Sugar Changed the World, Part 4: Building Claims — Unit test Answers

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.The sugar that piled up on the docks near the plantations was something new in the world: pure sweetness, pure pleasure, so cheap that common people could afford it. Scientists have shown that people all over the world must learn to like salty tastes, sour tastes, mixed tastes. But from the moment we are born, we crave sweetness. Cane sugar was the first product in human history that perfectly satisfied that desire. And the bitter lives of the enslaved Africans produced so much sugar that pure sweetness began to spread around the world.

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World. My great-grandparents had come from India to Guyana—then British Guiana—in the late nineteenth century to work on the sugar plantations. Sugar was the backbone of the British Empire at that time. The demand was huge, for sugar had gone from being a luxury that only kings could afford to a necessity. Even the poorest of London shopgirls took sugar in their tea. Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833, thirty years before the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States. But even after they freed their slaves, the sugar plantation owners were desperate to find cheap labor to cut cane and process sugar. So the British owners looked to another part of the empire—India—and recruited thousands of men and women, who were given five-year contracts and a passage back.

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.In every single American slave state, the population of enslaved people kept rising even after the slave trade was abolished. That was because enough enslaved children were born, lived, and grew to become adults. There was just one exception to this rule: Louisiana, where the native-born enslaved population kept dropping. Sugar was a killer.Unlike the Caribbean, Louisiana has cold snaps. That put an additional pressure on the sugar harvest. Not only did the slaves need to harvest the cane in perfect rhythm with the grinding mills, but the entire crop had to be cut down between mid-October and December. This pace only increased when growers installed improved, steam-powered mills. People needed to work faster than the weather and to keep pace with machines.

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.On the day the coolies were to depart, each one was given a "tin ticket,” an identification disk, hung around the neck or strapped to the arm. The enslaved Africans who were taken to the sugar plantations lost their names; they were meant to be pure property. The Indian indentures were lied to, they were tricked, they were no more than cheap labor to keep the plantations running—but they were still individuals. Each of their names was carefully recorded in account books.

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.Sugar has left a bloody trail through human history. Sugar plantations from Africa to the Caribbean and Louisiana and as far as Hawaii are haunted by stories of brutality, torture, rape, and murder. When slaves rebelled, they often took gruesome revenge on their masters, only to face even more horrific reprisals when the owners and overseers regained control. Indenture was a step better than slavery, but masters did their best to intimidate workers to keep wages low and silence critics. Violence was the very soil from which sugar sprang. The only way to fight sugar masters, it seemed, was for the workers to be harder, tougher, and more willing to accept bloodshed than the owners.Gandhi began to see that there was a way for the indentured Indians to strengthen themselves without having to rely on machetes and guns. Freedom, he realized, did not come only from rising up against oppressors or tyrants. It could also be found in oneself. The mere fact that the sugar masters treated their workers as some form of property did not mean the Indians had to accept that definition. In fact, it was up to them to claim, to assert, their own worth, their own value. A man who had his inner, personal dignity was free—no matter how a boss tried to bully him. Gandhi’s years in South Africa became a laboratory, as he experimented with how to be a truthful, free person. Finally, he was ready to put his ideas into practice.

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.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.You could date a great change in the world to a visit one Madame Villeneuve made to France in 1714. That year, Pauline, an enslaved woman from the Caribbean, arrived in France as the personal servant of her mistress. When Madame Villeneuve set off from the coast to visit Paris, she left Pauline in a convent. The young woman spent her time studying with the nuns and went so far in her training that she asked to become a nun herself and remain in the convent. The nuns agreed, which enraged Madame Villeneuve. She rushed to a judge, demanding to have her property back. Was Pauline a free woman, a bride of Christ, or an item to be bought, sold, and warehoused when she was not in use?Twenty-three years earlier, King Louis XIV had issued a set of rules that defined slavery as legal in the French sugar islands. But when two slaves managed to reach France, he freed them—saying they became free "as soon as they [touched] the soil" of France. The judges sided with Pauline—she was real to them, human, not a piece of property. For Pauline's judges, as for King Louis, slavery far off across the seas was completely different from enslaved individuals in France.

