Higman 2000 Sugar Revolution

The Sugar Revolution
Author(s): B. W. Higman
Source: The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 53, No. 2 (May, 2000), pp. 213-236
Published by: Wiley on behalf of the Economic History Society
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Economic History Review, LIII, 2 (2000), pp. 213-236
The
sugar
revolution
By B. W. HIGMAN
Of
the many revolutions identified by historians, only one takes its

name from a particular commodity.' This is the sugar revolution, a
concatenation of events located in the seventeenth-century Caribbean
with far-reaching ramifications for the Atlantic world. Unlike the more
broadly based revolutions typical of economic history-the industrial
revolution, the agricultural revolution, the commercial revolution, the
price revolution-the sugar revolution points to the transformative power
of a single commodity, resulting in what has sometimes been termed
'crop determinism'. Determining influences have readily been attributed
to other crops-rice, wheat, potatoes, for example-but none of these
have given their names to the transformations with which they are
associated.2 Sugar alone has achieved that status.
The six central elements of the sugar revolution are commonly regarded
as a swift shift from diversified agriculture to sugar monoculture, from
production on small farms to large plantations, from free to slave labour,
from sparse to dense settlement, from white to black populations, and
from low to high value per caput output. More broadly, it is claimed
that the sugar revolution had five effects: it generated a massive boost to
the Atlantic slave trade, provided the engine for a variety of triangular
trades, altered European nutrition and consumption, increased European
interest in tropical colonies, and, more contentiously, contributed vitally
to the industrial revolution. Not all accounts of the sugar revolution
include each of these features. Like most of the revolutions of economic
history, the sugar revolution concept has developed and diffused, tending
to take on new elements and expanding claims made for its significance.
These claims have entered the mainstream of long-run global economic
history and development economics.3
Generally, historians concede that the idea of revolution has served a
useful role in the writing of history, giving shape and purpose to the
trajectory of otherwise seamless, continuous patterns. Indeed, the emergence of history as an academic discipline and the modern understanding
I I thank Stanley Engerman, Howard Johnson, and Barry Smith for comments on drafts of this
article, Gregory Bowen for research assistance, and Ira Berlin, Pieter Emmer, Jock Galloway, Richard
Grove, Franklin Knight, Brij Lal, and Ralph Shlomowitz for helpful suggestions.
2 Scott, 'Defining the boundaries', p. 72; Earle, 'Staple interpretation'; Berlin and Morgan, Cultivation and culture, pp. 4-5; Salaman, History and social influence, pp. 220, 333, 601; Bray, Rice
economies, p. xiv; Scobie, Revolution on the Pampas, pp. ix, 4-8. For eccentric references to rice,
tobacco, cotton, and breadfruit revolutions, most of them spawned by the green revolution, see
Abdul Hameed et al., Rice revolution; Wenkam, Micronesia, p. 11; Berlin, Many thousands gone,
pp. 108-9, 142, 342-3.
3 Landes, Wealth and poverty, pp. 113-22. Cf. Cannadine, 'Present and the past'; Coleman, Myth;
Overton, Agricultural revolution.
C EconomicHistory Society 2000. Publishedby Blackwell Publishers,108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 iJF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148, USA.

214
B. W. HIGMAN
of revolution as dramatic social and economic change occurred simultaneously, about the time of the French Revolution. When the great
transformation attributed to sugar occurred, however, in the middle of
the seventeenth century, revolution was still thought of in classical terms
as signalling recurrence or restoration, a cyclical return to an earlier stable
state. These alternative models remain embedded in the debate in the
literature and in broader analyses of continuity and discontinuity. Discontinuity may be conceived as a punctuation of secular patterns of
evolutionary change or as something more profound, inaugurating a
completely new order. It is the second formulation-the dramatic version
of revolution-that has concerned modern historians and it is questions
regarding the indicators and measurements applicable to the proper
attribution of revolutionary status that have fuelled the most vigorous
debate over the reality of, for example, the industrial and agricultural
revolutions. However much historians may have come to recognize the
diminishing utility of applying the term to particular places, periods, and
events, revolution remains firmly established as a key concept.4
I
The sugar revolution concept has its origins in the literature of French
and English colonization. In French, the first identified use of the term
occurred in Gaston-Martin's Histoire de l'esclavage dans les coloniesfran,aises of 1948, where it was expressed as 'la revolution de la canne'. In
English, the earliest known use occurred in 1956 in A short history of the
West Indies by Parry and Sherlock, who titled their fifth chapter 'The
sugar revolution'.5 Gaston-Martin located the origins of the revolution in
Guadeloupe c. 1650-70, Parry and Sherlock in Barbados c. 1645-60.
These parallel accounts outlined the initial colonial settlement of the
eastern Caribbean by white smallholders and indentured labourers cultivating tobacco, ginger, indigo, and cotton; the replacement of these crops
and people by sugar and enslaved Africans; the amalgamation of smallholdings into large plantations; the great and sudden wealth of the new
planter class; the emigration of whites; and the consequent changes in
social structure and political organization. All of these aspects of the
sugar revolution were interpreted as outcomes deriving directly from the
biological and agricultural requirements of the sugarcane and the production function of sugar making.
Contemporary observers, from the 1650s, were aware of at least some
of these changes taking place around them, but the association with
'revolution' emerged only gradually along with the establishment of a
scholarly literature of European imperialism in the Caribbean. Satineau
in 1928 referred to 'une revolution economique et sociale' in describing
the transformation of Guadeloupe c. 1665. He gave sugar and the sugar
4 Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, pp. 203-23; Ritter, Dictionary, pp. 388-91; Gerschenkron,
Continuity, pp. 11-39; Rosser, Catastropheto chaos; Wrigley, Continuity, pp. 8-9.
5 Gaston-Martin, Histoire de l'esclavage, p. 19; Parry and Sherlock, Short history, p. 63.
i EconomicHistory Society 2000

THE
SUGAR
REVOLUTION
215
islands significant roles in French colonial history and in the Atlantic

