UofM Impact of Producing Too Much Luxurious Food to Humanity Paper Word count at least 600 Question: Has the mass production of foods that were once luxu

UofM Impact of Producing Too Much Luxurious Food to Humanity Paper Word count at least 600

Question:

Has the mass production of foods that were once luxuries but are now commonplace (sugar, white flour, meat) benefited humanity, or harmed it? Explain, using specific examples?

Writing requirement:

I recommend completing outlines for each with a first sentence, thesis statement (your main idea), three paragraph ideas with specific examples, and the main idea for a conclusion.

1) THESIS STATEMENT. Make sure you address all parts of the prompt/question, and be specific. For example, if you are answering question 1, you must address both parts of the prompt – the factors causing separation from food sources AND the effects of this separation. (“Urbanization and the mass factory production of food during the Industrial Revolution caused humans to be increasingly alienated from nature and their food sources. The most important long term effects have been environmental pollution and cruelty toward animals.”) Your thesis statement needs to state your complete answer, which you will then go on to “prove” with specific examples in your essay.

2) OUTLINE/STRUCTURE. As you set up your outline (see template in midterm essay module) make sure that in addition to a clear thesis statement you’ve written down strong topic sentences and specific examples for each paragraph. In your midterm essays many of you started off with great ideas but did not provide specific examples. For example, if you wrote “Crops from the Americas led to many important changes in Europe,” you should go on to define what crops and what exactly those changes were; did the population increase because of corn and potato consumption? Provide a statistic, tell me where and when this happened. Once you’ve given your specific examples you should explain why and how this helps prove your thesis.

3) CONTEXT. Remember to address the “Five Ws” in your essay – who, what, when, where, and why – especially as you are setting up the historical context.

4) TEXTUAL SOURCES. Some of the readings that will help you most in your final essay prep:

