Empire

• An Empire of Things

  • Tea
  • Sugar
  • Opium
  • Cotton
• Sugar cane


  • Member of the tropical grass family
  • Can grow up to 5m tall
• Saccharum


  The Latin, scientific name for sugar cane
• Species of sugar cane

  • S. officinarum
  • S. barberi
  • S. sinense
• Sugar cane probably came from the Pacific Islands or Indonesia around 5000 years ago and slowly spread across Asia to the Middle East
• Journey of sugar cane to Europe


  From India to Europe
• Honey


  The most obvious way to add sweetness before sugar cane arrived in Europe
• Honey mentioned in


  • Homer's Odyssey
  • Exodus in the Hebrew Torah
  • Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet
• Homer (The Odyssey): 'Any crewman who ate the lotus, the honey-sweet fruit, lost all desire to send a message back, much less return, their only wish to linger there with the Lotus-eaters, grazing on lotus, all memory of the journey home dissolved forever.'
• Honey-sweet fruit


  Sweetness is a bad thing in this quotation
• Homer (The Odyssey): 'No one else has ever sailed past this place in his ship until he has listened to the honey-sweet voice that issues from our lips'
• Honey has a double meaning

  Enjoyable but also dangerous
• Exodus: 'A land flowing with milk and honey'
• God's promise of a land flowing with milk and honey


  Importance and value of honey
• Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet): 'The sweetest honey is loathsome in his own deliciousness And in the taste confounds the appetite. Therefore love moderately.'
• Sweetness


  Can be a bad thing in this quotation
• Everyone in Europe could buy honey and it was used in cooking, but sweetness could also be a trap
• Sugar cane finally arrived in England when soldiers returned from the 1st Crusade in 1099
• Muslim countries in the Middle East grew sugar cane but it was so expensive that only kings and queens could afford it
• Monarchs competed with one another to show off and they used sugar
• Banquets and meals included sugar sculptures to show how wealthy you were
• Early sugar factory


  5 steps
• Sweetness


  • Desirable
  • Dangerous
• Henry the Navigator: ''The sweetest honey is loathsome in his own deliciousness'<|>'Honey-sweet voice'<|>'Honey-sweet fruit''
• Henry the Navigator


  1394-1460
• 5 steps in early sugar mill

  1. Harvest the sugar

  2. Cut the sugar

  3. Crush the sugar

  4. Boil the juices

  5. Let it set into 'sugar loaves'
• This was brutal, hot, demanding work and there weren't enough workers to do it. Portugal and Spain needed more workers.
• Slavery existed in Africa before Portugal and Spain took Madeira and the Canary Islands in the 1400s.
• Initially, Europeans participated in and developed a system inspired by the Arab slave trade in North Africa and West African empires like the Songhai and Mali.
• However, Europeans changed everything.
• In 1493, on his second trip to the Americas, Columbus brought pigs that carried influenza that killed 95% of the natives on the island of Hispaniola.
• Columbus also brought sugar cane.
• Now Spain had lots of perfect, tropical land to grow sugar cane. However, they didn't have anyone to farm the land and work in the sugar mills.
• After the first colonies in the 1500s, Spain and Portugal focused on mainland South America, while France, Holland and Britain fought it out in the Caribbean.
• It was only in the 1600s that Britain started founded settlements in the Caribbean (St Kitts in 1624, Barbados in 1627, Antigua in 1632). Sugar was grown on all these islands and worked by slaves.
• Growth of slave trade

  • 2,000 slaves per year in 1570
  • 6,000 slaves per year in 1610
  • 18,000 slaves per year in 1660
• Demand for sugar just went up and up and up...
• James Walvin: ''While it may seem perverse to modern eyes, few questioned this system of slavery. Not until the mid- and late 18th century did doubts emerge about the morality of slavery and slave trading. The reason was straightforward enough: here was a system, driven forward by sugar, which yielded abundant wealth and well-being for everyone – except, of course the Africans.''
• Mary Prince: 'While I was in the country, I saw how the field negroes are worked in Antigua. They are worked very hard and fed but scantily. They are called out to work before daybreak, and come home after dark; and then each has to heave his bundle of grass for the cattle in the pen. Then, on Sunday morning, each slave has to go out and gather a large bundle of grass; and, when they bring it home, they have all to sit at the manager's door and wait till he come out: often they have to wait there till past eleven o'clock, without any breakfast. After that, those that have yams or potatoes, or fire-wood to sell, hasten to market to buy a dog's worth of salt fish, or pork, which is a great treat for them. Some of them buy a little pickle out of the shad barrels, which they call sauce, to season their yams and Indian corn. It is very wrong, I know, to work on Sunday or go to market; but will not God call the Buckra [white] men to answer for this on the great day of judgment—since they will give the slaves no other day?'