Category Archives: Spain

by | 10 September 2024 · 6:16 am

Caribbean Language Demographics

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 402-405:

Four major languages are spoken in the Caribbean: Spanish, English, French, and Dutch. The 17 Caribbean countries that are predominantly Anglophone comprise more than 17% of the region’s population, yet the total English-speaking population of the Caribbean is less than that of the Dominican Republic alone. These statistics clarify the demographic predominance of the Spanish-speaking countries of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, which represent 61% of the Caribbean population. Of the 20% of Caribbean peoples who speak French or variations of French, three-quarters live in Haiti. The Dutch speakers of Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles represent another 2% (Knight 1995, 34). Other languages, spoken by fewer numbers of people, include Hindi and Javanese. The languages of the European colonizers remain the official languages of formal Caribbean education and legal systems, but numerous African languages brought by the slaves fused with European, Asian, and Amerinidian languages to create numerous “creole” languages, which are the spoken vernaculars of everyday life in a number of Caribbean countries. Most Caribbean creole languages are young as languages go, having existed for not more than two or three centuries. Today, however, there are growing written literatures in creole languages, and movements to promote the languages to equal standing as vehicles of formal instruction and communication. Among the most familiar examples is Haitian Kreyol, the spoken language of approximately 12 million insular and diasporic Haitians, which along with French has been an official language in Haiti since 1961. Other widely spoken creoles include Jamaican patois, which is spoken by about four million people in and outside Jamaica, and the patois of Trinidad and Tobago, a historical legacy primarily of French on Trinidadian English, which has been in decline since about the mid-20th century. In Suriname, Sranan Tongo is the language of approximately 300,000 people; in Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao, Papiamento is spoken by more than 350,000. And although the varieties of Spanish spoken in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic share a number of linguistic properties, they also have discernable differences based on geographic location and local histories.

…

From its colonization, the Caribbean has represented newness, which Europeans captured in the term “creole.” When applied to the region, the Spanish word criollo and the Portuguese word crioulo (derived from the verb criar, “to raise or bring up”) signified something or someone originating in Europe (or Africa) and reproducing itself in the New World. Thus animals, plants, and people could all be designated as creole. Creole people were the descendants of Europeans or Africans born in the Caribbean, as well as the offspring of African and European parents. Inherent in the idea of creole identity was an assumption that being born in the Caribbean or being the “mixed” descendant of two racially differentiated parents meant losing one’s ancestral cultural heritage.

…

In the Anglophone Caribbean, Brathwaite’s analysis of what he called the “creole society” of Jamaica emphasized the creation of new forms through the synthesis of existing ones. Arguing against understanding black and white populations as “separate nuclear units,” Brathwaite saw them as being “contributory parts of a whole” that produce a uniquely Caribbean culture. Creolization here represents the potential for social integration and unity, where the “mixed” population serves “as a bridge, a kind of social cement” that integrates society (Brathwaite 1971, 307, 305). In calling for a renewed emphasis on creole identity and the literary value of the creole language, the most recent Francophone creoliste writers and activists celebrate the heterogeneous dimensions that together comprise the Caribbean or, in the words of Martinican poet and writer Edouard Glissant, constitute Antillanité (Caribbeanness). The creoliste position, along with those of other thinkers, points to the abiding debates about how to characterize and give meaning to the forms of diversity so apparent in the region.

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by | 9 September 2024 · 5:43 am

Caribbean Return to Indentured Labor

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 399-402:

The Caribbean of today began to form half a millennium ago, impelled by European colonial expansion harnessed to nascent capitalism and centered on resource extraction and sugar plantations producing for a global market. Within 50 years of Columbus’s landing, indigenous Caribbean populations had been dramatically reduced, largely due to disease and the harsh conditions of labor imposed by the Spanish colonizers. This diminution of indigenous peoples was accompanied by the addition of foreigners from the “Old World” of Europe, Africa, and later Asia—a socially engineered assemblage of disparate ethnolinguistic groups under conditions of coerced labor and massive wealth accumulation. The imported groups included indentured Europeans, enslaved Africans, and, later, indentured Africans and Asians.

The transformations of the plantation system had various effects on the racial and demographic composition of different colonial territories. For example, the Hispanophone Caribbean, particularly Cuba and Puerto Rico, was not significantly developed for the global sugar market until the 19th century (although by mid-century Cuba and Puerto Rico had emerged as the first and third largest producers of sugar in the hemisphere), and the proportion of European populations compared to non-European populations was far greater there than in the Francophone and Anglophone colonies.

