The 1619 Project: Sugar

Note: This is my summary of chapter 3 of “The 1619 Project” (2021) – the book, not the television show. As in the book, “America” means US America and the 13 British colonies that it grew out of. Quoted text is straight from the book. 

Queen Sugar: Before the 1800s in the days of King Cotton there was Queen Sugar. Sugar, not tobacco or cotton, is what drove the transatlantic slave trade.

Triangular trade: Sugar was the side of the triangle that drove all the madness. The three sides of the triangle:

1. European goods were used to buy slaves in Africa. Goods included rum, guns, iron bars, fetters, clothes, copper pots, and glass beads.
2. African captives were sold into slavery in the Americas to buy sugar. Africans did in fact sell fellow Africans, though “captives tended to be ‘culturally and ethnically alien'”. About half were prisoners of war (aka enemy soldiers), a third were “criminals, undesirables, or outcasts”. The remaining 20% were kidnapped. Sugar planters “particularly favored men from Guinea, who were perceived to be ‘docile and agreeable.'” According to the Louisiana Slave Database, the most common ethnicities that arrived in Louisiana were Congo, Mandinga, Mina, Bambara, and Wolof.
3. American sugar was then sold to Europe for yet more European goods, and so on. Sugar was mainly grown in the Caribbean, Mexico, Brazil and, later, Louisiana. It required huge amounts of gang labour – which enslaved Africans provided (at gunpoint).

The Royal African Company, founded in 1672, took over the most the transatlantic slave trade within ten years. Its triangle ran from England (especially Bristol, Liverpool, and London) to Africa (especially Ghana) to the Caribbean (especially Jamaica and Barbados). As late as 1932 Martins Bank in Liverpool “memorialized the role of banks in financing the trade with a relief sculpture of two African boys fettered about the neck and ankles and holding bags of money”.

The Thirteen Colonies were too far north to grow sugar, but they did their bit, taking part in the transatlantic slave trade from 1709 onwards, and turning sugar into molasses and rum. Rhode Island dealt in over 100,000 African captives and revolted against the Sugar Act of 1764, which cut into their trade in molasses. Founding Father John Adams would later observe:

“Molasses was an essential ingredient of American Independence.”

Rum, made from fermented and distilled molasses, “was the lubricant that helped make the international slave trade run like a well-oiled machine.”

Columbus began all this in 1493, on his second voyage, when he brought sugarcane across the Atlantic. In his day sugar was a luxury good. Arab enslavers had brought sugarcane to the Mediterranean in the 700s, spreading it to Cyprus, Malta, Sicily, Morocco – and Spain.

Louisiana got a late start in sugar. “In New Orleans in 1751, French Jesuit priests planted the first cane stalks in the area, near Baronne Street.” But by the 1850s Louisiana was producing a fourth of the world’s sugar cane. Louisiana became the second richest US state in per-capita wealth and “New Orleans became the Walmart of people-selling.”

Today the US consumes more sugar per capita (including high fructose corn syrup) than anyone, nearly twice the USDA recommended limit. Thanks to food deserts created by redlining, Black Americans consume yet even more sugar.

– Abagond, 2023. 

See also:

• The 1619 Project
• sugar
  • high fructose corn syrup
• The Transatlantic slave trade
  • “Africans sold their own people as slaves”
  • dis-Africanization
• Guinea coast
• redlining
• Wolof
• Christopher Columbus
  • The Columbian Exchange
• Early Victorian tea set
• The Incomplete List of US Companies & Universities That Benefited From Black Slavery

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