Sugar Cane and Slavery
Sugar cane cultivation began in the 1640s, after its introduction in 1637 by Pieter Blower. Initially, rum was produced but by 1642, sugar was the focus of the industry. As it developed into the main commercial enterprise, Barbados was divided into large plantation estates which replaced the small holdings of the early British settlers as the wealthy planters pushed out the poorer. Some of the displaced farmers relocated to British colonies in North America, most notably South Carolina. To work the plantations, black Africans - primarily from West Africa - were imported as slaves in such numbers that there were three for every one planter. The slave trade ceased in 1807 and slaves were emancipated in 1834. Persecuted Catholics from Ireland also worked the plantations. Life expectancy of slaves was short, and replacements were purchased annually.
Sugar cane dominated Barbados' economic growth, and the island's cash crop was at the top of the sugar industry until 1720.
Increasingly after 1750 the plantations were owned by absentee landlords living in Britain and operated by hired managers.
Roberts (2006) shows that slaves did not spend the majority of time in restricted roles cultivating, harvesting, and processing sugarcane, the island's most important cash crop. Rather, slaves involved in various activities and in multiple roles: raising livestock, fertilizing soil, growing provisional crops, maintaining plantation infrastructure, caregiving, and other tasks. One notable soil management technique was intercropping, planting subsistence crops between the rows of cash crops - which demanded of the slaves skilled and experienced observations of growing conditions for efficient land use.
Read more about this topic: History Of Barbados
Famous quotes containing the words sugar cane, sugar, cane and/or slavery:
“There is no sugar cane that is sweet at both ends.”
—Chinese proverb.
“A good neighbour, even in this,
Is fatal sometimes, cuts your morning up
To mince-meat of the very smallest talk,
Then helps to sugar her bohea at night
With your reputation.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
“But a blind man’s cane poking, however clumsily, into the inmost corners of the house.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“I care not by what measure you end the war. If you allow one single germ, one single seed of slavery to remain in the soil of America, whatever may be your object, depend upon it, as true as effect follows cause, that germ will spring up, that noxious weed will thrive, and again stifle the growth, wither the leaves, blast the flowers, and poison the fair fruits of freedom. Slavery and freedom cannot exist together.”
—Ernestine L. Rose (1810–1892)