Over the 19th century, slavery was gradually abolished in the Caribbean. Newly independent Haiti (formerly Saint-Domingue) abolished slavery in 1804, followed by the British West Indies in 1838, the French possessions in 1848, all Dutch territories by 1863, and Cuba in 1886. Emancipation presented plantation owners with a dilemma: ensuring sugar and other production at high levels without the benefit of enslaved labor, or with diminishing numbers of freed workers willing to engage in plantation labor under the conditions offered by the plantocracy. One strategy implemented by Britain and France was that of freeing Africans from the slave trade of other European colonizers (Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese) and then sending them to British and French Caribbean colonies as indentured laborers. Almost 40,000 Africans were thus sent to the British West Indies and approximately 16,000 to the French West Indies (Schuler 1980).

Another form of 19th-century indenture brought immigrant laborers from Asia into the region. Organized as either state projects or private enterprises, indenture schemes evolved over eight decades and changed the demographic, cultural, and social terrain of the Caribbean as irrevocably as African slavery had done earlier. Between 1890 and 1939, for example, the Dutch recruited almost 33,000 Javanese, primarily from Central Java and Batavia, for their Caribbean colony of Suriname. The two principal source regions of indentured labor, however, were India and China. Itself a British colony, India experienced indenture as a government-regulated industry, with laborers recruited primarily from the regions of Oudh, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh and shipped out from the ports of Calcutta and Madras. Between 1838 and 1917, almost 400,000 Indians arrived in the British Caribbean, the majority in Guyana and Trinidad. Although China was never colonized, its political vulnerability allowed private interests to orchestrate indenture schemes, largely from Canton. Between 1840 and 1875, approximately 142,000 indentured Chinese arrived in Cuba (Helly 1993, 20); from 1853 until 1866 and in trickles thereafter, about 18,000 Chinese were indentured in the British West Indies (Look Lai 1993, 18). Later—beginning around 1890, and concentrated between 1910 and 1940—a second wave of Chinese immigrants, this time not under indenture, arrived in the Caribbean.

The relationships of Asian indentured laborers with the local populations they encountered have influenced the values, identities, and cultural practices of their respective societies. To one extent or another, all the Asian immigrants were initially viewed by the locals as labor competition. Particularly where they constitute a large percentage of the population, Indians have been represented by local anti-indenture interests as “scab” labor, yet historically they also have been pitted against Afro-Caribbean workers. The tensions arising from perceived and actual labor conflicts have left a monumental legacy of racial politics in such contemporary societies as Guyana and Trinidad, where Indians represent more than 40% of the population. Perhaps because of their relatively smaller numbers, Chinese and Javanese laborers have had less fraught relationships with established populations, especially with those in similar occupational and class positions. In Cuba, for example, Chinese indentured laborers worked side by side with enslaved Africans. Enmity between these two groups was encouraged by colonial authorities as a divide-and-rule strategy, but tensions expressed in racial terms did not significantly persist into the present, either in Cuba or in other parts of the region. Once the Chinese found their economic niche primarily in the retail trades and shopkeeping, they no longer represented labor competition to other populations.

Migrants to the Caribbean from the Levant—known as “Syrians,” “Syrian-Lebanese,” or árabes—also began to arrive in the 1860s, increasing their numbers significantly by the 1890s. Most were Maronite Christians leaving Ottoman-occupied regions. Lebanese immigrants came first, followed by Syrians and Palestinians. Although they spread out across the Caribbean (and into Latin America, where they are also called turcos), certain communities predominated in particular countries. For example, of the three groups from the Levant, Lebanese comprise the largest population in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, and Palestinians in Haiti (Nicholls 1980). These immigrants came as individuals, or sometimes in families, rather than in an organized migration arrangement; over the years, other family members followed. Although a few went into agricultural production, others became itinerant peddlers. Within a few generations these communities branched out into import-export trading, and today they comprise a large population of affluent and politically active citizens.

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by | 4 September 2024 · 5:26 am

Capt. Cook & Sea Otters

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 244-246:

COOK’S MONTH AT Nootka Sound would have far-reaching impacts—and not only in terms of establishing England’s early presence in the region that would eventually become British Columbia. Of the many ripple effects emanating from Cook’s visit here, perhaps the most consequential had to do with a single vulnerable creature: Enhydra lutris, otherwise known as the sea otter. These marine mammals, affectionate and mischievously cute, flourished here, feasting as they did on the huge populations of urchins and shellfish found throughout this extensive waterway. Sea otters appeared to lead a charmed existence, most of it spent cavorting on their backs.

