Sugar Changed the World: Part Three

Following the strand of sugar and slavery leads directly into the tumult of the Age of Revolutions.

Free men were not the silent, dutiful children of a wise king-father; rather, they were adults who spoke up for themselves.

In the Age of Sugar, Americans gave their lives to defend what they owned, yet they continued to own other people. Paradoxically, it took the English to challenge the idea that a person could be bought and sold.

Each year Cambridge University gave a prize for the best essay written in Latin. This was no obscure test for a few scholars — winning the prize was considered a great honor.

The English were getting richer because Africans were being turned into property. Clarkson and others who believed as he did, who in the coming decades would be called abolitionists, realized that while that link gave the English a stake in slavery, it also gave the antislavery forces an opportunity.

When he spoke, Clarkson brandished whips and handcuffs used on slaves; he published testimonials from sailors and ship doctors who described the atrocities and punishments on slave ships.

When he spoke, Clarkson brandished whips and handcuffs used on slaves; he published testimonials from sailors and ship doctors who described the atrocities and punishments on slave ships.

In the years leading up to the American Revolution, the women of New England refused to buy English products and English tea. The loss of income made London rescind some of the taxes it had imposed on America.

Now this same tactic — boycotting — was used to fight slavery.

In revolutionary France, the defenders of slaves began to win the argument against the advocates of property rights.

One, two, tree,
All de same;
Black, white, brown,
All de same;
All de same.
One, two, tree,
All de same!
That chant did more than threaten a slave revolt — it was a challenge to all ranking hierarchies.

As Henry Dundas, the British secretary of war, put it, their goal was to “prevent a circulation in the British Colonies of the wild and pernicious Doctrines of Liberty and Equality.”

The great paradox about the French Revolution is that even as the revolutionaries passed ever more laws to benefit the poor and enslaved, those same leaders turned increasingly zealous in murdering their enemies.

Slavery was not an abstraction, an economic force, a counter in the game of world politics — it was the suffering of men and women.

Because they could not use slaves, Hawaiian sugar growers turned to one ethnic group after another, trying to keep wages low by having each new type of worker compete with the old. But all this planning to create division had the strangest effect: It made Hawaii into the most ethnically diverse place in the world.