THE HIGH PRICE OF SUGAR

You read the article entitled "The High Price of Sugar." I want to draw your attention to some of the major points of the article. On p. 70 the article speaks of a "relationship between sugar production and African slavery that was to dominate Caribbean life for nearly four centuries." On p. 71 the article says "Slavery grew more important as European crusaders seized the sugar plantations of the eastern Mediterranean from their Arab predecessors. By the 15th century, African slaves supplied the labor for the Spanish and Portuguese plantations on the Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa (the Madeira, Canary islands, Sao Tome). To the Spanish way of thinking, then, African slaves were the logical solution to the labor shortages in the New World.

On Page 72 the article describes the banjar, a stringed isntrument which the Africans brought with them to Antigua and the New World. If a man knew how to make a banjar in West Africa, he could make a new one in the New World. The article also describes the toombah. On Sunday the slaves did not have to work, and would use Sunday for growing their own crops on the hillsides, marketing crops and goods such as baskets, and for dancing. The banjar was a musical instrument, usually with several strings, that originated in Senegal and Gambia. In the United States it came to be called a banjo. And the toombah seems to have been a type of drum. The point here is that the Africans brought certain fragments or remnants of their culture with them, especially in the realm of music and dance and the decorative arts..

On p. 74 the article also describes how arduous and difficult sugar production was. Sugarcane is a perrenial grass. Slaves dug holes and planted cane cuttings and then covered them over. It takes about 15 months for the plant to grow. As soon as the sugar cane was ripe it had to be cut and ground up, often within 24 hours, to keep it from spoiling. The bundles of cane were very heavy, often 100 pounds or so. The stalks of cane were then fed into machines with heavy rollers that crushed the cane and forced out the sucrose. Because the sun was so hot during the day, sometimes work would be done at night when it was cooler. If workers were tired they might lose fingers or limbs in the rollers. Watchmen stood guard to chop of the limbs of people who got caught in the machinery. Alternatively a person would be crushed by the rollers.

The cane juice had to be boiled and then cooled to make molasses and granulated sugar. In a cauldron the syrup separated from water and impurities. In this boiling process there was the danger of being burned or scalded. The syrup was then poured into molds and allowed to dry. When the dried sugar was turned upside down and dropped out of the mold, it had the distinctive sugarloaf shape. Sugar could also be distilled as molasses or rum.

So pervasive and extensive was sugar cultivation on the Caribbean islands that even today sugar remains the major export of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Barbados.

Sugar production is labor-intensive. It requires 1 worker per acre cultivated. Therefore a huge labor force was needed. Unfortunately, the most profitable crops often are labor-intensive. Coffee, tobacco and cotton are other examples of labor-intensive crops. These crops are grown with gangs of labor, on plantations.

THE GREAT DISEASE MIGRATION

Previously I described how the Spaniards enslaved the Indians of the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America and Peru. Experts believe there were 40-50 million Indians in the New World in 1492 when Columbus arrived. But in the decades that followed most of the Indian people died. Today anthropologists sometimes use the term Amerindians to describe the American Indians. One of the people who has studied this is Alfred Crosby, author of The Columbian Exchange. And he explains that there were massive epidemics, and tens of millions of Amerindians died of disease.

The Caribbean was inhabited by Indians such as the Tainos (Arawaks). There were also Indians called the Caribe, whom the Spanish said were cannibals. The Sea and region are named after them. But today, as far as anyone knows, the Caribe are extinct. They died out as a result of disease, even though the sea around the islands still bears their name. By 1600 most of the Indians in the Caribbean were extinct. Some historians believe that 8 million Indians lived on Hispaniola in 1492. After repeated epidemics, by 1535 the Indian population of Hispaniola was almost zero (Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, p. 213). The Europeans brought Africans to the Caribbean to supplement the declining Indian workforce, and ultimately to replace it or substitute for it all together. Today countries like Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, the Bahamas are black countries. This is because the Amerindians died out.

As the article called the Great Disease Migration says, on p. 54, in 1519, before Cortes, there were 25-30 million people in Mexico. In 1532 there were 17 million. In 1548 there were 6 million. In 1568, there were 3 million. By 1579 it was down to 2 million. Massive epidemics of smallpox and measles almost exterminated the indigenous Amerindian population.

