The Plantation Machine. Trevor Burnard
to start this process at the proper moment and to complete it promptly. In addition to having a large human labor force, cane farmers needed to be keenly aware of time. They also needed teams of oxen, mules, and carts. After harvest, the root system established by the initial cutting produced more cane offshoots, known in English as “rattoons” and in French as “rejettons.” Most eighteenth-century plantations took advantage of this regrowth to reap as many as five harvests from a single planting, a method known in English as “rattooning.” Successive generations of rattooned cane, however, though they mature faster, contain progressively less sucrose.
The same three factors that shaped cane growing—time sensitivity plus access to human labor and machinery—also determined whether canes could be transformed into saleable sugar. Time is especially critical in the sugar manufacturing process and not only because hundreds of thousands of canes must be crushed one or two days after harvesting. After a mill pressed the juice from a cane, spoilage was still a danger. Early modern sugar makers boiled the sugar juice, up to the point when they could see sucrose crystals emerging from the watery solution. This evaporation stage, however, was necessarily slow, because sugar syrup caramelizes if it receives too much heat at once. To control this process, sugar makers moved the hot sugar solution through five progressively smaller cauldrons as it thickened. Once their expert touch could discern sugar crystals, sugar refiners poured the syrup into hundreds of conical clay forms. These containers sat in a dry place for four to six weeks as the remaining water drained out, in the form of a dark, sweet molasses. To make a more refined “clayed sugar” or “sucre terré,” a sugar master covered the open tops of these pots with wet clay. The clay gradually released its water into the crystals below, carrying away impurities. The resulting sugar was lighter and sold for approximately twice the price of brown sugar. The claying process also produced a larger amount of molasses, which was an additional source of profit for a planter who distilled it into rum himself or sold it to a distillery. Making sugar profitably in such conditions required that an eighteenth-century planter be an accomplished farmer and a manager of a complex manufacturing process. He needed to have access to sufficient credit to buy and replace agricultural tools. He constantly worried about making sure sugar-making supplies were available at the times when the process needed them. Most of all, he had to carefully manage a large and troublesome labor force, which, moreover, was always in a state of flux, as sugar workers were frequently unhealthy or dying, consumed by an estate’s hard-driving operating schedule. In both societies, slave numbers were maintained only by frequent purchases of new slaves, usually direct from West or West Central Africa.
To an extent, these sugar plantations were “factories in the field.” Scholars have pointed out a number of characteristics that disqualify eighteenth-century sugar estates from being labeled Europe’s first “industrial” producers.14 Yet by the second half of the eighteenth century, these nonindustrial characteristics were fading. One key argument against a plantation being akin to an industrial enterprise is that eighteenth-century planters with their slave forces viewed labor as a fixed, not a variable cost, as factory owners did in a later period. For this reason, planters have been seen as resistant to a key aspect of the Industrial Revolution, the adoption of labor-saving technology, for example new plow designs. Planters did resist using plows to plant cane, though as chapter ten of this volume makes clear, Jamaican and especially Saint-Domingue sugar planters became increasingly interested after 1750 in technologies that could make their estates more profitable. Their lack of interest in plows stemmed from the fact that they always needed large workforces to cut the cane, so they saw no compelling reason to save labor in the planting process. Even in the early twenty-first century, workers with machetes, not machines, harvest much of the world’s sugar. Nevertheless, eighteenth-century planters used the gang system to make an enslaved cane cutter into a type of machine.15
It is true that sugar planters mostly did not deal with a free labor market, though many of them did lease “jobbing gangs” from local entrepreneurs for special tasks, like planting.16 The critical point, however, is that sugar planters saw their laborers not only as workers but as highly flexible capital investments. Slaves in these colonies were viewed both as property—capital that could be used in a variety of ways—and also as people—workers who could be forced to produce income for owners. Planters could sell them, use them as collateral, or hire them out to planters who needed additional labor. Slaves thus represented highly liquid forms of capital, as well as being people who produced income for their owners. Despite this “fixed-cost” labor situation, sugar planters’ attitude that their enslaved workers were flexible and expendable capital investments was consistent with an emerging industrial mentality. Planters’ skillful and increasingly flexible deployment of “human resources” (to give a modern term to this emerging way of seeing people in capital investment terms) demonstrated their place on the cutting edge of financial and industrial capitalism.
Why have we chosen to write about two colonies within separate imperial regimes rather than two islands under the same monarch, like Barbados and Jamaica, or Saint-Domingue and Martinique? The simple answer is that we believe the unusual place of the Caribbean within the early modern Atlantic World is best revealed when its two largest slave societies are examined side by side. Such juxtaposition highlights differences between the British and French imperial systems and cultures. But this book illustrates that more unites Jamaica and Saint-Domingue than separates them. This is less a comparative history, therefore, than a twin portrait of societies moving along parallel pathways.
The question of comparison is always a vexed one, as the twentieth-century history of New World slavery illustrates. In 1947, Frank Tannenbaum, an American scholar of Latin American history, wanted to understand why “the adventure of the Negro in the New World had been structured differently in the United States than in other parts of the hemisphere.” His conclusion—that the colonizing European culture determined the levels and nature of slavery and racism—inspired many comparative works, some of which were on Saint-Domingue and Jamaica.17 Such comparative studies have not resolved the question of whether slaves’ experience varied significantly according to the nationality of the masters. One reason is that it is difficult to find societies with similar plantation systems, at equivalent levels of demographic and economic development. The nature of a slave economy has much more influence on slaves’ lives than any imperial law or institution. A second reason is that such comparisons require precise definitions of slave “treatment.”18 To create such a definition and then research it in two different colonial systems is extraordinarily difficult. “Treatment” might consist of material considerations like access to food, clothing, and medical care, to be revealed by plantation records; it might be defined in legal terms, like protection from torture or overwork, and whether those legal protections were actually enforced; or it might involve the way slaves were treated in the wider culture, like their ability to leave slavery, maintain kin networks, or join religious communities.
Scholars may never be able to answer these types of comparative questions in a rigorous way. But direct comparison is not what interests us. Tannenbaum and those he inspired tried to show how imperial cultures shaped slave societies. An essential truth of the West Indies in this period, however, is that “geography outweighed nationality.”19 Greater Antilles colonies, like Jamaica and Saint-Domingue, shared more physical characteristics with each other than with Lesser Antilles colonies within the same empire. Barbados, for example, was the island most often linked to Jamaica in the eighteenth century; both colonies had a sugar plantation economy, a society built around slavery, and a prominent place in the British Empire. Nevertheless, there were stark differences between the two places. Barbados was physically much smaller, had a larger and more settled white population, and, most important, was the sole British sugar colony to experience natural increase in its slave population before slavery was abolished in 1834. It is as appropriate to compare Barbados with Virginia or South Carolina as it is to look at what it shared with Jamaica.20 A similar argument can be made in regard to comparing Martinique to Saint-Domingue. This Lesser Antilles colony was less than one-twentieth the size of Saint-Domingue and after 1750 no longer received significant numbers of European or African newcomers. The two colonies were thus very different from each other.
Jamaica and Saint-Domingue in the late eighteenth century resembled each other in being societies in which economic success