Colonialism: When Europe Devoured the World
An Invasive Species
The process by which sugar cultivation was brought to Europe was incredibly bloody. But its introduction to the Americas was orders of magnitude more barbaric. Before colonization, the people of the so-called “New World” sweetened their treats with products like honey, agave, berries or with other plants native to their particular region. Sugarcane was introduced with the great “Columbian Exchange,” in which Europe traded Africa implements of death and stolen treasure for human flesh in chains, and gifted the Americas plagues, religious dogmas, venereal diseases, and turnips in exchange for land, gold and commodities like tobacco and chocolate.
Sugarcane cultivation reached the Caribbean with Columbus’ second voyage. The Portuguese had already begun cultivating it in their colony of Madeira in 1450 and in São Tomé in 1490.
Columbus’ enslaved the Taíno people of Hispaniola. Initially demanding gold, and performing cruelties like dismembering the limbs of those who failed to meet his quotas, he realized that the island’s climate was ideal for growing sugar. Those who refused to work were tortured, raped, and brutalized, with many kidnapped and sent to Spain as chattel.
Sweetness in Heaven as on Earth
The Spanish quickly spread sugarcane, and slavery, across the Caribbean in places like Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Mexican coast. The Portuguese did the same in their Brazilian holdings where its production grew to staggering heights.
Europeans, including the French, British, and Dutch joined the Spanish and Portuguese in amassing enormous fortunes in sugar, and many other cash crops, on the backs of slaves in the Americas, Africa and Southeast Asia. They were followed by the less successful, though no less brutal in their turn: Germans, Italians, Swedes, Danes and infamously, the Belgians.
In the course of expanding the production of sugar and other commodities, the Spanish busied themselves with exterminating millions of indigenous people in the Americas and eradicating whole cultures like that of the aforementioned Taino. They also integrated the most mercenary and brutal elements of the indigenous aristocracies. This included leaders of cultures like the Aztec/Mexica, and even large numbers of nations who had eagerly sided with the Spanish colonizers, like the Tlaxcalan, into the Europe’s own aristocracy. The Montezuma family, descendants of the Aztec royal family, remain one of the most wealth families in the world.
The White Death
Though faced with death and tyranny of staggering proportions, the subjects of the globe spanning Spanish Empire were lucky compared to those subjected to the British, French and Dutch. The British and French replaced whole populations with imported slaves in the Caribbean, and exported as many their ruling classes deemed undesirables as possible to their colonies. The French deported their protestant Huguenot minority and later the socialist Communards of the 1848 revolt, along with countless prisoners, vagrants and others, in hopes that they’d prove an economic boon to the motherland. The British did similar with Catholics, and radical Protestant Puritans, Quakers and liberal freethinkers. All of the above proved more than happy to dispossess the original inhabitants of the lands they found themselves in, for the sake of their own freedom.
Some British subjects, like the Irish, ethnically cleansed to make room for Protestant Scots and Englishmen, particularly after Oliver Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland from royalist forces between 1649–1653, were sent to work the sugar plantations in chains. The English kidnapped many Irish with impunity, especially those living on the coast. While they were not chattel slaves, whose children were legally consigned to slavery on birth, they were unfree laborers who were mercilessly exploited by the English owners of their indenture contracts.
The Dutch, for their part, were so malevolently cruel that in present day Guyana, folk religion holds that much of the coastal land, and particularly the land were sugar plantations once stood, is haunted by the ghosts of colonizers referred to as the ‘masters of the land.’ These ‘masters’ continue to claim ownership of their former plantations and demand tribute, lest the present day inhabitants face their wrath. Some trees, called “Dutchman Jumbees”, are said to be possessed by the spirits of Dutch slavers who used the trees as sites of torture for their slaves. The Dutch would string disobedient slaves up by their entrails as they were still living. It is believed that the malicious trees inflict harm or even curses on those who climb them. The Dutch likewise gleefully inflicted terror and violent horrors on the people of other parts of the Caribbean, and Indonesia, treating them like animals beneath contempt. While the legacy of Dutch slavery continues for the peoples upon whom it was inflicted, the profits sit in now digital ledgers of Amsterdam banks.
With a few exceptions to the general trend like in French Canada, where a focus on the fur trade, rather than the development of plantations, led to a somewhat less brutal regime, the establishment of colonialism by the ruling powers of the northwestern Europeans was the greatest expansion of human misery, in the name of profit, in history.
Click the link below to continue on to the impact of sugar on the Empires
Freedom to Trade the Lives of Others
It is beyond the scope of this website to document the extent and depth of the horrific crimes of colonialism, but their actions should not be forgotten. In French Indochina, rubber plantations would scald children to death with hot rubber for failing to meet quotas, and the sugar plantations in southern Vietnam were no less brutal. In Haiti, where humans were ground down at such a rapid pace in the production of sugar that the French colony of Saint-Domingue represented 1/3 of all slave imports continuously to replace the human collateral of production where life expectancy was merely 25. In Saint-Domingue, the French castrated, mutilated and burned slaves alive to compel work as long as 18 hours a day. The British, like the French also oversaw a regime of rape, kidnapping, torture and degradation to extract ever more sugar from the blood of slaves and conquered soil. Even after the abolition of chattel slavery, the Europeans and other rich nations continue to degrade and exploit the descendants of the victims of colonization.
Colonization and the production of sugar in the Caribbean, or any place, was not ordained by Nature or God. The European capitalists justified it by arguing that it represented a ‘comparative advantage’ and had to be developed so that the Europeans who specialized in processing the goods produced by the colonies, could have a balance of trade with these regions. But as a famous sociologist noted in the 1800’s:
"For instance, we are told that free trade would create an international division of labor, and thereby give to each country the production which is most in harmony with its natural advantage. You believe, perhaps, gentlemen, that the production of coffee and sugar is the natural destiny of the West Indies.
Two centuries ago, nature, which does not trouble herself about commerce, had planted neither sugar-cane nor coffee trees there. And it may be that in less than half a century you will find there neither coffee nor sugar, for the East Indies, by means of cheaper production, have already successfully combatted his alleged natural destiny of the West Indies. And the West Indies, with their natural wealth, are already as heavy a burden for England as the weavers of Dacca, who also were destined from the beginning of time to weave by hand.”