False Economy - Alan Beattie [94]
Having previously taken a refreshingly direct but not indefinitely sustainable strategy of stealing sugar from Spanish ships through privateering (essentially state-licensed piracy), England used its naval and military power to create its own sugar islands in the seventeenth century. It seized Jamaica from the Dutch and drove Portuguese sugar out of the Northern European market. Oliver Cromwell, he of militarist mercantilism, was so delighted to hear of the capture of Jamaica that he took the rest of the day off.
But just as the Indian cotton business preached free trade while instituting a monopoly, so did sugar. In fact, it created two. In 1660, sugar from the Caribbean was made an "enumerated" commodity, which could not be exported directly from the colonies to continental Europe or North America but had to be landed (and taxed) in England first. The colonies were also dissuaded from processing the sugar themselves by prohibitive tariffs on refined sugar, as opposed to the raw treacle-like molasses, and from making manufactured goods that would compete with English exports. Thus the trade went: slaves from Africa to the West Indies, sugar from the West Indies to England, finished goods from England to Africa and to the colonies.
Since they were, at this point, highly competitive, the sugar planters were all for being able to sell their produce to any market they could find, and so they lobbied. The governor of Barbados in 1666 argued: "Free trade is the life of all the colonies. ... Whoever he be that advised his Majesty to restrain and tie up his colonies is more a merchant than a good subject." (An interesting distinction.) But the temptation for England to extract profit from the colonies was too high and the pressure from the sugar refiners of Britain, centered in London and Bristol, too great.
Our friend Sir Josiah Child of the East India Company popped up again, this time with arguments that made it clear that the interests of colonies should be subservient to the center: "All Colonies or Plantations do endamage their Mother-Kingdoms, whereof the Trades of such Plantations are not confined by severe Laws, and good execution of those Laws, to the Mother-Kingdom." Apart from a small concession in 1739, when they were allowed to export directly to ports south of Cape Finisterre, in Spain, all sugar had to go via England. The crown also excluded Scottish ports from the colonial trade, one of the reasons that the Scots, after trying (and failing) to set up their own New World colonies, were forced to merge their kingdom with England. After the Act of Union in 1707 the trade was permitted and Glasgow established a thriving sugar refining business.
In compensation, the West Indian colonies were given their own monopoly—an almost complete control of the British market with much lower import duties than were levied on sugar from elsewhere. The state further helped them out by increasing demand. From 1731 on, sailors in the Royal Navy were given a daily ration of rum, which rose to a pint a day by the late eighteenth century, a practice not abandoned until the 1970s. Generous allocations of sugar were later given to the impoverished inhabitants of government-run almshouses.
So instead of being allowed to engage in free trade, the Caribbean colonies were channeled down a particular route. They pumped out sugar and other enumerated crops like tobacco, for which