Sugar colony

“ The supply at present is not great, as the colonists are hampered for want of labour, more especially that labour adapted for the sugar-cane, which appears to be found in Indian or Chinese coolie labour. As soon as facilities are afforded to the colony of Natal for coolie labour, similar to that employed at Mauritius, the yield of this article [137] alone will be enormous; there being at least 1,280,000 acres of the soil, irrespective of what may be more appropriately devoted to cotton, capable of producing sugar. ”

“ By 1788 it contained some 28,000 white settlers, 22,000 free negroes and mulattoes, and 405,000 slaves. It had nearly eight hundred sugar estates, many of them on a huge scale. The soil was so fertile and the climate so favorable that on many fields the sugar-cane would grow perennially from the same roots almost without end. Exports of coffee and cotton were considerable, of sugar and molasses enormous; and the volume was still rapidly swelling by reason of the great annual importations of African slaves. The colony was by far the most valued of the French overseas possessions. ”

“ Because, not being an exclusively sugar-growing colony, as are almost all British West India Islands, it may suffer from the present depressed condition of the sugar market, but cannot be entirely ruined, owing to its having commanding resources, and many other valuable staples,—coffee, copper, cotton, &c. ”

“ A number of French and Creole settlers came to Trinidad in 1780, and about the middle of the following century Portuguese refugees from Madeira joined the colony. After the abolition of slavery by Great Britain in 1834, many Hindus were brought in under contract.
The soil of the island is very rich and well adapted to the growing of sugar cane and other tropical products. The sugar plantations are found in the level country bordering on the Gulf of Paria, where the soil is a dark clay, and which has been described as one of the finest stretches of sugar land in the West Indies. ”

“ Yet from the passing of the act the sugar industry began to decay, no fresh capital was put into it, plantations dwindled down in value 50 to 75%, mills were closed, and the magnificent industry threatened to die out. Sir Samuel Griffith, being converted by these signs of the times from his position that sugar could flourish in the colony without coloured labour, issued on 12th February 1892 his “Manifesto to the People of Queensland,” in which he acknowledged that to prevent the collapse of sugar-growing it was necessary to resume the immigration of Polynesians. ”

“ It is one of the misfortunes, perhaps the temptations of this modern world, that two of its chief necessaries, sugar and cotton, require a climate too hot for the labour of men who have intelligence enough to grow and export them on a large scale, and who are therefore compelled, as they consider, to employ the forced toil of races able to endure heat. The Australian colony of Queensland is unfit to produce wheat, but well able to grow sugar, and the islands of Fiji, which the natives have implored England to annex, have become the resort of numerous planters and speculators. ”

“ ELEPHANT SUGAR-CANE, MACKAY.
64Mackay is a small town, owing its existence to the production of sugar, and the vicinity, celebrated for its fertility, is at the present time the most important sugar-producing district of the colony. Queensland has been found to be upon the whole especially adapted to the cultivation of the sugar-cane, and the colonists have learned how to overcome all the disadvantages of the climate, so that the sugar-cane is raised not only in the tropical regions in the north, but also as far south as the vicinity of Brisbane. ”

“ In many places the scenery is very picturesque. Only a small portion of the colony is as yet settled. There are sugar plantations scattered here and there throughout the entire country, however; for they can be worked to advantage by Indian coolies. ”

“ It has cleared the ground of jungle and brought under cultivation 50,000 acres of the Delta and coast lands of the colony; has given an impetus to maize growing, to horse-breeding, to cattle raising on the seaside of the coast range; has started foundries and engineering establishments in all sugar centres; has built up a fleet of coastal steamers second to none in speed and accommodation. This year it has produced 80,000 tons of manufactured sugar, valued, including bi-products, at nearly a million and a quarter. ”

“ In 1884 the price of sugar fell so seriously as to make the prospects of the colony very gloomy, and for nearly two decades proprietors had to be content with a price kept artificially low by bounty-fed beet-sugar, many estates being ruined, while those that survived only did so by the application of every economy, and by their owners availing themselves of every new discovery in the sciences of cultivation and manufacture. ”

“ In order that we may understand the true position of the colonies, and the situation in which they have been placed, confessedly by no fault of their own, it will be necessary to ascertain what is the present cost of production of sugar there, under the curtailed and crippled system of free-labour, as compared with that of the slave-growing colonies. We apprehend that it will not be denied by any, that the soil, climate, and natural position of Jamaica and of British Guiana are in no way inferior to any in the known world for the growth and cultivation of the sugar-cane. ”

“ It is well known to those who are acquainted with the sugar islands, that the profits of the planter depend upon the vent he finds for his rum and melasses; for if sugar only, and no rum and melasses could be produced from the sugar cane, it would hardly pay the expence of culture, and manufacturing it into sugar. Therefore as the consumption of rum and melasses is stopped or increased, the sugar colonies (whether English or foreign) must respectively thrive or decline. ”

“ The planters, when the Gold Coast and Whidah Negroes were carried to the sugar colonies, before the French interfered in that trade, found there was not a sufficient number to extend their cultivation, by carrying on all the different planting business, and therefore were accustomed to purchase those tender (the worst sort of) Negroes, and employ them for household servants, to raise corn, aloes, look after cattle, bring them up to trades and easy labour, knowing them unfit for the hard work necessary in sugar-plantations. ”

