From A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (Raj Patel & Jason W. Moore, 2018) p14-17
THE EARLIEST FRONTIERS
Early modern colonialism used frontiers in an entirely new way. Always before, rising population density in the heartlands had led to the expansion of settlement, followed by commerce. This pattern turned inside out in the two centuries after 1492. Frontiers were to become an organizing principle of metropolitan wealth. The demographic and geographical logic of the resulting civilization would radically invert patterns established millennia earlier. Financial wealth – as we will see in chapter 2 – made these conquests possible. And it was in an experiment on an early Portuguese colonial outpost that many of the features of the modern world were first convened, in the manufacture of one of the first capitalist products: sugar.
One of the earliest flares of the modern world was lit on a small northern African island, where in the 1460s a new system for producing and distributing food took shape. In 1419, Portuguese sailors first sighted an island less than four hundred miles (644 kilometers) west of Casablanca, which they called Ilha da Madeira, “Island of wood.” The Venetian traveler and slaver Alvise da Ca’ da Mosto (Cadamosto) reported in 1455 that “there was not a foot of ground that was not entirely covered with great trees.” By the 1530s it was hard to find any wood on the island at all. There were two phases in the clear-cutting of Madeira. Initially, the trees had been profitable as lumber for shipbuilding and construction. The denuded forest became acreage for wheat to be sent back to Portugal starting in the 1430s. The second, more dramatic deforestation was driven by the use of wood as fuel in sugar production.
Humans, primates, and most mammals love the taste of sugar. Since the discovery of sugarcane in New Guinea in 6000 BCE, humans have understood the biological necessities of its treatment. There is a peak time to harvest the cane, when it is turgid with sweet juice – but then the grass is thick and difficult to cut. Once chopped, the cane can be coaxed to yield its greatest quantity of sugar for only forty-eight hours. After that, the plant starts to rot.
The botany of sugarcane thus calls for speedy production, which for millennia made it hard to produce in large amounts. This is why Sidney Mintz reports that “in 1226, Henry III requested the Mayor of Winchester to get him three pounds [1.4 kilograms] of Alexandrine sugar if so much could be had at one time from the merchants at the great Winchester Fair.” Increasing the amount that “could be had at one time” was not easy. One had to surmount the limits of what a single family might produce. One had to invest in new techniques and technology. Persians and North Africans in the great Muslim civilizations had, for instance, discovered that potash (potassium carbonate) could produce clearer sugar crystals: the best sugar was from Alexandria in Egypt, hence Henry III’s specific hankering for it. But it took new experiments in work, nature, and commerce to invent ways to produce far, far more.
Sugar had arrived in Iberia by the fourteenth century, brought by King Jaume II of Aragén (1267-1327), who also brought a Muslim slave expert in the art of sugar production. By 1420 it was being grown commercially, funded by German banking houses like the Ravensburger Handelsgesellschaft and cultivated on rented plots near Valencia by a mixture of slaves and free workers. But sugar remained rare – and there was a ready market for it. In the 1460s and 1470s, farmers on Madeira stopped growing wheat and started growing sugar exclusively. A lot more sugar. The sugar frontier quickly spread, at first to other islands in the Atlantic, then on a massive scale to the New World. Like palm and soy monocultures today, it cleared forests, exhausted soils, and encouraged pests at breakneck speed.
To reach such speeds, production had to be reorganized, broken into smaller, component activities performed by different workers. It simply isn’t possible to get good returns from workers who are exhausted from cutting cane and then spend the night refining it. New management and technologies helped move sugar manufacture from edge runner mills (big pestle-and-mortar machines) and small holdings to two-roller mills and large-scale slave production in Sao Tomé. Centuries before Adam Smith could marvel at the division of labor across a supply chain that made a pin, the relationship between humans, plants, and capital had forged the core ideas of modern manufacturing – in cane fields. The plantation was the original factory. And every time the sugar plantation found a new frontier, as in Brazil after Sao Tomé and the Caribbean after that, that factory was reinvented – with new machines and new combinations of plantation and sugar mill. The only thing missing from this story, of course, is the humans who did the work. In Madeira, they were Indigenous People from the Canary Islands, North African slaves, and – in some cases – paid plantation laborers from mainland Europe.
The plantations were irrigated by levadas, water channels forged of trees, mud, sweat, and blood. Today, thirteen hundred miles (twenty-one hundred kilometers) of levadas remain on an island thirty-seven miles (sixty kilometers) across at its widest point. Hydraulic engineers deployed slaves, sometimes dangling on ropes, to carve small canals through rock faces to channel streams to the cane fields. Many workers died in rockslides and dam breaches, but the engineers transformed Hows of water in Madeira so effectively that Afonso de Albuquerque, the first duke of Goa and the second governor of Portuguese India, asked that Madeirans be sent “to change the course of the River Nile”. Financed by Flemish and Italian capitalists, masters from Portugal oversaw cane’s planting, watering, harvest, and transformation into crystalized sugar. Turning cane stalks into sugar used prodigious amounts of fuel. At least fifty pounds (twenty-three kilograms) of wood was needed to boil and distill enough sugarcane juice to return a single pound (0.45 kilograms) of sugar. To turn the cane, heavy with water, into molasses and loaves of sugar, mills were built around Madeira’s capital, Funchai, to which slaves transported the cane. At its zenith, Madeira’s industry used five hundred hectares (1,236 acres) of forest each year to feed the boilers that kept the tributes of sugar flowing to Europe’s courts. Yet after the boom, the bust. Output peaked in the first decade of the sixteenth century, and the furnaces sputtered out by the 1530s, the trees having been stripped from the island. Production crashed, and investors found greater returns from large-scale slave-planted sugar whose processing was fueled by forests in the New World. Europe’s wealthy ate the sugar, and sugar ate the island.
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