(gentle music)
- [Brandy] We're in the galleries at the Wadsworth Atheneum.
Looking at a lovely sugar bowl.
We think about sugar as part of our everyday lives
but sugar has somewhat of a dark history.
- [Beth] The history of sugar in a nutshell.
You go from India in the Middle East, where it's grown
to Portugal, Madeira, the Azores
and then it hops to the New World.
- [Brandy] And we know for example that Christopher Columbus
brought a sugar plant to the New World on his second voyage.
- [Beth] He knew that it was a crop that might do very well
in the New World environment.
- [Brandy] It was seen as a crop
that could be incredibly profitable.
People wanted sugar.
- [Beth] Sugar was called white gold.
And we think about our sugar addiction today
but that's hundreds of years old.
And our desire for sweetness, may be as old as mankind.
- [Brandy] Imagine sugar as this luxury item.
Doled out a little bit at at a time
because it was so precious.
- [Beth] Mostly reserved for the absolute wealthiest
individuals in European society.
Kings and queens and nobility.
And it's really in the 1530s with the sugar industry
developing in Brazil that you're starting
to get this massive influx.
And sugar prices go down.
- [Brandy] So sugar prices start to go down
because production increases
in the West Indies and the Caribbean.
- [Beth] But still, it is for only
the highest echelons.
There are four beverages that are very important
to popularity of sugar.
- [Brandy] I can think of three: coffee, tea and chocolate.
All of which would benefit from added sugar.
- [Beth] Absolutely and then there's punch.
- [Brandy] But growing sugar is very labor intensive
and so this is where the darker part
of sugar's history comes in.
- [Beth] The slave trade developed around the sugar industry
as early as the 1440s in Madeira, in the sugar colonies.
In Portugal and then it's transplanted to Brazil
and millions of individuals are abducted, relocated
to work in the plantations.
The work is incredibly harsh and the average
enslaved worker on a sugar plantation
had a working life expectancy of seven years.
- [Brandy] So a global trade between Africa, Europe
and the Americas.
- [Beth] From New England to England, to Africa,
to the West Indies,
sometimes you're stopping in the south, Charleston, Norfolk.
Then you're coming back to New England
with a cargo full of mostly sugar and rum,
those are the big money makers.
But also spices, citrus fruits,
salt from the Turks and Caicos.
- [Brandy] It's important to remember too that molasses
is being produced as a byproduct of the production of sugar
and molasses is what you use to make rum.
And is also used as a sweetener.
- [Beth] Rum is used in the slave trade to literally
purchase individuals in Africa who have been abducted.
- [Brandy] So we've got tea coming from China
and other places in the East.
- [Beth] When tea becomes a thing, in the 1600s
there aren't Western forms to use
with this Eastern commodity, tea.
So you have artisans creating forms,
sometimes directly based on objects imported from China
and it's shaped like a Chinese rice bowl,
even with it's delicate lid, that could have been turned
over and used as a separate vessel.
- [Brandy] So silver is clearly a sign of status
and wealth that you displayed in your home.
And in the era before paper money there were silver coins.
And silver coins could be melted down and turned into
beautiful silver objects like this one.
Or silver objects could be melted down into coinage.
Making objects as beautiful as this,
is highly skilled labor.
- [Beth] And there's different types of labor
that's going to be happening in a silversmith's shop.
So you have the master silversmith, possibly a journeyman.
And then you have the apprentice.
- [Brandy] We're talking about taking a block of silver,
an ingot and hammering it flat.
- [Beth] So silver, for instance this bowl
is going to be created through a process
of raising through hammering.
And you're gonna do that on an anvil.
So you're gonna hammer around a concentric circle
and it's gonna cause this malleable material
to start to rise up.
But the more you hammer, the harder your silver's gonna get.
- [Brandy] So you have to heat it again.
- [Beth] And that process is called annealing.
After you've annealed it and created your form,
you're gonna go through a process called pickling
and that's putting it in an acid vat.
And then polishing.
'Cause silver is not this beautiful, shiny substance
in it's natural state.
So we think that a global economy is new to our 20th,
21st century world, but the truth of the matter
is the global economy started in the 1500s.
And this might be a domestic item and it would have sat
on someone's tea table, but it represents
the interconnected globe of the 18th century.
(light music)