economy, yet tempered the revolutionary character of the transformation
by suggesting the change was a lengthy process.6 Contemporary British
historians emphasized the speed and intensity of change in Barbados and
the Leeward Islands compared with the 'more gradual' transformation of
the French colonies, yet proved reluctant to apply the word revolution
to either case.7 The first writer known to do so in English was MacInnes,
who in 1935 called the events in the British West Indian colonies 'an
agrarian revolution'. This was something bigger than the sugar revolution,
taking in the southern continental colonies as well as the West Indies,
tobacco as well as sugar, and reaching into 'the African trade' and 'the
great colonial trade' of the British. Several other writers offered versions
of 'revolution' in this period, giving the idea of social revolution particular
relevance, though often the concept as well as the term remained submerged.8 Thus the eventual association of sugar with the notion of
dramatic transformation and discontinuity, as occurred in the construction
of the 'sugar revolution', was indeed a significant moment.
Modifications of the original sugar revolution concept and term have
taken several forms. In 1961 Lasserre distinguished the 'revolution sucriere' of the seventeenth century from a 'revolution industrielle' of the
nineteenth century which involved changes in technology and organization
internal to the sugar industry. Further, Lasserre divided this industrial
revolution into two stages: the first (in the 1840s) saw the establishment
of central mills, and the second (1875-1900) the emergence of latifundia.
This was a distinction with application in the British as well as the
French West Indies, and came also to be used for Cuba to which a fullscale sugar revolution was first attributed by Knight in 1970.9
The early 1970s witnessed a sudden increase in monographs directly
concerned with the sugar revolution of the seventeenth century, notably
three works by American historians on the English West Indies. In No
peace beyond the line (1972), Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh made large
claims for the 'agricultural and industrial miracle' that began in the
English and French West Indies in the 1640s, a change that 'completely
transformed their society and economy'. The transfer of sugar from Brazil
to the West Indies required the transplantation of 'an entire culture',
they said, and 'few enterprises in the history of agriculture in modern
times approach this in ingenuity, completeness, and in ultimate economic
consequences'. The introduction of the 'sugar complex' became 'a central
concern in the economic history of the seventeenth century'. Bridenbaugh
and Bridenbaugh twice referred to this transformation as a 'social revolution' and twice as an 'ecological revolution'. They saw the shift from
'incipient rural societies of white, English-speaking Europeans' to the
slave plantation and an African population as 'the most thoroughgoing
6 Satineau, Histoire de la Guadeloupe, pp. 112-13; May, Histoire 9conomique,pp. 206-20, 268.
Harlow, History of Barbados, pp. 43-4, 292-328; Newton, European nations, pp. 197-9.
MacInnes, Introduction, pp. 70-8; Williams, Capitalism and slavery, pp. 23-6; Deerr, History of
sugar, I, p. 160.
9 Lasserre, Guadeloupe, I, pp. 276, 290, 343, 390-1, 401; Knight, Slave society, ch. 2.
7
8

216
B. W. HIGMAN
social revolution in the history of the New World'. Building on the work
of Watts, they saw 'an ecological revolution of a thoroughly wasteful
kind' that matched the 'human tragedy' of the social revolution. However,
Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh used the term sugar revolution only once
and then in a narrow and restrictive sense: 'Of far greater import than
the "sugar revolution" in the long perspective of history, as well as in
the years 1650 to 1690, was the radical change in the personnel and in
the nature of the inhabitants of the English West Indies.'"0 Here, the
social revolution of earlier writers seems somehow to be disconnected
from the determinative role of sugar, in spite of the large claims made
by these authors for the global significance of the events.
Dunn's Sugar and slaves (1972) similarly employed the 'sugar revolution' term just once. The switch from tobacco to sugar, he said,
'made the Barbados planters rich overnight'. The planters amalgamated
properties and, with the help of the Dutch, mastered the technology of
sugar making, imported enslaved Africans, and entered European markets.
According to Dunn:
At first the Caribbeansugar revolutionwas pretty well confined to Barbados;
production in the Leewards, Martinique, and Guadeloupe did not become
significantuntil the 1670s. Nonetheless, sugar did have a truly revolutionary
impact upon the European pattern of colonization in the Indies. All of the
Englishand French islands inexorablyfollowed the Barbadianexample,changing from Europeanpeasant societies into slave-basedplantationsocieties.1"
Further, the sugar revolution brought the West Indian colonies under
mercantilist 'surveillance' and made them objects of European conflict.
But Dunn more frequently referred to a 'sugar boom' and, although he
placed much emphasis on the 'sugar and slavery system', his analysis
made relatively little use of the sugar revolution concept.12 In the same
year as the Bridenbaughs and Dunn (1972), Keagy wrote that 'A social
revolution was coincidental with the sugar revolution' and, in an alternative formulation, 'the introduction of sugar cane created a social revolution'; Lowenthal said 'Sugar brought a social as well as an agricultural
revolution.'"3
Sheridan's Sugar and slavery (1974) gave greater prominence to the

concept. Based on a London doctoral thesis of 1951 supervised by F. J.
Fisher, Sheridan used 'The sugar revolution' as a subheading in two of
his chapters. In the first, on Barbados, he used the term several times,
to draw attention to the island's 'numerous population of yeomen farmers
at the beginning of the sugar revolution', the initial increase in indentured
as well as slave labour, the 're-emigration' of whites, the 'drift toward
monoculture', and the consolidation of land that 'proceeded ruthlessly as
10 Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh, No peace beyond the line, pp. 9-10, 68-9, 82, 86-7, 265, 276,
348, 413; Watts, Man's influence.
' Dunn, Sugar and slaves, pp. 19-20.
"lIbid., pp. 62, 66-7, 90, 116, 151, 187-8, 334.
13 Keagy, 'Poor whites', pp. 15, 25; Lowenthal, West Indian societies, p. 27. Also in 1972, Curtin,
'Atlantic slave trade', p. 250.

THE
SUGAR
REVOLUTION
217
the sugar revolution gained momentum'. Thus, for Sheridan, the sugar
revolution was essentially economic rather than social.'4 His analysis
added a new dimension, emphasizing changes in agricultural techniques
that responded to the initial environmental depredations of the sugar
revolution. Here Sheridan supported the interpretation of Watts who
argued that the 'cane hole agriculture' of Barbados was a rational response
to the catastrophic soil loss which followed the destruction of forest and
the rush to be rich. But such 'high farming' was a longer-term consequence of the sugar revolution rather than an immediate feature. Indeed,
it was one of the ways in which Barbados quite quickly became an
exceptional sugar colony. Later, in 1984, Sheridan noted that the Bridenbaughs and Dunn showed 'how the sugar revolution transformed the
agricultural economy and effected a thoroughgoing social revolution'.15
These three histories of the English West Indies remain the principal
general accounts of the colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the most detailed interpretations of the sugar revolution. There
are no equivalent volumes for the French territories, though the concept
makes regular appearances. Price, in his France and the Chesapeake(1973),
saw 'a silent revolution' in the years 1640-70 in Guadeloupe, Martinique,
and St Christopher, marked by a 'gradual' retreat from tobacco and 'the
inexorable advance of sugar'. For Price, the 'social meaning' of the
transition to sugar was to be found in the replacement of the white
peasantry by large slave plantations.16 In the course of a monetary history
of Guadeloupe published in 1979, Buffon remarked: 'La revolution de
la canne 'a la fin du XVIIe siecle a transformedla vie economique et
sociale des miles;les colons, ruins par la crise du tabac, doivent vendre
leurs terres aux habitants sucriers; l'esclavage apparaft comme le seul
mode rationnel d'exploitation.' More interestingly, elsewhere in that work
he referred to 'la premiere revolution sucriere' and, following the lead of
Lasserre, distinguished it from 'la revolution industrielle' of the nineteenth
century. The first was that of the seventeenth century, marked by the
formation of plantations ('habitations'), the decline of 'les petites proprietes rurales', and 'le recours systematique 'a la main-d'oeuvre servile'. The
'revolution industrielle' was divided into two stages, thus contributing to
the emerging idea of phases in the evolution of the sugar industry and
the possibility of multiple sugar revolutions.17
The notion of multiple sugar revolutions was closely associated with
the application of the idea to other times and places, notably Cuba in
the nineteenth century. Perhaps the first to do this fully was the Jamaican
historian Knight in his Slave society in Cuba during the nineteenth century
(1970). Knight placed Cuba at the end of an extended diffusion of sugar
14 Sheridan, Sugar and slavery, pp. 128-34, 141-3, 395. A summary of these arguments appeared
in idemaDevelopment, pp. 27-33, and later refinements in idem, 'Domestic economy', pp. 46-53.
15 Sheridan, Sugar and slavery, pp. 140-1; idem, 'Domestic economy', pp. 48-9; Watts, 'Origins'.
Cf. Dunn, Sugar and slaves, p. 90.
16 Price, France and the Chesapeake, I, pp. 75-7.
17 Buffon, Monnaie et credit,pp. 19, 42, 262-3; Lasserre, Guadeloupe,I, pp. 352-6, 391. Cf. GastonMartin, Histoire de l'esclavage, pp. 23-4.
? EconomicHistory Society 2000

