Sugar Changed the World

Aronson and Budhos begin this part by discussing what it was like to be an Indian recruited to be an indentured servant in the Caribbean. The use of indentured servants from India began with a slave revolt encouraged by Reverend John Smith. The revolt was put down by the British governor of Guyana, John Gladstone, but it sparked a public outcry in Britain. This public response put pressure on the English Parliament to finally outlaw slavery on August 1, 1838. The sugar plantations thus had to turn to cheap labor from India.

India, especially northern India, which was hit by drought and famine, was poor, so there were many Indians eager to seek economic opportunity overseas. Leaving across the ocean, which was called crossing the kali pana (“black water”), was considered a religious crime by traditional Hindus. Still, some Indians were desperate enough to be recruited by agents of the shipping companies. The Indians who went to the sugar colonies for work were called coolies. The recruiters would promise the Indians they would return to India after a five-year contract of service, but some of their promises would be lies. Separated from the homeland, the coolies forged new bonds. The emigrants called themselves ship brothers (jahajii-bhai) and created songs about their experiences.

Although the indentured workers from India were paid and were not slaves, the work remained “brutally hard.” They were not allowed to leave the plantations; they could be punished with jail, hard labor, or loss of wages; they could be transferred to another plantation if they protested; and in some cases, the workers were beaten or suddenly died. Also, there was competition over work between African ex-slaves and coolies in the colonies. Still, the majority of Indians remained in the colonies even after their contracts ended. Their presence and the presence of ex-slaves helped transform the cultures of the colonies.

Coolies also began to push for more rights. In Guyana, an Indian named Bechu, who was raised and educated by an English missionary, protested against planters who paid Indians for their specific tasks and not by the hour. This protest represented a larger shift in which the planter class was losing its once-absolute power over its labor force.

In 1747, a German scientist, Andraeas Marggraf, discovered how to get sugar out of beets. Napoleon seized upon this opportunity as an alternative to getting sugar from the colonies. It was the relative of Marc Aronson, a Russian surf, who discovered a means of giving beet sugar a sparkling color. This discovery allowed him to buy his family out of serfdom. Further, the development of a cheap alternative to sugar provided a justification for the Russian government to liberate all serfs. Beet sugar became an alternative to not just cane sugar, but also the entire plantation system: “Beet sugar was a foreshadowing of what we have today: the Age of Science, in which sweetness is a product of chemistry, not whips” (117). In fact, beet sugar would be succeeded by other sugar alternatives and artificial sweeteners, like high-fructose corn syrup, aspartame, and Splenda. While plantations do still exist in countries such as the Dominican Republic, sugar is more a production from labs than harsh plantations.

While in Natal, a region of South Africa, Mohandas K. Gandhi met an indentured Indian servant who had been badly beaten by his employer. This encounter brought Gandhi’s attention to the fact that indentured servants in Natal had few rights. Further, Indians who stayed in Natal after their contract expired had to pay an annual tax. The situation was clear: “The Indian community in Natal understood the message the whites were sending: Work here, don’t stay here" (121). Gandhi advocated for the rights of indentured servants in Nata, once getting on the wrong side of an angry mob in the process.

In 1906, when South Africa passed a law called the Black Act that would require every Indian to have registration papers and be fingerprinted, Gandhi encouraged Indians to swear an oath not to obey the law. Gandhi called his passive, non-violent method to protest satyagraha, which can be translated as “truth with force,” “firmness,” or “love-force” (123). When the government of South Africa refused to budge, 2,300 Indians burned their registration papers. In India, Gandhi applied the principles of satyagraha toward the Indian struggle for independence from the British. Gandhi’s strategy, which sprang from his advocacy for indentured laborers, would later become a model for passive resistance across the world.