The biggest contribution Barbados made to South Carolina is the slave-based plantation economy, and all the social and legal controls that flowed from it.
What I’ve never quite understood is why plantations needed to be so large that they required enforced labor, be it indentured servants, captured Indians, or African slaves. It may simply be that size became a status symbol, especially after a few men were able to acquire such large tracts in Tudor Ireland. But, until the introduction of agricultural machinery in the nineteenth century, each additional acre of land brought under cultivation meant a proportional increase in labor hours, which in turn meant management problems that increased exponentially.
I’ve talked to several construction contractors who are puzzled that when their customers double their income doesn’t follow. Instead, they buy more materials, hire more employees, and personally work more hours. It was after that sort of momentum led to an unstable labor force in 1913 that Henry Ford began improving the assembly process itself.
It may be the scarcity of labor that limited the growth of farms in the area where I was raised in Michigan that influences my understanding. The early settlers weren’t that different from those who arrived in Barbados or South Carolina: land speculators and men with limited means, sometimes very junior members of important eastern families, looking for opportunity.
In Cameron, Patricia Averill found those who stayed on their claims for more than a few years became wheat farmers and those that did best usually had sons or other dependent family members to help. The speculators, who didn’t resell immediately, continually mortgaged their lands to newcomers, most of whom moved on, leaving speculators with their land and the accrued wealth from rents.
The first thing farmers needed was access to markets. In the earliest years, they drove wagons a hundred miles to Detroit to sell their harvest to traders shipping it east on Lake Erie and the Erie Canal. They welcomed the state’s efforts to build railroads, and didn’t prosper until those railroads were fully functional.
The second thing they needed was a local mill to grind their wheat for food. At the time, mills were turned by running water, and speculators had claimed all the potential sites before others even saw the land. The mill owners didn’t wish to own all the farm land that produced their raw material, and most farmers didn’t have the technical skills to build and operate their own mills.
From the very beginning, settlers from all economic classes assumed financial transactions would bind them together, that none were sufficient unto themselves.
In contrast, we’re told, when sugar production was introduced to Barbados from Brazil, it brought with it the assumption that each grower would have his own mill, and would need enough acres to justify the mill’s operation. The social structure of the island changed quickly when men with access to capital took over most of the land, and pushed out the men who’d been making a living on small holdings and weren’t willing to work for others for low wages.
Yet, large, self-sufficient plantations with captive labor weren’t inherent with sugar cane. The culture and technology for processing the crop was introduced to the Mediterranean by the Arabs when they expanded west after the death of Mohammed. The Portuguese took cuttings to the island of Madeira and then to Brazil where they improved the milling techniques; Antwerp became the primary refiner.
The large Portugese-Brazilian landowners, the senhores de engenbo, owned the mills which were maintained by skilled tradesmen recruited from Europe. They didn’t expect to raise all the cane needed to make their mills profitable. Instead, they made arrangements with small landowners, the lavradores de cana, to process their cane in exchange for a percentage. They also leased their spare land to poorer men as share croppers.
People at each level of production owned slaves, so slaves lived in smaller units. The wealth was distributed, but so was the risk of poor harvests, and the problems of labor management. To be sure there were contractual problems between mill owners and dependent farmers, but there are always problems when individuals need to co-operate.
The Brazilian model of the 1640's with its community of interest was more like Cameron in the 1830's than it was an antecedent for the self-sufficient, isolated units of South Carolina.
Notes:
Bethell, Leslie. Colonial Brazil, 1987.
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