Richard Ligon may have been a failed planter, but he was a successful promoter of plantations. His book on Barbados was reprinted in 1673, and, according to April Hatfield, owned by planters in Virginia. She believes his influence there was enhanced by the presence of his brother Thomas, who was a cousin and business partner of William Berkeley. In the late 1650's, Thomas bought 2,000 acres, including some land from William Byrd. Hatfield also thinks Thomas Willoughby may have amplified Richard Ligon’s importance, since Willoughby was the agent for Ligon’s Barbado’s partner, Thomas Modyford.
Ligon didn’t create the structure of the single crop plantation with a cheap, intimidated labor force. That probably happened in Tudor Ireland. What he did was describe how successful men responded to failure within a culturally accepted framework.
When men arrived in Barbados they substituted tobacco in the equation, following the example of Virginia and Maryland. They also replaced the subdued Irish with gangs of indentured servants. They were so successful they failed to make any money: when planters in every colony sent tobacco to London, prices dropped from the glut.
In response to the crisis, Alison Games reports Barbados planters agreed in the 1630's to stop growing tobacco for two years. The problems were repeated in 1640 with a poor cotton crop. That was the year James Holdipp, a land speculator who made money from cotton, tried sugar. Within five years, James Drax had made the crop a success and begun the substitution of slaves for indentured servants.
Thomas Kuhn suggests that when an intellectual structure like the idea of a plantation is new, it’s pliable enough that individuals are rewarded for applying it to new situations. It’s only after time, when there’s less scope for innovation, that the cultural pattern begins to ossify and men begin to blame their failures on their methods rather than examining accepted wisdom.
The tendency to look to the past, rather than experiment was reinforced by religion. Growers in Barbados came from many traditions, including Anglican, Irish Catholic and Scots Presbyterian. As their animosity to Drax shows, most were hostile to John Calvin and Puritanism.
However, while they did not accept Calvin’s idea that an irrational God had determined, before they were born, if they were saved or damned, they did accept the corollary, that success was a sign of grace. Thus, when they were confronted with the failure to make money with a plantation, their response would have been, like good Christians, to reexamine their past actions to see what they had done wrong to violate the natural order of good crops.
In the 1640's, the successful planters were the ones like Drax with the mental abilities to master the distillation process. When he turned to a captive labor force he could train and retain, the flow of knowledge to future small land holders stopped. When Humphrey Walrond was stoking frustrations to find support for the royalists in 1650, many complained Drax was hiding his knowledge, and therefore causing their failure.
Failure was built into the use of sugar because the plant exhausts the soil. For men who did not have the German or Japanese sense of maintaining the quality of land, that meant they needed a constant supply of new land. The solution for failure was migration, more land, more slaves to work that land, and more debt. In 1640, men left Barbados for Trinidad. Then they tried Antigua and Jamaica, then South Carolina. It was a solution with a built in limits: usable land is not an infinite commodity, and after the banning of the slave trade by the British in 1807, neither were slaves.
Kuhn suggests the longer the period of unpredictable results, the more men cling to their ideas, and the more likely a solution, when it comes, will come from an outsider who simply ignores the existing set of solutions. Such concepts are recognized as threats, and, Kuhn says, only become dominant when the followers of the new become more common that defenders of the old.
And so, tobacco and cotton farmers in Barbados attacked Drax before following him.
In the American south, cotton farmers resented the control of New England mill operators who set commodity prices, and thus limited their rewards. Rather than expand their concept of a self-sufficient plantation to one that included its own textile mill, they sought more land to produce bigger crops, unmindful of the arithmetic recognized by building contractors.
When Henry Ford decided the solution to retaining a skilled labor force wasn’t to enslave them, but to pay them more, and noticed the consequence was that he produced more customers, plantation owners were outraged. Their whole economy was built on the cheap labor required to increase their production on new, cheap land for a mill industry that kept commodity prices low, especially after World War I when fashions changed and demand for cotton dropped.
When they finally did bring mills into the south they were substituted into the existing formula. They offered cheap land, meaning few taxes or regulations, and controlled labor. However, there turn out to be limits to how cheap those can be made, and industry owners who have adopted their solution have migrated to areas with even cheaper labor. Again, their failure was inherent in their success: when you look at the areas with serious economic problems today they are along the fall line in the Carolinas where the textile mills have left, and those left behind again are blaming the successful rather than trying to solve the contractor’s conundrum.
Notes:
Cahill, Hugh. "A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1673 Edition," King’s College Book of the Month, September 2007.
Games, Alison. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, 1999.
Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century, 2007.
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962.
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted.
Showing posts with label Plantation Economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Plantation Economy. Show all posts
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Sunday, November 15, 2009
South Carolina - Profits
Economic historians have been arguing for years if slavery was profitable or, alternatively, would slavery have died from its own internal contradictions had there been no Emancipation Proclamation.
