History 2158A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Southeast Asia, Poaceae, Cave Painting
22 May 2018
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Sugar and Slavery
●Humans seem to have a biological disposition for liking sweet things
○Ex. 8000-year-old cave painting near Valencia, Spain depicting a figure raiding a beehive for honey
○Most mammals seem to like sweet things (except cats)
●Sugar doesn’t have a distinct taste - it’s just sweet
●Rise to popularity in the atlantic world (areas surrounding the atlantic ocean)
○Oceans are highways
○In the year 1000, almost nobody had access to sugar
○Eventually moved from the Old World to the New World
○By 1900, about ⅓ of daily calories in Britain was from sugar
●The most valuable international commodity before the rise of oil
●Argued that the wealth created by the sugar industry essentially paid for the industrial revolution
●Inextricably linked to slavery
●Sugar: what is it?
○Sucrose
○Manufactured synthetically from all green plants
○The sugar we use comes from sugar cane (sugar beets process is very recent)
■Sugar cane is a member of the grass family
■Beats everything in terms of calories per units of land
●Before mechanization, growing sugar was a long process
○The amount of sugar in the cane juice rapidly declines after ripened and cut, so it must be processed right
away
○Cut down, hauled off to a mill where it was crushed into juice, then boiled, poured into a mold, draining the
molasses from the mold to leave a sugar loaf
○Need a sugar hammer or a big blade to break or chop the loaf
○Sugar mills ran around the clock in the caribbean
○Long hours, terrible conditions, so it was impossible to find people willing to work in the sugar industry - for
that reason, involuntary labour followed the sugar process wherever it went
●Sugar cane native to southeast asia, most likely domesticated in papua new guinea
○Introduced to north africa and middle east
○The crusades exposed the europeans to sugar
○Sugar production moved mainly to cyprus (modern day lebanon)
■Slaves bought in the black sea area and shipped to cyprus
○Madeira on canery island was one of the places it was made
○1453: the Ottoman capture of Constantinople, cutting European access from the Black Sea (slaves)
○Portuguese began to buy slaves from West Africa
○Sao Tome: port off West Africa
■Couldn’t use European labour because they all died in the tropical climate
■African rulers sold prisoners from Congo to the Portuguese
■Definitive proof that you could transport sugar a long distance, which you couldn’t do with most
foods
■The place where the link between African slavery and sugar production began
●Nobility
○Sugar sculptures on dinner tables and whatnot
○Symbol of status and used as an art form
●Sugar in the New World
○Introduced by Christopher Columbus, who realized the potential of the Caribbean to grow sugar
■He brought sugar cane on his second journey
Document Summary
Humans seem to have a biological disposition for liking sweet things. 8000-year-old cave painting near valencia, spain depicting a figure raiding a beehive for honey. Most mammals seem to like sweet things (except cats) Sugar doesn"t have a distinct taste - it"s just sweet. Rise to popularity in the atlantic world (areas surrounding the atlantic ocean) In the year 1000, almost nobody had access to sugar. Eventually moved from the old world to the new world. By 1900, about of daily calories in britain was from sugar. The most valuable international commodity before the rise of oil. Argued that the wealth created by the sugar industry essentially paid for the industrial revolution. The sugar we use comes from sugar cane (sugar beets process is very recent) Sugar cane is a member of the grass family. Beats everything in terms of calories per units of land. Before mechanization, growing sugar was a long process.
