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]
