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

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.In Brazil, when word came that the harvest was about to begin, a priest came to bless the mill—and the workers. The blessing was like the whistle at the start of a race, for now everything sped up. 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.

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.Cutting cane was hard work, but it was nothing like what came next: Piles of freshly cut cane had to be fed into the ever-turning mill wheels, until they were completely crushed. The owners insisted that during the work hours the grinding never stop, no matter what. The mills were most often tended by women who were doing dangerous work while getting almost no rest. That was a very bad combination. An ax was often propped up near the rollers so if a slave closed her eyes for a second while pushing the cane, her arm could be hacked off before she was pulled through the merciless grinders. Guests at sugar plantations often remarked on how many one-armed people they saw.

Read the passage and study the map from Sugar Changed the World.If you walked down Beekman Street in New York in the 1750s, you would come to a general store owned by Gerard Beekman—his family gave the street its name. The products on his shelves showed many of the ways sugar was linking the world. Beekman and merchants like him shipped flour, bread, corn, salted beef, and wood to the Caribbean. They brought back sugar, rum, molasses, limes, cocoa, and ginger. Simple enough; but this trade up and down the Atlantic coast was part of a much larger world system.Textbooks talk about the Triangle Trade: Ships set out from Europe carrying fabrics, clothes, and simple manufactured goods to Africa, where they sold their cargoes and bought people. The enslaved people were shipped across the Atlantic to the islands, where they were sold for sugar. Then the ships brought sugar to North America, to be sold or turned into rum—which the captains brought back to Europe. But that neat triangle—already more of a rectangle—is completely misleading.Beekman's trade, for example, could cut out Europe entirely. British colonists' ships set out directly from New York and New England carrying the food and timber that the islands needed, trading them for sugar, which the merchants brought back up the coast. Then the colonists traded their sugar for English fabrics, clothes, and simple manufactured goods, or they took their rum directly to Africa to buy slaves—to sell to the sugar islands. English, North American, French, and Dutch ships competed to supply the Caribbean plantations and buy their sugar. And even all these boats filling the waters of the Atlantic were but one part of an even larger system of world trade.Africans who sold other Africans as slaves insisted on being paid in fabrics from India. Indeed, historians have discovered that some 35 percent of the cargo typically taken from Europe to Africa originally came from India. What could the Europeans use to buy Indian cloth? The Spanish shipped silver from the mines of Bolivia to Manila in the Philippines, and bought Asian products there. Any silver that English or French pirates could steal from the Spanish was also ideal for buying Asian cloth. So to get the fabrics that would buy the slaves that could be sold for sugar for the English to put into their tea, the Spanish shipped silver to the Philippines, and the French, English, and Dutch sailed east to India. What we call a triangle was really as round as the globe.This map shows how the Triangle Trade has traditionally been depicted.Which statement best explains how the map supports the text?

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.For an African, whether you were sent to the Caribbean or South America, you were now part of the sugar machine. And it did not much matter where your ship landed. You could be working the fertile fields of Brazil or the hills of Jamaica; the brutal cycle of making sugar was much the same.

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.Why were the English the first to build factories to mill cloth? Because of the wealth they gained, the trade connections they made, and the banking systems they developed in the slave and sugar trade. Indeed, the cheap cloth from the factories was used to clothe the slaves. English factories, you might say, were built, run, and paid for by sugar.

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.Cutting cane was hard work, but it was nothing like what came next: Piles of freshly cut cane had to be fed into the ever-turning mill wheels, until they were completely crushed. The owners insisted that during the work hours the grinding never stop, no matter what. The mills were most often tended by women who were doing dangerous work while getting almost no rest. That was a very bad combination. An ax was often propped up near the rollers so if a slave closed her eyes for a second while pushing the cane, her arm could be hacked off before she was pulled through the merciless grinders. Guests at sugar plantations often remarked on how many one-armed people they saw.Day after day, week after week, month after month, the cane was cut, hauled to the mill, and fed through the rollers. The mills kept going as long as there was cane to grind—the season varied between four and ten months, depending on the local growing conditions. A visitor who came to Brazil in 1630 described the scene: "People the color of the very night, working briskly and moaning at the same time without a moment of peace or rest, whoever sees all the confused and noisy machinery . . . will say that this indeed is the image of Hell.”

