Case Study: Sugar & Spice & Europeans Not So Nice!
Reading: For this case study you are to analyze Chapter 14 The Era of Global Contact (410 - 417) and review the sources provided below. You are expected to be able to answer the guiding question in full depth with specific historical evidence and supporting details.
Sugar
In 1493, one year after the first voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus introduced cane sugar to the islands of the Caribbean. At the time, sugar was practically unknown to most people in Europe. This would soon change.
In 1493, one year after the first voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus introduced cane sugar to the islands of the Caribbean. At the time, sugar was practically unknown to most people in Europe. This would soon change.
Spice
Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama sailed around the southern tip of Africa and reached India in 1498. Portugal, over the next centuries, changed the flourishing trade relationships in the Indian Ocean.
Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama sailed around the southern tip of Africa and reached India in 1498. Portugal, over the next centuries, changed the flourishing trade relationships in the Indian Ocean.
Key Concept:
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Guiding Question: Skill - Contextualization
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Sources
Source 1: Tom Standage, An Edible History of Humanity, New York: Bloomsbury 2010
Having been an expensive luxury item at the time of the Crusades, sugar fell in price as production increased, and by the end of the eighteenth century it had become an everyday item for many Europeans. Demand grew as the exotic new drinks of tea, coffee, and cocoa (from China, Arabia and the Americas, respectively) became popular in Europe, invariably sweetened with sugar. Having used fruit and honey as sweeteners for centuries, European consumers suddenly became accustomed to sugar, even addicted to it. The demand enriched Caribbean sugar barons, European merchants, and North American colonists. Rum became the most profitable manufactured item produced in New England, and by the early eighteenth century it accounted for 80 percent of exports. Attempts by the British government to restrict imports to New England of cheap molasses from the French sugar islands, in the form of the Sugar and Molasses Act of 1733 and the Sugar Act of 1764, were deeply unpopular with the colonists, causing the first of many disagreements and protests that ultimately led to the Declaration of Independence.
Source 2: Benjamin Moseley, M.D., A Treatise on Sugar with Miscellaneous Medical Observations, 1800.
The increased consumption of sugar, and increasing demand for it, exceed all comparison with any other article, used as an auxiliary, in food: for such is the influence of sugar, that once touching the nerves of taste no person was every known to have the power of relinquishing the desire for it.
Source 3: E.T. Parris, illustrator, The Sugar Hogshead, London, 1846
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Source 4: Tom Standage, An Edible History of Humanity, New York: Bloomsbury 2010
Establishing a sugar plantation required large capital investments to pay for land, buildings, machinery, and slaves. The resulting plantations were the largest privately owned businesses of their day, making their owners (who could expect annual profits of around 10 percent of capital invested) among the wealthiest men of the time. It has been suggested that profits from the sugar and slave trades provided the bulk of the working capital needed for Britain’s subsequent industrialization. In fact, there is little evidence that this was the case. But the idea of organizing manufacturing as a continuous, production line process, with powered, labor saving machinery and workers specializing in particular tasks, does owe a clear debt to the sugar industry of the West Indies, where this arrangement for emerged on a large scale.
The process for growing and producing cane sugar in 18th century Jamaica:
- Clear a hillside and plant the cane “setts” in rows at about five-foot intervals
- Cultivate for several weeks until canes stand above weeds
- After about 15 months of growing, cut cane at base with machetes. (New crop will regenerate from root base)
- Take canes to crushing mill where stalks are run under rollers and placed in presses for squeezing out all the juice.
- Run cane juice through covered “gutter” to boiling-house for first boil.
- Repeat boilings in large copper tubs. (The sugar cane stalk is 75% water, 15% sucrose, and 10% fiber. Repeated boilings are necessary to evaporate off the water.) Skim off scum that floats to surface.
- Take skimming’s from third and fourth boil to the still-house for making rum.
- Pour pots in drying room for two days. The cooled crystallized raw sugar leaves behind the more liquid molasses. The molasses leaks out the pot hole and cannot be further crystallized. Sell molasses as a sweetener or add to the skimming’s for making rum.
- Ship sugar cakes to Europe for direct consumption or further refinement. Perhaps ship some of the molasses to Boston for rum making.
Source 5: David Richardson, “The Slave Trade, Sugar, and British Economic Growth, 1748 – 1776,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1987.
