JCB Archive of Early American Images, Accession number 07532, Trapetum commune.
Sugar Cane Mill
Here in this early drawing we see the design of a Sugar Cane Mill in action during the late 1700s. It displays the mechanism in its full detail and highlights certains parts and action to help indicate viewers of what is what. The Sugar Cane Mill was a vital part of operations during this time as sugar was a rapidly successful endeavor making vast amount of profit for such a small product. With the success of sugar hitting the markets in Europe the demand for the product grew rampant and soon enough sugar plantations were made all across the Carribeans in order to seize this opportunity. Behind the production of sugar was the men and women who worked all day to meet the demands of production. Most of these men and women were enslaved Africans that were traded and sold in what we call the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade. Producing the sugar came at a cost as making the sugar and refining it was hard labor and ultimately prove dreadful for the workers. As mentioned in class it was apparently cheaper to just buy another slave rather than trying to help them so many enslaved workers were being worked to death and being replaced the day after. The average life span when working on the fields were around 3-5 years so it gives us a good understanding on how hard the process was in order to make sugar.
Without slaves, sugar production wouldn’t be what it would be known today. The rise of demands for sugar increased the work load for plantation owners and to compensate that they bought many slaves to the island to meet with the demands. The slave population grew massively in these islands from numbers such as a growth of 3000 slaves to 47000 in 1690-1720 or from 80000 to 172000 in 1720-1750 (Fick, pg.55). These rise in numbers of the slave population grew in order to meet the high demands of sugar production in the market. There were so many slaves in fact, that the island population were more slaves than free whites. Such change in the population drew in concerns for the owners of the plantation on the island which would lead into colonial authorities to make changes and adjustment to keep the slave population in check and put the free whites in power (Fick, pg.56).
While sugar was one of the many products coming out of the Carribeans , the picture gives us a insight on how the enslaved operated in the plantations during this time and see the conditions they were in.
Citations
1. Fick, Carolyn. “The French Revolution in Saint Domingue” A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean, edited by David Barry Gaspar and David Partick Geuggs, 55-56. Indiana University Press, 1997.