Sugar, the Industrial Revolution, and Women’s Rights
The colonial expansion into the Americas led to the discovery of vast lands ready for extensive production of sugar cane, a highly prized and rare commodity at that time. Investors and colonial explorers imported slaves from across the Atlantic from Africa to do the dirty work. The Atlantic slave trade and the mass production of sugar that followed had two major unintended consequences that changed the world both economically and politically. Firstly, it enabled European industrialization thanks to a new influx of capital. Secondly, slavery and the newfound industrialization prompted the first women’s movement. The sugar trade, slavery, and colonization intruded into the domestic spheres of European women in such a way that they had to stop it, so they banded together to boycott sugar from across the Atlantic. The whole story, though, is a little more complex:
The slave-based economy made cheap sugar readily available in Europe, quickly making it a commonplace commodity. Marx succinctly reveals the integral role of the slave system in Europe at the time, explaining “direct slavery is as much the pivot of our industrialism today as machinery” (Marx in Mintz 360). Sugar profits were invested in machinery and other industrial commodities that gained quick appeal in the business sector. The mechanical applications of the new technology expanded and further incited the Industrial Revolution (Mintz 361). The slave labor in the West Indies made sugar profitable, which in turn enabled new technology to be created and implemented. With the Industrial Revolution, a second system in Europe was created which profited off of a lesser sort of slave labor.
The Industrial Revolution catalyzed the creation of the British working class. In the end, both England’s capitalists and the proletarians came to rely on sugar. As industrialization increased, so did sugar consumption. It was hailed, though not in so exact words, as the ‘proletarian hunger-killer’ (Mintz 360). Increased work demands in England’s new factories led to the need for quick calories. Hearty oatmeal, butter, and milk were replaced with cheap, commercialized sugar-friendly food like jams and tea (Mintz 365). Women and children suffered as food went to the moneymaking, factory-laboring male. And, not surprisingly, there was a noticeable decline in the health of the commoner.
The consumption of sugar and its origins began to be recognized as an issue of concern in the newly industrialized England. No longer a thing far away in the ocean, sugar and slavery were brought into the home by the teacup, jar, and pound. People began taking notice of the labor that went into the agriculture around sugar. Learning of the harsh environment the slaves must endure in the procurement of sugar, the full ‘price’ of sugar was recognized. It was theorized that the slave was transformed into the very commodity he produced; the slave was literally wasting away in his labor—‘a pound of sugar for every two ounces of flesh’ (Sussman 52). A superstition surfaced that the battered fluid and substance of the slave was, in fact, imbibed through the sugared products of their labor. People were alarmed at the very thought and believed eating the tainted sugar stuffs physically harmed them. The people of Britain took up arms against slavery in order to maintain their health. Women in charge of the hearth and home fought against the impinging colonial life in British homes.
Women envisioned the slave labor as a direct affront to their peaceful, moral domestic sphere. They were contesting the morality of slavery, but perhaps more so challenging the evidence of it in their own homes. Contrasting the national sphere dominated by the political motives of men, this sphere was the one women had the duty to secure. Family-orientated metaphors and bodily imagery became frequent during the abolitionist debate. Bodily pollution and contamination came from sugar because, the abolitionists described, the injured slave ‘fluids’ were transferred to the food. Thus it was that women believed the deleterious treatment of the slaves and cannibalistic sugar consumption breached the boundary of pristine domesticity.
Like a man ingesting a fierce animal in order to gain its strength, the proletariats were under the belief that there was an exchange of fluids between the British and the slaves in the consumption of sugar. Thus, by eating the sugared goods “British consumers [were] themselves transformed into the savage cannibals they had once merely fantasized on the colonial periphery” (ibid. 53). Using such incriminating imagery, the abolitionists compelled the sugar consuming British to separate themselves from the barbaric Africans (ibid. 56). Accordingly, women attempted to differentiate their moral, proper lifestyles and respectable homes from that of the savagery represented by the colonies and the sugar they produced. They created women’s groups and boycotted South Atlantic sugar in droves.
It was repugnant that the imported sugar served to make the upstanding British women immoral and commit crimes against humanity. A Christian pamphlet asked, “Does it not behove all professors of Christianity well to consider how far they encourage the oppressor, by purchasing their commodities, thus defiled with blood?” (Sussman 54). Eliciting Christian edict to invoke guilt when imbibing the bloodied sugar, eating sugar was further personified as cannibalism. Samuel Taylor Coleridge questions further, “Will the Father of all men bless the Food of Cannibals—the Food which is polluted with the blood of his own innocent children?” (ibid.) Now, considering the bodily contamination inherent in the consumption of sugar, along with the maltreatment of the slaves, the women boycott all the sugar they could. They needed to in order to stifle the infringement of the colonial environment into the British domestic sphere: “By rejecting contaminated sugar, then, consumers are not only rejecting slavery, but also separating themselves from the foreign environment in which slave labor occurs” (Sussman 56).