But the trait that made them so beautiful, their thick, glossy coat, was also their curse, for in certain parts of the world—Asia, especially—the pelts were considered “soft gold.” Affluent Chinese men coveted sea otter cloaks as a status symbol and would pay astronomical sums for them. The lustrous fur was soft but also resilient, and it could be brushed in any direction, a result of its incomparably high fiber count—sea otters produce upwards of six hundred thousand hairs per square inch, twice the density of the fur seal.

During those heady days of the Manchu Dynasty, the market for pelts was becoming frenzied, akin to the tulip mania that gripped Holland in the 1630s. The potential profits staggered the imagination. Up until that time, most of the sea otter pelts that found their way into Chinese ports came from the Russian Far East and from the first, tentative Russian forays into Alaska. But stories from Cook’s visit here would lure crass armies of European and American fur hunters to Nootka and nearby locales, setting in motion a brutal industry that became so wildly competitive it would nearly ignite a war between England and Spain to control access to the sound.

Relentless hunting of sea otters, combined with the fact that they are slow breeders—typically producing only one pup every other year—meant that within a few decades of Cook’s arrival they would become virtually extinct. The fur trade springing up around Nootka Sound would doom the sea otter and cause enormous dislocations among the Mowachaht and other tribes living here—for the Europeans brought the deadly triad of alcohol, guns, and disease, which in short order would cast the Native cultures into a tailspin.

In their trading with the Mowachaht, Cook’s men procured many hundreds of sea otter pelts. The sailors called them “sea beaver,” and they well understood, as Midshipman George Gilbert put it, that their fur “is supposed to be superior to any that is known.” At the time, though, the men were not scheming to earn fortunes in Asia. They simply thought the velvety furs would come in handy in the Arctic—and, indeed, they would fashion the pelts into handsome greatcoats, caps, and gloves that would see them through many an Alaskan cold front. “To us who were bound for the North Pole,” said Samwell, the pelts “were extremely valuable articles and every one endeavored to supply himself with some of them.”

The Resolution and the Discovery, thoroughly refurbished, were towed out of the cove on April 26, 1778. Mowachaht men, keening songs in their canoes, accompanied the two ships almost to the mouth of the sound. As a parting gift, a chief bestowed upon Cook a handsome cloak made of “soft gold,” a fur raiment that nearly reached down to Cook’s ankles. In return, the captain presented the chief with a fine broadsword with a brass hilt—which, Cook thought, “made him as happy as a prince.” The Mowachaht implored the Englishmen to return soon. “By way of encouragement,” Cook wrote, the chief promised that he and his people would “lay in a good stock of skins for us, and I have not the least doubt but they will.”

The two ships, their sails rapidly filling, turned out of the sound and into the open sea.

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by | 3 September 2024 · 9:02 am

Capt. Cook & the Americans, 1778

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 226-227:

On the other side of North America, the revolt against England had deepened into a bitter war that showed no signs of abating. At that very moment, British troops were occupying Philadelphia, while George Washington’s bedraggled army was beginning to stir from its winter quarters at Valley Forge. The war was taking on an international flavor. Shortly after the Resolution and the Discovery left the Hawaiian Islands, Benjamin Franklin and two other American commissioners had signed a treaty in Paris that intimately bound France to the rebellious colonies. With the stroke of a pen, France became the first nation to recognize the United States as a sovereign country. An outraged Britain would soon declare war on France, thus fully bringing the French into the American conflict.

Despite all of this, Benjamin Franklin would later make a point of lobbying among his colleagues for Captain Cook and the Resolution to be granted special immunity not afforded to other British ships. Should American vessels encounter Cook anywhere on the high seas, they were to give him leeway and clemency. Cook was on an assignment of transcendent importance for humanity, Franklin’s proclamation asserted, one too important to be detained by squabbles between nations. Franklin made his remarks in what he called a “passport” addressed to the captains and commanders of all American ships. In case Cook’s vessel should “happen to fall into your hands,” Franklin advised, “you should not consider her as an enemy, nor suffer any plunder to be made of the effects contained in her, nor obstruct her immediate return to England.” Americans, he said, should “treat the said Captain Cook and his people with all civility and kindness, affording them as common friends to mankind, all the assistance in your power which they may happen to stand in need of.”

The Spanish, who would soon be joining France in declaring war against England, were already well aware that Captain Cook was supposed to be somewhere in the Pacific, headed for the northwest coast of America—and they were highly displeased with England’s encroachments upon the region. They had informed officials in Mexico to keep a lookout for Cook and, if possible, to intercept and arrest him. Spanish shipwrights were constructing two new vessels—one in Mexico, another in Peru—for a voyage that aimed to halt and overtake Cook while reasserting Spanish claims in the Pacific Northwest.

