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  • Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680
  • Robert L. Paquette
Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450–1680. Edited by Stuart B. Schwartz (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2004) 347 pp. $59.95 cloth $22.50 paper

In Wealth of Nations (London, 1776), Adam Smith argued for the relative efficiency of wage labor before tucking away into a single sentence shortly thereafter the jarring acknowledgment that Britain's slave-based sugar plantations in the West Indies were generating higher profits than any other type of agriculture in the transatlantic world. Addictive sweetness derived from the juice of a pithy, perennial grass indigenous to tropical Asia had, in Smith's time, become a burgeoning want, satisfied by enslaved African labor on American plantations. Although the story of sugar cane's migration from the eastern Mediterranean to the Americas has received scholarly attention, this anthology explores the role of sugar [End Page 489] in various sectors of the Atlantic economy during a grayish, preparatory period (1450–1680), when the transformative power of sugar was not as clear-cut.

Six of the eight essays in this volume focus on sugar production in specific regions and contain valuable quantitative data. Schwartz, who conceived the project and contributed an able introduction to the book as well as one of its better essays, encouraged most of the authors to respond to a set of questions on the financing, ownership, organization, and management of the sugar business; on the profitability and productivity of sugar plantations; and on the forms of labor that were used to grow and process cane.

William Phillips discusses the Islamic origin of Iberian sugar-cane cultivation and its subsequent embrace, typically on a small scale using peasant laborers, by Christian landlords during the late Middle Ages. Albert Vieira, while underscoring the centrality of Madeira and the Canaries to the transferral of sugar culture to the Americas, explores the conspicuous separation of cane growers from mill owners in Madeira and the minority presence of enslaved Africans in the mixed labor forces of both places.

Historians have neglected Hispaniola's brief sugar boom during the first half of the sixteenth century. Planters there, as Genaro Rodríguez Morel points out, benefited from royal largesse in their construction of dozens of sizable estates, which, unlike those on the Atlantic Islands, frequently employed hundreds of slaves. Sugar had a notable presence in Cuba long before its nineteenth-century sugar boom. Alejandro de la Fuente's fresh research documents the rise and fall of sugar production on the island during the seventeenth-century.

Brazil led the world in sugar production from 1550 to 1670. In examining multiple aspects of that history, Schwartz stresses a gradual shift in the cane fields to enslaved African labor and the central role—influenced, it seems, by the Madeiran model—of lavradores de cana (cane farmers) in supplying cut cane to a much smaller number of mill owners. Only after 1600, says Herbert Klein, in a synthesis of previously published material, did the fortunes of the early Atlantic slave trade become closely bound to the production of sugar.

Eddy Stols explores Antwerp's involvement in the sugar industry and the cultural and symbolic significance of sugar consumption in Western Europe from 1500 to 1650. He insists that the sugar trade and sugar refining had a far greater impact on stimulating the Western European economy during this period than historians have previously believed.

John McCusker and Russell Menard close the volume by reexamining the dynamic process that brought a fully integrated sugar plantation system to Barbados in the 1680s. They credit English merchants and planters, not visiting Dutch traders, with the decisive entrepreneurship that turned Barbados, for a time, into the world's leading producer of sugar. Moreover, the crop's large-scale cultivation did not suddenly reverse [End Page 490] economic decline in the island but rather "sped up and intensified a process of experimentation and diversification already underway" with other crops (306).

This volume will not persuade many historians to abandon the term "sugar revolution" in their explanations about the making of the modern world. The authors succeed, however...

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