Sugar culture in the hemispheric americas  (Page 2/2)

An initial way to incorporate Grainger would be to ask students to place themselves in the position of Grainger’s original audience, potential sugar planters, and ask them to dissect the poem looking for all hints/tips on sugar cultivation. At this point, the instructor could emphasize that Sugar-Cane: A Poem was but one of many instructional writings available to planters from the sixteenth century onwards. Then, a class discussion could take place focusing on the detailed process of growing sugar for market purposes in the colonial era. Students will quickly learn that sugar growing required skilled labor and patience, as a single crop would take over a year from planting to processing. Selections from Richard Sheridan’s Sugar and Slavery (1973) (see full biographical details below) could provide another description of the process and introduce the broad economic influence of the sugar industry.

Sugar house

In addition, one lecture could focus specifically on the relationship between sugar and the American Revolution. This could include an explanation of the Sugar Act, but also an emphasis on the trade relationship among Britain, the West Indies, and the North American colonies. Selwyn Carrington’s The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1775-1810 (2002), provides tables and charts to aid in a discussion of the sugar trade. For instance, Table 2.12 tracks the sugar exports from the British West Indies to Britain for 1772-83 and shows that during just 1772-73 approximately 112,305 casks of sugar were transported. Furthermore, Carrington describes how the byproducts of sugar, such as rum, were also vital to trade. The British West Indies bought North American colonial goods and, “in return, the mainland colonies took all British West Indian rum,” a byproduct of sugar agriculture (1).

Although an overview of the Atlantic sugar trade is important, the poem also allows for a focus on how the sugar culture manifested itself in a variety of ways on the local level. A comparative exercise could ask students to take on the perspective of sugar planter, or a slave on a sugar plantation, from various locales. Grainger’s poem provides a viewpoint from St. Christopher, while the letters of Pierre Dessales explore the experiences of a planter living in Martinique during the nineteenth century (see Sugar and Slavery, Family and Race (1996) for transcriptions of Dessales’s letters and diaries). Another valuable, and vivid, primary source is Jamaican planter Thomas Thistlewood’s 37-volume diary, excerpts of which are printed in Douglas Hall’s In Miserable Slavery (1989). All of these accounts give information on sugar culture, planter life, and the slave experience.

Cutting the sugar-cane, william clark, 1823

If a focus on individuals does not work with the outline of the course, an educator could easily craft a lesson drawing upon the ample literature on sugar culture around the globe and throughout history. One essay collection that epitomizes this global perspective is Sugar, Slavery, and Society (2004), which contains eight essays on the Caribbean, India, the Mascarenes, and the United States. These essays make it possible to see how the cultivation of sugar evolved over time and was subject to influences other than the economic pressures of the British. The sugar industry in Louisiana, for example, was influenced by French agricultural advances. As one historian states, “progressive French ideas did find their way into the sugar industry…French chemical and analytical techniques proved to be useful”(26). Educators can stress how West Indian sugar planters in the 1760s, such as Grainger, can be linked to Louisiana sugar cultivators in the 1880s by their ties to world markets and their quest for up-to-date agricultural techniques.

Bibliography

Burnard, Trevor. Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slave in the Anglo-Jamaican World . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Carrington, Selwyn. The Sugar Industry and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1775-1810 . Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002.

Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972.

Forster, Elborg and Robert Forster, eds. Sugar and Slavery, Family and Race: The Letters of Pierre Dessales, Planter in Martinique, 1808-1856 . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Hall, Douglas. In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750-1786 . London: Macmillan, 1989.

Heitmann, John Alfred. The Modernization of the Louisiana Sugar Industry, 1830-1910 . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987.

Moitt, Bernard, ed. Sugar, Slavery, and Society: Perspectives on the Caribbean, India, the Mascarenes, and the United States . Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004.

Scarano, Francisco. Sugar and Slavery in Puerto Rico: The Plantation Economy of Ponce, 1800-1850 . Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

Schwartz, Stuart B., ed. Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Sheridan, Richard B. Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623-1775 . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.