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by | 18 August 2024 · 8:30 pm

African Origins of Caribbean Slaves

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 246-247:

Between 1500 and 1870, the Caribbean region (construed as the islands and associated mainland rim) was the destination of about 5.75 million Africans, about 46% of all captives involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Four years after the first black slaves came from Seville in 1501, 17 African slaves arrived in Hispaniola to work in its copper mines and 100 or so in its gold mines. In 1525, 213 captives from São Tomé landed in Santo Domingo, marking probably the first slave voyage from Africa to the Americas. For the next century Africans continued to arrive in small numbers (perhaps 7,000 total) in the Spanish Caribbean islands. Not until the second quarter of the 17th century did a significant number (about 27,000) arrive in the British Caribbean. The 18th century was the high point of the trade, accounting for two-thirds of all Africans shipped to the Caribbean, although Cuba received most of its slaves (710,000) in the 19th century. The British Caribbean received the most Africans—almost 2.8 million—with the French next at 1.3 million, the Spanish about 1 million, the Dutch about 500,000, and the Danish just 130,000. About 15% to 20% of Africans arriving in the Caribbean were subsequently traded within the Americas.

The origins of these Africans varied. Overall, West-Central Africa supplied the most slaves—about 1.6 million. After 1595 Angola became the leading source of slaves for Spanish America; later it contributed about one-third of Africans brought into Cuba. The next most important region was the Bight of Biafra, which supplied about 1.3 million slaves, while the Gold Coast supplied just over a million, mostly to the British West Indies. The Bight of Benin exported just under a million, over a third of them to the French West Indies. The three regions of Upper Guinea—Senegambia (500,000), Sierra Leone (300,000), and the Windward Coast (300,000)—were minor suppliers despite being geographically the closest to the Caribbean. South East Africa sent fewer than 200,000.

Particular islands drew on specific regions of Africa for considerable periods of time. Before 1725, about three-quarters of Africans in Jamaica came from the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin, accounting for the early prominence of so-called “Coromantees” from the former coastal region and Adja-speakers from the latter on the island; later, however, Jamaica received most of its Africans from the Bight of Biafra. In the first quarter of the 18th century, 60% of African arrivals in Saint-Domingue were from the Bight of Benin; by the third quarter of the century, 60% came from West-Central Africa. Overall, about half of Saint-Domingue’s Africans came from Angola and the Congo. When the slave trade into Cuba began in earnest in the late 18th century, about a third of its Africans were from the Gold Coast. Thereafter, West-Central Africa and the Bight of Biafra predominated.

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by | 15 August 2024 · 2:20 pm

Spanish Caribbean Havana vs. San Juan

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 185-188:

As large stretches of the Greater Antilles were falling into general decline and had begun to look inward, giving rise to the peculiar creole cultures one associates today with the Hispanophone Caribbean, one city—Havana—was experiencing unparalleled growth and prosperity. In effect, one of the few Spanish Caribbean success stories of the long 17th century was Havana’s conversion into a major maritime outpost, a dynamic, multicultural center where goods and people from distant lands built an emerging mercantile capitalism. With this change, the economic and demographic epicenter of the Spanish Caribbean moved decisively from the old colonial capital of Santo Domingo to western Cuba. Havana’s growth, laggard at best until about 1590, would be unstoppable after that year. Historians have often remarked how, in economic prowess and cultural achievement, western Cuba became more like a continent than an island. By the end of the 18th century, Havana, this capital of “continental Cuba,” was the third most populous city in the Americas and a crucial link connecting the main elements of Spain’s dispersed overseas empire. The demographic and economic growth that fueled its ascent began around the middle of the 16th century and continued in spurts throughout the long 17th century.

Historian Alejandro de la Fuente and his collaborators (2009) have narrated in great detail the story of Havana’s emergence as the most important of Spain’s Caribbean maritime cities, initially rivaled in importance only by Cartagena [Colombia]. Beginning in the second half of the 16th century, Havana emerged as the crossroads of three key trading circuits in the Spanish Atlantic: the transatlantic trade, the intercolonial trade between various ports in the Spanish circum-Caribbean region, and the intracolonial trade connecting various Cuban ports with the island’s principal commercial hub. The first of these trading circuits funneled large amounts of silver from the continental colonies and some American staples such as sugar, tobacco, indigo, and hides toward Europe in exchange for manufactures, foodstuffs, wine, and enslaved Africans. The second circuit, the intercolonial, grew in importance as Spain’s fleet system of transatlantic navigation (the so-called Carrera de Indias) became more developed. It connected the more marginal ports in the Caribbean, usually bypassed by Spanish ships, with the Atlantic routes. The third circuit, to and from the Cuban interior, linked Havana to the outside world as both supplier and market. Because the forces that made up Cuba’s great maritime city were so far-flung and diverse, and because the people who built the city also hailed from diverse corners of the Atlantic world, referring to Havana as one of the few “Atlantic communities” seems justified.

