The Sugar Revolution in New England: Barbados, Massachusetts Bay, and the Atlantic Sugar Economy, 1600-1700 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Menzin, Marion. 2019. The Sugar Revolution in New England: Barbados, Massachusetts Bay, and the Atlantic Sugar Economy, 1600-1700. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42029508 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA The Sugar Revolution in New England: Barbados, Massachusetts Bay, and the Atlantic Sugar Economy, 1600-1700 a dissertation presented by Marion Menzin to The Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History Harvard University Cambridge Massachusetts May 2019 © 2019 Marion Menzin. All rights reserved. Advisor: Sven Beckert Author: Marion Menzin The Sugar Revolution in New England: Barbados, Massachusetts Bay, and the Atlantic Sugar Economy, 1600-1700 Abstract My dissertation seeks to deepen our understanding of the emergence of capitalism and imperialism in the early modern world both by analyzing the nature of sugar as an early modern commodity and by considering the role that demand for sugar played in the colonization of New England and Barbados. My aim is twofold: to investigate and periodize sugar, molasses, and rum consumption in early seventeenth-century England and then Massachusetts Bay, and to explain the nature of this demand and its consequences for the economy and people of the English Atlantic. I trace the emergence of the local and international business and personal networks that bound together Barbados and New England into an interdependent sugar and slavery region, as well as examining the role that native peoples played in the sugar economy. I argue that the emergence of capitalism during this period should in part be understood as an expression of pent-up consumerism. Consumerism was not simply an accommodation to a changing socioeconomic system, but a driver of it. The pre-existing demand of English people for sugar must be considered as a factor in efforts to secure and develop the English colonies and Atlantic markets. Historians have long recognized the importance of sugar as a vehicle of capital accumulation, of its production zones as markets for British industrial goods, and of sugar plantations themselves as early models of industrial organization. Yet sugar’s influence as a consumer good has not been as well explored. My research indicates that factors such as lower prices, greater availability, or social change do little to explain sugar’s popularity in England before the development of the English sugar iii colonies, when prices remained high (though not prohibitively so) and work rhythms traditional. While the sugar-slave complex did buttress the rise of capitalism – in particular, sugar’s narrow cultivation zone and its capital-intensive processing characteristics encouraged trade and market production of all kinds of surplus commodities, and the wealth it generated fostered capital accumulation and expanded the slave trade – people did not become habituated to sugar because of the cultural and economic changes brought by capitalism. I argue that the sequence was in fact quite the reverse: it was sugar dependency that fostered capitalistic behaviors. The intense reaction that sugar produced in the body – generating sensations associated with healing, life, and nurture – contributed to its unique role in the early modern gift economy. Ironically, this cultural function only reinforced demand for the commodity, resulting in perhaps the most impersonal, profit-driven industrial production process yet seen in the Atlantic world, and rendering sugar a source of social devastation. My dissertation is both a quantitative economic history and a cultural analysis of the processes involved in human choice and behavior. I undertake to uncover why, beginning in the seventeenth century, far-flung groups contributed enormous financial and human resources to large-scale sugar production and trade, changing the face of the Atlantic world and accelerating the pace of modern economic development. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ............................................................................................................................................................ iii Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................................ v List of Figures .................................................................................................................................................. vi Introduction ...................................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One “Everywhere in Frequent Use”: Sugar Dependency in Early Modern England .................................. 29 Chapter Two “Well Without Want”: Competency and Dependency in the Foodways of Early New England ..... 63 Chapter Three “Our New England Friends”: Twin Colonies and the Birth of the North American Sugar Economy, 1630-1660 ....................................................................................................................... 106 Chapter Four “To Procure Our Necessaries”: Sugar Products in the Early New England Economy, 1640-1680 ...................................................................................................................................................... 153 Chapter Five “They Liked and Desired More”: Indians, Sugar, and Dispossession in the Atlantic World .......... 207 Bibliography .................................................................................................................................................. 249 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: The Corwin, Gibbs, and Winthrop Families in New England and the West Indies ........ 136 Figure 2: Page from Jonathan Corwin’s Account Book ........................................................................ 138 Figure 3: Page from Eleazar Hathorne’s Account Book ....................................................................... 141 Figure 4: Page from John Pynchon’s Account Book ............................................................................. 177 Figure 5: Harvard College Tuition Payments in Sugar, 1650-1656 ...................................................... 181 Figure 6: Page from John Barton’s Account Book ................................................................................. 188 Figure 7: Page from George Corwin’s Account Book ........................................................................... 199 vi Introduction The Sugar Revolution in New England: Barbados, Massachusetts Bay, and the Atlantic Sugar Economy, 1600-1700 The 1805 Farmer’s Almanack included a list of seasonal instructions for New England farmers. In the raw month of March, the almanac advised, it was time to “keep your barn neat,” “take care of cows that are with calf,” and “prune your fruit trees.” Such tasks suggest a world of insular homesteads bounded by the stone walls that divided one farmer’s property from another’s. But on the contrary, these decisions about the allocation of agricultural labor reverberated across the globe. What farmers grew for themselves, what they produced to sell on the market, and what they chose to buy with the proceeds: these choices had not only economic but moral implications. For this reason, the almanac entreated farmers to expend resources in the early spring to “make your own sugar, and send not to the Indies for it. Feast not on the toil, pain and misery of the wretched.”1 The “wretched,” of course, being the millions of Africans enslaved on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean to satisfy the appetite of New Englanders for sweetness. Maple sugaring did enjoy a revival in the early republic as an expression of abolitionism, reflecting an awareness of the way in which consumption and slavery were interwoven. It was an unlikely prospect, however, that an army of New Englanders would descend on the forests of the far north and tap enough maple trees to satiate the region’s sugar market, when the labor-intensive commodity could be produced so cheaply by slaves. Yet New Englanders had always understood that their dietary choices were entwined with the destinies of faraway lands. Concern with securing sugar, molasses, and rum underlay New England’s initial integration into the Atlantic economy. By as early as 1600 sugar was an entrenched component of English diet, but the sugarcane from which it was extracted was biologically incompatible with the landscapes of England and New 1 Robert B. Thomas, The Farmer’s Almanack (Boston: John West, 1804). 1 England. In those regions, honey and maple sap, along with sweet, starchy fruits and vegetables, had nourished the human predilection for sweetness for millennia, but the appeal of those native products paled in contrast with intensely sweet and user-friendly processed sugar. English sugar hunger underlay the exploitation of land and people in the Americas, beginning in Barbados. It was also a factor