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.As a weeder, your job was to carefully pick away the undergrowth that could choke the cane stalks and stop them from growing tall enough, or that might attract vermin. Cleaning and weeding was done as many as three times while the cane grew, and it was some of the worst labor. A weeder spent ten to fourteen hours a day bent over with a hoe, digging out the unwanted growths at the base of the knobby cane stalks, ignoring the rats that might scuttle over his or her feet or the bladelike leaves that slashed at the worker's wrists and arms. Rats were everywhere—the records from one plantation in Jamaica report three thousand of them captured in just six months.

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.Textbooks talk about the Triangle Trade: Ships set out from Europe carrying fabrics, clothes, and simple manufactured goods to Africa, where they sold their cargoes and bought people. The enslaved people were shipped across the Atlantic to the islands, where they were sold for sugar. Then the ships brought sugar to North America, to be sold or turned into rum—which the captains brought back to Europe. But that neat triangle—already more of a rectangle—is completely misleading.Beekman's trade, for example, could cut out Europe entirely. British colonists' ships set out directly from New York and New England carrying the food and timber that the islands needed, trading them for sugar, which the merchants brought back up the coast. Then the colonists traded their sugar for English fabrics, clothes, and simple manufactured goods, or they took their rum directly to Africa to buy slaves—to sell to the sugar islands. English, North American, French, and Dutch ships competed to supply the Caribbean plantations and buy their sugar. And even all these boats filling the waters of the Atlantic were but one part of an even larger system of world trade.Africans who sold other Africans as slaves insisted on being paid in fabrics from India. Indeed, historians have discovered that some 35 percent of the cargo typically taken from Europe to Africa originally came from India. What could the Europeans use to buy Indian cloth? The Spanish shipped silver from the mines of Bolivia to Manila in the Philippines, and bought Asian products there. Any silver that English or French pirates could steal from the Spanish was also ideal for buying Asian cloth. So to get the fabrics that would buy the slaves that could be sold for sugar for the English to put into their tea, the Spanish shipped silver to the Philippines, and the French, English, and Dutch sailed east to India. What we call a triangle was really as round as the globe.

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World. If you walked down Beekman Street in New York in the 1750s, you would come to a general store owned by Gerard Beekman—his family gave the street its name. The products on his shelves showed many of the ways sugar was linking the world. Beekman and merchants like him shipped flour, bread, corn, salted beef, and wood to the Caribbean. They brought back sugar, rum, molasses, limes, cocoa, and ginger. Simple enough; but this trade up and down the Atlantic coast was part of a much larger world system.Textbooks talk about the Triangle Trade: Ships set out from Europe carrying fabrics, clothes, and simple manufactured goods to Africa, where they sold their cargoes and bought people. The enslaved people were shipped across the Atlantic to the islands, where they were sold for sugar. Then the ships brought sugar to North America, to be sold or turned into rum—which the captains brought back to Europe. But that neat triangle—already more of a rectangle—is completely misleading. Beekman's trade, for example, could cut out Europe entirely. British colonists' ships set out directly from New York and New England carrying the food and timber that the islands needed, trading them for sugar, which the merchants brought back up the coast. Then the colonists traded their sugar for English fabrics, clothes, and simple manufactured goods, or they took their rum directly to Africa to buy slaves—to sell to the sugar islands. English, North American, French, and Dutch ships competed to supply the Caribbean plantations and buy their sugar. And even all these boats filling the waters of the Atlantic were but one part of an even larger system of world trade.Africans who sold other Africans as slaves insisted on being paid in fabrics from India. Indeed, historians have discovered that some 35 percent of the cargo typically taken from Europe to Africa originally came from India. What could the Europeans use to buy Indian cloth? The Spanish shipped silver from the mines of Bolivia to Manila in the Philippines, and bought Asian products there. Any silver that English or French pirates could steal from the Spanish was also ideal for buying Asian cloth. So to get the fabrics that would buy the slaves that could be sold for sugar for the English to put into their tea, the Spanish shipped silver to the Philippines, and the French, English, and Dutch sailed east to India. What we call a triangle was really as round as the globe.

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.For an African, whether you were sent to the Caribbean or South America, you were now part of the sugar machine. And it did not much matter where your ship landed. You could be working the fertile fields of Brazil or the hills of Jamaica; the brutal cycle of making sugar was much the same.If the terrain was not too rocky or hilly, you might be part of a group of slaves who drove teams of oxen to draw plows across the fields. On rougher ground, you were sent out to clear a space five inches deep and five feet square. Then you dug holes for the cane shoots in the cleared squares. You needed to work quickly and without stopping. Overseers watched closely to make sure of that, beating slaves who did not carve out at least twenty-eight holes an hour on one French island. 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 Equiano explained, the sugar slaves could hardly rest even when their day was done.