I wanted to hand this out as a lesson, thinking about how were still connected to the past. There are people i dont, they are not my close personal friends, i like you all very much, but to do that, to hand out a quarter cups worth of sugar, this was the middle ages in europe. It was extravagant. Sugar, in the 1300s, was a rare and expensive good. It was medicine. It was prized and available only to the richest of the rich in western europe. To hand up the small amount i gave you would have been seen as an extravagant thing. Now, it is so much a part of our diets. You can go into a gas station and grab a handful and take it with you. I pay for it. Sugar is so cheap and common, it is hard to avoid it. Is there anyone who has had to give it up for dietary reasons . How easy was it . Terrible. Prof. Paulett right, its hard. Its in medicine and pills. How this came to be how it went from being a rare and expensive good to a thing that is so common that it is hard to avoid, this gets to the heart of the class. It goes from being a rare and expensive good to being something everyone has access to, which ties closely to the colonization of the americas. To the development of slavery in the new world. This little good we dont think much about is part of a massive reorganization of all the cultures of the atlantic ocean. That what we are talking about today. The history of sugar in the americas. It gets is not just where food came from, but into some very significant questions. Sugar was one of the main motors of the slave trade. 75 of all africans brought into the americas in the 1600s were brought to areas where they were growing and making sugar. It was a huge business. Scholars argue it was the First Industrial enterprise in the western world. This tiny thing, this sweet stuff in packets, it has a significant history. That is what we are talking about today. As a lesson in just how boring evil can be, when we think about slavery, one of these evils in history, the people at the time did not see it that way. Lots of decisions added up to create this institution of slavery. So, focusing on the english caribbean, english colonial history, we are talking about sugar, much more than that. Without this commodity, this development, the caribbean, the shape of north American History would be different. To give us a sense of the scale, we start in 1607 in jamestown. Theres just that one colony. After 20 or 30 years, there has been some expansion. The puritans of new england have expanded. They tried other experiments, focusing particularly on uninhabited islands in the caribbean. You have a few colonies being formed in small, volcanic places. 60 years later, england has not expanded that dramatically into the caribbean. They conquered jamaica, which is no small prize. In mainland america, you see a rapid explosion of colonies. 12 of the famous 13 have been founded, and are being developed rapidly. Thats why sugar is so important. The development of the east coast of north america is tied closely to the caribbean. As these tiny islands become developed, become planted, home to massive sugar producing plantations owned by the english, the east coast of north america develops into a support system to these caribbean islands. Traditionally, in American History class, we focus on this part of the map. By doing that, we lose Important Information on what is happening down here that is pushing the history in those places. Again, sugar seems trivial, seems unimportant. The history of sugar, particularly english sugar, is tied closely to everything we do today. The history of how we do things. The history of the country we live in today. These Little Islands here, they have a big influence. Particularly, if we focus in on the island of barbados down here, which will be the main focus of todays lecture. Its almost impossible to see on the map. You zoom in and its still hard to see. You zoom in further, and this cluster of pixels is the island of barbados. Its not terribly large. Its about 170 square miles. Thats a quarter of the size of the county where we are right now. This island has an amazingly large influence on the shape of englands empire and the english landing. All of this is driven by sugar. Questions before we jump in . The mike is open. Theres more sugar in it for you. Alright. The history of sugar prior to the english settlements of barbados, we have talked about how it was a rare and expensive good. We talked about portuguese expansion into the atlantic. They had a european love of sugar. It is easy to love. It gives you a jolt of energy. It makes other food taste better. Theres reasons people wanted it so much. Theres a buzz. Portugal had tapped into it, expanding sugar. The crop was developed in south asia and has come west. Most european sugar in the middle ages came from the mediterranean. In the 1500s, they take Sugar Technology and expanded even further to the coast of brazil at the bottom of the map. As part of this trade networks, the portuguese had innovated other things. Slave Trading Networks provided a source of labor for sugar growth. Not the only source of labor, but an important one. This is what happens to sugar between 1500 and 1600, the slow expansion through the portuguese trade networks. Expanded and innovated and invested in sugar and developed a basic set of techniques, improved upon older techniques. Improved in terms of production capacity. The system they developed, this is a later image which shows the basic technologies they had developed. Hopefully, looking at this, you are getting a sense that growing sugarcane is one thing, but making sugar is another. To take the raw cane juice that grows in sugarcane, the plant on the slide, and to turn it into crystalline sugar, this is an elaborate science, to refine that juice and turn it into crystallized sugar. If you go to a sugar refinery, its like an oil refinery. May have to turn raw juice into crystalline sugar. This was all based upon, you know, the 2015 version of what the portuguese have developed, it gets easy. It was first developed in the southern parts of asia. Is grows easily on its own. The thing about sugarcane is it has a 1416 month growing cycle. You cant planted anywhere they gets frost. The trick is taking the raw juice out of the plant and turning it into something people want to eat. This is