Expanding a Lucrative Business
Brazilian sugar production developed fast. By 1600, when sugar prices had increased, Brazil had two hundred sugar engenhos in operation and produced more than ten thousand tons of sugar annually.38 As we saw in chapter 3, this period of peak production coincided with the Dutch occupation of Pernambuco between 1630 and 1654.
Between 1630 and 1640, as imports of enslaved people intensified, Brazil dominated the international sugar industry. During this period, Brazilian sugar estates had an average of approximately 100 bondspeople, but 150 to 200 enslaved people toiled in each of the largest sugar estates. Moreover, some planters could own more than one plantation by accumulating the ownership of a large enslaved population.39After Hispaniola’s experiments with the sugar industry, sugar mills also emerged in Cuba at the end of the sixteenth century, but a robust sugar industry did not develop there until the early nineteenth century, after the revolution that abolished slavery in the French colony of Saint-Domingue.40 Up until the early seventeenth century, the Spanish were the only European colonizers in the West Indies, but gradually, especially the English (as well as the Dutch, French, and Danish) established colonies in the Greater and Lesser Antilles.41 In this context, Barbados became the first English colony in the region to develop an economy based on a plantation regime in the seventeenth century. Tobacco and cotton plantations initially prevailed, but they were mainly operated by English, Scottish, and Irish male and female indentured workers, including children as young as ten. These white servants were not slaves. Even though they could be bought and sold, and despite their working and living conditions being often as abysmal as those of enslaved people, adult indentured servants agreed to be transported to Barbados to work without compensation for a finite period, between four and five years, to pay for their transportation to the West Indies.42
In the 1640s, English planters obtained sugarcanes from a Dutch slave ship.
The Dutch, by then settled in northeastern Brazil, also provided technological advice. As sugar emerged as the major crop cultivated in Barbados, the African enslaved population quickly outnumbered male European colonists and indentured servants. Barbados became the richest English colony in the West Indies, and the size of plantations and slaveholdings increased, varying from one hundred to two hundred enslaved persons.43 Women made up an important part of the enslaved population on the island, and in some eighteenth-century estates, bondswomen represented half the slaveholdings.44 Later, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, enslaved women performed all kinds of physically demanding activities in Barbados’s sugarcane fields. In addition to being exposed to sexual violence, bondswomen in these sugar estates were victims of brutal physical punishments inflicted by overseers and drivers.45Also in the West Indies, and as in the English colonies, the plantations of the French colony of Saint-Domingue employed enslaved Africans and indentured servants during the seventeenth century. During this period Martinique also developed sugarcane plantations. By the 1650s, a plantation system emerged in Saint-Domingue and Jamaica, which became an English colony in 1659. Most of the planters of these two colonies, as well as other Caribbean islands colonized by the English and the French, actually resided in England and France. Based in their respective metropoles in Europe, these absentee slave owners operated their estates with the support of attorneys and managers, who administered various states and often were slave owners themselves.46
The rise of Jamaica and Saint-Domingue as the two main competitors of Brazilian sugar coincided with the expulsion of the Dutch from northeastern Brazil in 1654. After the Dutch were expelled from Pernambuco, they maintained their presence in Curaçao and Suriname, from where they continued to impact the development of sugar production in the West Indies, which eventually overturned Brazil’s dominance in sugar production. Meanwhile, English colonies in North America did not become large sugar producers, but during the seventeenth century, tobacco plantations emerged in Maryland and Virginia. As in the early years of the colonization in Barbados, enslaved Africans performed agricultural activities alongside white indentured servants in these two North American colonies.47 But as elsewhere, gradually the number of indentured workers decreased, and planters increasingly imported enslaved Africans to labor on the profitable plantations.