218
B. W. HIGMAN
and the plantation, beginning with Cyprus in the middle of the fifteenth
century, saying that 'it was only when most other societies were turning
away from slavery as an economic system and a form of labor organization
that the Cubans became involved in the agricultural revolution that had
entered the Caribbean Sea in the early seventeenth century.' The 'sugar
revolution' of the eastern Caribbean provided the model for Cuba in
several respects: dependence on tobacco in the 'preplantation era', 'a
revolution in landholding' patterns and tenure, clearance of hardwood
forest, new methods of organizing slave labour, a vast increase in the
slave trade, a demographic shift, and changes in international commercial
and political relationships. Between 1763 and 1838 Cuba experienced
'revolutionary changes' that transformed the island from 'an underpopulated, underdeveloped settlement of small towns, cattle ranches, and
tobacco farms to a community of larger sugar and coffee plantations'.
Knight titled the second chapter of his book 'The sugar revolution of
the nineteenth century' and in it concentrated on changes in milling
technology, most of which occurred after 1838. Here he introduced the
notion of stages in the transformation: 'In the initial stages before 1838
increased production depended on the proliferation of small units.' The
later stages relied on the intensive use of steam power in mills and
railways, though, said Knight, 'the adoption of steam did not by itself
create a full-scale revolution within the Cuban sugar industry."' Like
Lasserre and Buffon, Knight termed this second stage of transformation
'the industrial revolution' in the Cuban sugar industry.19
In Cuba, then, the sugar revolution could be seen as having two stages
occurring within a century, whereas the two revolutions attributed to the
French West Indies were separated by 200 years. However, in 1977
Knight argued that the 'extensive and interrelated changes in the
demography, landholding and occupational divisions' of that period
should properly be called 'the first sugar revolution, to distinguish it from
the second revolution which took place principally in Oriente in the
period 1905-1924'.20 This second revolution was the period in which
US corporations pushed immense sugar plantations into the eastern end
of Cuba, engrossing smaller units. Hoernel argued along similar lines:
'The sugar revolution came late to Cuba and even later to Oriente.'
Oriente's 'revolution in sugar' was 'a unique social transformation'. It
meant, said Hoernel, 'revolutionary change as a result not only of foreign
influence but also of foreign control and design calculated to produce
both modernization and "Americanization"'I.21
In 1978 Knight published a regional history, the index to which listed
'sugar revolutions' though the text used only the singular form: 'Seen in
the conventional terms of the sugar revolution, it is quite clear that
the English Caribbean islands tended to experience the first wave of
Knight, Slave society, pp. xviii, 3-17, 31, 194.
Ibid., p. 38; Mintz in Guerra y Sanchez, Sugar and society, p. xxviii. See also Thomas, Cuba,
p. 115.
20 Knight, 'Origins', p. 234, n. 8.
21 Hoernel, 'Sugar and social change', pp. 215, 217, 236.
18
'9

THE SUGAR REVOLUTION
219
intensification, followed closely by the French, with the Spanish colonies

belatedly participating.'22 But, until 1978, no sugar revolution had been
attributed to Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic. Historians of Cuba
were equally reluctant to use the term, though they recognized the
'profound change' associated with the transformation resulting from sugar,
beginning with the 'boom' of the late eighteenth century and the 'long
sugar orgy' which followed. Not only did the English 'sugar islands'
provide a model for Cuba, but the occupation of Havana by the English
in 1762-3 supplied an immediate stimulus to the emergence of a capitalist
sugar economy.23 Cuban planters then travelled to Barbados and Jamaica
to observe the plantation system and sugar technologies. British machines
were imported in quantity. In these ways, the British were seen to play
a role equivalent to that of the Dutch in the seventeenth century.
Similarly, it was from the subject literature of the British West Indies
that the concept of the sugar revolution entered Cuban thought.24
II
In the past 25 years, the sugar revolution has become a commonplace
of Caribbean history writing and development economics and been assimilated to a larger literature.25 In some cases the term is given capital
letters or placed in inverted commas, but it has clearly become a useful
shorthand for a complex process, readily recognized in contexts outside
particular island histories. The term is never attributed to a particular
source, though the ideas of other writers may be criticized explicitly, and
even when the term is missing the concept is ubiquitous.
Within the Caribbean, territorial contenders for the sugar revolution
have not changed significantly. In 1984 Scarano applied the term to
Puerto Rico, apparently for the first time, but his emphasis was somewhat
different from that of Knight's analysis of Cuba and from work on the
sugar revolution of the seventeenth century. Scarano's use of the term
was social rather than industrial: 'the sugar revolution of the nineteenth
century led slaveowners to exercise stricter controls over their chattel, to
limit opportunities for manumission, and to import such massive numbers
of Africans as to completely upset the cultural configuration of the subject
class.'26 Puerto Rico was a latecomer, but the transformation engendered
by sugar in the early nineteenth century, in some regions of the island,
22Knight, Caribbean (1978), p. 87. In the second edition (1990), p. 114, the text is amended to
'sugar revolutions' but sugar is missing from the index.
23 Moreno Fraginals, Sugarmill, pp. 18-28; idem, Ingenio, I, pp. 15-17, 68, 72, 96.
24
Guerra y Sanchez, Sugar and society, pp. 1-5.
25 Akenson, If the Irish, pp. 71, 141; Blrald,
Histoire economique,p. 26; Kupperman, Providence
Island, p. 112; Beckles, History, pp. 20-3; Abenon, Guadeloupe, I, pp. 195-211, II, p. 16; Davis,
Slavery, pp. 58-72; Henry, Peripheral capitalism, p. 21; McCusker, Essays, p. 311; McCusker and
Menard, Economy, p. 156; Stein, French slave trade, p. 7; Walvin, Fruits of empire, p. 136; Fogel,
Without consent, pp. 18-29; Brenner, Merchants and revolution, pp. 159-66; Engerman and Gallman,
eds., Cambridgeeconomichistory of the US, I; Knight, ed., General history of the Caribbean, III; Canny,
ed., Oxford history of the British empire, I, p. 226; Houston, 'Colonies, enterprises, and wealth',
pp. 164-70.
26 Scarano, Sugar and slavery, p. 164. Cf. Ramos Mattei, Hacienda azucarera, pp. 37-9.
? EconomicHistoty Society 2000