The three mercantile systems that converged in Havana interconnected with each other in the city’s harbor, a large, deep, well-protected port capable of accommodating dozens of vessels at a time. It was one of the two or three best harbors in the Caribbean and, considering its proximity to the Gulf Stream, easily the best located. During the second half of the 16th century, Havana’s window to the sea would be made virtually impregnable by the construction of three forts (one at each side of the bay’s entrance, and one closer to the main docks) as well as an underwater chain at the harbor’s entrance to interrupt traffic whenever necessary. This defensive complex was highly successful and—as the English corsair Francis Drake found in 1586—could be so formidable that it discouraged even the most daring aggressors from attacking the city.

…

As an Atlantic city, Havana gradually became a Spanish Caribbean anomaly in several ways. First, it became a thriving port that drew strength from Spain’s increasing presence as a precious-metal producer in the European system at a time when other port cities in the region were becoming more inward-looking and less cosmopolitan. It also bred a social order more hierarchical than those of smaller cities: Havana’s elite was ethnically more diverse, economically more dynamic, and in its business orientation more akin to other Atlantic hubs like Seville, Cartagena, and Veracruz. As its prosperity grew, Havana’s elite drew more resources from the agriculturally rich hinterland, from which it obtained goods, including sugar, that later were sold via Atlantic networks. Local fortunes grew enough in the 17th century so that some habanero families purchased titles of nobility and imitated in the Caribbean the lavish lifestyles of the Spanish aristocracy. The habanero elite stood at the pinnacle of a society profoundly stratified by class, status, and race—a socioracial hierarchy that in its well defined and protected social spaces was not quite replicated in any other Spanish Caribbean city.

If, in its vitality amid the relative poverty of the 17th-century Spanish Caribbean, Havana occupied one extreme, San Juan stood at the opposite end of the spectrum. A heavily fortified bastion governed by military men, it was the only port in Puerto Rico authorized to engage in direct trade with the metropole. When contacts with the mother country were frequent, as in the final quarter of the 16th century, this arrangement had worked relatively well. After 1625 or so, however, the monopoly trading system collapsed and Puerto Rico was thrust essentially to the margins of Spain’s Atlantic trading circuits. Between 1651 and 1675, reportedly only nine ships left Seville, the Spanish peninsula’s single designated port for colonial trade, for San Juan. As commercial relations with Spain came to a virtual halt, the colonists in Puerto Rico were forced to rely on contraband. These contacts, illegal but commonplace, drew them into a web of trade relations that was centered in the Danish and British islands to the east and south. Thus, contrary to Havana, the Atlantic port city par excellence, San Juan had become a regional port city where life centered on the contraband relations that thrived at the imperial margins and in proximity to foreign colonies.

Still, this poor, underpopulated city on the eastern edges of the Spanish empire, surrounded by impressive walls and guarded by a massive fort (San Felipe del Morro) at the entrance to the bay, was racially stratified and hierarchical in ways reminiscent of Havana, although it was less residentially and socially segregated. Whites (whether rich or poor), free people of African descent, and enslaved persons cohabited in many of the barrios into which the city’s small footprint was divided. San Juan’s landholding and commercial elites were clearly poorer than those of Havana or even Santo Domingo, although many foreign observers remarked on their aristocratic aspirations and claims to racial purity.

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by | 12 August 2024 · 6:22 am

Redefining “Plantation” in 1600s

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 131-133:

At least in the British case, the very word “plantation” offers a clue to the continuities between Old and New World histories of violent expansion, for it entered the English language during the Tudor period, in the context of the English conquest of Ireland. When the English broke up the previous social and political structures of the Celtic Irish, installed themselves as lords of the land, and pressed their new subjects into agricultural service, they called the result “planting.” To the 16th-century English, planting meant improving the land—in the sense not just of planting crops, but of implanting a social order they thought superior to what had been there before. The phrase speaks to migration and agriculture, but also to political domination. This is the sense in which Francis Bacon used it in his “Essay on Plantations” in 1625. Some 30 years later, Thomas Hobbes was even more precise in referring to a plantation as “numbers of men sent out from the commonwealth, under a conductor, or governor, to inhabit a foreign country, either formerly void of inhabitants, or made void then by war.”

