Chapters 13 -15

A little late on last weeks journal, but oh well here ya go!

I found it interesting to read that the amount of slaves that were sent to South American plantations was way WAY higher than that that of North America. The book tells us that a big reason for this was a direct effect of the sugar industry, but it only briefly mentions that the reason was because of how difficult the work was so I thought i’d go into the sugar production practices of the time and try and describe why it was so much more intense than other slave-driven manufacturing processes of the era.

One major difference in the cultivation of sugar that differed from industries like cotton was that industries like cotton typically just grew the raw material and shipped it out to another manufacturer who refined the product into a usable material. Sugarcane is different in that once it is harvested it will spoil quickly and consequently must be processed quickly into its final crystalized form. Because of this, sugarcane plantations also had to handle the responsibilities of refining the raw product into the crystalized form that people could directly use in addition to the planting and harvesting of the plant.

Virtually every aspect of the planting and harvesting of sugarcane is intense, back breaking work. To plant sugarcane, workers had to dig a square roughly five feet wide down around 8 inches and were expected to do at least 60 of these a day. So these plantations must have been massive considering the amount of slaves they had working for them. Because these places were usually in tropical areas, weeds and rodents would attack growing plants thus requiring an entire portion of slaves to be dedicated to pest extermination and weed removal. The plants grew taller than the average human by harvest and because of that were difficult to chop as the plant needed to be cut at basically the base. The stalks were taken to factories where wind powered crushers would crush the juice that would be sent to the boilers to boil and refine into crystalized sugar. I’m sure its not surprising that many people lost limbs in the machinery during this process.

After reading up on this process i’m not surprised now by the number of slaves required for the sugar industry. Sugar really isn’t necessary for any human diet; its basically a drug and the europeans were hooked (and willing to exploit anyone to get their fix.) Its not surprising that slave labor was used, but at the scale at which this was happening it is surprising to me how long this went on before revolution occurred. I suppose humans will take a lot of abuse to maintain routine in their lives and I cant say I’m exempt from this assumption.