The irony is that the conditions that created the big fortunes in Barbados that set people’s expectations were fleeting. As soon as people saw the profits, they entered the business. Governments raised trade barriers which led to more sugar refineries, and less profit for the end-producers. They also restricted transportation, which drove up costs paid by farmers. At the same time, Brazil resumed production and new islands were brought into production, which drove commodity prices down.
Fernand Braudel believes the high profit point in the supply chain for refined sugar was at the point where the raw material was stored in wholesalers’ warehouses. For sugar producers in Brazil, he believes the annual profit was four to five percent, and their production costs were probably lower, over time, than those in Barbados because they could harvest their own fuel and produce some of their own food.
When Richard Ligon arrived in Barbados in 1647, he was told it was better to buy a fully operational plantation than it was to clear land himself. He joined Thomas Modyford and others taking over lands developed by William Hilliard. At the time, they got 500 acres, of which 200 were in sugar, 120 in wood to fuel the mills, 80 in pasture for the animals that worked the mills, 70 in provisions to feed the labor, and the rest in other cash crops.
By 1680, 80% of the land on Barbados was devoted to sugar cane, and planters had to pay for their wood and provisions that came from as far away as the Norfolk area of Virginia. Early settlers in South Carolina began as provisioners to the island.
Although the early planters probably didn’t know it, sugar cane is most profitable during its first years. The grass, like its corn cousin, needs a rich soil and quickly exhausts the available nutrients. After a few years, the farmer must either begin improving the soil, or clear new land.
While sugar cane is a perennial, the quality of the syrup that’s extracted from its saps degenerates with each cutting, so the crop must be replanted every few years anyway. One factor leading to the American civil war was the constant need of southern cotton farmers for new, unexhausted land.
Ligon himself didn’t do very well. He became sick in 1650 and returned to England, just as the confrontation between the Commonwealth and the followers of the deceased Charles I was beginning to affect trade. He hadn’t made enough to repay his English debts, which also had increased in the closing years of the English civil war. He wrote his promotional tract about Barbados in debtors prison.
He made the risks clear: a bad season, a fire, losses at sea, and a man could be ruined. However, he also described the large feasts hosted by James Drax and Humphrey Walrond that bespoke social success. He said Drax didn’t plan to return to England until he could "purchase an estate of ten thousand pound land yearly, which he hop’d in a few years to accomplish."
It was easy for Englishmen to ignore the risks mentioned by Ligon: agriculture had always subjected farmers to random success. What they paid attention to was the possibility that this time a man could "by his own Industry, and activity, (having youth and strength to friends,) raise his fortune, from a small beginning to a very great one."
And so men harnessed themselves to the slave plantation economy he described, oblivious to the fact that it was the land speculator who made his money from cotton, William Hilliard, who sold another plantation in 1654 and retired to England, not Drax. In 1657, some William Hilliard was living in Humphrey Walrond’s old home in Sea, Somerset.
Notes:
Braudel, Fernand. The Wheels of Commerce, 1982, pp193, 273, and The Perspective of the World, 1984, pp156-157.
Cahill, Hugh. "A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1673 edition," King’s College Book of the Month, September 2007.
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted.
Street, James. The Mynster of the Ile", Or, the Story of the Ancient Parish of Ilminster, 1904.
The irony is that the conditions that created the big fortunes in Barbados that set people’s expectations were fleeting. As soon as people saw the profits, they entered the business. Governments raised trade barriers which led to more sugar refineries, and less profit for the end-producers. They also restricted transportation, which drove up costs paid by farmers. At the same time, Brazil resumed production and new islands were brought into production, which drove commodity prices down.
Fernand Braudel believes the high profit point in the supply chain for refined sugar was at the point where the raw material was stored in wholesalers’ warehouses. For sugar producers in Brazil, he believes the annual profit was four to five percent, and their production costs were probably lower, over time, than those in Barbados because they could harvest their own fuel and produce some of their own food.
When Richard Ligon arrived in Barbados in 1647, he was told it was better to buy a fully operational plantation than it was to clear land himself. He joined Thomas Modyford and others taking over lands developed by William Hilliard. At the time, they got 500 acres, of which 200 were in sugar, 120 in wood to fuel the mills, 80 in pasture for the animals that worked the mills, 70 in provisions to feed the labor, and the rest in other cash crops.
By 1680, 80% of the land on Barbados was devoted to sugar cane, and planters had to pay for their wood and provisions that came from as far away as the Norfolk area of Virginia. Early settlers in South Carolina began as provisioners to the island.
Although the early planters probably didn’t know it, sugar cane is most profitable during its first years. The grass, like its corn cousin, needs a rich soil and quickly exhausts the available nutrients. After a few years, the farmer must either begin improving the soil, or clear new land.
While sugar cane is a perennial, the quality of the syrup that’s extracted from its saps degenerates with each cutting, so the crop must be replanted every few years anyway. One factor leading to the American civil war was the constant need of southern cotton farmers for new, unexhausted land.
Ligon himself didn’t do very well. He became sick in 1650 and returned to England, just as the confrontation between the Commonwealth and the followers of the deceased Charles I was beginning to affect trade. He hadn’t made enough to repay his English debts, which also had increased in the closing years of the English civil war. He wrote his promotional tract about Barbados in debtors prison.
