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perked up since the end of Queen Anne’s War a couple of years before. Imports as well as exports were advancing vigorously, and over the next decade it was the rare year that didn’t see at least two hundred vessels clear the port. Burgis’s perspective evokes and celebrates this latest round of expansion by exaggerating the density of the built environment and depicting every structure that could be taken as evidence of municipal progress—churches, markets, substantial private residences, wharves, shipyards—each carefully rendered and identified by number. Lilliputian merchants walking to the Exchange, shipwrights at work on the hull of a new vessel, a man driving a steer along the waterfront, and other figures not only make the scene more lifelike but suggest the scope and variety of enterprise in the city as well. So does the impressive throng of merchantmen, sloops, warships, yachts, and ships’ boats on the river, perhaps celebrating a royal birthday or other special occasion (two vessels can be seen firing salutes).

The Burgis View, 1717. Visible in the lower right-hand corner is the Brooklyn ferry landing, where cattle and produce from Long Island were brought across to the growing city. Almost directly above the ferry house, on the Manhattan shore, are the shipyards that built vessels for the West Indian trade. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)

WHITE GOLD, BLACK SLAVES

New York was flourishing when William Burgis saw it thanks mainly to a prodigious rise in the English market for sugar. In 1660, when it was a luxury associated with social privilege, England consumed a thousand hogsheads of sugar. That figure had since increased a hundredfold while the per capita annual consumption of sugar doubled, driven up by a combination of improved purchasing power and falling prices. By 1730 sugar would be as embedded in English culture as Whig principles were in English politics. A cup of heavily sweetened chocolate or coffee—accompanied by candies, cakes, or bread slathered with molasses—was integral to the daily rituals of middle-class life and a practical way to supplement the caloric intake of poorly nourished workers.

Changes in production and exchange moved in tandem with the rise in consumption. Until 1710 or so, half of England’s sugar came from the tiny (166 square miles) island of Barbados. Between 1710 and 1720, however, notwithstanding the fact that its annual output continued to rise, Barbados was eclipsed by the development of numerous new plantations on Jamaica and four of the Leeward Islands: Antigua, Nevis, St. Kitts, and Montserrat. By the 1730s their combined production accounted for fully 85 percent of the sugar exported from the British West Indies, and sugar from all sources had emerged as the single most valuable article of British overseas trade. “White gold,” they called it.

By then, too, wealthy West Indian planters—far wealthier, as a group, than their tobacco- and rice-cultivating counterparts on the North American mainland—were leaving their affairs in the hands of agents and returning home to England, where they set themselves up on sprawling estates and elbowed their way into social prominence alongside the old landed aristocracy and commercial bourgeoisie. The most ambitious went to Parliament, where they fought tenaciously to promote what came to be known as the West Indian “interest.” Among their most notable achievements were the rum ration ordered by the Royal Navy in 1731 (half a pint per man per day) and the Molasses Act of 1733, which gave the planters a virtual monopoly of the North American market by laying prohibitively high duties on foreign (i.e., French) sugar, molasses, and rum imported into the mainland colonies. Not surprisingly, protecting the West Indies from foreign rivals, especially the French, became a central imperative of British foreign policy, a fact acknowledged by the placement of permanent British naval stations on Jamaica and Antigua.

Sugar also brought wealth to British refiners, shippers, bankers, insurers, and investors, not to mention