I used to think that the advent of factories marked the start of the Industrial Revolution. But there were factories operated by slaves in the West Indies a century before the Industrial Revolution began around 1750. Those factories were called plantations.
While the factory—“a building or set of buildings with facilities for manufacturing”—did typify the Industrial Revolution, such a construction had appeared a century earlier in Barbados in the West Indies. By the 1660s, English owners of sugar plantations had developed an “agro-industry,” fueled by slave labor.
The consumption of sugar skyrocketed in England in the seventeenth century, and the English in Barbados (and soon, Jamaica) took advantage of the demand. In his 1985 book Sweetness and Power, Sidney W. Mintz described a system he calls “the closest thing to industry that was typical of the seventeenth century”—Barbados sugar plantations.[1]
The plantations were not just agriculture; they involved a highly complex process that started with sugar cane planting and ended with at least partially refined sugar. Slaves planted and harvested the cane, extracted its juices, and boiled those juices into products of various levels of refinement, from molasses to sugar. A typical plantation had one or two extraction mills, a boiling house, a curing house, a distillery, and a warehouse.
“The heat and noise were overpowering, there was considerable danger involved, and time was of the essence throughout, from the moment when the cane was perfect for cutting until the semicrystalline product was poured into molds to drain and be dried,” Mintz wrote.[2]
Slave labor was critical to this process. Slaves could be forced to do the work that no one else wanted to do. “The advent of the sugar culture, beginning in Barbados about 1640, transformed the British West Indies,” wrote Robert Fogel in 1989. “The industrial discipline, so difficult to bring about in the factories of free England and free New England, was achieved on sugar plantations more than a century earlier—partly because sugar production lent itself to a minute division of labor, partly because of the invention of the gang system, which provided a powerful instrument for the supervision and control of labor, and partly because of the extraordinary degree of force that planters were allowed to bring to bear on enslaved black labor.”[3]
I don’t yet know whether or how this brutal and sophisticated plantation system affected England’s Industrial Revolution. Historians don’t seem to have made much of a connection between the two. Yet they have written extensively about how hard it was to get English workers to voluntarily accept the rigors of factory life. There was, some said, a wide gulf between the “task orientation” of rural life (which included agriculture, housekeeping, and child-rearing) and the “time orientation” required by a factory manager.[4] Farm workers who lived by the sun and the seasons inevitably had periods of downtime, so the cottage industries that preceded factories were suited to task orientation, not time orientation. Fitting these workers into a factory schedule with stringent time constraints was not easy.
Historian E.P. Thompson said that the change took a long time in England, partly because “England’s was the first industrial revolution, and there were no Cadillacs, steel mills, or television sets to serve as demonstrations as to the object of the operation.“[5]
We now know, however, that there was in fact a “demonstration”—for factory managers, but not workers—in the English West Indies, with a vastly different workforce, one that could be coerced rather than persuaded. Should we view the ease of creating a factory operated by slave labor as a foil to the difficulty of changing the attitudes of free people to become workers? And if so, what have we learned?
I would love some discernment on this issue.
Image above: Slaves cutting sugar cane. From Ten Views of the Island of Antigua (London: 1823). In the Flickr.com British Library collection.
Notes (Comments below)
[1] Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1986 [paperback edition]), 48.
[2] Mintz, 49.
[3] Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: Norton: 1994 ), 25-26.
[4] E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work-discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present 38 (Dec., 1967): 56-97.
[5] Thompson, 80.
Thank you for the astute comments, below. Pascal, did Professor Perroux ever write about the sugar plantations? Wallace, you’re right that coal and steam characterize the Industrial Revolution but many of the innovations also typical of the Industrial Revolution used water power, since steam engines took quite awhile to become efficient. Ramona, you’ve raised a lot of interesting questions. Pascal’s point about sugar plantations starting in the islands in the Atlantic indicates that they began before Barbados was converted to sugar production; I don’t know about Latin America. Possibly there was initially so much attention to precious metals that the sugar plantations only came later.
About F. Perroux, it’s such a long time ago, and he has written so many books, that I won’t be able to answer your question unfortunately.
As for sugar plantation in Latin America, in a recent book in French called “Plus Jamais Esclave” by Aline Helg, Professor at the University of Geneva, formerly Professor of History at the University of Texas, Austin, she writes on page 38 – 39 that the first sugar plantation in Peru, south of Lima, dates from 1555 and in Veracruz, Mexico, around the same time.
For Barbados, interesting to note that in 1780 there were 68000 slaves, while between 1650 and 1775, 432000 slaves were brought in. This gives an indication of the slave mortality rate on this island of 430 km².
The model of the sugar slave industry was started in Sao Tome, The Canary, and Madera, by the Portugese and Spanish, as early as 1450. It was then exported to the Carribeans and the Americas in the XVI Century.
As an Economic student in Paris in 1961, I had a course by Professor F. Perroux on “The History of Economic Developement”. It was clear for him that the first experiences of indutrialisation was the sugar cane industry.
My first thought is that like many innovations, when a time is ripe, the innovation appears independently in different places. That is manifestly true in the arts, sciences, business, and even the intellectual world.
A factory, I suggest, might be thought of as a central location for mass production by a labor force organized into teams that perform a single repeated task to specific divisions of a manufacturing process. I would add a difference that might separate sugar production from production in the 19th C English factory–the addition of mechanization powered by coal and steam, making factories relatively independent of natural geography, especially after canals and railroads made bringing fuels to factories cheap.
Both slave labor and wage labor can be used but management is different. In both cases, however, labor becomes a commodity rather than a commercial relationship. (Perhaps that should be added to the definition of the factory system.)
I have not opined on whether the sugar factory contributed to the factory system of the Industrial Revolution. Nor do I have an original thought. My only suggestion would be that the factory of the Industrial Revolution was almost certain to add mechanical power fueled by coal and later oil to many parts of the production process. (What fuel did sugar factories use? Almost certainly wood.)
Were the Barbados sugar plantations and production preceded by those in Latin America? I am thinking of the Cortez hacienda (and sugar production) outside of Mexico City. Stone viaducts brought the water to the mill which was located near the cane fields. Spanish land grants (encomiendas) were given for a specified time to Cortez and many other Spaniards. (Indians living on the land were included in the encomienda.) Indians supplied the labor through what most might call a slave labor system. Also, I know nothing of the processing of gold and silver into the forms in which they were shipped to Spain. Would metal refineries be counted as manufacturing?