Plantation Factories: Science and Technology in Late-Eighteenth-Century Cuba

This article studies efforts by a group of plantation owners in Havana to increase production at their sugar plantations by introducing chemical sciences and new foreign technologies to their mills. The modernization plans were debated versus the conventional alternative: increasing capacity by importing hundreds of thousands of slaves and scaling up traditional methods of processing sugar. Plantation owners sought to also clarify the distinction between science and technology and better understand how each promised to advance sugar production. This clarification resulted in a conceptual division between science and technology that shaped the Cuban sugar industry. It also contributed to re-define what it meant to be an "expert" sugar master to the exclusion of the artisans that had for centuries worked as such. The tensions explored in this article illustrate many of the difficulties of transferring immature sciences and new technologies to a non-originating country.