what the portuguese innovate, building upon older technology. The processing. This is what we are seeing here in this engraving. A sign of how important sugar was to europeans, that they would take time to engrave and show actual manufacturing. They were interested in the technology, interested as an enterprise. The process of making sugar is shown here on the slide. Back here, we had it growing in these tall rows. Its being cut. Once you cut it, you have two or three hours to use it or it will dry up. You have to rush it immediately to some sort of crushing mill to squeeze the juice out. This is a portuguese innovation. This roller mill, these three cylinders are tightly pushed together. You feed the stalk into it. It runs down a trough. The tricky part begins when you have to start refining it. At each stage, this removes a certain impurities. As you boil, this is also revised by a skilled tradesperson called the boiler. He is sort of like a master chef. He is someone who sees the juice bubbling and skims the impurities, leaving the good stuff. So this is a laborintensive process. It requires massive amounts of labor. You have people running cane to the mill from the fields. People must turn it constantly. You have to keep the kettles burning. You cannot take a break. You have to have people hauling sugar from place to place, juice from place to place. This is a laborintensive business. It is aroundtheclock. And then, once its done, after all this work, all this juice, all this boiling, you have a loaf of sugar. One third has too much molasses, and you have one pound of good raw sugar in the middle. It has to be refined again to turn to white sugar. The molasses can be distilled and made into rum. You get money out of the waste product. This is sugar on the brazilian coast. In the 1500s, you get more and more towards this system. To things should jump out about this. One, you need a lot of labor. Two, this is a complicated technology for the 1600s. This is not cheap to build or maintain. Any people that know how to make this kind of machinery to make it all work. It is expensive to start a sugar operation. But, europeans loved sugar so much that people paid it to justify the expenses down the way. While cane is easy to grow, the mill needed large labor forces. This is hot, heavy work out in the fields planting and harvesting cane, so its simple but not easy. You need people to build and maintain the mills. You need carpenters and masons. You need a lot of land. You need a lot of labor. You need a lot of knowhow. You need a lot of material, a lot of skill. There are not a lot of mom and pop operations. What has developed in brazil, because it is so expensive, is kind of a mixed sugar economy. The portuguese, individual portuguese subjects, very few ever put together enough money to create a total system. Some people can put together enough money to create the mill. Some have land and labor. Other people cant afford the land, but they can work has to as tenant farmers. And then, you have a mixture of slave labor from africa and from native americans, and Contract Labor making this all happen. Many of the elements were developed in brazil. They are not being put together into a total system yet. You have a mixture of Medieval Technology and modern technology. Is all kind of mixed together. But, once you take this basic technology of sugar production and insert it into a different geography, the dynamics change enough that a different country with a different resource and a different level of investment money takes the stuff being developed in brazil slowly, and in the span of a couple of decades, turns it into the modern plantation system. That signals the rapid expansion of modern sugar development. We move from brazil to barbados, get the english involved. Thats where were heading. Alright. The presugar history of barbados matches that of virginia and new england. English companies are looking for places to plant colonists and make money. You have Small Companies putting together expeditions to settle in the caribbean. They are thinking the might grow something useful. So, in the 16 20s, these various Companies Settle a number of small islands. Barbados is one amongst them. Barbados was, in the long run, one of the most successful. It was just stuck out from the edge of everything. It wasnt occupied by anyone. No native americans, no french or spanish, just volcanic rock. Looking for an unoccupied space, the english move in. There wasnt a lot inviting about the colony except for the tropical climate. For the first 20 years, barbados develops slowly. The company that offers head rights borrows from the virginia system. All the colonies learn from each other. They both had rights, land, the english come, they settle the island. Tobacco grows well. Great, weve got a good. Cotton grows well too, you develop these small farms. Virginia has already overproduced tobacco to the point that the price has dropped. Slowly, right, they create small, okayseeming farms. They grow tobacco. Theres modest success in barbados. That is the arc barbados is on, looking like a marginal colony for 20 years. Around 1640, all the forces of World History combined to create a significant but small event. Dutch ships come to barbados from brazil and bring the technology of making sugar to the english. The technology was closely guarded. In an early version of corporate espionage, they take the technology and bring it to england. This involved world wars. It involved wars between england and holland on one side with spain and portugal on the other. The dutch conquer everything portugal had built. They took over portuguese trading factories. They took over the sugar plantations of brazil. The dutch bring the technology of how to make sugar to the english settlers of barbados around 1640. We are not clear on the date. We know it just happened around then. This is a significant event no one sat down and recorded. What a big deal it would become. The technology alone was not enough to change the island. But, bringing that technology, that english thing links barbados to englands wealth and in a different way to economics. Is these tiny, mundane, economic decisions that transform slavery and so much of north america. What happens when the Technology Comes to barbados is no Investment Opportunities are