The sugar revolution

Abstract

O f the many revolutions identified by historians, only one takes its name from a particular commodity. 1 This is the sugar revolution, a concatenation of events located in the seventeenth-century Caribbean with far-reaching ramifications for the Atlantic world. Unlike the more broadly based revolutions typical of economic history-the industrial revolution, the agricultural revolution, the commercial revolution, the price revolution-the sugar revolution points to the transformative power of a single commodity, resulting in what has sometimes been termed 'crop determinism'. Determining influences have readily been attributed to other crops-rice, wheat, potatoes, for example-but none of these have given their names to the transformations with which they are associated. 2 Sugar alone has achieved that status.The six central elements of the sugar revolution are commonly regarded as a swift shift from diversified agriculture to sugar monoculture, from production on small farms to large plantations, from free to slave labour, from sparse to dense settlement, from white to black populations, and from low to high value per caput output. More broadly, it is claimed that the sugar revolution had five effects: it generated a massive boost to the Atlantic slave trade, provided the engine for a variety of triangular trades, altered European nutrition and consumption, increased European interest in tropical colonies, and, more contentiously, contributed vitally to the industrial revolution. Not all accounts of the sugar revolution include each of these features. Like most of the revolutions of economic history, the sugar revolution concept has developed and diffused, tending to take on new elements and expanding claims made for its significance. These claims have entered the mainstream of long-run global economic history and development economics. 3 Generally, historians concede that the idea of revolution has served a useful role in the writing of history, giving shape and purpose to the trajectory of otherwise seamless, continuous patterns. Indeed, the emergence of history as an academic discipline and the modern understanding 1 I thank Stanley Engerman, Howard Johnson, and Barry Smith for comments on drafts of this article, Gregory Bowen for research assistance, and

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