My last blog entry began the story of how sugar, malaria, and the Columbian Exchange resulted in the living hell of slavery flourishing in the Caribbean. I described the economic reasons why this took place. Today we’ll examine some more implications of this development. It involves the combination of malaria and sugar. To read previous posts on the importance of the Columbian Exchange, please check out (Introduction to the Columbian Exchange) (Humanity’s near extinction) (Smallpox and the Columbian Exchange) (Horses and Bison) (Sugar in the Caribbean).
Malaria helps explain why slavery became the labor system of choice in the Caribbean. The native people of the Caribbean largely fell prey to European violence and diseases. The brutal work and likelihood of getting malaria made European labor prohibitively expensive. So, the absentee plantation owners turned to African slaves. Sugar was a profitable enough crop that plantation owners could work slaves literally into their graves and still keep importing more of them. The spread of malaria and sugar cultivation went together.
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Here’s one way to envision how profitable these sugar islands were by the 1700s. When France lost the Seven Years’ War to Great Britain, it surrendered some of its New World colonies to the British afterward. Which territories did it surrender? France preferred to yield the Mississippi Valley of North America (west of the Mississippi River to Spain and east of the river to Britain) and French Canada to Britain rather than its key sugar islands in the Caribbean. (France gave up a few islands but kept Guadalupe and Martinique.) By modern standards that was stupid, but by 1763 standards it made sense. That’s how valuable sugar was.
Other Implications of Malaria and Sugar
Malaria (along with some other diseases like yellow fever) also helped determine the type of slavery that would flourish in the Caribbean. Why, you might wonder, did large slave plantations with gangs of enslaved people flourish as opposed to small plantations with only a few?
Mainly, it was a matter of mitigating risk. Knowing that slaves would die frequently from disease and brutal work, it made sense to have many of them. A person who owned three slaves suffered a major loss if one died. One-third of their workforce, in fact. This loss might be great enough that the planter couldn’t afford to acquire another enslaved person as a replacement. The neighbor with thirty slaves who also lost one could carry on with little change, however.
Environmental Implications of Malaria and Sugar
The environmental impact of sugar planting is very important yet widely overlooked. Growing sugar requires clearing land. The Caribbean islands, largely forested, needed clearing. Clearing vegetation, especially in areas that experience tropical rainfall, tends to produce severe erosion.
This meant trouble in the long term for Caribbean islands. Clearing forest further increased the demands for slaves and created more habitat suited for mosquitos. The erosion, however, was a permanent problem. It persisted long after the abolition of slavery. Erosion remains one reason why many Caribbean islands remain agriculturally poor today. Much of the soil on the islands, which never had deep agricultural soils to begin with, has washed away. Think of it as a final legacy of colonialism, if you will, and not a good one.
Thank you for reading this far in my look at the importance of the Columbian Exchange. I plan to move on to other topics next, but I may come back to it at some point.
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