Sugar Planting in the Late Eighteenth Century Caribbean

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Bryan Edwards was an Anglo-Jamaican sugar planter, politician, and writer. He is best known for writing The History, Civil, and Commercial of the British Colonies of the West Indies. Several editions of that book were published between the 1790s and early 1800s. In this excerpt, Edwards describes sugarcane, the crop that produced all of the world’s commercial sucrose sugar before the nineteenth century.

Sugarcane was first domesticated on the tropical Southeast Asian-Pacific island of New Guinea in prehistoric times. The early New Guinean farmers chewed the plant for its sweet juice, but did not refine sugar from it. Sugarcane cultivation gradually spread from New Guinea to other Pacific islands and to the Southeast Asian mainland, and to India. It was in India, in ancient times, that people began to refine crystalline sugar from sugarcane juice.

Indian sugar-making technology then spread westward to Iran . When Arab Muslim conquerors invaded Persia in the 6th century AD, they found people growing sugarcane and manufacturing sugar. The Arabs then spread the sugar industry across their empire in the Middle East. Soon sugar was being made in Iraq, the Levant, and Egypt.

European Christians found sugar being made when they invaded the Levant in the Middle Ages. European Crusader kingdoms in the Levant manufactured and exported sugar to Europe. When the Crusaders were expelled from the Holy Land, they brought sugar technology to the Christian-ruled islands of the Mediterranean, including Cyprus, Crete, and Sicily.

Sugar production spread further with the advent of the European age of expansion. Spanish and Portuguese navigators introduced sugar to the Atlantic islands of the Canaries, Madeira, and Sao Tome, and, finally, to the Americas. Portuguese-ruled Brazil became the world’s largest sugar producer in the 16th century, undercutting the older sugar producers of the Old World. Portuguese-Dutch fighting for control of Brazil’s sugar producing regions led to declining production, which allowed colonists in the British and French ruled Caribbean islands to begin to produce sugar.

Barbados was one of the early Caribbean sugar producers in the 17th century, but by the 18th century Jamaica had overtook Barbados to become the leading British West Indian sugar producer. An even more prolific 18th century sugar-producing Caribbean colony was French-ruled Saint-Domingue . Jamaican sugar fell into decline by the early 19th century, and the island was supplanted by newer sugar producers like Cuba.

Sugar production was closely associated with slavery, because of the heavy labour demands of cultivating and processing the crop. Early sugar planters in the Americas employed indigenous and African slaves. The latter became predominant as time went on. After slavery was abolished, planters turned to contract labour- workers signed up for 5 or 10 year contracts to stay and work on a single plantation. The heavy labour demands of sugar shaped the demographics of sugar-growing areas. Today former sugar areas tend to be densely-populated. In many cases they have large populations of African descent. In some places, like Trinidad, Guyana, & Suriname, there are also many people descended from contract workers brought to work on the plantations after emancipation. Former sugar-growing areas also tend to be unusually densely populated.

In this excerpt from one of Edwards’ books, the sugar planter describes the agricultural, industrial, and commercial aspects of sugarcane. In Part I of the text, he describes his understanding of sugarcane’s history, and how the crop was grown on the late 18th century British Caribbean sugar estates. In Part II, he describes how sugarcane was processed into sugar, molasses, and rum.