Colonies of Sugar

Patricia Ibarra

Andrews

World History 11

28 January 2013

            When reading about the Colonies of Sugar, it was interesting how sugar was very valuable because it was much in demand in Europe, where it was used as medicine, spice, sweetener, preservative, and also in sculptured forms like a decoration that signified highest status. The Arabs who introduced it into the Mediterranean mainly produced the sugar production. Later the British, French, and the Dutch turned their Caribbean territories into productive sugar producing colonies, breaking the Portuguese and Brazilian control. Sugar had transformed Brazil and the Caribbean because of the production that went towards, like growing the sugarcane and processing it into usable sugar. This type of production made slave labor very tiring because it was intensive. Slaves who produced the sugar, worked under severe conditions. Working in the heat made it exhausting and hard to work in, especially because of the fire from the cauldron, which were used to turn raw sugarcane to crystallized sugar. I couldn’t imagine how hard it must have been for a slave during that time period because the workload that they had to put in was a lot. And also it’s sad to hear that because of the working conditions, many slaves had high death rates, five to 10 percent per year. This required plantation owners to keep importing new slaves in order to keep doing the job.