Read the two passages from Sugar Changed the World.By the late 1700s, Saint Domingue (what is now Haiti) was the world center of sugar. So many sugar plantations dotted the landscape that slaves called commanders managed other slaves. On the night of August 14, 1791, commanders from the richest sugar plantations in Saint Domingue gathered in a place called Alligator Woods and swore a solemn oath. They would rise up against their white owners, "and listen to the voice of liberty which speaks in the hearts of all of us." That voice told them to destroy everything related to sugar. Sugar made the Africans slaves, so sugar must be wiped off the island, now a vast sugar factory to the world.By the end of August, the French colony was in flames. So many cane fields were on fire that the air was filled with "a rain of fire composed of burning bits of cane-straw which whirled like thick snow." Smashing mills, destroying warehouses, setting fields on fire, the freedom fighters demolished some one thousand plantations—and that was just in the first two months of their revolution. The fight against sugar and chains soon had a leader, Toussaint, who called himself "L’Ouverture”—the opening. Toussaint was making a space, an opening, for people to be free.When the Haitians defeated the French armies, Napoleon lost control of the world's most productive sugar islands and with it his dream of great sugar profits. As a result, Napoleon had no use for the land in North America he had so recently obtained from Spain. Napoleon did, though, need money to pay for his wars. That is why he sold the vast Louisiana Territory to Jefferson for the bargain price of just fifteen million dollars. What textbooks call the Louisiana Purchase should really be named the Sugar Purchase. Americans obtained the middle part of what would become their nation because the Haitians achieved their freedom.

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.Eventually, I visited Guyana to find out the fate of our house. As our car passed old sugar estates, and I saw the palm trees bending against the wide sky, the lush cane growing in thick, shiny rows, the villages, which were really parcels of land surrounding the important estates, I realized that sugar had been the entire reason for this country's existence. Every now and then an old boiling house—where the cane is processed into crystals, molasses, and rum—would show itself on the flat landscape, cropping up like a hulking ghost.

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.Slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1833, thirty years before the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States. But even after they freed their slaves, the sugar plantation owners were desperate to find cheap labor to cut cane and process sugar. So the British owners looked to another part of the empire—India—and recruited thousands of men and women, who were given five-year contracts and a passage back. For a person from India, going overseas was not a simple matter. Once you crossed the "black water" of the surrounding oceans, you were said to have "gone to tapu." You no longer had any place in your village and could not be accepted back until you went through a special ceremony. Leaving India truly meant giving up your home; yet for some—for my family—that was their only chance for a better life.

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.Seeing the fortunes being made in sugar, the French started their own scramble to turn the half of the island of Hispaniola that they controlled (which is now Haiti), as well as Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guiana (along the South American coast near Dutch Guiana), into their own sugar colonies, which were filled with hundreds of thousands more African slaves. By 1753, British ships were taking an average of 34,250 slaves from Africa every year, and by 1768, that number had reached 53,100.The sugar that piled up on the docks near the plantations was something new in the world: pure sweetness, pure pleasure, so cheap that common people could afford it. Scientists have shown that people all over the world must learn to like salty tastes, sour tastes, mixed tastes. But from the moment we are born, we crave sweetness. Cane sugar was the first product in human history that perfectly satisfied that desire. And the bitter lives of the enslaved Africans produced so much sugar that pure sweetness began to spread around the world.

Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World. MARCIt was a typically hot, dry day in Jerusalem. Marina and I were sitting on a sun-warmed stone patio when I learned my family's sugar story. A cousin of mine was filling in a bit of our history that had always puzzled me.My father's family came from Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, where his father, Solomon, the grand rabbi of Kiev, was the latest in a long line of rabbis that stretched back to the 1300s. Solomon was a forward-thinking rabbi who helped make bridges between the Jewish community and the Christians. He knew that change was coming, and he committed himself to building what was to become the land of Israel. My grandfather moved his family to Tel Aviv, where he became one of the leaders of the Jewish community.

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.