An Edible History of Humanity (12 page)
Read An Edible History of Humanity Online
Authors: Tom Standage
Sugar and slavery had gone together for centuries. Sugarcane is originally from the Pacific islands, was encountered in India
by the ancient Greeks, and was introduced to Europe by the Arabs, who began cultivating it on a large scale in the Mediterranean
in the twelfth century using slaves from East Africa. Europeans acquired a taste for sugar during the Crusades and captured
many of the Arab sugar plantations, which they manned with Syrian and Arab slaves. The slave-based production system was then
transplanted to the Atlantic island of Madeira in the 1420s after its discovery by the Portuguese. During the 1440s the Portuguese
increased sugar production by bringing in large numbers of black slaves from their new trading posts on the west coast of
Africa. At first these slaves were kidnapped, but the Portuguese soon agreed to buy them, in return for European goods, from
African slave-traders. By 1460 Madeira had become the world’s largest sugar producer, and no wonder: It had an ideal climate
for sugar, was close to the supply of slaves, and was on the edge of the known world, so that the brutal realities of sugar
production were kept conveniently out of sight of the growing throng of Euro-pe an consumers. The Spanish, for their part,
began making sugar on the nearby Canary Islands, again using slaves from Africa.
This proved to be merely the warm-up for what was to come in the New World. It was not until 1503 that the first sugar mill
opened on Hispaniola. The Portuguese began production in Brazil around the same time, and the British, French, and Dutch established
sugar plantations in the Caribbean during the seventeenth century. After attempts to enslave local people failed, chiefly
because they succumbed to Old World diseases to which they had no immunity, the colonists began importing slaves directly
from Africa. And so began the Atlantic slave trade. Over the course of four centuries, around eleven million slaves were transported
from Africa to the New World, though this figure understates the full scale of the suffering, because as many as half of the
slaves captured in the African interior died on the way to the coast. The vast majority of the slaves shipped across the Atlantic—around
three quarters of them—were put to work making sugar, which became one of the main commodities in Atlantic trade.
This trade developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and ended up consisting of two overlapping triangles. In
the first, commodities from the Americas, chief among them sugar, were shipped to Eu rope; finished goods, chiefly textiles,
were shipped to Africa and used to purchase slaves; and those slaves were then shipped to the sugar plantations in the New
World. The second triangle also depended on sugar. Molasses, the thick syrup left over from sugar production, was taken from
the sugar islands to England’s North American colonies, where it was distilled into rum. This rum was then shipped to Africa
where, along with textiles, it was used as currency to buy slaves. The slaves were then sent to the Caribbean to make more
sugar. And so on.
Having been an expensive luxury item at the time of the Crusades, sugar fell in price as production increased, and by the
end of the eighteenth century it had become an everyday item for many Europeans. Demand grew as the exotic new drinks of tea,
coffee, and cocoa (from China, Arabia, and the Americas, respectively) became popular in Europe, invariably sweetened with
sugar. Having used fruit and honey as sweeteners for centuries, European consumers suddenly became accustomed to sugar, even
addicted to it. The demand enriched Caribbean sugar barons, European merchants, and North American colonists. Rum became the
most profitable manufactured item produced in New England, and by the early eighteenth century it accounted for 80 percent
of exports. Attempts by the British government to restrict imports to New England of cheap molasses from the French sugar
islands, in the form of the Sugar and Molasses Act of 1733 and the Sugar Act of 1764, were deeply unpopular with the colonists,
causing the first of many disagreements and protests that ultimately led to the Declaration of Independence.
As well as being notable for its reliance on slavery and its economic importance, sugar production also crystallized a new
model of industrial organization. Making sugar involved a series of processes: cutting the sugarcane, pressing it to extract
the juice, boiling and skimming the juice, and then cooling it to allow the crystals of sugar to form, while the leftover
molasses was distilled into rum. The desire to do all of this on a large scale, as quickly and efficiently as possible, led
to the development of increasingly elaborate machinery and prompted the division of workers into teams that specialized in
separate parts of the process.
In particular, sugar production depended on the use of rolling mills to press the cane. These could extract juice more efficiently
than the old-fashioned methods of chopping up the stalks by hand and pounding it, or using screw presses. Rolling mills were
also better suited to continuous production: Once pressed, the stalks could be used as fuel for the boilers in the next stage
of the process. The machinery developed to process sugar—powered by wind, water, or animal power—was the most elaborate and
costly industrial technology of its day, and it prefigured the equipment later used in the textile, steel, and paper industries.
Operating the rolling mills, tending the boiling cauldrons of juice, and working the distilling equipment could be dangerous,
however. A moment’s inattention when feeding sugar into the roller mill, or when handling the boiling sugar, could lead to
horrific injuries or death. As one observer noted: “If a Boyler get any part into the scalding sugar, it sticks like Glew,
or Birdlime, and ’tis hard to save either Limb or Life.” Nobody would do such dangerous and repetitive work at the low salaries
planters were offering, which is why the planters relied on slave labor. To minimize the risk of accidents, it made sense
for workers to specialize in particular tasks. Even for less dangerous work, such as the cultivation of the cane, planters
found that dividing their slaves into teams and giving them specific tasks made it easier to supervise their work and coordinate
the different stages of the process.
An engraving showing proto-industrial sugar production in the West Indies.
