False Economy - Alan Beattie [96]
The undoing of the sugar lobby came when the costs of protection multiplied and the lobby's opponents started to organize. Sugar was originally a luxury enjoyed by the rich. But as the population grew and moved into the towns, the need for concentrated and nonperishable calories rose rapidly. Along with three other imported stimulants—tea, coffee, and tobacco—sugar helped to fuel the workers of the Industrial Revolution. Per capita sugar consumption increased fivefold in the nineteenth century, creating an enduring sweet tooth throughout the English population. George Porter, a sugar broker of the mid-nineteenth century, wrote of sugar in 1851: "Long habit has in this country led almost every class to the daily use of it, so that there is no people in Europe by whom it is consumed to anything like the same extent."
The costs of cosseting the West Indian planters continued to rise. New sources of cheap sugar—Hawaii, the Philippines, Cuba, Mauritius—multiplied, and British sugar lost yet more foreign markets. During the European wars of the early nineteenth century, when the British blockaded continental ports and cut off sugar supplies from the French Caribbean, Napoleon responded by planting sugar beet across Northern Europe.
Expensive Caribbean sugar had become more than an annoyance. Because it made up a significant part of the working-class diet, wages had to be higher than they would otherwise have been to enable factory workers to eat. As such, it was one of the main targets of the industrialists, one of whose rallying cries was a call for the "free breakfast table"—that is, for British workers to be allowed to buy the cheapest food possible. One speaker in Parliament in 1844 estimated the cost of protected sugar to the country at £5 million a year.
It was not a coincidence that the same free trade liberals who inveighed against the Corn Laws had also frequently spoken out against slavery, which was finally outlawed in the British empire in 1834. The attack on slavery was also an attack on the sugar monopolists. (Less honorably, the textile manufacturers benefitted nonetheless from the continuation of slavery in the southern United States, which helped keep their cotton imports cheap.)
Eric Williams, a historian who later became prime minister of the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago, said that by the late eighteenth century, sugar planters were sleepwalking to disaster. "The chasm was yawning at the feet of the sugar planter," he wrote, "but, head held proudly in the air, he went his way mumbling the lesson he had been taught by the mercantilists and which he had learned not wisely but too well." The sugar lobby had broken the cardinal rules of protection maintenance. It had threatened to become a serious drag on the whole economy, and had irritated a highly organized rival lobby—and a lobby of exporters at that. The abolition of slavery undermined the sugar business (though the slaveowners, naturally, were compensated from the public purse for the inconvenience suffered). Through an act passed in 1846, the same year as the repeal of the Corn Laws, the duties on sugar from all sources were gradually equalized, and later all sugar import tariffs were reduced.
And so today's world trade in sugar is a free market. Or at least it might have been, except that once more some vigorous competitors from an earlier era dug in their claws and transmuted into protected sloths in a later one. Those Napoleonic continental sugar beet farms are still with us. Indeed, they are now protected by tariffs and subsidies under the European Union's common agricultural policy, despite the fact that their output is now wildly more expensive than cane sugar from Brazil, Thailand, or Australia. They have also been joined by