One of the most profitable investments for early capitalists was sugar. Columbus brought sugarcanes from Portuguese Madeira on his second voyage. The Portuguese brought sugar cultivation from Sao Tome off the West African coast to their New World colony of Brazil in the early 16th century.[1] Quickly exhausting the gold deposits on Santo Domingo, settlers turned to the production of sugar as a surer source of profit. Sugar’s desirability and rarity did for the islands of the West Indies what oil later did for the Middle East: It gave them a monopoly of a commodity whose demand continued to climb for two centuries.[2]
Sugar was instantly popular in Europe. Soon the English, Dutch, and French seized Caribbean islands of their own during the 17th century to exploit this new and lucrative crop. Sugar did more than furnish calories and sweetness; it made possible storing fruits and vegetables throughout the year. There were only three ways to keep food before artificial refrigeration: salting it, preserving it, or drying it. Sugar was the essential ingredient for preserves.[3]
The plantations that operated as “factories in the fields” were the first examples of highly capitalized agriculture. They were completely unlike the farms in Europe. Plantation work was always drudgery, but it became brutal when the workers were enslaved and beaten to work harder. The gender ratio in the sugar plantations was often as high as 13 men to 1 woman. The native inhabitants of the islands were treated cruelly by the plantation owners until Bartolme de Las Casas, bishop of Chiapas became their greatest defender.[4]
The decision made by Bartolme de Las Casas would ultimately affect the lives of millions of people and its ramifications still reverberate throughout our world today. He proposed that the Spanish import African slaves as a way to protect the native peoples. He argued that Africans were better prepared to do the work. From his suggestion came one of the most lucrative capitalist’s plums of Caribbean commerce, the asiento, a contract that Spanish officials awarded for an annual supply of slaves and European goods. The first one, signed in 1595, gave the Portuguese the exclusive rights to land 4,250 slaves annually at Cartagena. [5]
From the 1620s through the 1680s, the English government was in turmoil. King James I discovered that he could make a tremendous amount of money by selling licenses for the exclusive public control of a product, a trade, or even a government service, like the inspection of tobacco or collection of customs. As one scholar reported, in the early seventeenth century a typical Englishman lived in a house built with monopoly bricks; heated by monopoly coal. His clothes are held up by monopoly belts, monopoly buttons, monopoly pins. He ate monopoly butter, monopoly currants, monopoly red herrings, monopoly salmon, monopoly lobsters. The holders of monopolies had the exclusive right to sell these items and charged as much as people would pay for them.[6]
The more the English rulers attempted to extract money in unconventional taxes, grants, and patents, the more economic issues got pulled into parliamentary debates. By the end of the 17th century the monopolies had passed.[7] In 1713 the British secured the asiento and dominated the slave trade for a century, until reformers at home brought a stop to the whole awful enterprise. Merchants in the English continental colonies, particularly those from Rhode Island and New York, participated in the slave trade along with the slavers that sailed from Liverpool. While Cuba dominated the sugar industry, slaves could be sold there for 30 times what they had cost in Africa. Profits like that would always find takers.
Smoking and chewing tobacco proved so popular in England that the demand triggered a boom back in Virginia. Settlers that arrived with sufficient cash established themselves on large plots of land, while the English king promoted the slaves trade. Now English slavers could supply Virginia with slaves directly from Africa at a good price.[8] By 1720 there were two African slaves for every English settler in South Carolina. Just as the Virginian slave owners had done, the Carolina planter elite passed draconian laws controlling every aspect of slave behavior to still their fears of a slave rebellion.[9]
As cotton production was added to the agri-businesses using slave labor the spread of the crops westward to Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, embedded slavery in the economy of the new nation. At its peak in the 1790’s, a slave vessel left an English port every other day.[10] By 1815 southern planters were sending 7 million bales of cotton to the mills of Lancaster and Manchester. By 1860 this total had risen to 192 million bales, and the slave population had quadrupled to almost four million black men, women, and children.[11] The market value of American slaves on the eve of the Civil War was almost three billion dollars, a sum greater than the value of all manufacturing and railroads in the United States.[12]
The issue of slavery came to a head with the Civil War. What did the war cost? The cost of life was 1,094,453 casualties. In monetary terms, a final official estimate in 1879 placed the total cost at $6,190,000,000. The Confederacy spent perhaps $2,099,808,707. By 1906 another $3.3 billion already had been spent by the U.S. government on Northerners' pensions and other veterans' benefits for former Federal soldiers. The physical devastation, almost all of it in the South, was enormous: burned or plundered homes, pillaged countryside, untold losses in crops and farm animals, ruined buildings and bridges, devastated college campuses, and neglected roads all left the South in ruins.[13]
The amazing thing is that a majority of those involved in the wholesale buying, shipping and retail selling of slaves were Christians. The vast majority of the Northern and Southern soldiers were Christians. Ministers on both side preached sermons in which they declared that God was supporting their side. Do you think there is something wrong with the belief systems that could produce such contradictory claims? Do you think God supports people doing things like this in His name? Would you? Don’t you think it’s about time to address the facts, even if some beliefs have to either change or go? What Would Jesus Do?
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