Sugar Freedom

A consumer boycott of sugar helped put an end to slavery in England and "inspired abolitionists in the U.S.," writes Fergus M. Bordewich in a Wall Street Journal review of Sugar: A Bittersweet History, by Elizabeth Abbott (3/31/10). Of course, it was consumer demand for sugar that created "the trans-Atlantic slave trade, wrecked the lives of millions of Africans, and brought fabulous wealth to white planters and absentee investors." Slaves, as Elizabeth Abbott puts it, were "sugar machines."

The sugar trade "was an economic pillar of the British Empire, part of the triangular trade by which British ships carried trade goods to Africa; slaves from Africa to the West Indies; and sugar, rum and molasses from the Indies back to England." The slaves, according to Elizabeth, survived only an average of seven years in the field, between the brutal Caribbean sun and the regular whippings for those who didn’t work fast enough. Sugar, writes Elizabeth, was "literally polluted with slaves’ blood."

Abolitionists figured that a sugar boycott might change things, calculating "that if every family using five pounds of sugar and rum per week refused to consume slave-grown sugar, every 21 months they would save one African from enslavement and death. Cynics scoffed. But by the 1790s, 300,000 English were abstaining from West Indian sugar, while grocers and importers sought new sources of ‘free sugar’ in East Asia. Parliament voted to abolish slavery in Britain in 1807 and then in the West Indies in the 1830s," which further emboldened abolitionists in the United States.