He made the risks clear: a bad season, a fire, losses at sea, and a man could be ruined. However, he also described the large feasts hosted by James Drax and Humphrey Walrond that bespoke social success. He said Drax didn’t plan to return to England until he could "purchase an estate of ten thousand pound land yearly, which he hop’d in a few years to accomplish."
It was easy for Englishmen to ignore the risks mentioned by Ligon: agriculture had always subjected farmers to random success. What they paid attention to was the possibility that this time a man could "by his own Industry, and activity, (having youth and strength to friends,) raise his fortune, from a small beginning to a very great one."
And so men harnessed themselves to the slave plantation economy he described, oblivious to the fact that it was the land speculator who made his money from cotton, William Hilliard, who sold another plantation in 1654 and retired to England, not Drax. In 1657, some William Hilliard was living in Humphrey Walrond’s old home in Sea, Somerset.
Notes:
Braudel, Fernand. The Wheels of Commerce, 1982, pp193, 273, and The Perspective of the World, 1984, pp156-157.
Cahill, Hugh. "A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1673 edition," King’s College Book of the Month, September 2007.
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted.
Street, James. The Mynster of the Ile", Or, the Story of the Ancient Parish of Ilminster, 1904.
Sunday, November 08, 2009
South Carolina - Sugar Production
Some try to rationalize the existence of African slaves as necessary to do work that Europeans could not do in a tropical environment where heat and disease killed so many. Many forget, in the time before central heating, winter cold was as fatal as summer heat. Before men discovered germs, diseases killed everywhere and life was short: Richard Ligon arrived in Barbaros during a yellow fever epidemic and in London during the plague.
We also tend to forget the nature of farm work before John Deer and Cyrus McCormick. When sugar cane was introduced into Barbados as a cash crop in the 1640's, there was little about the cultivation and milling that was something indentured servants weren’t already doing.
Most of the labor was used to clear land, plant canes, keep away weeds, and harvest. The work was hard, but it probably wasn’t any worse that what white men were already doing, and continued to do into the twentieth century in the American south, for tobacco.
The harvested canes were taken to a mill where cut up pieces were crushed by rollers and the juice collected. The rollers were turned by oxen who walked an endless circle. The mill required men who understood machinery well enough to keep it clean and repair it when something broke. These, no doubt, were some of the skilled trades the Portuguese recruited from Europe.
The mill operation also required men who understood how to raise, train, and work animals. Some of the indentured servants, especially those with some knowledge of the agricultural trades, probably already knew this, and would have considered it a better job than working in the fields.
The third step was entirely new - the boiling of extracted syrup until sugar precipitated out. The heat was intense in the enclosed buildings where a fire was kept stoked to keep the liquid cooking. However, the actual work of skimming the impurities from the pans and transferring the liquid from pan to pan had to be easier than clearing land or harvesting cane.
The problem with sugar, or for that matter tobacco and cotton, is that it needs more labor than one man can provide, but are only profitable if labor costs are low. Families didn’t exist in Barbados at the time sugar was introduced, so small landowners couldn’t rely on their sons. Partnerships were usually only a few men, who could not produce enough to live well.
The problem for the would-be planter was how to avoid the trap of the local construction contractor whose costs are fixed and rise when work increases. They could and did make small improvements in the process, but not enough to cover the costs of production and debt.
When Ligon arrived in 1647, men were just mastering the first two steps. He noted, they originally cut the cane too soon, when it was a year old, but learned to wait three more months. They also needed help knowing the best way to plant the canes and harden the rollers. These things they could, and did, learn from men who traveled to Brazil.
They were still having problems with distillation. He said many of the early barrels were more molasses than sugar, and weren’t worth shipping to England. By the time he left, three years later, many had solved that problem as well.
Once men had mastered the production of sugar and all producers were equally proficient, it meant the only ways men could increase their profits was to increase production by lowering the price of land and labor. The one led to the perpetual demand for cheap or free land. Within years, men were leaving Barbados for other islands.
The other led to the search for cheap, reliable labor. Wage labor was impossible in a frontier society where men could only get food and shelter from plantation owners. Indentured servants had proved a problem, and became a bigger problem for large landowner when they were free and competing for land and export markets on a small island. Convicts would be tried, but they were probably even less tractable. Indians flat refused to work, or died when they were imported from other places.
Slaves, seen through the prism of visits to Brazil and the enthusiastic advice of Dutch traders willing to provide them at a price, seemed like the only innovation that might break the cost cycle and provide reward for effort. What now is seen as a great moral wrong, then was seen as progress.
Notes:
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted.
We also tend to forget the nature of farm work before John Deer and Cyrus McCormick. When sugar cane was introduced into Barbados as a cash crop in the 1640's, there was little about the cultivation and milling that was something indentured servants weren’t already doing.