220
B. W. HIGMAN
matched the consequences observed two centuries earlier. In 1993, however, Martinez-Fernandez argued that, compared with Cuba, Puerto
Rico's expansion was shorter (confined to the 1820s and 1830s), more
localized, and less far-reaching, so that 'If Cuba's sugar boom was a
revolution, Puerto Rico's was a revolt.'27 Earlier, in 1985, Moreno Fraginals contended that although Cuba and Puerto Rico experienced an
'industrial revolution in the sugar industry' this 'was not accompanied
by a complementary agricultural revolution'. It was a transformation
largely internal to the industry, with less far-reaching consequences than
the sugar revolution of the seventeenth century.28 Historians of the
Dominican Republic readily agree that between 1875 and 1920 the sugar
plantations of the southern zone experienced 'revolutionary changes' and
'a virtual agrarian revolution', 'modernization', and a 'sugar boom', and
that changes in mill technology exhibited 'typical elements of the Industrial Revolution'.29 But the Dominican Republic remains without a certified sugar revolution.
The sugar revolution has also found a place in general histories of
sugar. Thus Galloway's The sugar cane industry (1989) both uses the term
explicitly and employs the concept broadly in ways that were unknown
to Deerr's History of sugar 40 years earlier. Although the term itself
appears only once in Galloway's book, the concept is ever-present and
made to play an important role in attempts to understand the modem
world economy.30 Often the model provided by the sugar revolution has
been expanded to encompass the 'plantation revolution' as defined by
Sheridan in the late 1960s, and used to explain the subordination of
periphery to metropolis as well as the impossibility of long-term economic
development in plantation economies.31
Other writers have placed the sugar revolution of the seventeenth
century in the context of a longer pattern of evolution and diffusion.
Thus Craton, in 1984, argued that New World plantations differed from
their Mediterranean precursors only in 'scale and intensity'. In his view,
'the sugar revolution' (the plantation system established in Barbados
between 1640 and 1660) represented no 'critical revolutionary watershed',
and indeed 'was no revolution at all'.32 This was an interpretation building
on earlier work by Verlinden who contended that most techniques of
colonization developed in the Atlantic, including the sugar plantation,
had their ultimate origins in the eastern Mediterranean in the later middle
ages.33 On the other hand, studies of sugar in fifteenth-century Madeira,
by Rau, concluded that, although the island's colonization, deforestation,
27
Martinez-Fernmndez, 'Sweet and the bitter', p. 59.
28 Moreno Fraginals, 'Plantations', p. 5.

29 Bryan, 'Question of labor', pp. 235-6; Del Castillo, 'Formation', p. 216; Baud, 'Origins', pp. 140-
2; Moreno Fraginals, 'Plantations', p. 14.

30
Galloway, Sugar cane industry,p. 115; Deerr, History of sugar; Mintz, Sweetnessand power, pp. 3665; Meinig, Shaping, I, pp. 164-8; Scammell, First imperial age, pp. 44, 124-31.
31 Sheridan, 'Plantation revolution'; Stavrianos, Global rift, pp. 88-90.
32 Craton, 'Historical roots', pp. 215-17.
33Verlinden, 'Transfer', pp. 18-32. See also Braudel, M&diterranee,p. 123; Wallerstein, Modem
world-system,p. 88; Galloway, 'Mediterranean sugar industry'; Davis, Slavery, pp. 58-63.

THE
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REVOLUTION
221
and development of sugar as an export economy within a period of just

30 years was 'a truly extraordinary phenomenon', it was based on smallscale production units and limited slavery, and thus 'still far from the
great sugar-cane plantations of future Brazil, with their slavery institutions
and their great mill and plantation owners'.34 A similar case was argued
in 1987 by Fernatndez-Armesto who termed Madeira's rise to prosperity
'spectacular'. Sugar took over the island in as little as a decade. In the
Cape Verde Islands, in the 1460s, 'a new model was introduced: the
slave-based plantation economy, unprecedented in European experience
since the ancient latifundia.' On the other hand, Fernaindez-Armesto
argued that although slave labour was used in the first sugar mills of the
Canary Islands, the cane land was worked by sharecroppers.35
In the most complete long-term study, The rise and fall of the plantation
complex (1990), tracing the diffusion from the Mediterranean to the
Americas, Curtin concluded that the seventeenth-century sugar revolution
was indeed a revolution, though 'that particular sugar revolution of the
seventeenth century was only one among many'. Thus for Curtin the
movement of the complex from Madeira to Brazil was a 'sugar revolution',
as were each of the subsequent movements within the Caribbean, and
beyond to Mauritius, Natal, Fiji, and Hawaii. At the same time, Curtin
gave a special place to the sugar revolution of the eastern Caribbean,
arguing that while it followed the 'institutional and economic patterns'
established in Brazil, 'this new version of the plantation complex was more
specialized, more dependent on networks of maritime, intercontinental
communication. '36
Barbados, said Green in 1988, 'staged the first West Indian sugar
revolution'.37 Galloway's account similarly placed Barbados at the core
of this 'social and economic revolution', but like Knight he argued for a
sequential spread in which 'the sugar revolution took hold in one colony
after the other', increasing densities and shifting the demographic balance
towards enslaved Africans. Pushing the process back in time, Galloway
argued that the establishment of the sugar industry in the Mediterranean
around 900 was part of an 'Arab agricultural revolution' but he did not
term those events a sugar revolution.38 Similarly, his account of the
spread of sugar through the Atlantic islands of Madeira, the Azores, the
Canaries, and Sdo Tome saw the emergence of an agricultural system
increasingly like the colonial sugar plantation of tropical America, but
still prototypical. Even Brazil, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries, lacked the full package of characteristics necessary for a sugar
revolution, and no historian, it seems, has applied the term, though sugar
is seen as determinative of the social and economic life of Pernambuco
and Bahia.39
34
35
36
3
38
39
Rau, 'Settlement of Madeira', p. 6.

Femdindez-Armesto, Before Columbus, pp. 198-200.
Curtin, Rise and fall, p. 73.
Green, 'Supply versus demand', p. 414.
Galloway, Sugar cane industry, pp. 33, 46, 80-2, 115.
Ibid., pp. 70-8; Schwartz, Sugar plantations, pp. 15-26; idem, 'Colonial Brazil', pp. 423-53.

222
B. W. HIGMAN
There has been a similar reluctance to apply the term to the technological and organizational changes that transformed the sugar industry in the
'long' nineteenth century, the period of Lasserre's 'revolution industrielle'.
Between 1790 and 1914, argues Galloway: 'The gradual evolution that
had characterized the industry over the centuries from garden cultivation
in the Levant to the large plantations of the West Indies gave way to a
pace and scope of change that was revolutionary in comparison.'40 In
spite of this dramatic 'break with the past', it was to the period before
1790 that Galloway applied the term sugar revolution. Schnakenbourg
argued that in the 1840s the planters of the French West Indies introduced 'une veritable revolution industrielle', combining modern technology formerly used in the beet sugar industry and the centralization of
manufacture for neighbouring plantations in 'usines centrales'. Similarly,
he described extremely rapid change in Guadeloupe in the second half
of the nineteenth century, technological changes which replaced the
'preindustrielle' system, and compared the new technologies with the
industrial revolution in French textiles.41 However revolutionary these
changes might have been, they tend to be considered internal to the
sugar industry, with narrower implications than the sugar revolution
of the seventeenth century.42 They were global changes lacking global
consequences. Thus the 'sugarcane revolution' that Randhawa identifies
in Java in the 1890s and in India in the early twentieth century was
merely 'a revolution in the method of cane improvement'. As Lewis
observed, sugar was 'The only tropical crop to experience a scientific
revolution' before 1914.43 All of these changes were engrossed by the
larger notion of modernization. For example, although Larkin's study of
the creation of 'sugar society' in the Philippines in the years 1836-1920
recognized 'the universal determinism of sugar in societal development',
he did not call the resultant 'transformation' of land, society, and polity
a sugar revolution.44 Title to the sugar revolution remains firmly located
in the seventeenth-century West Indies.
III
Mintz, in 1964, described the plantation as a truly New World creation:
'from the perspective of post-Roman European history, the plantation
was an absolutely unprecedented social, economic, and political institution, and by no means simply an innovation in the organization of
agriculture.'45 From the 1940s, French writers had emphasized the dual
agricultural and industrial aspects of the transformation wrought by sugar,
and referred to the sugar complex as an 'agriculture-industrie'. In 1985
40
Galloway, Sugar cane industry, p. 123.

