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White to move and mate in two #663 - The World of Sugar [1]
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Date: 2025-05-08
How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years
WAR AND SLAVERY
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Pamphlets such as Rush’s traveled swiftly across the Atlantic via the commercial links between Quakers in Philadelphia and London, helping to turn abolitionism into the most prominent popular movement in Britain in the 1780s. Quakers started petitioning Parliament in 1783 and widened it to an ecumenical movement grounded in fact-finding and Smithian economics. Adam Smith, after all, had already disavowed agricultural servitude as backward and had included, although not persuasively, black slavery in this point of view.134 The protests against the consumption of slave sugar became a genuine popular movement. William Fox’s pamphlet of 1791 condemning the consumption of sugar “stained with spots of human blood” was printed in twenty-five editions totaling fifty thousand copies—and it has been assumed that, including bootlegged versions, that number rose to almost 250,000. Its message was clear and simple: “If we purchase the commodity, we participate in the crime.”135
The Phrase “stained with spots of human blood” entailed an awkward visualization with an almost cannibalistic connotation and was particularly powerful in the case of sugar.136 …
Fox’s urgent request to consumers also contained a direct and resonating appeal to women. As William Wilberforce, the most prominent British abolitionist, prophesied in the 1790s, women’s role in the abolition movement would eventually further their own emancipation.139 Abstinence reverberated nationally and apparently right up to the royal house, if we can believe a cartoon showing the English king, queen, and their daughters around the table bravely sipping their bitter sugar-free tea. However, alternatives were available. Like Rush had done before, Fox alluded in the American version of his famous pamphlet to Botham’s observations, who in the meantime had testified in the British Parliament that sugar grown by Chinese millers in Java could be obtained more cheaply than sugar from the West Indies.140
SLAVERY STAYS
… Any romanticizing of the conditions at plantations, such as in nostalgic stories of antebellum Louisiana, obscures the words of Herbert Apthekar, one of the pioneers of slavery studies in the United States: “Slavery was a chronic state of warfare, and all men who were not Negroes were, by law, part of the standing army of oppressors.”61
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