Sugar Revolution / lecture on sugar, Cronon, Pilcher (Planet Taco), Schlosser (Fast Food Nation, chapte 5 only), Taste of Boredom Economic History Review, LIII, 2 (2000), pp. 213–236
The sugar revolution
By B. W. HIGMAN
f the many revolutions identified by historians, only one takes its
name from a particular commodity. This is the sugar revolution, a
O
concatenation of events located in the seventeenth-century Caribbean
1
with far-reaching ramifications for the Atlantic world. Unlike the more
broadly based revolutions typical of economic history—the industrial
revolution, the agricultural revolution, the commercial revolution, the
price revolution—the sugar revolution points to the transformative power
of a single commodity, resulting in what has sometimes been termed
‘crop determinism’. Determining influences have readily been attributed
to other crops—rice, wheat, potatoes, for example—but none of these
have given their names to the transformations with which they are
associated.2 Sugar alone has achieved that status.
The six central elements of the sugar revolution are commonly regarded
as a swift shift from diversified agriculture to sugar monoculture, from
production on small farms to large plantations, from free to slave labour,
from sparse to dense settlement, from white to black populations, and
from low to high value per caput output. More broadly, it is claimed
that the sugar revolution had five effects: it generated a massive boost to
the Atlantic slave trade, provided the engine for a variety of triangular
trades, altered European nutrition and consumption, increased European
interest in tropical colonies, and, more contentiously, contributed vitally
to the industrial revolution. Not all accounts of the sugar revolution
include each of these features. Like most of the revolutions of economic
history, the sugar revolution concept has developed and diffused, tending
to take on new elements and expanding claims made for its significance.
These claims have entered the mainstream of long-run global economic
history and development economics.3
Generally, historians concede that the idea of revolution has served a
useful role in the writing of history, giving shape and purpose to the
trajectory of otherwise seamless, continuous patterns. Indeed, the emergence of history as an academic discipline and the modern understanding
1
I thank Stanley Engerman, Howard Johnson, and Barry Smith for comments on drafts of this
article, Gregory Bowen for research assistance, and Ira Berlin, Pieter Emmer, Jock Galloway, Richard
Grove, Franklin Knight, Brij Lal, and Ralph Shlomowitz for helpful suggestions.
2
Scott, ‘Defining the boundaries’, p. 72; Earle, ‘Staple interpretation’; Berlin and Morgan, Cultivation and culture, pp. 4-5; Salaman, History and social influence, pp. 220, 333, 601; Bray, Rice
economies, p. xiv; Scobie, Revolution on the Pampas, pp. ix, 4-8. For eccentric references to rice,
tobacco, cotton, and breadfruit revolutions, most of them spawned by the green revolution, see
Abdul Hameed et al., Rice revolution; Wenkam, Micronesia, p. 11; Berlin, Many thousands gone,
pp. 108-9, 142, 342-3.
3
Landes, Wealth and poverty, pp. 113-22. Cf. Cannadine, ‘Present and the past’; Coleman, Myth;
Overton, Agricultural revolution.
 Economic History Society 2000. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148, USA.
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b. w. higman
of revolution as dramatic social and economic change occurred simultaneously, about the time of the French Revolution. When the great
transformation attributed to sugar occurred, however, in the middle of
the seventeenth century, revolution was still thought of in classical terms
as signalling recurrence or restoration, a cyclical return to an earlier stable
state. These alternative models remain embedded in the debate in the
literature and in broader analyses of continuity and discontinuity. Discontinuity may be conceived as a punctuation of secular patterns of
evolutionary change or as something more profound, inaugurating a
completely new order. It is the second formulation—the dramatic version
of revolution—that has concerned modern historians and it is questions
regarding the indicators and measurements applicable to the proper
attribution of revolutionary status that have fuelled the most vigorous
debate over the reality of, for example, the industrial and agricultural
revolutions. However much historians may have come to recognize the
diminishing utility of applying the term to particular places, periods, and
events, revolution remains firmly established as a key concept.4
I
The sugar revolution concept has its origins in the literature of French
and English colonization. In French, the first identified use of the term
occurred in Gaston-Martin’s Histoire de l’esclavage dans les colonies françaises of 1948, where it was expressed as ‘la révolution de la canne’. In