Schnakenbourg, Histoire, pp. 201, 205; idem, 'Disparition', pp. 257-9, 291-2.
42 Beachey, British West Indies sugar industry; Heitmann, Modernization.
43 Randhawa, History of agriculture in India, III, pp. 329-30; Lewis, Tropical development, p. 19;
Galloway, Sugar cane industry, p. 194.
44 Larkin, Sugar, pp. 2-6, 46, 167.
45 Mintz in Guerra y Sanchez, Sugar and society, p. xiv. See also Sheridan, Development, p. 55.
41

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Mintz advanced the 'heretical' view that the sugar plantation was 'probably the closest thing to industry that was typical of the seventeenth
century'.46 Putting quantitative value on this argument, Fogel emphasized
the scale of capital investment in sugar plantation land and machinery
which created enterprises not matched in the US until after 1810.
Eighteenth-century sugar plantations, claims Fogel, 'were the largest privately owned enterprises of the age and their owners were among the
richest of all men'. Sugar plantations also used 'some of the most
advanced technology of their age', including 'a new industrial labor
discipline', this more than a century earlier than in the factories of Britain
and New England.47 Paquette and Engerman in 1996 argued that in the
period 1650-1750 sugar plantations involved 'a sophisticated integration
of production and processing and an intensive use of the factors of
production' that created 'some of the most advanced economic enterprises
in the world'.48 Blackburn, in 1997, further emphasized the 'modernity' of
the plantation, seeing the 'military revolution' of 1560-1660 as supplying a
model for the plantation and the 'plantation revolution'.49
Traditionally, the sugar revolution has not been associated with significant technological innovation. Thus Ratekin in 1954 argued that the
sugar mills established in Espafiola in the early sixteenth century harked
back to those of tenth-century Egypt.50 Sheridan in 1960 claimed that,
compared with the industrial revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, technologies of sugar cultivation and manufacture changed little
before 1800. 'With slight modification', he said, 'the system of English
agriculture which was transplanted in the tropics during the seventeenth
century persisted for nearly two centuries.'5' This notion of technological
stagnation was long attributed to the backwardness of the planters as a
class and the ways in which slavery inhibited innovation. The construction
of the planters as economic rationalists, a development parallel to the
acceptance of the neutralizing sugar revolution concept, necessarily cast
doubt on the entire package of ideas linked with backwardness and
decline and fall.52 Thus recent scholarship has questioned the underlying
assumptions, providing evidence of experiment, invention, and the adoption of new technologies, from the techniques of cultivation to mill
machinery. Most of this research relates to periods outside the usual
timing of the sugar revolution, but some of it does suggest a very early
Magalhaes Godinho, 'Industrie et commerce', p. 543; Mintz, Sweetness and power, p. 48.
Fogel, Without consent, pp. 23-6.
48
Paquette and Engerman, eds., LesserAntilles, p. 6.
49 Blackburn, Making of New Worldslavery, pp. 229-31, 242, 335, 419, 511, 589; Parker, Military
revolution,p. 1.
50
Ratekin, 'Early sugar industry', pp. 4-7.
51
Sheridan, 'Samuel Martin', p. 126.
52
Mintz in Guerra y Sinchez, Sugar and society, p. xxi; Edel, 'Brazilian sugar cycle', p. 31; Batie,
'Why sugar?', pp. 17-27; Merivale, Lectures;Williams, Capitalism and slavery; Gray, History of agriculture, I, pp. 437, 444-5.
46
47

224
B. W.
HIGMAN
willingness to experiment, adopt, and adapt, particularly in milling technology.53

Barbados retains its place as the archetype of the sugar revolution and
has been the focus of the most sophisticated technical studies. Most of
this work has been concerned with the transition from white indentured
to black enslaved labour. Economic and counterfactual modelling has
been applied to the labour question in several studies, many of them
comparing the experience of the sugar colonies with that of the tobacco
colonies of the mainland. An uneasy consensus has emerged that the
sugar planters' shift to slave labour was the product of rational market
choice. What is most important for present purposes is that these analyses
are explicitly set in the context of the 'sugar revolution' while rejecting
the deterministic and racial interpretations of earlier scholars.54 However,
climate and race have proven hard to shake off, resurfacing as perceptions
and attitudes or as active biological agents. For example, Eltis has argued
the importance of non-economic factors in the choice of enslaved Africans
over indentured whites, a choice ensured by the fact that 'the sugar
revolution proceeded too quickly to allow Europeans to adjust perceptions
of insiders and outsiders'.55
Archival research on sources of capital for the sugar revolution has
been carried out for Jamaica by Zahedieh and for Cuba by Knight. Their
findings are similar, showing that internal sources were more important
than metropolitan, supporting the argument of Pares against Adam
Smith.56 Contributing to this interpretation, Emmer has questioned the
long held view that the Dutch 'catalyzed the sugar revolution in the
Lesser Antilles if they did not originate it', but regrettably, existing
archival evidence is insufficient to enable calculation of the volume of
investment and trade. Emmer doubts that the Dutch offered generous
credit, after their experience in Brazil, and, in any case, 'several of the
wealthy planters in the Caribbean themselves could have financed their
purchases of slaves and equipment'.57 Efforts to estimate wealth and
income flows generated by the sugar revolution have been few and
inhibited by empirical deficiencies. Only Eltis's estimates of total and per
caput product for Barbados in the 1660s fall within an accepted period
of the sugar revolution; other studies generally relate to later years. It is
important to note, however, that Eltis does confirm the 'extraordinarily
high incomes' of the planters of Barbados. Even if slaves and servants
are included, per caput incomes were high by comparison with the North
American colonies or the English homeland. The strong performance of
the Caribbean sugar colonies before 1700 made them 'far more significant
53 Galloway, 'Tradition and innovation'; idem, Sugar cane industry; Ormrod, 'Evolution of soil
management'; Satchell, 'Early use of steam power'; McCusker, Essays, p. 324; Daniels, 'Agroindustries'; Daniels and Daniels, 'Origin'.
54 Vignols, 'Question mal posee'; Thompson, 'Climatic theory'; Galenson, White servitude,pp. 14951; Beckles, White servitude; Beckles and Downes, 'Economics of transition', pp. 226-30; Green,
'Supply versus demand', pp. 403-6; Bean and Thomas, 'Adoption', pp. 377-98.
55 Eltis, 'Europeans', p. 1422; Coelho and McGuire, 'African and European'.
56 Zahedieh, 'Trade'; Knight, 'Origins'; Pares, Merchants and planters, p. 50.
57 Emmer, '"Jesus Christ"', pp. 211-12.
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than any other region of the Americas', and Eltis concludes that 'in its
capacity to generate high-value exports relative to both its physical and
demographic size, Barbados was a new phenomenon in the Atlantic
world. '58
Studies of changes in land tenure and distribution based on intensive