created. The tobacco plantations of barbados were not turning out as well as planned. But, when english people realize they have a space that could grow sugar, and a space where they can mill sugar, thats a prime investment opportunity. All the pieces come together. Theres a settler class. Youve got a small group of tobacco farmers with established credit. Barbados has a reputation as a place that is secure. It hasnt been burned by the spanish in the past 20 years. Is a safe space for the money to go. They have access to the valuable technology the portuguese had developed, and through the dutch, they have an access point to west african labor. You put that together with the most crucial ingredient of all, money, barbados explodes. Not overnight, but it is amazing how it happened. It takes time. Within 20 years, barbados has gone from an island with a few small farms growing slowly to the heart of an emerging modern plantation complex. The process transforms the laws and attitudes and ideas and beliefs of the english people around the atlantic. So, its investment. They know they can grow it and mill it. Sometimes, they build mills just to process other peoples sugarcane. New immigrants take up land as tenant farmers. They get pushed out, because these investors putting money into the island expects to see a return on that investment. Because of the geography of barbados, because of the nature of investment, the emerging economy, this is tied closely to the emerging idea of capitalism. With all these factors coming together in a small space, these investors start pushing more and more to accelerate slavery on the island. This has an effect. Land values shoot up. Theres not a lot of land to begin with. These are tiny islands. The price of the property shoots up. Automatically, the people that can afford it to buy acreage see an increase in their wealth. Thats important. That money you can borrow against. Thats collateral, credit. But, the land values, there is an incentive. Right . If you spent all of this money on some acreage in barbados, you want to make sure that you get enough money out of it to cover that investment. The land is expensive so you want to get as much out of it as possible. You do not want to waste valuable acreage with trees and wilderness and docs or whatever might be on it. Get as much possible, planned as much sugar as possible, the most viable crop in as many places as you can. There is an incentive to maximize production because of the nature of the island. But, and this is where the colonialism begins, no one had yet developed the idea of the law of supply and demand, but they were feeling it. And, what happened is that these people planned more and more sugar and the price starts to come down. Which means that if you are going to recoup your investment you have to plant more and more. Alongside that, there is an effort to cut costs wherever you can, including labor. The incentives very quickly build in barbados. To turning from a system of farming that is based mostly upon servant labor to slave labor. Because the incentive bills so quickly because it is such a small islands, the value of land goes up so much and the cost is so big. What is so scary about slavery, the thing about the institution that should terrify is how it made so much economic sense to people in the 1600s. That is going to that is the terrifying thing. It was not an act of evil done by people for totally irrational reasons. It made a certain kind of sense. And that is the dangerous thing about it. Especially when you take into account that 17thcentury englishman were comfortable with the idea of slavery. And they did not have a very welldeveloped sense of human rights during as we saw in ireland and in north america at jamestown. There is not a whole big belief in 17thcentury england. English people were used to slavery be normal. There are various kinds of captivity and unfreedom going around the rest of europe. So, we put all of that together, the economic incentives, the cultural believes of england you very quickly lead to thinking like this appear on the screen. Up here on the screen. So, this is a very short letter, almost the entirety from a fellow to another in massachusetts. A lot of words here, but what is important about this quote is a lot of words here, but what is important about this quote is that the english are already thinking about africans. Not as just laborers who get something out of the plantation, they are thinking of them as investments. There are thinking about them in terms of cost and increase. They are taking human lives and turning them into commodity value. This is the scary thing. About slavery. It is so much a part of this economic thinking that is developing. The modern english economy. This is what is happening. They believe that certain groups of people are barbarians and are eligible to be slaves. You take the believe that already exists and you add this economic motive to it and you get something that is a little bit different. Moving toward something even more brutal than captivity and slavery as it existed in medieval europe. We are getting into a dark place here, but history is full of these kinds of dark places. Barbadian planters are doing as this quote reveals is that they are thinking about the lives of these africans in particular, in terms of how much sugar they produce. And how quickly they will produce it. And the economics of the time, the late 1600s, after this quote. Barbadian planters started thinking in terms that a single enslaved labor will produce enough to pay their purchases in a couple of years. Anything they produce after that would be mostly pure profit once you subtracted that their level of subsistence given to these workers, shelter, food, clothing. Medieval laws on slavery still insisted masters of slaves provide their sustenance to their slaves. Now, these human lives, in addition to these old medieval laws, are developing this new thing, commodity value. A value in terms of what they produce. A monetary value. This also means that slave labor, unlike servants serving to pay for their term of work. Slaves who are kept in bondage can always be sold again. This is part of the investment idea of them. One of the creepy things. A person who is a slave can be sold to another planter and you can recoup the price at some o