Most of the labor was used to clear land, plant canes, keep away weeds, and harvest. The work was hard, but it probably wasn’t any worse that what white men were already doing, and continued to do into the twentieth century in the American south, for tobacco.
The harvested canes were taken to a mill where cut up pieces were crushed by rollers and the juice collected. The rollers were turned by oxen who walked an endless circle. The mill required men who understood machinery well enough to keep it clean and repair it when something broke. These, no doubt, were some of the skilled trades the Portuguese recruited from Europe.
The mill operation also required men who understood how to raise, train, and work animals. Some of the indentured servants, especially those with some knowledge of the agricultural trades, probably already knew this, and would have considered it a better job than working in the fields.
The third step was entirely new - the boiling of extracted syrup until sugar precipitated out. The heat was intense in the enclosed buildings where a fire was kept stoked to keep the liquid cooking. However, the actual work of skimming the impurities from the pans and transferring the liquid from pan to pan had to be easier than clearing land or harvesting cane.
The problem with sugar, or for that matter tobacco and cotton, is that it needs more labor than one man can provide, but are only profitable if labor costs are low. Families didn’t exist in Barbados at the time sugar was introduced, so small landowners couldn’t rely on their sons. Partnerships were usually only a few men, who could not produce enough to live well.
The problem for the would-be planter was how to avoid the trap of the local construction contractor whose costs are fixed and rise when work increases. They could and did make small improvements in the process, but not enough to cover the costs of production and debt.
When Ligon arrived in 1647, men were just mastering the first two steps. He noted, they originally cut the cane too soon, when it was a year old, but learned to wait three more months. They also needed help knowing the best way to plant the canes and harden the rollers. These things they could, and did, learn from men who traveled to Brazil.
They were still having problems with distillation. He said many of the early barrels were more molasses than sugar, and weren’t worth shipping to England. By the time he left, three years later, many had solved that problem as well.
Once men had mastered the production of sugar and all producers were equally proficient, it meant the only ways men could increase their profits was to increase production by lowering the price of land and labor. The one led to the perpetual demand for cheap or free land. Within years, men were leaving Barbados for other islands.
The other led to the search for cheap, reliable labor. Wage labor was impossible in a frontier society where men could only get food and shelter from plantation owners. Indentured servants had proved a problem, and became a bigger problem for large landowner when they were free and competing for land and export markets on a small island. Convicts would be tried, but they were probably even less tractable. Indians flat refused to work, or died when they were imported from other places.
Slaves, seen through the prism of visits to Brazil and the enthusiastic advice of Dutch traders willing to provide them at a price, seemed like the only innovation that might break the cost cycle and provide reward for effort. What now is seen as a great moral wrong, then was seen as progress.
Notes:
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted.
Sunday, November 01, 2009
South Carolina - Indentured Servants
It’s clear why the Dutch West Indies Company would have promoted slavery. What’s not clear, is why sugar planters like James Drax were willing to go into debt to buy slaves when they lived on an overpopulated island. However, their shared experiences were formed the decade before when Barbados was land rich and labor poor.
James Holdipp arrived in 1629 as the agent of the proprietor, James Hay, the Earl of Carlisle, and for a syndicate of London merchants that controlled 10,000 of Hay’s acres. Within a year, he had his own plantation.
In 1637 he told Hay’s estate he intended to ship indentured servants to work his 600 acres. Since he had control of so much land, he could barter. In 1644, April Hatfield says he gave Thomas Applewhite 50 acres and canes for 25 servants. By then, indentures were seen as commodities which could be bought and sold. It was a short step from trading contracts to trading the people they represented.
Many of the servants came through Bristol, which began registering indentures in 1654 in response to complaints that people were being kidnaped. From those records, Larry Gragg has learned the majority came from Bristol and the surrounding towns, not the country, and that many who had skills were trained in the wool or agricultural trades. About half were unskilled minors.
Wool prices had peaked in the area in 1620, and depression had followed. By 1634 conditions were so bad, people were mutinous and the young willing to leave. The average age of servants in Barbados in 1635 was 23, with most between 15 and 25. In 1642, 92% were male. With no women, masters and men spent their free time drinking.
The frontier society was essentially unregulated, and some, if not many, of the masters treated their servants badly. When Richard Ligon lived on the island between 1647 and 1650, he said the worst took their men straight from the ship to the field, and assumed they’d build their own shelters without supplying tools or material on their own time. By then slaves, who cost more and were owned for life, were treated better.
Although the early contracts varied in their terms and were often so vague masters could abuse them, many of the early servants were independent by 1640. Alison Games said many formed partnerships with friends to put together enough capital to buy small holdings, and that 43% of the landowners had been servants five years before.
While many large landowners feared servant rebellions, Ligon reported servants usually resorted to more subtle forms of retaliation. The basic diet was boiled corn and beans; meat only appeared when an ox died. Workers had no incentive to treat the animals well that powered the sugar mills.
More damaging were fires set by careless smokers that could destroy a crop or buildings. Ligon reported Holdipp and Sylvester Constantine had such fires the year he arrived. He also noted some masters were known to treat their men well, including Humphrey Walrond, who imported some clothing that absorbed sweat better than the linen men left England wearing.
