False Economy - Alan Beattie [95]
The argument can plausibly be made that early on, the mercantilist creation of the sugar islands did indeed help strengthen the British nation, not least in fostering the expansion of its fleet. Relying on Portugal, Spain, or the Netherlands for sugar supplies would have meant placing Britain at the mercy of a military opponent that might be tempted to use their sugar profits to attack British ships. And some research suggests that, at least initially, sugar islands like Jamaica paid for themselves by providing havens for smugglers and for the English privateers who preyed on Spanish shipping.
But as cheaper sugar became available from around the world, particularly from Latin America, in the eighteenth century, the question increasingly arose: Just whom did this arrangement benefit? That it enriched sugar landlords with plantations in the Caribbean, as well as the sugar refiners and rum distillers back in Britain, is certain. That it benefitted the nation as a whole became an increasingly untenable argument.
By the end of the eighteenth century, probably 8 to 10 percent of the total income of England came from activities in the West Indies. But that did not mean the nation as a whole was better off. There were certainly costs involved: namely, the loss of alternative uses to which the heavy investment in the Caribbean could have been put, the higher price of sugar at home, and the burden of maintaining what for the years 1763—1775 was an average of nineteen warships and between three and seven regiments of soldiers in the Caribbean.
That the English paid dear for their sugar was not in doubt. The average price of sugar in London in 1765 was a third higher than in Nantes, in France. When Britain briefly captured the Caribbean islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique from the French in 1759, the influx of cheaper sugar meant that the price of sugar in London fell by a quarter. The historian Robert Paul Thomas calculates the total profit from the British West Indies at £1.45 million a year in the 1770s. But the money invested in the Caribbean could have raised a minimum return of £1.3 million if invested elsewhere. Taking into account an annual cost to consumers from more expensive sugar of £383,000, plus the price to taxpayers of maintaining the soldiers and sailors at £413,000, the West Indian colonies had in fact become a drain on Sir Josiah's "Mother-Kingdom."
The reality of the situation took a while to sink in, thanks to the political power of the concentrated beneficiaries versus the diffuse bearers of the burden of cost. In the eighteenth century, the sugar lobby in England sprayed money around merrily on themselves and their cause.
The ostentatiously wealthy West Indian planters, many absentee landlords who spent more time oozing through the salons of London than tramping the fields of Jamaica, became stock figures of eighteenth-century English society. Their sons filled the elite public schools of Eton, Westminster, Harrow, and Winchester. The West Indian, a play that opened in London in 1771, begins with a huge reception for a planter coming home to England. One servant remarks admiringly: "They say he has rum and sugar enough belonging to him, to make all the water in the Thames into punch."
In the unreformed Parliament before 1832, political power was relatively straightforward to buy. Three brothers from the Beckford family, one of the great plantation-owning dynasties, were MPs at the same time in the mid-eighteenth century. A London-based agent for the colony of Massachusetts reported in 1764 that fifty or sixty West Indian-influenced members of Parliament