Christopher M.; [Church, Christopher M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS013000 History / Europe / France, HIS041000 History / Caribbean & West Indies / General
ISBN: 5109874
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2017-09-28T04:00:00+00:00

Fig. 17. Sugar production in Guadeloupe, 1880–1905

With the ascendancy of beet sugar, Guadeloupe, like Martinique, witnessed a steep decline in its sugar production by the 1890s, so that by 1900 the island produced half the tonnage it had produced ten years earlier. Graph created in R statistical package with data from France, Annuaire statistique 15:734; Rolph, Something about Sugar, 242.

Despite the changes to the exchange rate and the colonial bank’s attempts to mitigate the island’s trade deficit, the sugar industry in Guadeloupe continued to falter. By 1890, Europe and to a lesser extent the entire world had shifted away from cane cultivation toward beet sugar, a more lucrative and efficient product than cane sugar. Though worldwide cane sugar production remained relatively stable between 1882 and 1897, beet sugar saw a meteoric rise, growing 280 percent over fifteen years (figure 18). This drove the worldwide price of sugar downward, a blow to Guadeloupe’s sugar industry. Falling revenue led to a drop from fifty-seven million kilograms to just shy of forty million kilograms in sugar production in Guadeloupe between 1882 and 1899. Moreover, the island had seen four massive sugar shortfalls due to storms and hurricanes in 1885, 1891, 1894, and again in 1899. While all three of the island’s largest sugar companies had seen a profit in 1899, they had struggled for nearly fifteen years. Worse, a poor harvest in 1900 due to incendiarism, drought, and the hurricane in August 1899, producing eleven million fewer kilograms than the prior year’s harvest, wiped away the 1899 profits.42 By 1900 the islands’ three largest sugar producers had seen a net loss of nearly 1.8 million francs since 1882 and they owed about twice that figure (3.6 million francs) to creditors—again, reason for them to support increasing Guadeloupe’s exchange rate. The largest central sugar factory, Usine d’Arboussier, had also seen a decline in profits; from 1876 to 1883, it received approximately 53.10 francs per thousand kilograms of sugar, while from 1894 to 1899 this figure dropped to 37.75 francs per thousand kilograms.43 Guadeloupe’s sugar industry was deeply under water.

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