work in archives remain rare, though the pattern in Barbados before and
after the sugar revolution has become better understood, as has the
distribution and scale of slaveownership. The apparent impact of the
sugar revolution is moderated, showing that large holdings existed before
sugar and that smallholdings survived the spread of monoculture in many
island niches. According to Sheridan, the notion 'that the big planters
bought up all the land in the sugar colonies is a myth'.59 Demographic
studies have also become increasingly refined, though hampered by data
deficiencies for the central years of the sugar revolution.60 The transformation of environment and landscape has been traced by Watts, showing
that deforestation and spectacular erosion followed the path of the sugar
revolution, creating a significant ecological discontinuity.6' The political
emphasis of earlier writers has also been revisited. Craton, for example,
argued in 1995 that the introduction of sugar to Barbados initiated a
complex 'socioeconomic and therefore political revolution'.62
IV
The sugar revolution has been given a large role in the commercial
revolution and English imperial expansion in the seventeenth century.63
The significance of sugar in English trade has long been acknowledged.
Zahedieh, for example, stated that 'sugar quickly became England's
leading colonial import and, from its first arrival on the market in the
1640s, yielded a far higher and steadier profit than any other American
cash crop'. In the period 1600-1800, argued Fogel, slave-produced sugar
was 'the single most important of the internationally traded commodities,
dwarfing in value the trade in grain, meat, fish, tobacco, cattle, spices,
cloth, or metals'.64 According to McFarlane: 'The shift towards sugar
transformed England's relations both with its Caribbean colonies and
with its colonial settlements as a whole, forging economic links which
turned the scattered American territories into an interconnected system
which more properly resembled an empire.' The West Indies were essential to the economic development of the non-plantation colonies north of
Virginia, and the islands served as a springboard for the spread of slavery
Eltis, 'Total product', pp. 334-7; Sheridan, 'Wealth'; Ward, 'Profitability'.
Sheridan, 'Domestic economy', p. 51. See also Pares, Merchants and planters, pp. 18-19, 66
n. 35; Niddrie, 'Attempt'; Innes, 'Pre-sugar era'; Campbell, 'Aspects'.
60Beckles, White servitude, pp. 13-23, 125-34; Puckrein, Little England, pp. 65-7, 147-59.
61 Watts, Man's influence; idem, West Indies, pp. 228-31; Richardson, Caribbean, p. 30.
62 Craton, 'Property and propriety', pp. 503, 507. See also Brenner, Merchants and revolution,
pp. 165-6.
63 Moreno Fraginals, 'Plantations', p. 9, refers to a 'commercial revolution', c. 1870-1900, and
'what can be called the revolution of the sugar trade'.
64 Zahedieh, 'Trade', p. 206; Fogel, Withoutconsent,pp. 21-2; Farnie, 'Commercial empire', p. 210.
58
59

226
B. W. HIGMAN
in the South. The Barbados 'sugar revolution', contended McFarlane,

'created an archetype' for the development of a larger British West Indian
economy, 'bound to England and the North American colonies by the
circuits of an increasingly sophisticated system of transatlantic and intercolonial trade'.65 More broadly, the sugar revolution was a powerful
impetus to the development of 'triangular and multilateral trades' that
involved Africa through the slave trade, and Ireland through trade in
provisions and livestock.66
The impact on Africa's economic structure and trade is comparable.
For example, in 1993 Searing argued that the Atlantic economy reached
into the Senegal in the late seventeenth century, exposing it for the first
time to an external dynamic. This dynamic had its source in the plantations of the Americas: 'The sugar revolution drove the wheels of
mercantilist capitalism like a mighty wind, propelling ships and cargoes
of trade goods to the shores of West Africa, where the Atlantic world
purchased the slaves whose sweat and blood fed the engines of economic
growth.'67 Earlier, Frank argued that an important, 'perhaps the major,
contribution to the eighteenth-century commercial revolution came from
the sugar revolution and the associated slave and triangular trade'.68
These are arguments building on the work of Williams, Pares, and
Sheridan, but now firmly located within European and Atlantic economic
history and explicitly linked to the consequences of the sugar revolution.
Recent studies of the history of sugar have introduced new elements,
particularly the negative consequences for consumers, making sugar a
double disaster rather than an entrepreneurial achievement. Sugar is now
seen as an addictive substance, nutritionally superfluous, the source of
tooth decay, obesity, and cardiovascular problems, a commodity barely
preferable to the tobacco it often replaced. The sugar revolution has
come to be placed at the symbolic centre of the 'consumer revolution'
and at the heart of European dietary transformation associated with the
industrial revolution. From a luxury good, sugar became a commodity
of common consumption, and in this way, argued Mintz, sugar 'epitomized the transition from one kind of society to another'. Further:
The first sweetened cup of hot tea to be drunk by an English workerwas a
significant historical event, because it prefigured the transformationof an
entire society, a total remaking of its economic and social basis. We must
struggleto understandfully the consequences of that and kindredevents, for
upon them was erected an entirely different conception of the relationship
65 McFarlane, British in the Americas, pp. 129-32. See also Holmes, Making of a great power,
pp. 64-5; Sheridan, Development, p. 70.
66 Clay, Economic expansion, II, pp. 168-78; Solow, 'Capitalism and slavery', pp. 730-1; Truxes,
Irish-Americantrade, pp. 13-19.
67 Searing, West African slavery, p. 27.
68 Frank, World accumulation, p. 120.

THE
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between producers and consumers,of the meaning of work, of the definition

of self, of the nature of things.69
The full significance of this event comes into clearer focus through
comparison with the history of sugar in China. There, although sugarcane
products were used from ancient times, sugar never became a food of
common consumption. Further, although China was the site of fundamental innovation in sugar cultivation and manufacture, sugarcane was never
a monoculture nor was it produced on plantations or by slaves. In China,
sugar never became the centre of a dietary or social revolution.70
V
The sugar revolution concept has now been tried and tested for half a
century. Has it successfully survived that testing and does it remain a
useful way of understanding the events it attempts to comprehend? Was
the sugar revolution a fundamental historical discontinuity? The term has
been broadly accepted and users have rarely questioned its validity or
been explicitly critical. Sometimes it has been employed merely as a
dramatic device, but, as the term has moved from a general to a more
specialized literature, it has been required to carry correspondingly greater
analytical weight.
In order to attempt a critique of the sugar revolution concept, it is
necessary to consider first the precision of its definition. Three distinct
uses are identifiable in the literature. First, the sugar revolution is sometimes taken to mean primarily a shift to sugar production from other
economic activities (typically tobacco growing). This usage, which is
relatively recent, makes other events (such as changes in land and labour)
'consequences' of the sugar revolution or coincidental constituents.71
Secondly, some writers have emphasized the social aspects of the transition: the shift from white indentured to black slave labour and the
emigration of the white yeomanry. This was the form in which the sugar
revolution concept was born, the social revolution of Gaston-Martin and
of Parry and Sherlock. Both of these meanings focus firmly on events in
the Caribbean. The third definition is much more wide ranging,
encompassing changes in economy, demography, society, and politics,
not merely in the Caribbean but throughout the Atlantic' world, and
creating models of modernity. This last definition has attracted a growing
band of advocates.
Although these three definitions are readily distinguishable, they frequently intersect and writers seem not always to be aware that they are
69 Mintz, Sweetness and power, p. 214. See also Thomas and Bean, 'Fishers of men', p. 914;
Crosby, Ecological imperialism,pp. 77-8; Hobhouse, Seeds, pp. xiv, 58-66; Austen and Smith, 'Private
tooth decay'; Zahedieh, 'London', p. 243; Walvin, Fruits of empire, p. 125; McKendrick et al., Birth
of a consumersociety; Komlos, 'New World's contribution', pp. 71-3.
70 Daniels, 'Agro-industries', pp. 79, 87, 93; Mazumdar, Sugar and society in China, pp. 1-4, 13860, 171, 193-4, 421 n. 2, 498 n. 37.
71 Keagy, 'Poor whites', p. 15; Galenson,
Traders, pp. 7-43; Green, 'Caribbean historiography',
pp. 513-14; Hoyos, Barbados, pp. 32-46.
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talking about different things. This is not an unusual situation. The