The plantation was thus not simply a type of agricultural enterprise, but a political institution deployed in organizing colonial social space. It also welded a model of political domination to one of economic enterprise. As sociologist Edgar Thompson (1935) argued, at least since Tudor times, planting had come to signify “a form of migration and settlement which was organized, controlled, and given direction by capital; and it looked to a profitable return from capital.” Planting meant colonizing, but in a rather specific sense: it involved capital investment and the anticipation of profit. A plantation colony is one established not for military purposes, or as a place where individuals from overpopulated areas migrate to gain access to land (although it may come to serve such purposes as well). It is a planned enterprise geared toward generating return on capital by transplanting people who are expected to produce commercially valuable crops in a colonized territory.

This is what the British charter companies so important in the colonization of North America were about: their goal was to transplant people for profit. It just so happened that the settlers in Virginia found the right kind of crop (tobacco), whereas those in New England did not—which is part of the reason why the term “Plymouth plantation” sounds quaint to us. The Puritans certainly “planted,” and quite violently so; but the result was something rather different from a plantation colony as generally understood today. The intriguing historical semantics of the English term “plantation” notwithstanding, the forms of violent, agriculturally based settler colonialism it implied did not set the precedent for the institution that would leave its indelible imprint on the history of the Caribbean: the agro-industrial complex of the slave labor–based sugar plantation and its tri-continental economic articulation that linked New World colonial production sites with markets for commodified human labor from Africa and networks of capital, credit, distribution, and consumption in Europe. The origins of the institution arguably lie in the very first phase of Spanish colonialism in the Caribbean.

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by | 11 August 2024 · 3:41 pm

Sugarcane on the Atlantic Islands

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 77-80:

From the mid-15th century, the Portuguese took slaves to work on Madeira: Moroccans and Berbers, black Africans, and Canary Islanders. The number of slaves who could be profitably employed was limited because the Madeiran sugar establishments were still relatively small in comparison to the later Caribbean and Brazilian plantations. Because of population growth in Portugal itself in the 16th century, many free Portuguese laborers migrated to Madeira, further lessening the demand for slaves. There were even proposals to export some of the slaves already there. In the 15th century, Madeira was a precursor of the future American colonial areas, but by the early 16th century its development had transformed it into a replica of metropolitan Portugal.

The Portuguese established sugar production on other Atlantic islands, but none rivaled the early profits of Madeira. In the Azores sugar production met with little success because of the unfavorable climate; there grain and dyestuffs were always more important, and slaves were few in number. Portuguese agriculture in the arid Cape Verde Islands concentrated on cereals and fruits and was complemented by cattle raising. São Tomê, which became a crucial entrepôt for the transatlantic slave trade, experienced a sugar boom in the 16th century and can also be seen as a prototype of the sugar islands of the Caribbean.

With sugar production and trade prospering, shiploads of sugar were delivered to the large European markets: Lisbon, Seville, Antwerp, and cities of the Mediterranean. Although most of the plantations and mills were in the hands of Portuguese, the bulk of the export trade was controlled by foreigners, many of them Italians resident in Portugal. Columbus traded in Madeiran sugar early in his career and lived on the neighboring island of Porto Santo for a time in the 1470s. The European demand for sugar was strong, and the lower costs of Madeiran sugar caused heavy competition for the longer-established Mediterranean producers.

The Portuguese were not the only Europeans who were developing the Atlantic islands during this time. In the early 15th century, Castile began sponsoring conquests in the Canaries, and by the end of the century it had secured control of all the islands. Unlike the other Atlantic islands, the Canaries had a native population who were likely akin to the Berbers. Foreshadowing events in the Americas, the Spaniards subdued the islanders and enslaved those who resisted. Of these, a number were exported to Europe or Madeira, while others were employed on Canarian sugar plantations.

The island population was relatively small to begin with, and its numbers fell due to epidemic disease after the European incursion. Members of indigenous groups whose leaders had signed treaties could not be enslaved legally, unlike members of the non-treaty groups, and those who were enslaved frequently attained manumission. In the early years of the 16th century, the Canarian slave trade to Europe ceased as the islanders increasingly assimilated European culture and intermarried with the colonists. Since native workers never filled the labor needs of the Canaries, the islands witnessed an influx of other workers, including a number of free Castilian and Portuguese settlers. Wealthier settlers brought their own slaves with them from the peninsula. Portuguese slave traders brought in blacks from West Africa, and Castilian mariners raided the coast for North Africans, Berbers, and other slaves. Following the first Spanish contact with the Americas, a few American Indians were sold in the Canaries, but the Spanish crown soon outlawed the slave trade in Indians.