Please recall that the people of the New World had lived in biological isolation for more than 10,000 years. They had never been exposed to common Old World diseases such as smallpox, cowpox, chicken pox, measles, whooping cough, and the like. People in Europe, Africa and Asia had been in touch with each other for 10,000 years, and had exchanged diseases before. Both Africans and Europeans, and Asians as well, had been exposed to smallpox for thousands of years. Thus Africans and Europeans shared many of the same animals and therefore many of the same diseases.

Many of these diseases in humans actually originated with animals thousands of years ago(see Diamond, p. 207). Coxpox did come from cows. Swine flu did come from pigs. Pigs and ducks did generate influenza. Ducks and geese get herpes, as do horses, and the disease in humans might be simply a mutated form of the original animal disease. Chickenpox is in the same family of viruses as herpes. Cows get a disease called rinderpest. People drink the milk of cows. The rinderpest causes the cow to develop sores and lesions that ooze pus. If people touched these, and then put their fingers in their mouth or touch their eyes or nose or wipe their face then the disease would spread to humans. Scientists now realize that rinderpest in cattle mutated into a human disease- measles. Tuberculosis and smallpox also evolved from pathogens (micro-organisms) carried by cattle. Sheep get anthrax, and people can get it too. Many Old World diseases seem to be mutated forms of animal diseases. Furthermore, in the Old World, people sometimes kept livestock in their homes and villages. Shepherds, swineherds and people who cared for livestock could easily catch diseases from the flocks. The bubonic plague, or Black Death, in Europe, was carried by fleas on rats. But because people in Europe, Africa and Asia had lots of contacts with these domestic animals, they had developed resistance to the diseases.

The Amerindians had never been exposed to these diseases and therefore they had no immunity or resistance, and were utterly defenseless. Partly this was because they did not have the animals (cows, pigs, sheep) that gave rise to these diseases, and they had not experienced the human diseases that had developed from animals thousands of years before in the Old World. Africans and Europeans had many of the same animals (horses, cows, pigs) and so had developed resistance to some of the same diseases. On p. 55 of the article it explains that in 1519 smallpox broke out on Santo Domingo (Hispaniola). Half the population died. From there smallpox spread to Mexico, Panama, South America and the rest of the Caribbean. When Cortes invaded Mexico and attacked the Aztecs in 1521, he carried smallpox with him. A smallpox epidemic broke out. Witnesses reported that that the streets were littered with the bodies of the dead and dying Indians. So many Indians died that the survivors could not bury them. They just knocked their houses down over the bodies. What destroyed the Aztec Empire was not the guns of Cortes and a few hundred followers, but the smallpox epidemic.

At the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, Cortes and his men broke and cut off the aqueducts that carried fresh water into the city. Without fresh water to drink, or for sanitation, smallpox ravaged the city. The stench in the city was unbearable. Again, it was smallpox that destroyed the Aztecs more than anything else.

However I should make it clear that the spread of disease was an accident of history and biology. The Europeans in the 1500s did not do this knowingly or deliberately. It was not calculated or intentional. Europeans did not develop an understanding of germ theory until the late 1700s when Edward Jenner developed an innoculation for cowpox. Up until that time Europeans thought disease was caused by bad vapors or by an imbalance in so-called humors in the body. They bled people with leeches and gave them mercury to correct the imbalance in the humors. Europeans could observe that the Indians of the Caribbean and Latin America died of disease in unbelievable numbers. But they did not know why.

The spread of disease was an unintended consequence of contact between the peoples of the Old World and the New World. Gonorrhea and syphilis had already existed in the Old World.

Because the Indians had no resistance, in the beginning (1490s, 1500s) they could not withstand contact with Europeans and Africans. Africans shared some of the same animals and diseases as Europeans. Contact with the European was not as lethal for the African, from a disease perspective. Ironically, it was the strength of the African in resisting disease that made him a "perfect" slave, or a perfect target.

There were also some diseases that occurred in Africa that did not occur in Europe. There are many different types of malaria, caused by different types of mosquitos. However it was not until about 1903 that Walter Reed discovered that mosquitos carry these diseases.

Even more deadly was trypanosomiasis. It is better known as "sleeping sickness." It is caused by the bite of an African fly called the tsetse fly. In the final stages of the disease a person develops a condition called encephalitis. This is the swelling or inflammation of the brain. It produces coma, and the person dies. Africans have some resistance to trypanosomiasis. Europeans do not, and until the discovery of quinine in 1857 European colonization of sub-Saharan Africa was almost impossible. Trypanosomiasis did not travel from Africa to the New World.