When Philip Bell arrived as governor in 1641, he began introducing social institutions, including ones that regularized the living arrangements of servants. However, by then it was too late to rebuild the trust between masters and independent servants that would have been necessary for the two groups to work as partners in the sugar industry.
In 1656, James Holdipp’s brother Richard was with the military in Jamaica where he suggested that some of the men join him in developing a sugar plantation. He was court marshaled, and the officers, echoing Walrond, told the men they would be slaves, and later warned Cromwell he was "so extremely hated for his cruelties and oppression, which they say he hath executed in the Indies." In 1664, Thomas Modyford led settlers from Barbados to the island with sugar, slaves and a contract for convict labor. By then, it was the only permitted way.
Notes:
Games, Alison. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, 1999.
Gragg, Larry Dale. Englishmen Transplanted: the English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660, 2003.
Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century, 2007. Henry Applewhite, cousin of Thomas, is the one who migrated from Barbados to the Norfolk area of Virginia with his family and slaves.
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted; Richard’s brother, Thomas, migrated to Virginia where he bought land from William Byrd and entered business dealings with William Berkeley.
Venables, Robert. The Narrative of General Venables, edit by Charles Harding Firth, 1900, on Richard Holdipp.
James Holdipp arrived in 1629 as the agent of the proprietor, James Hay, the Earl of Carlisle, and for a syndicate of London merchants that controlled 10,000 of Hay’s acres. Within a year, he had his own plantation.
In 1637 he told Hay’s estate he intended to ship indentured servants to work his 600 acres. Since he had control of so much land, he could barter. In 1644, April Hatfield says he gave Thomas Applewhite 50 acres and canes for 25 servants. By then, indentures were seen as commodities which could be bought and sold. It was a short step from trading contracts to trading the people they represented.
Many of the servants came through Bristol, which began registering indentures in 1654 in response to complaints that people were being kidnaped. From those records, Larry Gragg has learned the majority came from Bristol and the surrounding towns, not the country, and that many who had skills were trained in the wool or agricultural trades. About half were unskilled minors.
Wool prices had peaked in the area in 1620, and depression had followed. By 1634 conditions were so bad, people were mutinous and the young willing to leave. The average age of servants in Barbados in 1635 was 23, with most between 15 and 25. In 1642, 92% were male. With no women, masters and men spent their free time drinking.
The frontier society was essentially unregulated, and some, if not many, of the masters treated their servants badly. When Richard Ligon lived on the island between 1647 and 1650, he said the worst took their men straight from the ship to the field, and assumed they’d build their own shelters without supplying tools or material on their own time. By then slaves, who cost more and were owned for life, were treated better.
Although the early contracts varied in their terms and were often so vague masters could abuse them, many of the early servants were independent by 1640. Alison Games said many formed partnerships with friends to put together enough capital to buy small holdings, and that 43% of the landowners had been servants five years before.
While many large landowners feared servant rebellions, Ligon reported servants usually resorted to more subtle forms of retaliation. The basic diet was boiled corn and beans; meat only appeared when an ox died. Workers had no incentive to treat the animals well that powered the sugar mills.
More damaging were fires set by careless smokers that could destroy a crop or buildings. Ligon reported Holdipp and Sylvester Constantine had such fires the year he arrived. He also noted some masters were known to treat their men well, including Humphrey Walrond, who imported some clothing that absorbed sweat better than the linen men left England wearing.
When Philip Bell arrived as governor in 1641, he began introducing social institutions, including ones that regularized the living arrangements of servants. However, by then it was too late to rebuild the trust between masters and independent servants that would have been necessary for the two groups to work as partners in the sugar industry.
In 1656, James Holdipp’s brother Richard was with the military in Jamaica where he suggested that some of the men join him in developing a sugar plantation. He was court marshaled, and the officers, echoing Walrond, told the men they would be slaves, and later warned Cromwell he was "so extremely hated for his cruelties and oppression, which they say he hath executed in the Indies." In 1664, Thomas Modyford led settlers from Barbados to the island with sugar, slaves and a contract for convict labor. By then, it was the only permitted way.
Notes:
Games, Alison. Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, 1999.
Gragg, Larry Dale. Englishmen Transplanted: the English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660, 2003.
Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century, 2007. Henry Applewhite, cousin of Thomas, is the one who migrated from Barbados to the Norfolk area of Virginia with his family and slaves.
Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, 1657, much extracted; Richard’s brother, Thomas, migrated to Virginia where he bought land from William Byrd and entered business dealings with William Berkeley.
Venables, Robert. The Narrative of General Venables, edit by Charles Harding Firth, 1900, on Richard Holdipp.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
South Carolina - Capitalism
If Barbados borrowed its technology from Brazil, why didn’t it also borrow the organization of production?