Source 6: Tom Standage, An Edible History of Humanity, New York: Bloomsbury 2010
Spices helped to lure Columbus westward, where none were to be found, and da Gama eastward, where they could be found in abundance. And as if to crown their achievements in establishing new sea routes, spices also inspired the first circumnavigation of the earth. In 1494 Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, Which included a simple way to divide up the new lands reached by their explorers. They ruled a line down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, halfway between the Cape Verde Islands off the African coast (which were claimed by Portugal) and Hispaniola (which Columbus had just claimed for Spain). Any new lands to the west of the line, it was agreed, would belong to Spain, and those to the east would belong to Portugal; the opinions of the inhabitants were considered to be irrelevant.
…This set the tone for the Portuguese efforts to control Indian Ocean trade; any ship or port without a cartaz (Portuguese permit that granted protection to the port and its ships) was deemed to be fair game, local rulers were intimidated into trading on terms generous to the Portuguese, and violence was used arbitrarily and unsparingly.
…This set the tone for the Portuguese efforts to control Indian Ocean trade; any ship or port without a cartaz (Portuguese permit that granted protection to the port and its ships) was deemed to be fair game, local rulers were intimidated into trading on terms generous to the Portuguese, and violence was used arbitrarily and unsparingly.
Source 7: Baily Wallys, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire: 1415 – 1580, University of Minnesota, 1977.
King Manuel of Portugal sent instructions to Viceroy Francisco de Almeida in 1505
King Manuel of Portugal sent instructions to Viceroy Francisco de Almeida in 1505
It seems to us nothing would serve us better than to have a fortress at the mouth of the Red Sea or near to it – rather inside it than outside might afford better control – because from there we could see to it that no spices might pass to the land of the sultan of Egypt, and all those in India would lose the false notion that they could trade any more, save through us
Source 8: Tom Standage, An Edible History of Humanity, New York: Bloomsbury 2010
The Dutch East India Company (VOC)
Convinced that they had to find a way to control the source of the spices, the Dutch got their act together. In 1602 they formed the Dutch East India Company (the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC), an association of merchants meant to reduce competition, share risk and realise economies of scale. Other European countries also formed East India companies—everyone from Portugal to Sweden to Austria had a go—but none was ever as successful in the spice trade as the VOC. By 1670 it was the richest corporation in the world, paying its shareholders an annual dividend of 40% on their investment despite financing 50,000 employees, 30,000 fighting men and 200 ships, many of them armed. The secret of this success was simple. They had no scruples whatsoever.
Profits from the spice trade helped to bankroll the Dutch “golden age” of the seventeenth century, a period in which the Dutch led the world in commerce, science, and financial innovation, and the wealthy merchant class provided sponsorship for artists such as Rembrandt van Rijn and Johannes Vermeer. But in the long run the Dutch spice monopoly proved to be less valuable than expected. The garrisons and warships needed to protect the monopoly were hugely expensive and did not justify the returns as the price of spices began to fall in Europe in the late seventeenth century. The falling price was due in part to a more abundant supply, so the Dutch imposed artificial constraints on it: They burned huge quantities of spices on the docks in Amsterdam and began to limit the volumes shipped from Asia in an effort to prop up prices. But as trade in textiles became more important, spices accounted for a shrinking proportion of Dutch returns, falling from 75% in 1620 to 23% in 1700.
Convinced that they had to find a way to control the source of the spices, the Dutch got their act together. In 1602 they formed the Dutch East India Company (the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC), an association of merchants meant to reduce competition, share risk and realise economies of scale. Other European countries also formed East India companies—everyone from Portugal to Sweden to Austria had a go—but none was ever as successful in the spice trade as the VOC. By 1670 it was the richest corporation in the world, paying its shareholders an annual dividend of 40% on their investment despite financing 50,000 employees, 30,000 fighting men and 200 ships, many of them armed. The secret of this success was simple. They had no scruples whatsoever.
Profits from the spice trade helped to bankroll the Dutch “golden age” of the seventeenth century, a period in which the Dutch led the world in commerce, science, and financial innovation, and the wealthy merchant class provided sponsorship for artists such as Rembrandt van Rijn and Johannes Vermeer. But in the long run the Dutch spice monopoly proved to be less valuable than expected. The garrisons and warships needed to protect the monopoly were hugely expensive and did not justify the returns as the price of spices began to fall in Europe in the late seventeenth century. The falling price was due in part to a more abundant supply, so the Dutch imposed artificial constraints on it: They burned huge quantities of spices on the docks in Amsterdam and began to limit the volumes shipped from Asia in an effort to prop up prices. But as trade in textiles became more important, spices accounted for a shrinking proportion of Dutch returns, falling from 75% in 1620 to 23% in 1700.