shifting meaning of the sugar revolution has parallels in, for example, the
subject literature of the industrial revolution and the agricultural
revolution.72 It remains an important issue, however, because it affects
explanation and interpretation. Whereas most writers see sugar as determinative, and the shift to sugar as the cause of the shift to slave labour,
some make the shift to slavery a necessary condition of the shift to
sugar.73 The same applies to the causal relations between sugar and the
plantation, and hence the creation of what Sheridan termed the plantation
revolution. What is at stake here is the determinative status of sugar, as
plant, commodity, and symbol. If sugar was not truly determinative, it
might be better to call the sugar revolution something else-perhaps
Sheridan's plantation revolution, or a social or economic or industrial
revolution-or to dismiss it as a myth. Most of the revolutions in the
subject literature have come to be termed myths and inventions, at one
time or another, but the survivors appear remarkably resilient.
It is true that the processing of sugarcane must take place quickly after
its harvest, preferably within a day or two, and that economies of scale
make the capital equipment of factories a costly investment. These facts
are basic to the notion that sugar could be produced profitably in the
seventeenth century only on large plantations.74 Davis, for example,
argued in 1973 that this outcome was determined by 'a simple fact of
technology'. Further, he said, to produce sugar on an efficient scale, the
plantation 'required a large concentration of fixed-capital, and the owner
of the capital wanted a completely subordinated and rigidly disciplined
labour force'. The result was that 'sugar transformed society in every
area it touched, because of the economies of scale that large productive
units offered'.75 However, both modern and historical experience show
that sugar can in fact be produced profitably by a range of systems.
Small farmers can and do cultivate cane and sell to large central mills,
the mill being owned by the farmers themselves through co-operative
arrangements or by independent corporations or the state. Something
like this seemed a possible outcome in seventeenth-century Barbados and
the Leeward Islands. Crushing mills and boiling equipment could be
made mobile, as in southern China.76 What prevented this form of
development was not so much any technological requirements of sugar
but rather the desire of individuals to take all of the profits by owning
72 Flinn, Origins, pp. 1-3; Cannadine, 'Present and the past'; Coleman, Myth; Temin, 'Two views';
Overton, Agricultural revolution; idem, 'Re-establishing'; Kerridge, Agricultural revolution; Chambers
and Mingay, Agriculturalrevolution, pp. v-vi.
73 Green, 'Caribbean historiography', pp. 513-14; idem, 'Supply versus demand', p. 418; Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh, No peace beyond the line, p. 57.
74 Earle, 'Staple interpretation'.
75 Davis, Rise of the Atlantic economies,p. 257.
76 Pares, West-Indiafortune, pp. 103-4; Davies, North Atlantic world, p. 187; Shlomowitz, 'Plantations'; Ruthenberg, Farming systems, pp. 206-10; Attwood, Raising cane, pp. 214, 291; Cushner,
Lords of the land, pp. 58-80; Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, pp. 140-2; Rau, 'Settlement'; Green, 'Supply
versus demand', p. 417; Guerra y Sanchez, Sugar and society, p. 78; Emmer, ' "Jesus Christ" ',
p. 212; Scott, 'Defining the boundaries', pp. 71-2; Goldthorpe, 'Definition'; Daniels, 'Agro-industries', p. 246; Mazumdar, Sugar and society in China, pp. 324-6.

THE
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all of the capital assets, including land and labour, an outcome made
possible by the incipient pre-sugar concentration of land holding, the
existence of an enslaved population, and the moral acceptability to the
colonial state of the status of the enslaved.
Another alternative method of organizing sugar production was the
leasing of plantation land to tenants, as occurred early in Brazil and later
in Cuba and some British Caribbean colonies, through systems of cane
farming. Indeed, it is the 'incomplete' character of the Brazilian transition
to sugar that prevents the application of the sugar revolution concept
to its experience before 1650.77 What occurred in Barbados was truly
revolutionary because it took the Brazilian and Atlantic island models
and transformed the prototype into a pure form. This transformation was
not determined simply by the crop sugar, the smallness of the islands of
the eastern Caribbean, or the need for intensive cultivation techniques,
but depended on a set of social assumptions that must be questioned.
Was any other crop capable of providing the foundation for such a radical
transformation in the seventeenth century? Indigo is often mentioned in
terms of its demands on capital for complex processing plants, and
tobacco supported slavery and the plantation system in Providence Island
and in Virginia, as did rice in South Carolina, yet the subject literature
contains no 'indigo revolution' and (with the recent exception of Berlin)
no 'tobacco revolution' or 'rice revolution'.78 It was sugar above all that
made vast profits for its capitalists, consumed enormous numbers of
enslaved people, created plantation economies and slave societies, and
shaped the modern world in ways other crops and commodities could
barely approach. Approximately two-thirds of all the people carried in
the slave trade- from Africa to the New World went to sugar colonies.79
It did not have to be that way. Sugar might have been much less
prominent on the world stage, produced by the much lamented yeomanry,
with different consequences. But sugar made possible the great transformation, a disastrous development from so many points of view, and on
these grounds deserves to be associated with the revolution it engendered.
To this extent, the sugar revolution remains a valid term. To the extent
that it attributes a determinative role to the crop and directs attention
away from human agency, it reduces the moral responsibility of the
actors and creates a neutralized concept for historical analysis. The sugar
revolution did not need to be recreated in each new location; once the
model was firmly established it spread naturally, the technological and
environmental requirements of the crop reproducing familiar social and
economic consequences wherever the plantation was imprinted on the
landscape.80
"
Schwartz, Sugar plantations, pp. 295-312; Boxer, Dutch in Brazil, pp. 140-4.
Pares, West-Indiafortune, p. 15; Davis, Rise of the Atlantic economies,p. 260; Solow, ed., Slavery,
p. 28; Kulikoff, Tobacco and slaves, pp. 37-8; Scammell, First imperial age, pp. 124-5; Kupperman,
ProvidenceIsland, pp. 175-80; Berlin, Many thousandsgone, pp. 109, 142.
79 Fogel and Engerman, Time on the cross, p. 16; Berlin and Morgan, eds., Cultivation and
culture, p. 7.
80 Galloway, 'Tradition and innovation'.
78