English, the earliest known use occurred in 1956 in A short history of the
West Indies by Parry and Sherlock, who titled their fifth chapter ‘The
sugar revolution’.5 Gaston-Martin located the origins of the revolution in
Guadeloupe c. 1650-70, Parry and Sherlock in Barbados c. 1645-60.
These parallel accounts outlined the initial colonial settlement of the
eastern Caribbean by white smallholders and indentured labourers cultivating tobacco, ginger, indigo, and cotton; the replacement of these crops
and people by sugar and enslaved Africans; the amalgamation of smallholdings into large plantations; the great and sudden wealth of the new
planter class; the emigration of whites; and the consequent changes in
social structure and political organization. All of these aspects of the
sugar revolution were interpreted as outcomes deriving directly from the
biological and agricultural requirements of the sugarcane and the production function of sugar making.
Contemporary observers, from the 1650s, were aware of at least some
of these changes taking place around them, but the association with
‘revolution’ emerged only gradually along with the establishment of a
scholarly literature of European imperialism in the Caribbean. Satineau
in 1928 referred to ‘une révolution économique et sociale’ in describing
the transformation of Guadeloupe c. 1665. He gave sugar and the sugar
4
Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, pp. 203-23; Ritter, Dictionary, pp. 388-91; Gerschenkron,
Continuity, pp. 11-39; Rosser, Catastrophe to chaos; Wrigley, Continuity, pp. 8-9.
5
Gaston-Martin, Histoire de l’esclavage, p. 19; Parry and Sherlock, Short history, p. 63.
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islands significant roles in French colonial history and in the Atlantic
economy, yet tempered the revolutionary character of the transformation
by suggesting the change was a lengthy process.6 Contemporary British
historians emphasized the speed and intensity of change in Barbados and
the Leeward Islands compared with the ‘more gradual’ transformation of
the French colonies, yet proved reluctant to apply the word revolution
to either case.7 The first writer known to do so in English was MacInnes,
who in 1935 called the events in the British West Indian colonies ‘an
agrarian revolution’. This was something bigger than the sugar revolution,
taking in the southern continental colonies as well as the West Indies,
tobacco as well as sugar, and reaching into ‘the African trade’ and ‘the
great colonial trade’ of the British. Several other writers offered versions
of ‘revolution’ in this period, giving the idea of social revolution particular
relevance, though often the concept as well as the term remained submerged.8 Thus the eventual association of sugar with the notion of
dramatic transformation and discontinuity, as occurred in the construction
of the ‘sugar revolution’, was indeed a significant moment.
Modifications of the original sugar revolution concept and term have
taken several forms. In 1961 Lasserre distinguished the ‘révolution sucrière’ of the seventeenth century from a ‘révolution industrielle’ of the
nineteenth century which involved changes in technology and organization
internal to the sugar industry. Further, Lasserre divided this industrial
revolution into two stages: the first (in the 1840s) saw the establishment
of central mills, and the second (1875-1900) the emergence of latifundia.
This was a distinction with application in the British as well as the
French West Indies, and came also to be used for Cuba to which a fullscale sugar revolution was first attributed by Knight in 1970.9
The early 1970s witnessed a sudden increase in monographs directly
concerned with the sugar revolution of the seventeenth century, notably
three works by American historians on the English West Indies. In No
peace beyond the line (1972), Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh made large
claims for the ‘agricultural and industrial miracle’ that began in the
English and French West Indies in the 1640s, a change that ‘completely
transformed their society and economy’. The transfer of sugar from Brazil
to the West Indies required the transplantation of ‘an entire culture’,
they said, and ‘few enterprises in the history of agriculture in modern
times approach this in ingenuity, completeness, and in ultimate economic
consequences’. The introduction of the ‘sugar complex’ became ‘a central
concern in the economic history of the seventeenth century’. Bridenbaugh
and Bridenbaugh twice referred to this transformation as a ‘social revolution’ and twice as an ‘ecological revolution’. They saw the shift from
‘incipient rural societies of white, English-speaking Europeans’ to the
slave plantation and an African population as ‘the most thoroughgoing
6
Satineau, Histoire de la Guadeloupe, pp. 112-13; May, Histoire économique, pp. 206-20, 268.
Harlow, History of Barbados, pp. 43-4, 292-328; Newton, European nations, pp. 197-9.
