Aim: What were the Economic Effects of European Colonization
in the Americas?
What was the value of a “blank slate” for the Europeans in the Americas?
• No traditions to deal with - ordinarily it takes generations to force embittered peasants into factories and make them workers
• Displaced laborers could be forced into agricultural factories and mines
• Created a new system of exploitation from scratch – capitalism w/o steam power
Sugar Production: Origins
INDIA 500 CE
Sugar Production: Too Dry
NORTH AFRICA 900 CE
Sugar Production: Too Cool
INDIA 500 CE
NORTH AFRICA 90 CE
SICILY 1200 CRETE
CYPRUS 1200
SPAIN 1300
Which way to India?
Sugar Production - Just Right!But no labor force…
CANARY ISLANDS
CAPE VERDE
Sugar Production - Just Right!But no labor force…
CANARY ISLANDS
CAPE VERDE Here It Is!
Sugar: Where else?
Hot and Humid
Why did the Europeans need African slaves?
Why not get (free) European colonists?Why not use indentured servants?
African slaves: – Used to tropical climate, used to Eurasian
diseases, familiar with sugar as a crop– Only dispossessed labor can be forced into this
new form of killing labor
Plantation slavery as a social system in the Caribbean
• Mostly practiced in “killing” climates and conditions
• Huge numbers of slaves :: white settlers
Sugar as a “Factory” Product: Hoeing for Planting
Sugar as a “Factory” Product: Harvesting
Sugar as a “Factory” Product:
Gathering the Cane
Sugar as a “Factory” Product: The Mill
Sugar as a “Factory” Product: Sugar House
The juice of the cane is conveyed in pipes from the mill to the boiling house, where it is converted into sugar. Here it is passed through a succession of coppers gradually increasing in heat ... At each copper a Negro is placed to take off the scum as it rises, and when the temperature of that vessel has had its full effect, to remove it with a ladle into the next.
Sugar as a “Factory” product
• A sugar plantation is a factory
• Europeans did not invent slavery, but Europe made slaves into factory workers and plantation field hands: “Unfree Laborers” in a capitalist enterprise
American Silver Production
• Europe (1535) 3 million ounces
• Potosi (1540) 1.5 million ounces
• Potosi (1590) 10 million ounces (+ Mexico)
America is where Europe “invents” capitalism
• The accumulation of capital through the super-exploitation of Native Americans and Africans
• Combining capital with labor starts here
• Large-scale work-places based on division of labor and a class structure