In their fight against sugar consumption, whether on immoral, cannibalistic or proximal value grounds, women changed their role from static housewives and mothers to ethics leaders. With the use of feminine, familial imagery there came a “…relation between the re-organization of the domestic space around moral influence and emotional authority on the one hand and changing attitudes toward the colonial arena on the other’ (Sussman 58). “‘ Natural’ feminine characteristics were appropriated as political tools” as mothers became the moral leaders of the family and the nation (ibid. 59). She created empathy for the oppressed and sympathy for the suffering as she led families to discover the correlation between the abominable treatment in the colonies and intake of thusly infected sugar. “Abolitionist rhetoric thus consciously [called] on female sensibility to safeguard the home from colonial contamination, to preserve that home as a symbol of a purified English identity, and to ensure that the domestic sphere remains distinct from the colonial arena” (Sussman 61).
The home space had been separated from the male dominated political sphere, but the immoral sugar consumption forced women to extend themselves beyond the confines of their once pure homes. With the boycott, women became the moral leaders of men. “The invention of the domestic sphere in the mid-eighteenth century allowed for women to be valued for more than their physical attributes; they became the emotional authority” at a higher level (Sussman 58). In charge of running the household, women were national consumers of the goods men depended on for profit. “The discourse of domesticity created a space in which individual thoughts and emotions were separable from and superior to the economic and political world” (ibid. 58) wherein “the emphasis [shifted] from simply [woman’s] capacity to consume to her capacity to feel something about what she consumes” (ibid 59). For the first time, women had the economic power to influence men’s minds and morals through their (contemporary) wallets (Sussman 62).
The progression from sugar manufacturing to European industrialization and the empowerment of British women is therefore clearly expressed in the cause and effect of history. Colonization and slavery generated a supply of sugar that became indispensable to European industry and consumers. Sugar consumption catalyzed the Industrial Revolution, for the surplus profits from the slave produced sugar were invested in new machinery and at the same time the quick, sugary goods allowed the working class to have more time to labor in the new factories. Coming to a head, colonial life and its immorality encroached on that of the British woman’s home. Women took advantage of the maturing capitalist system where the consumers theoretically hold all end power. They boycotted sugar in order to demonstrate abolitionist sympathy and purify their domestic sphere. And so, simple sugar was the impetus of the first modern woman’s movement.
It was colonial expansion that made evident women’s capacity to shape the economic and moral values of those around them. The increased interested in sugar production was the catalyst of this influence. Sugar encouraged the profit seeking Europeans to establish contacts with those who controlled the household intake of goods. As head of the domestic sphere, it was women who were in this economic realm. Clearly, without these household heads making the decision to purchase sugar European trade would have been stunted. Therefore, women are recognized and revered today thanks to the cascade of events surrounding the sugar trade. Its intrusion on the woman managed domestic sphere of England to the first collective activist actions by women. The empowerment and united-ness caused by the sugar boycott led women to recognize that they could do more: they could make cause and demonstrate for equality and autonomous liberty for themselves. Thus, it was the colonial sugar trade that made women recognize they could be the social instruments of change that they continue to be today.
Bibliography:
Brooks Jr., George E. 1976. “The Signares of Saint-Louis and Gorée: Women Entrepreneurs in Eighteenth Century Senegal” in Women in Africa, Nancy J. Hafkin and Edna G. Bay, eds. Stanford: Stanford UP
Palmié, Stephan. 1995. “A Taste for Human Commodities: Experiencing the Atlantic System” in Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery, Stephan Palmié, ed. Knoxville: U. of Tennessee Press
McD Beckles, Hilary. 1999. Centering Women. Oxford: James Currey, (chapters 2 and 3)
Mintz, Sidney. 1979. “Time, Sugar, and Sweetness,” Marxist Perspectives vol. 2
Sussman, Charlotte. 1994. “Women and the Politics of Sugar, 1792,” Representations vol. 48
Thornton, John K.. 1998. The Kongolese Saint Anthony. Cambridge: Cambridge UP
Verlinden, Charles. 1970. The Beginnings of Modern Colonialism (ch. 1). Ithaca: Cornell UP
January 16, 2009
Tags: food event, Health, heroes, nutrition, sugar Posted in: Fun Food Facts, Health, Politics
2 Responses
Hey! This is a really interesting article. Well done!
Thanks! I felt it was a very compelling narrative that just had to be put out there.
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