8
MacInnes, Introduction, pp. 70-8; Williams, Capitalism and slavery, pp. 23-6; Deerr, History of
sugar, I, p. 160.
9
Lasserre, Guadeloupe, I, pp. 276, 290, 343, 390-1, 401; Knight, Slave society, ch. 2.
7
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b. w. higman
social revolution in the history of the New World’. Building on the work
of Watts, they saw ‘an ecological revolution of a thoroughly wasteful
kind’ that matched the ‘human tragedy’ of the social revolution. However,
Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh used the term sugar revolution only once
and then in a narrow and restrictive sense: ‘Of far greater import than
the “sugar revolution” in the long perspective of history, as well as in
the years 1650 to 1690, was the radical change in the personnel and in
the nature of the inhabitants of the English West Indies.’10 Here, the
social revolution of earlier writers seems somehow to be disconnected
from the determinative role of sugar, in spite of the large claims made
by these authors for the global significance of the events.
Dunn’s Sugar and slaves (1972) similarly employed the ‘sugar revolution’ term just once. The switch from tobacco to sugar, he said,
‘made the Barbados planters rich overnight’. The planters amalgamated
properties and, with the help of the Dutch, mastered the technology of
sugar making, imported enslaved Africans, and entered European markets.
According to Dunn:
At first the Caribbean sugar revolution was pretty well confined to Barbados;
production in the Leewards, Martinique, and Guadeloupe did not become
significant until the 1670s. Nonetheless, sugar did have a truly revolutionary
impact upon the European pattern of colonization in the Indies. All of the
English and French islands inexorably followed the Barbadian example, changing from European peasant societies into slave-based plantation societies.11
Further, the sugar revolution brought the West Indian colonies under
mercantilist ‘surveillance’ and made them objects of European conflict.
But Dunn more frequently referred to a ‘sugar boom’ and, although he
placed much emphasis on the ‘sugar and slavery system’, his analysis
made relatively little use of the sugar revolution concept.12 In the same
year as the Bridenbaughs and Dunn (1972), Keagy wrote that ‘A social
revolution was coincidental with the sugar revolution’ and, in an alternative formulation, ‘the introduction of sugar cane created a social revolution’; Lowenthal said ‘Sugar brought a social as well as an agricultural
revolution.’13
Sheridan’s Sugar and slavery (1974) gave greater prominence to the
concept. Based on a London doctoral thesis of 1951 supervised by F. J.
Fisher, Sheridan used ‘The sugar revolution’ as a subheading in two of
his chapters. In the first, on Barbados, he used the term several times,
to draw attention to the island’s ‘numerous population of yeomen farmers
at the beginning of the sugar revolution’, the initial increase in indentured
as well as slave labour, the ‘re-emigration’ of whites, the ‘drift toward
monoculture’, and the consolidation of land that ‘proceeded ruthlessly as
10
Bridenbaugh and Bridenbaugh, No peace beyond the line, pp. 9-10, 68-9, 82, 86-7, 265, 276,
348, 413; Watts, Man’s influence.
11
Dunn, Sugar and slaves, pp. 19-20.
12
Ibid., pp. 62, 66-7, 90, 116, 151, 187-8, 334.
13
Keagy, ‘Poor whites’, pp. 15, 25; Lowenthal, West Indian societies, p. 27. Also in 1972, Curtin,
‘Atlantic slave trade’, p. 250.
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the sugar revolution gained momentum’. Thus, for Sheridan, the sugar
revolution was essentially economic rather than social.14 His analysis
added a new dimension, emphasizing changes in agricultural techniques
that responded to the initial environmental depredations of the sugar
revolution. Here Sheridan supported the interpretation of Watts who
argued that the ‘cane hole agriculture’ of Barbados was a rational response
to the catastrophic soil loss which followed the destruction of forest and
the rush to be rich. But such ‘high farming’ was a longer-term consequence of the sugar revolution rather than an immediate feature. Indeed,
it was one of the ways in which Barbados quite quickly became an
exceptional sugar colony. Later, in 1984, Sheridan noted that the Bridenbaughs and Dunn showed ‘how the sugar revolution transformed the
agricultural economy and effected a thoroughgoing social revolution’.15
These three histories of the English West Indies remain the principal
general accounts of the colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the most detailed interpretations of the sugar revolution. There
are no equivalent volumes for the French territories, though the concept
makes regular appearances. Price, in his France and the Chesapeake (1973),
saw ‘a silent revolution’ in the years 1640-70 in Guadeloupe, Martinique,