One answer is the logic of capitalism. It was in the interest of the shippers financing the introduction of sugar production into Barbados to sell as many things as possible to the growers. It was better to sell every farmer some rollers and a set of coppers than it was to sell to only the wealthiest. It was better to tell every farmer he should own slaves than it was for them to enter into shared labor partnerships or recruit cheaper indentured servants that arrived on competing English ships.
The more business transactions, the higher the profits for the Dutch West Indies Company and the merchant bankers in Amsterdam and London. Of course, the fact money had to be leant to finance the purchases, meant merchant bankers were only willing to support the most credit worthy. However, their agents in Bridgetown could always hold the promise of future loans to the poor to discourage them from considering other options.
If this sounds as cynical as the recent efforts by banks to sell and resell mortgages that would never be paid because the profits were in the trades, not the interest, it’s because both are the consequence of a system that values wealth from trade over that from production. And like our current financial crisis, the reasons for the Dutch behavior lay in its recent past.
When Isabella I of Castile married Ferdinand II of Aragon, they consolidated control over most of the Iberian peninsula. In the early years, the Dutch were more interested in competing in the East Indies with Portugal for the spice trade than they were in the New World ruled by Spain.
Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter, Juana, married into the powerful Hapsburgs of Austria. Her son, Charles V, was Holy Roman Emperor when Martin Luther refused to rescind his 95 theses at the Diet of Worms in 1521. In 1549, Charles changed the status of the lowland provinces along the North Sea from dependencies of individual German princes into his personal domain. Since many supported the Reformation, they were drawn into conflict with Charles, who introduced the Inquisition to strengthen his position in the Seventeen Provinces.
The Protestant provinces rebelled against Charles’ son, Philip II, in 1581. In 1585 Alessandro Farnese seized their central city, Antwerp, and expelled the Protestants. His city of Genoa took over the banking system. The men with knowledge of sugar refining moved to Amsterdam, which became the new trade center.
Charles V had married his first cousin, the sister of the then king of Portugal. In 1581, the same year the Dutch rebelled, Philip inherited the Portuguese throne and banned the Dutch from their traditional trade with Brazil.
The Dutch were traders who had no choice but to exploit changes in market conditions. In 1621 the United Provinces didn’t renew their truce with Spain and instead chartered the Dutch West Indies Company. It immediately began attacking the Spanish controlled sugar lands of Brazil, finally taking power in Recife in 1629. Maurice of Nassau arrived as local governor in 1637. The next year, the company took Sno Paulo de Loanda, the Portugese slave trade center off the coast of Angola.
While the Dutch company put together the pieces to dominate the sugar and slave trades, it only had a few years to exploit its monopoly. The Portuguese regained their independence from Spain in 1640. The Brazilians evicted the Dutch in 1654. Oliver Cromwell passed the first Navigation Act in 1651 that forbade British colonies from using foreign, especially Dutch, carriers. Charles II issued his act in 1660, setting off trade wars between the major powers that destroyed Amsterdam’s monopoly on sugar refining.
It was in the twenty years between the time Portugal became independent and the accession of Charles II that the Dutch were able to develop Barbados as a new market for slaves and a new source for raw materials to feed their sugar refineries. After that, their ships only carried about five to six percent of the slaves.
Notes:
Emmer, Pieter C. The Dutch Slave Trade 1500-1850, 2006, reviewed for Institute of Historical Research website by J. L. Price.
One answer is the logic of capitalism. It was in the interest of the shippers financing the introduction of sugar production into Barbados to sell as many things as possible to the growers. It was better to sell every farmer some rollers and a set of coppers than it was to sell to only the wealthiest. It was better to tell every farmer he should own slaves than it was for them to enter into shared labor partnerships or recruit cheaper indentured servants that arrived on competing English ships.
The more business transactions, the higher the profits for the Dutch West Indies Company and the merchant bankers in Amsterdam and London. Of course, the fact money had to be leant to finance the purchases, meant merchant bankers were only willing to support the most credit worthy. However, their agents in Bridgetown could always hold the promise of future loans to the poor to discourage them from considering other options.
If this sounds as cynical as the recent efforts by banks to sell and resell mortgages that would never be paid because the profits were in the trades, not the interest, it’s because both are the consequence of a system that values wealth from trade over that from production. And like our current financial crisis, the reasons for the Dutch behavior lay in its recent past.
When Isabella I of Castile married Ferdinand II of Aragon, they consolidated control over most of the Iberian peninsula. In the early years, the Dutch were more interested in competing in the East Indies with Portugal for the spice trade than they were in the New World ruled by Spain.
Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter, Juana, married into the powerful Hapsburgs of Austria. Her son, Charles V, was Holy Roman Emperor when Martin Luther refused to rescind his 95 theses at the Diet of Worms in 1521. In 1549, Charles changed the status of the lowland provinces along the North Sea from dependencies of individual German princes into his personal domain. Since many supported the Reformation, they were drawn into conflict with Charles, who introduced the Inquisition to strengthen his position in the Seventeen Provinces.
