The Plantation Machine. Trevor Burnard
that brutality, Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were central to a developing eighteenth-century Atlantic capitalism. As Abbé Raynal commented in 1770, “The labours of the colonists settled in these long-scorned islands are the sole basis of the African trade, extend the fisheries and cultivation of North America, provide advantageous outlets for the manufacture of Asia, double perhaps triple the activity of the whole of Europe. They can be regarded as the principal cause of the rapid movement which stirs the universe.”3
At the heart of this book is the argument that the Caribbean sugar plantation of the eighteenth century was an industrial, or at least proto-industrial, operation.4 Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were important in the Atlantic World because in the 1700s sugar planters there were able to maximize the scale—and the social and cultural consequences—of the “integrated” plantation model developed first in the Lesser Antilles in the 1600s. The eighteenth-century integrated sugar plantation, described below, led planters and their employees to develop new attitudes toward wealth, society, and production. Sugar plantations were among the first Western institutions to implement industrial-style production, deploying hundreds of workers factory-like in an array of complex interdependent tasks with careful attention to time. Their managers did not recognize or analyze their use of capital or time in ways that would become common in later manufacturing enterprises. Planters’ extraordinary focus on wealth meant that material success, allied to a heightened racial sensibility that elevated “whiteness” to a position of great importance, supplemented class standing as a primary basis of social standing. White colonial residents of Jamaica and Saint-Domingue developed individualistic behaviors that might be described as egalitarian if these societies had not been so heavily dependent on enslaved laborers. Facing the threat of slave rebellion, foreign attack, and this new individualism, colonial elites invented new ways to create or reinforce some sense of community. They also developed new racial legislation in the 1760s that established “whiteness” as a defining characteristic of full citizenship. Wealth was the defining feature of the two colonies. What was harder to develop was a sense of belonging—awareness by colonists that they belonged to places with a distinct social and corporate identity.
In order to understand how Jamaica and Saint-Domingue were central to the development of eighteenth-century Atlantic capitalism, we need to understand the workings of the central institution in each colony: the plantation. The “integrated” sugar plantation dominated the social and economic worlds of both Saint-Domingue and Jamaica. Sugar was not the only business in the two colonies: each possessed a diversified economy with a vibrant commercial culture, producing a variety of tropical crops unlike the small-island sugar colonies of the Lesser Antilles such as the British colonies of Barbados and Antigua and the French colonies of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Saint-Domingue especially produced a range of other plantation commodities, most notably coffee. But sugar was central to colonial culture. It employed more workers, and generated more profits, than any other crop on either island. A sugar plantation required more land, labor, and technology than any other type of enterprise in the Caribbean. Moreover, white people in both colonies regarded sugar planters as the social elite. In 1746 Jamaica had 455 sugar estates, and in 1753 Saint-Domingue had 556.5
An “integrated” sugar plantation is one that not only grows sugarcanes but also transforms them into sugar crystals. Until roughly the middle of the seventeenth century, sugar production in Europe’s Atlantic colonies was often split between cane growers and sugar manufacturers. This was especially true in northern Brazil, where mills in the 1600s produced three to six times as much sugar as their equivalents in the Atlantic colonies of Madeira and Sao Tomé or on the Spanish Caribbean islands of Cuba and Santo Domingo.6 Specialization allowed Brazilian sugar makers to solve technical problems, for example, adopting a vertical crushing mill in place of the inefficient horizontal millstones used by Mediterranean sugar makers.7
Brazilian methods, including the split between cane farmers and refiners, shaped how English and French colonists began making sugar in the Caribbean in the 1640s and 1650s.8 Up to the 1670s, Barbados and Martinique sugar estates were unlikely to have their own mills.9 It took some forty years before cane growers on these two islands began to build their own sugar works. A hurricane in 1676 hastened the process in Barbados because many small and medium landowners sold their farms rather than rebuild.10 But the most important aspect of the transition to an integrated plantation model was the rise of the gang system of slave labor. In the gang system managers grouped field workers according to their physical stamina, rather than assign tasks to individual slaves. This policy allowed them to enforce the rigid cultivation schedules that mills and boiling houses required. They charged the first gang with the hardest tasks like planting or harvesting cane, for it was important that workers move through the fields at approximately the same pace, and chop harvested canes into similarly sized pieces to be fed through the mill. Planters grouped adolescents and workers past their physical prime into a second gang, used to do less difficult work, like weeding. The French word for these slave gangs—ateliers or “workshops”—illustrates the connection contemporaries saw between this new way of organizing field work and the manufacturing process. Gang labor was first mentioned in connection with Barbados in the 1650s, about the time that the first integrated plantation arose. But gang labor required dozens of workers. Planters who wanted to build gangs needed capital that would roughly equal what they spent to acquire land and build a refining operation. Sources are not clear about the rate at which planters adopted gang labor, but by the eighteenth century the system was ubiquitous on Caribbean sugar estates.11
When Lesser Antilles planters integrated planting and manufacturing, and restructured their work regimes accordingly, they discovered that this approach was very profitable. An estate that successfully timed its harvest schedule to match the speed of its mill and boiling houses saved a lot of canes from rotting in its fields and mill yard. The owner of an integrated plantation could thus time the planting of his fields to keep his manufacturing operations occupied the better part of the year. As sugar makers came to participate in harvest decisions, they understood the kinds of cane juice that were sluicing into their cauldrons, whether they were from a field that gave high or low yields. A growing mastery of the details of raw materials, manufacturing constraints, and labor management produced more salable sugar. This “new plantation” model also brought significant efficiencies of scale. Larger slave forces and more land allowed planters in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue to train more slave artisans and specialists, establish livestock pens and provision grounds, and generally cut their operating costs, at least in theory. Antigua’s Samuel Martin, in the 1765 edition of his Essay upon Plantership, used the metaphor of a machine to convey the importance of regularity in plantation management. He noted that “a plantation ought to be considered as a well-constructed machine, compounded of various wheels, turning different ways, and yet all contributing to the great end proposed; but if any one part runs too fast or too slow in proportion to the rest, the main purpose is defeated.”12 It was in these Greater Antilles colonies that the full economic, social, and cultural impact of this mode of sugar planting was expressed.
For the integrated model to work, its agricultural operations required an extraordinary degree of labor, capital investment, and attention to the passage of time. Setting aside problems that all early modern farmers faced—bad weather, plant disease, invading weeds, declining fertility, and pest incursions—planting and harvesting sugarcane was significantly more difficult than for any other early modern food crop, in terms of labor, capital equipment, and timing. Early modern sugar workers planted a field by burying thousands of sugarcane cuttings two to three feet deep into the soil. Planting or “holing” a cane field required extraordinary exertion by a team of workers. In the sugar-producing regions of the Americas these men and women were almost always enslaved and of African descent. Depending on the plant variety and the environmental conditions, these canes required roughly twelve to eighteen months to grow to maturity.
Harvesting the cane required backbreaking labor as each worker cut thousands of tall stalks several inches above the soil level and chopped each of them into three similarly sized pieces. Planters in Brazil in 1689 required their slaves to cut forty-two hundred canes per day.13 Heavy with juice, those canes had to be immediately hauled to a mill because they would rot in twenty-four to forty-eight hours if they were not crushed. In fact, planters often found