Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War

by Howard W. French

The product of their output made the sugar industry an important, if still unheralded building block of what became the industrialized West. First, it provided Europe with a powerful financial stimulus. Beyond the most obvious benefits from the sugar business—the revenues and profits that it generated directly—one must also look at what economists call multiplier effects, which stemmed from the many spin-offs and ancillary businesses that flowed from sugar, and from the rapidly expanding world of plantation economies. In terms of scale, perhaps the biggest of these was the exploding slave trade itself, which sugar drove like nothing else, before or after. Finally, there was the technically demanding nature of sugar’s production. Harvesting, pressing of the cane, boiling, and other processing steps were all highly time sensitive and needed to be carefully synchronized in order to ensure both efficiency and quality. As they came to be integrated operations, sugar plantations and the mills they fed with cane, moreover, became some of the largest industries anywhere. The Caribbean still lies ahead in our story, but once sugar took off there, two thousand or more slaves per integrated plantation was not uncommon, making them far larger in size than almost any businesses known in Europe. As the historian Caitlin Rosenthal has written, “Only in the mid-nineteenth century would the largest factories begin to approach the scales of late eighteenth-century plantations. Josiah Wedgwo...