The Protestant provinces rebelled against Charles’ son, Philip II, in 1581. In 1585 Alessandro Farnese seized their central city, Antwerp, and expelled the Protestants. His city of Genoa took over the banking system. The men with knowledge of sugar refining moved to Amsterdam, which became the new trade center.
Charles V had married his first cousin, the sister of the then king of Portugal. In 1581, the same year the Dutch rebelled, Philip inherited the Portuguese throne and banned the Dutch from their traditional trade with Brazil.
The Dutch were traders who had no choice but to exploit changes in market conditions. In 1621 the United Provinces didn’t renew their truce with Spain and instead chartered the Dutch West Indies Company. It immediately began attacking the Spanish controlled sugar lands of Brazil, finally taking power in Recife in 1629. Maurice of Nassau arrived as local governor in 1637. The next year, the company took Sno Paulo de Loanda, the Portugese slave trade center off the coast of Angola.
While the Dutch company put together the pieces to dominate the sugar and slave trades, it only had a few years to exploit its monopoly. The Portuguese regained their independence from Spain in 1640. The Brazilians evicted the Dutch in 1654. Oliver Cromwell passed the first Navigation Act in 1651 that forbade British colonies from using foreign, especially Dutch, carriers. Charles II issued his act in 1660, setting off trade wars between the major powers that destroyed Amsterdam’s monopoly on sugar refining.
It was in the twenty years between the time Portugal became independent and the accession of Charles II that the Dutch were able to develop Barbados as a new market for slaves and a new source for raw materials to feed their sugar refineries. After that, their ships only carried about five to six percent of the slaves.
Notes:
Emmer, Pieter C. The Dutch Slave Trade 1500-1850, 2006, reviewed for Institute of Historical Research website by J. L. Price.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
South Carolina - Sugar Plantations
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.
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.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
South Carolina - Barbados
South Carolina’s history begins with the ambitions of men who looked to the Caribbean islands where Spain was generating so much wealth. In 1625, soon after the Virginia Company started settling North American, men financed by London merchant William Courteen landed on Barbados, far east in the Lesser Antilles near the coast of South America.
The early years were spent attracting settlers and finding a commercial crop to pay their rents to Courteen and then the Earl of Carlisle, James Hay, who granted 10,000 acres to London merchants to repay his own debts. James Holdrip arrived in 1629 as Hay’s agent, but instead acquired 1,000 acres of his own.
Karl Watson says that within 20 years, there were 11,200 farms and plantations on the 166 square mile island, before much of the interior was cleared of forest. In 1650, Larry Gragg says 75% of the holdings were less than 50 acres and 21% less than 10 acres with a population of 23,000 in 1655.
Much of the early labor came from indentured servants, many of them young tradesmen who shipped from Bristol. They probably are the ones who bought small pieces of land when they had earned their freedom, and may have resold even smaller, unregistered pieces to increase their own capital.
The principal export was tobacco, a labor intensive crop that can be cultivated on small tracts. However, the leaf quality was poor, and prices fell when better tobacco from Virginia flooded the London market and civil war broke out in England between Parliament and the forces supporting the king, Charles I, in 1642.
Earlier, the Dutch West Indies Company had introduced sugar cultivation and African slave labor into the eastern horn of Brazil known as Pernambuco. In the ongoing wars for supremacy between European powers that form the background of many colonial enterprises, the Dutch took control of that section of Brazil in 1630 and built the port of Recife.
Holdrip and James Drax were the first to attempt to grow sugar commercially on Barbados in the early 1640's. Drax solved the first critical problem, converting the cane into something which could be shipped profitably, when he imported a mill and distilling apparatus along with someone with knowledge from that Dutch enterprise.
The other problems were amassing enough land to make the mill cost effective and controlling the labor to do the hard work of clearing and maintaining land. The Dutch had already learned the maximum acreage in northeastern Brazil was about 1500 acres, according to David Watts. Men began clearing the interior and buying out smaller land holders. In 1640 Drax owned 400 acres; in 1654 he had 700 acres worked by 200 African slaves.
The conversion to a capital intensive crop that depended on African slave labor occurred just as the English Civil war was sending men to the island who had lost any wealth they might have had. In 1646, captured supporters of Charles I were sentenced to the island as servants, followed by officers from both sides. Irish rebels captured at Drogheda in 1649 were exiled, as were the prisoners taken in the closing battles of 1649. Men who supported Penruddock's uprising in Somerset were sent in 1655.
Meantime, the Portuguese retook Pernambuco from the Dutch in 1654, exiling the very people who best understood how to grow sugar cane profitably. Some, at least, immigrated to Barbados. In 1668, the Netherlands took over Surinam, which gave the Dutch refugees a new home and sent some of the English settlers who grew sugar there to Barbados.
Dutch merchants were more interested in underwriting the sugar trade, than they were in producing the crop, and so advanced credit to those who could provide them the necessary collateral. They naturally favored the larger land owners trying to buy or clear land over the ones just rising above subsistence. At the time, people claimed 10,000 left between 1645 and 1665 for newly opened islands, a number Archibald Thornton thinks exaggerated. Still, the racial composition of the population changed from 86% white in 1643 to 34% in 1664.