and St Christopher, marked by a ‘gradual’ retreat from tobacco and ‘the
inexorable advance of sugar’. For Price, the ‘social meaning’ of the
transition to sugar was to be found in the replacement of the white
peasantry by large slave plantations.16 In the course of a monetary history
of Guadeloupe published in 1979, Buffon remarked: ‘La révolution de
la canne à la fin du XVIIe siècle a transformé la vie économique et
sociale des ι̂les; les colons, ruinés par la crise du tabac, doivent vendre
leurs terres aux habitants sucriers; l’esclavage apparaι̂t comme le seul
mode rationnel d’exploitation.’ More interestingly, elsewhere in that work
he referred to ‘la première révolution sucrière’ and, following the lead of
Lasserre, distinguished it from ‘la révolution industrielle’ of the nineteenth
century. The first was that of the seventeenth century, marked by the
formation of plantations (‘habitations’), the decline of ‘les petites propriétés rurales’, and ‘le recours systématique à la main-d’œuvre servile’. The
‘révolution industrielle’ was divided into two stages, thus contributing to
the emerging idea of phases in the evolution of the sugar industry and
the possibility of multiple sugar revolutions.17
The notion of multiple sugar revolutions was closely associated with
the application of the idea to other times and places, notably Cuba in
the nineteenth century. Perhaps the first to do this fully was the Jamaican
historian Knight in his Slave society in Cuba during the nineteenth century
(1970). Knight placed Cuba at the end of an extended diffusion of sugar
14
Sheridan, Sugar and slavery, pp. 128-34, 141-3, 395. A summary of these arguments appeared
in idem, Development, pp. 27-33, and later refinements in idem, ‘Domestic economy’, pp. 46-53.
15
Sheridan, Sugar and slavery, pp. 140-1; idem, ‘Domestic economy’, pp. 48-9; Watts, ‘Origins’.
Cf. Dunn, Sugar and slaves, p. 90.
16
Price, France and the Chesapeake, I, pp. 75-7.
17
Buffon, Monnaie et crédit, pp. 19, 42, 262-3; Lasserre, Guadeloupe, I, pp. 352-6, 391. Cf. GastonMartin, Histoire de l’esclavage, pp. 23-4.
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and the plantation, beginning with Cyprus in the middle of the fifteenth
century, saying that ‘it was only when most other societies were turning
away from slavery as an economic system and a form of labor organization
that the Cubans became involved in the agricultural revolution that had
entered the Caribbean Sea in the early seventeenth century.’ The ‘sugar
revolution’ of the eastern Caribbean provided the model for Cuba in
several respects: dependence on tobacco in the ‘preplantation era’, ‘a
revolution in landholding’ patterns and tenure, clearance of hardwood
forest, new methods of organizing slave labour, a vast increase in the
slave trade, a demographic shift, and changes in international commercial
and political relationships. Between 1763 and 1838 Cuba experienced
‘revolutionary changes’ that transformed the island from ‘an underpopulated, underdeveloped settlement of small towns, cattle ranches, and
tobacco farms to a community of larger sugar and coffee plantations’.
Knight titled the second chapter of his book ‘The sugar revolution of
the nineteenth century’ and in it concentrated on changes in milling
technology, most of which occurred after 1838. Here he introduced the
notion of stages in the transformation: ‘In the initial stages before 1838
increased production depended on the proliferation of small units.’ The
later stages relied on the intensive use of steam power in mills and
railways, though, said Knight, ‘the adoption of steam did not by itself
create a full-scale revolution within the Cuban sugar industry.’18 Like
Lasserre and Buffon, Knight termed this second stage of transformation
‘the industrial revolution’ in the Cuban sugar industry.19
In Cuba, then, the sugar revolution could be seen as having two stages
occurring within a century, whereas the two revolutions attributed to the
French West Indies were separated by 200 years. However, in 1977
Knight argued that the ‘extensive and interrelated changes in the
demography, landholding and occupational divisions’ of that period
should properly be called ‘the first sugar revolution, to distinguish it from
the second revolution which took place principally in Oriente in the
period 1905–1924’.20 This second revolution was the period in which
US corporations pushed immense sugar plantations into the eastern end
of Cuba, engrossing smaller units. Hoernel argued along similar lines:
‘The sugar revolution came late to Cuba and even later to Oriente.’
Oriente’s ‘revolution in sugar’ was ‘a unique social transformation’. It
meant, said Hoernel, ‘revolutionary change as a result not only of foreign
influence but also of foreign control and design calculated to produce
both modernization and “Americanization” ’.21
In 1978 Knight published a regional history, the index t…
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