Sugar Changed the World, Part 3: Word Choice and Multimedia Answers

Read the passage and study the image from Sugar Changed the World. This excerpt was written by Olaudah Equiano, an enslaved African man who was taken to Barbados. The effect of an author’s choices can change over time. For example, Equiano includes the phrase "poor creatures” to appeal to the reader’s emotions. However, by today’s standards this is considered dehumanizing.The painstaking work had just one aim: to plant a crop that would end up taking the life of every worker who touched it. As [Olaudah] Equiano explained, the sugar slaves could hardly rest even when their day was done.Their huts, which ought to be well covered, and the place dry where they take their little repose, are often open sheds, built in damp places; so that when the poor creatures return tired from the toils of the field, they contract many disorders, from being exposed to the damp air in this uncomfortable state.These are what enslaved people’s huts looked like in the Caribbean (photo by V. C. Vulto).

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.By the 1800s, it was clear that the Age of Sugar—that combination of enslavement, factories, and global trade—was replacing the Age of Honey, when people ate local foods, lived on the land of their ancestors, and valued tradition over change. Sugar was the product of the slave and the addiction of the poor factory worker—the meeting place of the barbarism of overseers such as Thomas Thistlewood and the rigid new economy. And yet, for that very reason, sugar also became the lynchpin of the struggle for freedom.When we talk about Atlantic slavery, we must describe sugar Hell; and yet that is only part of the story. Africans were at the heart of this great change in the economy, indeed in the lives of people throughout the world. Africans were the true global citizens—adjusting to a new land, a new religion, even to other Africans they would never have met in their homelands. Their labor made the Age of Sugar—the Industrial Age—possible. We should not see the enslaved people simply as victims, but rather as actors—as the heralds of the interconnected world in which we all live today. And indeed, it was when the enslaved Africans began to speak—in words and in actions—when Europeans began to see them as human, that the Age of Sugar also became the Age of Freedom.

Read the passage and study the image from Sugar Changed the World.Slaves were given long, sharp machetes, which would be their equipment—but for some also their weapons—until the harvest was done. The cutters worked brutal, seemingly endless shifts during the harvest—for the hungry mills crushed cane from four in the afternoon to ten the next morning, stopping only in the midday heat. Slaves had to make sure there was just enough cane to feed the turning wheels during every one of those eighteen hours. They worked in teams, a man slashing the cane, a woman binding every twelve stalks into a bundle. According to one report from 1689, each pair of workers was expected to cut and bind 4,200 stalks a day. Exactly how much they cut depended on how much their mill could handle—the cutting must never get a day ahead of the grinding, for then the sugar cane would dry up.In this illustration by William Clark, enslaved people cut sugar cane.