Sugar Changed the World

Aronson and Budhos begin this part with the story of Madame Villeneuve’s trip from the Caribbean to France in 1714 with her slave, Pauline. After Pauline was left at a convent, she refused to return to the Caribbean with Madame Villeneuve. Under French law established by King Louis XIV, slavery was legal in the Caribbean colonies, but not on French soil. Madame Villeneuve tried taking the case to court, but the judges ruled in Pauline’s favor: “she was real to them, human, not a piece of property” (72).

In the English colonies in North America, the modern-day United States, the colonists began protesting against the English Parliament’s tax on sugar. For them, this and other attacks on their property rights reduced them to the same level as slaves. In fact, Aronson and Budhos explain that taxes on sugar came about because of plantation owners’ influence on the English Parliament in order to pressure colonists into buying their sugar from the Caribbean. In 1733, Parliament passed the Molasses Act (later called the Sugar Act), which put a tax on every gallon of molasses that did not come from an English source, discouraging colonists from trading with the French. This new tax only increased smuggling and tensions between the American colonists and England. Nonetheless, Americans continued to practice slavery themselves.

A movement to abolish slavery began in England. In 1785, Thomas Clarkson won a contest of writing persuasive essays in Latin, responding to the question, “Is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?” Clarkson and others dedicated themselves to the cause of outlawing slavery. One tactic they used was boycotting sugar produced in the colonies. Even though slavery had existed in various forms for thousands of years, it was being challenged because “abolitionists forced you to think about how [products were] made” (79-80).

The French Revolution not only overthrew the French monarchy, but also introduced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, a document stating that all men are born with equal rights. This claim— specifically the idea that everyone is born free and equal—caused a clash between plantation owners, who argued slaves were their property, and revolutionaries fighting for human rights. The new Republic of France abolished slavery. However, when the French Revolution turned violent with the execution of nobles, the English abolitionist movement suffered: “As blood started to flow in the streets of Paris, slave owners in England and the Americas were given a perfect defense: If you interfere with property rights, if you free slaves, if you change anything in the government, the result will be chaos and terror” (82).

Still, the principles of the American and French revolutions inspired a massive slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue. This rebellion resulted in the overthrow of French rule and established an independent country, Haiti, ruled by former slaves. To prevent revolution from spreading to their colonies, in 1793 British forces tried to re-enslave the Haitians, but they failed. When the general Napoleon Bonaparte took over the government of France, he reestablished slavery and sent an army to reconquer Haiti. This attempt also failed. However, the United States, which was also afraid that Haiti’s success would inspire slave revolts, refused to recognize the government of Haiti until 1862. The governments of Europe likewise would not recognize Haiti, hampering the development of Haiti as a nation. Meanwhile, in England, the abolitionists under the leadership of William Wilberforce managed to get a bill passed on March 25, 1807 banning all English involvement in the slave trade. They accomplished this by drawing attention to the inhumanity of slavery.

After the Haitian Revolution, sugar plantation owners from the former colony of Saint-Domingue fled to Louisiana. In Louisiana, the brutality of sugar production meant it was the one slave state in the United States where the slave population was dropping: “Sugar was a killer” (93). Because of Louisiana’s cold snaps, the entire crop had to be harvested between mid-October and December. This short time frame, along with the development of steam-powered mills, put intense pressure on slave laborers. As a result, plantation owners in Louisiana tended to buy healthy, young men as slaves. Aronson and Budhos suggest it may have been the presence of so many teenage men looking for a form of expression that led to the creation of jazz.

Sugar production led to cultural change elsewhere. With growing restrictions on the slave trade, plantation owners in Hawaii turned to low-paid Chinese and later Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and Portuguese laborers. When Japanese women joined men on the Hawaiian plantations, they developed a form of music that blended Japanese and native Hawaiian styles. The cultural blending is apparent in the gender’s name, holehole bushi. As Aronson and Budhos explain, “holehole is a Hawaiian word meaning ‘stripping leaves,’ and bushi is Japanese for ‘song’” (98). Although plantation owners were trying to create competition between different ethnic groups to keep wages low, they also accidentally “made Hawaii into the most ethnically diverse place in the world” (99).