Habitation Sucrière - The sugar plantation

Other tropical commodities such as coffee, cotton and indigo were consumed in increasing quantities by Europeans, but it was the profits from sugar that drew in metropolitan investment capital, enflamed imperial rivalry, and led to the metastasis of the Atlantic slave trade starting in the late seventeenth century. On islands such as Barbados, Jamaica, and Saint-Domingue, sugar barons stood at the top of the social pyramid and much of the rest of the economy was oriented around sugar although there were very few places of sugar cane monoculture. Colonies in temperate regions of the Atlantic basin such as New England, and European port cities such as Liverpool, Nantes and Bordeaux developed their economies by deepening exchanges with the sugar-dominated West-Indian Islands. When other corners of the Caribbean basin such as Cuba and Louisiana were transformed into centers of tropical commodity production after the Revolution in Saint-Domingue (1791-1804), the sugar plantation led the way. Sugar itself was a cornerstone of an expanding consumer economy that paved the way for the Industrial Revolution. For these reasons, the sugar plantation was a central motor of economic growth toward the end of the first globalization of the early modern period [l’époque moderne].

The sugar plantation did not originate in the Caribbean—it had antecedents in the eastern Mediterranean, Madeira, the Canaries, and Southern Spain—but it was here that it attained its modern form, combining a highly extensible labor supply with novel technology and ways of organizing production. The invention during the seventeenth century of the three-roller upright rolling mill in the Dutch-dominated Pernambuco region of Brazil transformed the productivity, timing and quality of sugar cane processing. Finally, the exportation of Dutch technology and capital to the closer quarters of the British West Indies in the mid seventeenth century laid the basis for the “Barbados” or “Gang” [atelier] System. In these more easily controlled island contexts, the plantation became a consolidated enterprise  where all aspects of sugar cane planting, harvesting, crushing [roulaison] and refining took place under the close supervision of the plantation owner or his delegates [gérants, économes et commandeurs]. The basic technology, organization and labor supply of the Caribbean sugar plantation did not change significantly until the abolition of slavery and introduction in the nineteenth century of the steam-powered sugar cane rolling mill. In the meantime, the Barbados System spread all over the Caribbean basin, transforming the society, economy and environment wherever it went.

The sugar plantation was an agro-industrial enterprise that, while superficially resembling the modern-day factory, rested upon eminently traditional foundations. The term “habitation” itself suggests the household structure of older slave-based social units such as the Greek oikos or—more pertinently for this discussion—the Roman latifundium, large export-oriented private estates. In English, “plantation” may refer to the habitation itself or to the entire colony, which underlines the centrality of this institution to European colonization efforts as a whole. At the heart of the habitation, oikos or latifundium lay the patriarchal, despotic authority of the master, independent of any civil power, over his subjects. The French Code Noir (1685), and similar provisions in the Spanish Empire deriving from the Roman-law based Siete Partidas (1252-1284), attempted to temper this despotic power by outlawing the torture and murder of slaves and imposing limits on work and standards of nutrition. The Barbados Code (1661), which served as a model for other slave colonies in the British Colonies, sought only to codify a punitive regime of chattel slavery without any compensatory protections. Although the Code Noir was intended to restrain masters’ violence and greed for the sake of profitability and stability on the plantation, in practice its provisions were rarely enforced, leaving slaves exposed to violence and neglect [incurie]. When they were not themselves slave owners, colonial administrators showed utmost deference to owners’ belief that state intrusion into the plantation regime would compromise masters’ authority. Toward the eighteenth century, France, Spain and to a much lesser degree Britain began to issue legal reforms intended to minimize the abuse of slaves; these changes were resisted by owners, and in any cases had little measurable effect on sugar plantations. 

Of all the plantation monocultures in tropical zones, sugar was the most physically taxing and deadly. Sugar cultivation took place in exceptionally hot, low-lying areas; the exigent timing of harvest and refining frequently extended work beyond the already exhausting norm of sunup to sundown, six days a week with a one hour pause at midday; the gang system of labor organization itself tended to reinforce social pressure among slaves to intensify work rhythms; and the generally larger size of the sugar plantation strained whatever traditional moral norms might have limited overwork, physical abuse and malnutrition on the part of masters. Overworked and malnourished slave populations on sugar plantations died, on average, young and had low birth and infant survival rates, which meant that each year, from 5-10% of the slave population had to be replaced by the purchase of newly arrived captives. The constant arrival of new African captives, often from different regions of Africa, itself contributed to a constant social instability on these sugar plantations.

The African captives who worked on these sugar plantations reacted to these conditions with a combination of accommodation and resistance. Permanent escape was one solution, and newly arrived captives were the most likely to attempt “grand marronage.” By the eighteenth century, many, but not all, islands and coastal areas of the Caribbean Basin had small “marroon” communities with which colonial officials reluctantly reached a modus vivendi. More common were short-term evasions, so-called “petit marronage,” whereby individuals or small groups temporarily suspended work or left the plantation for short spells in order to recover from overwork and, implicitly, protest poor working conditions and malnutrition. Planters punished or tolerated these acts of resistance according to their own sense of the situation. Other slaves—sometimes the same who might at other times actively resist—sought better working and living conditions by making themselves particularly useful to plantation owners. Skilled slaves [esclaves à talent] tels que commandeurs, nurses, household managers [ménagères], refiners, and carpenters received better lodging, clothing, and nourishment. Enslaved women who entered (often forcibly) into intimate sexual relations with planters or their delegates  sometimes received similar consideration, and when they bore children as a result of these unions they or their children were sometimes, but not automatically, rewarded with manumission. Manumitted slaves and their descendants sometimes ascended into planter society by acquiring land and slaves; in the process they created new and, in the case of French Saint-Domingue, powerful social groups committed to their own liberty but not necessarily that of the slaves from whom they were descended. 

Inside the plantations dominated by the master and his delegates, and in the interstitial spaces between them, these captives and their descendants struggled to create novel, independent worlds. Family structures, including fictive kin relationships, helped to create a semblance of stability and safety; handicrafts brought in income and gave an outlet to aesthetic impulses; medico-botanical knowledge imported from Africa improved otherwise difficult living conditions; religious rituals maintained links with African homelands or ancestors and, frequently, promised means of redress against injustice; gardening, fishing, foraging, and small livestock rearing furnished desperately needed nutrition or income and distinct creole foodways [cuisine]—often subsequently adopted by whites—asserted the power and originality of Afro-Caribbean culture.  Similarly, African languages were maintained by slaves and became the basis, in combination with European and Indigenous languages, for commonly-shared creole languages. Because of their size and relative impersonality, and the lopsided black-white population ratios on the islands where sugar cultivation dominated, the sugar plantations of the Caribbean helped, perhaps inadvertently, to produce cultural, social, and political alternatives to the workhouse environment of the sugar plantation. 

Published in november 2024