Atlantic sugar production and European sugar consumption rose dramatically in the late eighteenth century. Despite this increase, there were two separate calls to refrain from consuming sugar in both Britain and France at the end of the eighteenth century. Demands for abstinence were directed toward women to stop household consumption of sugar. In Britain, abolitionists urged women to stop buying West Indian sugar because it was a slave good,
produced on plantations where enslaved Africans were subject to cruelty and where mortality rates were high. In France, the call to forego sugar came during the early years of the Revolution of 1789, in response to rising sugar prices. The women of Paris were asked to refrain from buying sugar at high prices that were assumed to be a result of market manipulation by speculators and hoarders engaging in anti-revolutionary behavior. The increase in Parisian sugar prices was not driven primarily by
profiteering, but by a global shortage caused by the slave revolt in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now Haiti. Comparing these two sugar boycotts, one in Britain, the other in France, provides an opportunity outside of national historical narratives to consider how both events employed the same technique for very different aims. The call to renounce sugar in both cases used economic pressure to create political change. An exploration of these movements for abstinence will provide a better
understanding of how they critiqued consumption, and translated discourses, both abolitionist and revolutionary, into practice.
Copyright 2021 by Duke University Press
2021
You do not currently have access to this content.
SERVANTS IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA IN THE 17th CENTURY THE BEGINNINGS OF SLAVERY
Introduction
We might conveniently begin by quoting the British historian R.G. Colling- wood whose statement that "all history is an interim report on work in progress" is an apt description of this paper. For much work on the beginnings of slavery is now in progress. If there has been general agreement on the fact that in all the English colonies of the New World black slavery was only a second form of labor supply and followed a period - more or less long - of white servitude, the factors that determined this transition and its significance for Ammerican history and society were not well established. Furthermore, the beginnings of black slavery received relatively scant attention, even though from the early 1960's onwards black history became one of the major interests of American historians. Their work was more concerned with the functioning of slavery and with two troubling questions : how did England, then of all the colonial powers the one society with the fewest remnants of all forms of medieval servitude develop the harshest, most total system of chattel slavery in the New World and how could the people who demanded the freedoms of selfgovernment for themselves deny those freedoms to one fifth of the people in their midst ? In the 60's such explanations as class interest and racism were being studided and great controversies developed around the psychological consequences of slavery or its degree of oppressiveness and for the first time much effort went into the study of the life of the slaves. Yet, in all this activity colonial America remained relatively neglected and the work of the
Chapter 4: Slavery, Freedom and the Struggle for Empire
Slavery and Empire
How did African slavery differ regionally in eighteenth-century North America?
Atlantic Slave Trade: The systematic importation of African slaves from their native continent across the Atlantic
Ocean to the New World, largely fueled by rising demand for sugar, rice, coffee and tobacco
oLater condemned by people as a crime against humanity
o18th century—regularized business between European merchants, American planters, and African traders
oVital part of world commerce
o1st mass consumer goods produced by slaves
Sugar, rice, coffee, tobacco
Rising demand increased growth of slave trade
Atlantic Trade
Caribbean remained commercial focus of the British Empire
oBritain: manufactured goods to Africa and New World
oNew World: colonial products to Europe
oAfrica: slaves to New World
Merchants in New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island were active in slave trade
oShipped slaves from Africa to the Caribbean or southern colonies
Slave market of the West Indies were largest for fish, grain, livestock, and lumber exported from New
England and colonies
In Britain, slave trade and profits stimulated
oRise of ports like Liverpool and Bristol
oGrowth of banking
oShipbuilding
oInsurance
oFinance early industrial revolution
Free colonists and Europeans—freedom meant power and right to enslave others
As slavery became more entrenched so too did the idea of Quaker abolitionist John Woolman—“the idea of slavery
being connected with the black color, and liberty with the white”
Africa and the Slave Trade
Benin (African society) opted out of slave trade
Most African rulers took part
oPlayed Europeans against one another
oCollected taxes from foreign merchants
oKept capture and sale of slaves under their control
oSlave trade was a source of wealth and gave rise to African Kingdoms
Loss of population weakened society and economy
The Middle Passage
Middle Passage: The hellish and often deadly middle leg of the transatlantic “Triangular Trade” in which European
ships carried manufactured goods to Africa, then transported enslaved Africans to the Americas and the Caribbean,
and finally conveyed American agricultural products back to Europe; from the late 16th to the early 19th centuries,
some 12 million Africans were transported via the Middle Passage, unknown millions more dying en route
1