Neither Cromwell nor Charles condoned the trade with the Dutch, and the efforts of each hindered the efforts of men trying to grow sugar. Planters continued to squabble over the competing grants made to Courteen and Hay until Charles II expropriated the island in 1663 and imposed a yearly tax.
By the middle 1660's, there probably wasn’t a person on the volatile island who didn’t have a personal grievance against an action by some form of the British government. Such tales of personal loss are the ones passed on within families that propel and exaggerate the quarrels of the past into the future, especially among those families who don’t have newer, more positive experiences to replace them.
Notes:
Gragg, Larry Dale. Englishmen Transplanted: the English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660, 2003.
Thornton, Archibald Paton. "The Organization of the Slave Trade in the English West Indies, 1660-1685," The William and Mary Quarterly 12:399-409:1955.
Watson, Karl. "Slavery and Economy in Barbados," BBC website 1 May 2001.
Watts, David. The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492, 1990.
The early years were spent attracting settlers and finding a commercial crop to pay their rents to Courteen and then the Earl of Carlisle, James Hay, who granted 10,000 acres to London merchants to repay his own debts. James Holdrip arrived in 1629 as Hay’s agent, but instead acquired 1,000 acres of his own.
Karl Watson says that within 20 years, there were 11,200 farms and plantations on the 166 square mile island, before much of the interior was cleared of forest. In 1650, Larry Gragg says 75% of the holdings were less than 50 acres and 21% less than 10 acres with a population of 23,000 in 1655.
Much of the early labor came from indentured servants, many of them young tradesmen who shipped from Bristol. They probably are the ones who bought small pieces of land when they had earned their freedom, and may have resold even smaller, unregistered pieces to increase their own capital.
The principal export was tobacco, a labor intensive crop that can be cultivated on small tracts. However, the leaf quality was poor, and prices fell when better tobacco from Virginia flooded the London market and civil war broke out in England between Parliament and the forces supporting the king, Charles I, in 1642.
Earlier, the Dutch West Indies Company had introduced sugar cultivation and African slave labor into the eastern horn of Brazil known as Pernambuco. In the ongoing wars for supremacy between European powers that form the background of many colonial enterprises, the Dutch took control of that section of Brazil in 1630 and built the port of Recife.
Holdrip and James Drax were the first to attempt to grow sugar commercially on Barbados in the early 1640's. Drax solved the first critical problem, converting the cane into something which could be shipped profitably, when he imported a mill and distilling apparatus along with someone with knowledge from that Dutch enterprise.
The other problems were amassing enough land to make the mill cost effective and controlling the labor to do the hard work of clearing and maintaining land. The Dutch had already learned the maximum acreage in northeastern Brazil was about 1500 acres, according to David Watts. Men began clearing the interior and buying out smaller land holders. In 1640 Drax owned 400 acres; in 1654 he had 700 acres worked by 200 African slaves.
The conversion to a capital intensive crop that depended on African slave labor occurred just as the English Civil war was sending men to the island who had lost any wealth they might have had. In 1646, captured supporters of Charles I were sentenced to the island as servants, followed by officers from both sides. Irish rebels captured at Drogheda in 1649 were exiled, as were the prisoners taken in the closing battles of 1649. Men who supported Penruddock's uprising in Somerset were sent in 1655.
Meantime, the Portuguese retook Pernambuco from the Dutch in 1654, exiling the very people who best understood how to grow sugar cane profitably. Some, at least, immigrated to Barbados. In 1668, the Netherlands took over Surinam, which gave the Dutch refugees a new home and sent some of the English settlers who grew sugar there to Barbados.
Dutch merchants were more interested in underwriting the sugar trade, than they were in producing the crop, and so advanced credit to those who could provide them the necessary collateral. They naturally favored the larger land owners trying to buy or clear land over the ones just rising above subsistence. At the time, people claimed 10,000 left between 1645 and 1665 for newly opened islands, a number Archibald Thornton thinks exaggerated. Still, the racial composition of the population changed from 86% white in 1643 to 34% in 1664.
Neither Cromwell nor Charles condoned the trade with the Dutch, and the efforts of each hindered the efforts of men trying to grow sugar. Planters continued to squabble over the competing grants made to Courteen and Hay until Charles II expropriated the island in 1663 and imposed a yearly tax.
By the middle 1660's, there probably wasn’t a person on the volatile island who didn’t have a personal grievance against an action by some form of the British government. Such tales of personal loss are the ones passed on within families that propel and exaggerate the quarrels of the past into the future, especially among those families who don’t have newer, more positive experiences to replace them.
Notes:
Gragg, Larry Dale. Englishmen Transplanted: the English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660, 2003.
Thornton, Archibald Paton. "The Organization of the Slave Trade in the English West Indies, 1660-1685," The William and Mary Quarterly 12:399-409:1955.
Watson, Karl. "Slavery and Economy in Barbados," BBC website 1 May 2001.
Watts, David. The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492, 1990.
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