“ The general statement regarding the danger of depending on a single industry applies with very special force to the dependence of the West Indian Colonies upon the sugar industry, for the cultivation of sugar collects together a larger number of people upon the land than can be employed or supported in the same area by any other form of cultivation. In addition to this it also unfits the people, or at any rate gives them no training, for the management or cultivation of the soil for any other purpose than that of growing sugar-cane. ”

“ Instead of supplying her own wants with Tropical produce, and next nearly all Europe, as she formerly did, it is the fact that, in some of the most important articles, she has barely sufficient to supply her own wants; while the whole of her colonial possessions, east, west, north, and south, are at this moment supplied with—and, as regards the article of sugar, are consuming—foreign slave produce, brought direct, or, refined in bond, exported and sold in the colonies at a rate as cheap, if not really cheaper, than British muscovado, the produce of these colonies. ”

“ In our sugar colonies, on the contrary, the whole work is done by slaves, and in our tobacco colonies a very great part of it. The profits of a sugar plantation in any of our West Indian colonies are generally much greater than those of any other cultivation that is known either in Europe or America: And the profits of a tobacco plantation, though inferior to those of sugar, are superior to those of corn, as has already been observed. Both can afford the expense of slave cultivation, but sugar can afford it still better than tobacco. ”

“ It is now the most important of the sugar colonies of the West Indies, and its produce is said to be greater than that of all the English sugar colonies put together. The other sugar colonies of France are in general all very thriving. ”

“ Now, under the fostering influence of free trade in sugar, it may reasonably be expected that in a few years the whole, or nearly the whole sugar consumed by Europe, will be raised by the slave colonies, and wrung by the lash from the most wretched species of slaves—those of Cuba and Brazil! ”

“ We think it right to add that in all Colonies where sugar can be completely, or very largely, replaced by other industries, the Colonies in question will be in a much sounder position, both politically and economically, when they have ceased to depend wholly, or to a very great extent, upon the continued prosperity of a single industry. "f. The total or partial extinction of the sugar industry would, in most places, very seriously affect the condition of the labouring classes for the worse, and would largely reduce the revenue of the Colonies. ”

“ We have had experience enough in our own colonies, not to wish to see the experiment tried elsewhere on a larger scale. It is true that from some of the smaller islands, where there is a superabundance of negro population and no room for squatters, the export of sugar has not been diminished: it is true that in Jamaica and Demerara, the commercial distress is largely attributable to the folly of the planters—who doggedly refuse to accommodate themselves to the new state of things, and to entice the negroes from the back settlements by a promise of fair wages. ”

“ The Molasses Act.—The great staple of the West Indies was sugar. In its production the English Islands had surpassed the French colonies, a condition which was due to the restrictive measures of the French government. But in 1717 France adopted a liberal policy toward her colonies and the production of sugar increased to such an extent that the English sugar-producing islands experienced a financial depression. The thrifty colonial traders from the mainland, especially from New England, took advantage of the low price of French and Dutch sugar, molasses, and rum. ”

“ Such is the amount of protection at present enjoyed by our colonists—a protection which, be it remarked, is every year to decrease! In the present, or second year after the passing of Lord John Russell’s bill, we find that slave-grown sugar can be brought into the market at a cost of production less at least by five pounds per ton than that of our own colonies! We can now easily understand how it is that, within a very short period, Cuba has increased her exports of sugar from 50,000 to more than 200,000 tons ”

“ Free trade in sugar was introduced, although it was demonstrated, and, indeed, confessed, that the effect of it would be to ruin all the free-labour colonies, and throw the supply of the world into the hands of the slave states. Provided, for a few years, you succeeded in reducing the average retail price of sugar a penny a pound, it was deemed of no consequence though we extinguished the growth of free-labour sugar—destroyed colonies in which a hundred millions of British capital were invested, and doubled the slave trade in extent, and quadrupled it in horror, throughout the globe. ”

“ To provide against this evidently approaching crisis in the supply of sugar for the British market, we have thrown open our harbours to slave-grown sugar from every quarter of the globe; and from the rapid decline in the produce of the West Indian islands, even before this last coup-de-grace was given them by the application of free trade, principles to their produce, it is painfully evident that a result precisely similar is about to take place in the British colonies. ”

“ While such is the situation of our own colonies, upon whom we forced emancipation, let us see what is doing in the slave countries, to whom we are handing over our custom. The increase in the sugar produce of Cuba, as we have already seen, is from 50,000 to 200,000 tons, and is still rapidly increasing. ”

“ The West Indian colonies, somewhat increased in number by the results of our wars between 1793 and 1815, had suffered many evils from French privateering and negro rebellions, but were now at the height of their prosperity. Vigorously if recklessly developed by the slave-owning planters, they were at this moment the main producers of sugar and coffee for the whole world. ”

“ The rapid growth of the commerce of the American colonies excited an intense jealousy [166] in our West Indian Islands, which claimed a monopoly of supply of sugar, rum, molasses, and other articles to all the British possessions. The Americans trading with the French, Dutch, Spaniards, etc., took these articles in return; but the West Indian proprietors prevailed upon the British Government, in 1733, to impose a duty on the import of any produce of foreign plantations into the American colonies, besides granting a drawback on the re-exportation of West Indian sugar from Great Britain. ”

“ The limits of these colonies are as extensive as Jamaica is, and the negro can squat. They are as fertile as Jamaica is, and the negro can procure his food almost without trouble. But not the less is it a fact that the exportation of sugar from Guiana and Trinidad now exceeds the amount exported in the time of slavery, while the exportation from Jamaica is almost as nothing. ”