Sugar:
it’s bad for you,
it makes your teeth fall out,
and it’s a central component of any gross Western diet.
For centuries, sugar drove the world economy.
It made old white men wealthy and powerful,
helped turn Britain into a global colonial superpower,
and it made cities like Bristol filthy rich.
Empires of Dirt,
a series about Europeans getting rich at the expense of everyone else.
Previously, we found out how Britain exported homophobia
to the rest of the world
and how Britain got China hooked on opium.
[How Bristol was Built on Sugar and Slavery]
Our love of the white stuff resulted in untold misery
for African men, women and children.
It’s estimated that around 70 percent of
the 12 million people who were kidnapped from Africa
and put on slave ships in the 17th and 18th centuries
were destined for sugar colonies in America and the West Indies.
All this heartache, just so our tea could taste like cotton candy.
It seems incredible to think of now, but before the 16th century,
sugar wasn't really that widespread in Europe.
During the 14th and 15th centuries,
it was imported here from the Middle East
and Mediterranean countries like Cyprus.
Only the elites ate sugar, because it was so ridiculously expensive.
We’re talking literal kings and queens
and maybe the odd bishop here and there.
When Portuguese settlers landed in Brazil in the early 16th century,
they started growing sugar cane straight away.
Sugar flooded into Europe,
giving everyday consumers a taste for the sweet stuff.
Britain quickly followed suit.
Soon, almost every island in the Caribbean
was covered in plantations.
These plantations produced 80 to 90 percent of
all the sugar consumed in Western Europe
during the 18th and 19th centuries.
Europe went mad for sugar.
The average sugar consumption in England and Wales
went up twentyfold between 1663 and 1775.
By the 18th century, even the poorest worker took sugar in their tea
because it was so popular.
By 1750, a fifth of all of Europe's imports was sugar.
The average Brit went from eating four pounds of sugar a year in 1700
to twenty pounds of sugar a year a century later.
The reason sugar was so expensive
is because it’s labour intensive to cultivate.
That is, until European plantation owners realized that
if you enslaved your workforce, you wouldn’t have to pay them,
so you could make sugar a lot more cheaply.
On Caribbean sugar plantations in the 17th and 18th centuries,
enslaved African men, women, and children
were forced to work in horrific conditions from dawn to dusk,
growing and harvesting sugar cane.
The younger and fitter enslaved people
were made to plant and cut the crop,
while children and older people were forced to clean,
guard the crop, and drive away birds.
Working in the sugar mill wasn’t any better.
People could be maimed or killed by the machinery.
The sugar boiling houses were horrifically hot,
especially in the sweltering Caribbean summers.
During harvest time, enslaved people worked 18-hour days.
A third of newly kidnapped people died within three years.
The plantation owners didn't care.
They just trafficked in new people to replace them.
As enslaved people toiled to pick and process sugar cane,
slave traders like Bristol’s very own Edward Colston grew rich.
Colston had business interests in
the sugar-producing island of St Kitts.
These plantations made him rich and powerful,
so he did what rich and powerful people often do,
which is donate loads of money to charity to launder their reputation
and build statues to honor themselves after they die.
By the 18th century, Bristol had become
a center of the global sugar trade.
At one point, Bristol had 22 sugar houses,
refineries where you could store and process sugar,
like the one right here.
Sugar merchants operated out of the city,
importing sugar and lending money to Caribbean plantation owners.
Sugar made these businessmen so rich they called it “white gold.”
If you walk around Bristol today,
you can still see the enormous mansions they once owned.
The American Revolution of 1775
and the abolition of the slave trade in 1807
marked the end of Britain’s dominance of the global sugar trade.
Production shifted to America, in particular the state of Louisiana,
where—surprise, surprise— it was grown by enslaved people.
Today, most of the world's sugar is grown in Brazil,
although thankfully not by enslaved people.
Slavery was abolished there in 1888,
making Brazil the last country in the Western world to do it—
after they’d kidnapped and trafficked four million people.
Trinidad closed its last sugar factory in 2007.
And Colston?
Despite his role in various companies
kidnapping and trafficking enslaved people,
he died at home at the ripe old age of 84.
His statue, however, met a more untimely end.
In June 2020, Black Lives Matter protesters pulled it down
and pushed it into Bristol Harbour right here.
It got fished out,
but around here, Colston’s name is dirt.