In Peru in the 1520s smallpox killed the Inca ruler, Huayna Capaj, and the heir to the throne, and many of the members of the royal family. A succession struggle erupted, and a civil war, with the Inca empire split into 2 factions. In 1531-32 Pizarro and his men dealt the final blow to an already divided and weakened Inca empire. Pizarro held the Inca ruler, Atahualpa, as prisoner and demanded a huge ransom. After collecting the ransom in gold and silver and precious stone, the Spaniards killed Atahualpa anyway.

In addition to the smallpox epidemics, there was a disastrous measles epidemic in Santo Domingo in 1529.

The consequence of these epidemics was that much of the Amerindian population was wiped out by disease. For the Europeans, this created a labor shortage. In fact, as we have seen, the Europeans did try Indian slavery first, in the Caribbean, Mexico, the Andes. Tens of thousands of Indian slaves were worked to death in the Bolivian silver mines at Potosi. But Indian slavery was not successful because the Indians had no immunity or resistance to Old World diseases and they died quickly, in catastrophic numbers. The Indian population of the Caribbean was virtually wiped out. The planters needed a labor force that could withstand both Old World diseases and tropical diseases like malaria and yellow fever. And by an accident of history, the African had a measure of resistance to the Old World diseases and tropical diseases. In terms of resistance to disease, Africans could withstand contact with Europeans far better than the Indians. On page 56 of the article Charles Merbs of Arizona State U. writes "The fact that Africans shared immunities with Europeans meant that they made better slaves."

Let me hasten to add, however, that you must not get the impression that Africans were indestructible. Africans had resistance to disease. If they got sick, many would recover. But Africans were not utterly immune to disease. Rather, Africans lasted longer than Indians. The Indians would die within weeks and months. Africans might last five years, or seven years, before they succumbed to disease. In the United States, with its frosts that kill many diseases, Africans lasted even longer. But in Brazil, an African who had been on a plantation for seven years was considered long-lived. But in the seven years that he lasted, he had made a fortune for his master.

For the Europeans, they had land (taken from the Indians) and a profitable commodity (usually sugar), but lacked an adequate labor force. This was the problem of labor deficit or labor shortage. They desperately needed a labor force that could tolerate the Old World diseases. They needed a substitute that could replace the Indians. As we know, that alternative or substitute labor force was the Africans.

GLASKER'S CONCLUSIONS

1. We may speculate that if the Indians had not been so susceptible to Old World diseases, the Aztecs and Inca and Maya might have been able to hold off the Spanish a lot longer. Conquest would have been more protracted; taken a lot longer; required a lot more soldiers and guns.

2. If the Indians had not been so susceptible to Old World diseases, then once conquest occurred the Spanish and Portuguese might have had an adequate labor force with the Indians in the New World. With an adequate labor force they would not have had as much need for a replacement.

3. With an adequate labor force in the Americas, the Europeans might have left the Africans alone in Africa.

4. It is critically important to realize that in part the trans-Atlantic slave trade occurred because the Indians died in catastrophic numbers, and the Europeans needed a substitute labor force to replace the Indians. The fate of Africans and Indians was linked by the misfortune of comparative immunity to disease. Some Africans might still have been enslaved. But the number and volume would not have been so great had there not been the mass extermination of the Indians.

5. Part of the explanation of the enslavement of black or African people is racism. But part of it is also economics (or greed), and part of it has to do with comparative immunity and resistance to disease.

6. If Africans had been as susceptible to Old World diseases as Amerindians, the trans-Atlantic slave trade could not have happened. The Africans would not have survived the voyage of 6-8 weeks across the ocean. It would have been pointless to bring shiploads of corpses across the ocean. Biologically, black or African people had better resistance to the Old World diseases than the Indians. Immunologically speaking, they were stronger. Therefore they were highly prized and sought after as slaves. Biology is destiny.The fate of the Indians was mass extermination and near genocide. The fate of Africans was enslavement as a labor replacement and substitute for the Indians. The Europeans did not know WHY the African was stronger, only that he or she was. Ironically, it was the Africans' strength that made them targets.

In 1492 the islands of the Caribbean were inhabited by Indians. One hundred years later the Indians were virtually extinct, and places like Hispaniola, Haiti, Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas had become black societies with a small, armed, white minority. Yet the reason these countries are black today is because of the extermination of the original Indian population and its replacement by Africans.