These sugar establishments on Madeira and in the Canary Islands turned out to have some important features of the Caribbean plantations that would emerge in the 16th century, including elements both agricultural (growing the cane) and industrial (refining the sugar), the use of slave labor, and the export of a product to be sold in the growing markets of Europe. The significant difference between the sugar establishments on the Atlantic islands and the later plantations of the Caribbean was size; the former had smaller plots of land and fewer laborers. Those Atlantic islands provided a link between Mediterranean sugar production and the plantation system that was to dominate New World slavery and society into the 19th century.

Madeira and the Canaries formed the staging area from which sugar cultivation and refining would reach Hispaniola, the island where sugarcane was first planted in the Caribbean. Columbus, knowledgeable in the Portuguese sugar trade, had ships of his second transatlantic voyage stop in Madeira for additional supplies. These included refined sugar as a medicinal store and cuttings of sugarcane, which were later planted at Columbus’s ill-fated settlement of La Isabela on the north shore of Hispaniola. The first canes grew but failed to establish permanent sugar production. Only in the first decade and-a-half of the 16th century did successful sugar plantings and newly introduced sugar mills on Hispaniola establish the foundations for the fateful beginning of the colonial plantation complex in the Americas.

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by | 10 August 2024 · 6:03 am

Role of Sugarcane in the Islamic World

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 69-71:

Sugar and slavery, key components that helped shape the colonial Caribbean, were present in the medieval Mediterranean world in both Muslim and Christian areas. Elements that contributed to the development of the plantation complex in the early modern Caribbean and elsewhere in the Americas had long Mediterranean histories: the use of slaves, slave trade, sugar cultivation and refining, merchant capitalism, and marketing networks.

The Muslims first introduced sugarcane growing and refining to the Mediterranean after they found the crop under cultivation and production in Khuzistan in Mesopotamia, just north of the Persian Gulf. When the Muslims conquered the region in the seventh and eighth centuries, they established a labor force imported from East Africa to work in the cane fields, thus foreshadowing the links between sugar production and black slavery. Still, in the Islamic world and the Christian Mediterranean, free labor predominated in sugar production.

From Khuzistan, sugar refining spread to Baghdad, which lasted as a refining center until the end of the Middle Ages. Egypt was the next step along sugar’s westward march; the first sugar plantations were established there in the early eighth century. From Egypt, the Muslims spread sugarcane to Yemen and to the lands around the Mediterranean: Syria, Sicily, southern Morocco, and southern Spain. In ancient and early medieval times, the Mediterranean had not known sugar; sweetening came from honey and fruit juices. Honey remained a luxury because its supply was limited and could never be expanded much. Sugarcane was entirely different, its growth limited only by the availability of suitable land and labor.

By the 10th century, sugar production was thriving in several places in the Islamic world, and cane sugar traded widely in the Muslim markets and afield to the Byzantine Empire and the Christian West. Because of the special requirements of successful sugarcane production, it was mainly large landholders who could afford the necessary investment. The intensive nature of the industry has been a feature of cane sugar production ever since.

Egyptian sugar processes became famous throughout the world. The Egyptians probably invented the manufacture of cube or misri (Egyptian) sugar. They had long used two minerals, natron (sodium carbonate) and alum (aluminum potassium sulfate), for the refining of honey, and around the 11th century they began to refine cane sugar with the same minerals.

The first written evidence of sugarcane in Spain appears in the 10th century, even though Muslims conquered most of the Iberian peninsula early in the eighth century and, from the time of the emir ’Abd al-Raḥmān I in the mid-eighth, were introducing and acclimating new crops in palace gardens in southern Spain. The Calendar of Córdoba first mentions sugarcane around the year 961, but this source may reflect conditions in Egypt more accurately than in Spain, or may be referring to all territory under Cordoban control rather than Córdoba itself. Certainly in Muslim times, sugar was grown in a wide stretch of southern Iberian territory, from the wetlands of the lower Guadalquivir south of Seville to warm coastal valleys along the Mediterranean coast from Málaga to Almería and occasionally as far north as Castellón.