230
B. W.
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One of the few critics of the concept, Davies, argued in 1974 that the
sugar revolution model 'has the virtue of simplicity to recommend it but
like most models is a better servant than master'. His first criticism was
that 'the "sugar revolution" nearly everywhere was a matter not of years
but decades or scores of years'.8' Only in Barbados, argued Davies, was
the sugar revolution truly present, the agricultural and demographic shift
occurring there between 1645 and 1660. Other modern scholars have
offered slightly different chronologies for the sugar revolution in Barbados,
but almost all agree with Davies in seeing the transition as abrupt and
radical rather than gradual. Perhaps the least rapid sugar revolution is
attributed to Cuba, occupying the period 1762-1838 or even 1750-1850.
This contrast with Barbados helps to explain why the sugar revolution
concept was not quickly applied to Cuba, but historians generally appear
untroubled by the notion that the sugar revolution might extend over
decades or even more than 50 years in particular cases. Similarly, they
seem comfortable with the notion that the dramatic changes in Barbados
in the middle of the seventeenth century depended on a long history of
gradual development and innovation. By comparison with typical agricultural and industrial revolutions, the sugar revolution was indeed abrupt.
Davies's conditions are unusually demanding.82
Differences in timing and intensity, and in the abruptness of the
discontinuity, are negotiated through the notion of multiple revolutions.
Problems of periodization are accommodated by dividing the process into
phases or stages, and by identifying sequences, such as Knight's first and
second sugar revolutions in Cuba. This solution parallels ways in which
historians have dealt with variations in the speed and timing of agricultural
and industrial revolutions. Certainly, the idea of multiple sugar revolutions, occurring in different places over several centuries but sharing the
same essential characteristics, has not worried historians, and indeed it
contributes to the generalizing attraction of the concept.83 It also contributes to the determinative role attributed to sugar. Caution is appropriate
here, however, because it is more convincing to argue that the initial
example of Barbados provided a model rather than that sugar required
the same outcome in every place. Davies's notion that, to be deserving
of the title, the sugar revolution had to occur in the seventeenth century,
seems unhelpful, as is the idea that every case ;required a 'pre-sugar'
tobacco period and the displacement of a large white labour force.84 On
the other hand, the idea advanced by some writers that the sugar revolution spread throughout the Caribbean, to every British and French
colony, is clearly incorrect.85 In several significant territories, such as the
Dominican Republic and the British Windward Islands, sugar's triumph
81 Davies, North Atlantic world, p. 180. Cf. idem, Royal African Company, pp. 14-15.
82 Puckrein, Little England, p. 71; Pares, West-Indiafortune, p. 14; Emmer, ' "Jesus Christ" ', p. 212;
Akenson, If the Irish, p. 141; McCusker, Essays, p. 311; Mokyr, Lever of riches, pp. 42, 59; Crafts,
British economicgrowth, p. 6; Wrigley, Continuity, pp. 8-12.
83
Galenson, Traders,p. 7. Cf. De Vries, 'Industrial revolution'.
84
Davies, North Atlantic world, pp. 180-9.
85
Dunn, Sugar and slaves, pp. 19-20.

THE
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was never complete and these areas are not regarded as having undergone
sugar revolutions even though their economies and societies have been
touched, heavily, by the crop. The 'non-sugar' territories of the Caribbean
are often termed 'marginal' and the economic history of the non-sugar
sector has emerged as a significant category of study. It has been shown
that the non-sugar domestic economy survived the sugar revolution relatively well, even in Barbados.86 But the role of sugar remains secure,
constituting the standard against which other economic activities are
measured, in the same way as the pre-sugar period identifies the prehistory
of the Caribbean economy. Thus the sugar revolution constitutes the
defining moment of the region's economic and social history, a history
commonly characterized by the synergy of sugar and slavery.
Is the scale and scope of the sugar revolution sufficiently great to merit
the attention of historians of regions other than the Caribbean and
periods other than the seventeenth century? The smallness of the islands
which were the initial sites of the sugar revolution is often emphasized
and sometimes measured against the Isle of Wight which is slightly
smaller than Barbados.87 This is a comparison of little merit from a
Caribbean perspective (where Barbados has long been known as 'Little
England'), or from a French or Spanish point of view, but it should not
in any case be regarded as a disqualification. Indeed, the smallness of
the islands of the eastern Caribbean was greatly to their advantage,
reducing the costs of transport and providing access to European, African,
and North American markets, as well as facilitating defence and internal
security.88 In the Greater Antilles, sugar spread into the hinterland more
slowly than it developed along the coasts. Both islandness and smallness
contributed to the success of the sugar revolution and to its initial
location. The Barbados sugar revolution altered the output of sugar
sufficiently to affect the luxury market, while in the eighteenth century
the much greater production possibilities of StDomingue and Jamaica
shifted consumption towards a mass market, and the Cuban sugar revolution of the nineteenth century added so much to the market that
prices collapsed.
The revolutionary status of the transition to sugar is to be judged in
terms of its structural significance as much as its immediate impact on
output and consumption. For the internal histories of the Caribbean
territories, the social and economic transformation consequent on the
shift to sugar was indeed radical and fundamental. Knight has argued
the case for Cuba: 'The historical importance of the sugar revolution lay
in its all-pervading effect on the structure of Cuban society and economy.'89 In this way the sugar revolution is linked to that other basic
building-block of the subject literature of the Americas, the concept of
86
Sheridan, 'Domestic economy', p. 51; Shepherd, 'Livestock and sugar'; Eltis, 'Total product',
p. 334; Parry, 'Plantation and provision ground'.
87 Merivale, Lectures, p. 79; Leroy-Beaulieu, Colonisation, I, p. 116; Higham, Development, p. xiv;
Pares, West-Indiafortune, p. 14; Hobhouse, Seeds, p. 59.
88 Puckrein, Little England; Sheridan, Sugar and slavery, pp. 124-8.
89 Knight, Slave society, p. 45.

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HIGMAN
'slave society', in which the institution of slavery is as determinative a

force as sugar. In the larger history of the Atlantic economy, the sugar
revolution marks a genuine historical discontinuity, the significance of
which remains to be fully explored and interpreted.
Australian National University
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The Sugar Revolution

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Economic History Review, LIII, 2 (2000), pp. 213-236

the many revolutions identified by historians, only one takes its

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islands significant roles in French colonial history and in the Atlantic

i EconomicHistory Society 2000

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Sheridan's Sugar and slavery (1974) gave greater prominence to the

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THE SUGAR REVOLUTION

intensification, followed closely by the French, with the Spanish colonies

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Martinez-Fernmndez, 'Sweet and the bitter', p. 59.

28 Moreno Fraginals, 'Plantations', p. 5.

2; Moreno Fraginals, 'Plantations', p. 14.

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and development of sugar as an export economy within a period of just

Rau, 'Settlement of Madeira', p. 6.

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Galloway, Sugar cane industry, p. 123.

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THE SUGAR REVOLUTION

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willingness to experiment, adopt, and adapt, particularly in milling technology.53

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Studies of changes in land tenure and distribution based on intensive

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in the South. The Barbados 'sugar revolution', contended McFarlane,

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between producers and consumers,of the meaning of work, of the definition

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talking about different things. This is not an unusual situation. The

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? EconomicHistory Society 2000

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'slave society', in which the institution of slavery is as determinative a

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