Establishing a sugar plantation required large capital investments to pay for land, buildings, machinery, and slaves. The
resulting plantations were the largest privately owned businesses of their day, making their owners (who could expect annual
profits of around 10 percent of capital invested) among the wealthiest men of the time. It has been suggested that profits
from the sugar and slave trades provided the bulk of the working capital needed for Britain’s subsequent industrialization.
In fact, there is little evidence that this was the case. But the idea of organizing manufacturing as a continuous, production-line
process, with powered, labor-saving machinery and workers specializing in particular tasks, does owe a clear debt to the sugar
industry of the West Indies, where this arrangement first emerged on a large scale.
“LET THEM EAT POTATOES”
When Marie-Antoinette, the queen of France, heard that the peasants had no bread to eat, she is supposed to have declared,
“Let them eat cake.” In one version of the story, she said this when the starving poor clamored at her palace gates; in another,
the queen made the remark while riding through Paris in her carriage and noting how ill-fed the people were. Or perhaps she
said it when hungry mobs stormed the bakeries of Paris in 1775 and almost caused the postponement of the coronation of her
husband, Louis XVI. In fact, she probably never said it at all. It is just one of many myths associated with the infamous
queen, who was accused of all kinds of excess and debauchery by her political opponents in the run-up to the French Revolution
in 1789. But the phrase encapsulates the perception of Marie-Antoinette as someone who professed to care about the starving
poor but was utterly incapable of understanding their troubles. Even if she never advocated the substitution of cake for bread,
however, she did publicly endorse another foodstuff as a means of feeding the poor: the potato. She probably did not say “Let
them eat potatoes” either, but that is what she and many other people thought. And it was not such a bad idea. In the late
eighteenth century, potatoes were belatedly being hailed as a wonder food from the New World.
Europeans had first learned of potatoes in the 1530s, when the Spanish conquistadores embarked upon the conquest of the Inca
Empire, which stretched right down the west coast of the South American continent. Potatoes were a mainstay of the Inca diet,
alongside maize and beans. Originally domesticated in the region of Lake Titicaca, they then spread throughout the Andes and
beyond. The Incas developed hundreds of varieties, each suited to a different combination of sun, soil, and moisture. But
the value of potatoes was lost on the Eu rope ans who first encountered them. The earliest written description, dating from
1537, describes them as “spherical roots which are sown and produce a stem with its branches and flowers, although few, of
a soft purple color; and to the root of this same plant . . . they are attached under the earth, and are the size of an egg
more or less, some round and some elongated; they are white and purple and yellow, floury roots of good flavor, a delicacy
to the Indians and a dainty dish even for the Spaniards.” Although a few potatoes were sent back to Spain, and spread from
there to Europe’s botanical gardens, they were not seized upon as a valuable new crop in the way that maize had been. By 1600
potatoes were being cultivated on a small scale in a few parts of Europe, since the Spanish had introduced them to their possessions
in Italy and the Low Countries. In 1601 Clusius, a botanist in Leyden, described the potato and gave it the scientific name
Solanum tuberosum
. He noted that he had received specimens in 1588 and that potatoes were grown in Italy for consumption by both humans and
animals.
Why did potatoes not prove more popular? After all, in the sandy soil of northern Europe they would eventually prove to be
capable of producing two to four times as many calories per acre as had previously been possible with wheat, rye, or oats.
Potatoes take only three to four months to mature, against ten for cereal grains, and can be grown on almost any kind of soil.
One problem was that the first potatoes brought over from the Americas were adapted to growing in the Andes, where the length
of the day does not vary much during the year. In Eu rope, where the length of the day varies far more, they initially produced
a rather meager crop, and it took botanists a few years to breed new varieties that were well suited to the European climate.
But even then, Europeans were suspicious of this new vegetable. Unlike maize, which was recognizable as a previously unknown
cousin of wheat and other cereal grains, potatoes were unfamiliar and alien. They were not mentioned in the Bible, which suggested
that God had not meant men to eat them, said some clergymen. Their unaesthetic, misshaped appearance also put people off.
To herbalists who believed that the appearance of a plant was an indication of the diseases it could cause or cure, potatoes
resembled a leper’s gnarled hands, and the idea that they caused leprosy became widespread. According to the second edition
of John Gerard’s
Herball
, published in 1633, “the Burgundians are forbidden to make use of these tubers, because they are assured that the eating
of them causes leprosy.” More scientifically inclined botanists took an interest in potatoes, the first known edible tubers,
and identified them as members of the poisonous nightshade family. That did not help their reputation either: Potatoes came
to be associated with witchcraft and devil worship.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century potatoes were widely regarded as suitable fodder for animals, but to be eaten
by humans only as a last resort, when no other food was available. The potato made slow progress in the following years, being
consumed only by the very rich (it was prized by some aristocratic gardeners and was served as a novelty) and the very poor
(it became a staple food among the poor, first in Ireland, and then in parts of En gland, France, the Low Countries, the Rhineland,
and Prussia). Famines brought the potato new converts, as people who had no choice but to eat potatoes soon discovered that
they were not so terrible after all. One of the first acts of the Royal Society, Britain’s pioneering scientific society,
after its foundation in 1660, was to point out the value of potatoes in times of famine—on the basis that in years when the
wheat crop failed, there was often a good potato harvest. But this advice was ignored, and it was only when famine struck,
as it did in France in 1709, that the virtues of potatoes were made starkly clear and the threat of starvation forced people
to put aside their prejudices.