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During Islamic times, sugar was a luxury product, used extensively in pharmacology and medicine and as a significant component of cuisine. Muslim physicians, following Galen’s approach, used it to balance the four humors. Honey and sugar, usually dissolved in water, were used to treat disorders of the respiratory, urinary, and digestive systems. A 15th-century Egyptian allegorical tale showed the personification of sugar leaving the ranks of the army of medicine and joining the army of the foods, reflecting the increasing availability of cane sugar. Sweets, including candy and sweet baked goods and other confections, were popular throughout the Muslim world. Equally important was the common use of sugar, along with fruits and other sweeteners, in meat dishes and vegetable recipes throughout medieval Christian as well as Islamic lands. In modern times the cuisine of Europe has tended to shed such recipes and to confine sweetened foods to the dessert course, whereas in North Africa main courses of meats and vegetables sweetened with sugar and fruits have remained popular.

Egyptian sugar production prospered in the 13th and 14th centuries, with sugar exported to the commercial centers of Italy, France, and Spain. Yet at the same time, the sugar industry in the Near East began to fall victim to the same forces that were causing an overall decline in the economy of the Islamic world, including deforestation and the Christian advance in maritime power and trade. Sugar factories began to close around the middle of the 14th century, and that process accelerated in the 15th. Cairo had 66 sugar mills in 1325; by the first years of the next century, nearly half had been abandoned.

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Filed under Egypt, food, Mediterranean, migration, religion, slavery, Spain

by | 9 August 2024 · 6:20 am

Europe’s Oldest Overseas Colonies

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 7-8:

Because of this long history of colonial domination, the Caribbean is rightly considered the oldest theater of overseas European expansion. The extended duration of the region’s colonial experiences and the depth of the colonial imprint on its society and culture dwarf those forged in African or Asian colonies during the age of high imperialism (ca. 1850–1914). Whereas in those latter regions, with very few exceptions, colonial arrangements lasted less than a century, in the Caribbean most societies were built from scratch at least 350 years ago (and some more than 500 years ago), all within strictures dictated by a mercantile, colonial capitalism. Put in even starker terms, except for Haiti, which violently overthrew French colonial rule after little more than a century, all of the Caribbean nations that gained independence in the course of the 19th or 20th centuries had endured at least three centuries of colonial domination.

Moreover, few other colonial settings were as dramatically affected by European agency—demographically, politically, and culturally—as the insular Caribbean. The drama of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca states notwithstanding, the success of Iberian colonialism on the American mainland rested heavily on the mobilization of large indigenous populations, often with the significant collaboration of subjugated native elites. Though mainland Spanish America received its share of European settlers and African slaves, Amerindians (and, increasingly, mestizos) predominated demographically throughout the colonial era. Likewise, Europeans rarely managed to gain more than coastal footholds in Asia until the late 18th century, and in Africa not until the second half of the 19th.

In the Caribbean, however, the demographic collapse of the indigenous population led to the near-complete repopulation of the islands by enslaved Africans transported to the region as a rightless and degraded workforce for emerging plantation enterprises, which increasingly provided the raison d’être for colonies in which sugar, coffee, tobacco, indigo, cocoa, or other tropical staples shaped the course of political and economic development. To be sure, communities of Native Caribbean descent persist today in Dominica, St. Vincent, and other islands, and in Puerto Rico and its diaspora a neo-Taino movement that aims to attain federal recognition has recently taken hold. Likewise, as Aisha Khan points out in chapter 27, the size of populations locally identified as “white” (or “Asian”) varies greatly from island to island. Yet there is no question that the Caribbean region as a whole is demographically the most highly “Africanized” part of the New World.

Contemporary historians of the transatlantic slave trade tend to agree that the Antilles absorbed about 45% of the upwards of 10 million enslaved Africans who survived the violence of capture in Africa and the ordeal of the Middle Passage (Eltis 2001). But the sheer extent of the moral catastrophe entailed in the transplantation of Africans to the Caribbean becomes clearer in comparative terms. The French Windward Islands (Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Lucia, and Grenada), whose combined landmass of 1,483 square miles is about equal to that of the state of Rhode Island, imported more than 300,000 slaves between the early 17th century and the ending of the trade in the mid-19th century, while the entire British mainland of North America imported some 389,000 over a comparable period. Even more dramatically, French Saint-Domingue, slightly larger than Maryland, is estimated to have received upwards of 770,000 enslaved Africans between its formal cession to France in 1697 and the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791, a vast majority of them arriving in the decades immediately preceding this event—yet no more than 450,000 of them were still alive when the revolution put a decisive end to slave importation into the colony. Still, the French islands were far from exceptional in this regard. British Jamaica imported more than a million enslaved Africans between 1655 and 1807, yet released a mere 310,000 of them and their descendants into freedom once emancipation arrived in the 1830s.

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Filed under Africa, Britain, Caribbean, economics, France, labor, Latin America, migration, Netherlands, slavery, Spain