Sugar Cane Flashcards
(34 cards)
Book: What plant family does sugarcane belong to?
The grass family
Book: What plant supplies close to 40% of the world’s supply of table sugar?
Sugar beet
Book: Where is almost half of the world’s cacao grown?
West Africa - Ivory Coast
Book: How did cotton slavery numbers change from 1790 to 1810?
The number of slaves doubled
Book: How many cotton slaves were there in 1860?
~4 million
What is the no. 1 crop in the world based on tonnage produced?
Sugar cane. (Saccharum officinale)
Where did sugar cane originate?
Papua New Guinea (With pigs! and bananas!).
How long ago was sugar cane domesticated?
~10 000 years (same as bananas!).
Where and when was sugar crystallization invented?
In India (350 BC).
How did sugar cane cultivation spread?
Slowly at first through India and Persia, but them spread around the Mediterranean by Muslims and further by Christians.
Who brought sugar cane to the New World?
Columbus brought it to Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic) while the Portuguese brought it to Brazil.
When was the first sugar cane harvest in the New World? By 1520, how many sugar mills had been built there?
- Thousands established by 1520.
How was sugar received in Europe?
Replaced honey in most baking purposes, also filled a void as an addition to hot drinks (the “handmaiden of hot drinks”).
How many sugar refineries existed in Amsterdam in 1650?
55.
How many sugar refineries existed in London in 1753?
80.
How many sugar refineries existed in Orleans, Bordeaux, Nantes, and Marseille combined in 1790?
77.
What new products were brought about because of the mass production of sugar? What else accompanied sugar production?
Jams, candy, confectionary, cake, rum. With all this new stuff came slavery though (so like, not a great trade-off…).
What replaced gin as the drink of the British navy? The cultivation of which plant made this possible?
Rum replaces gin. It’s one of the new products you can make with sugar from sugar cane.
How did Spanish Hispaniola become a French colony called Saint-Domingue?
French pirates who had been living on Tortuga (a nearby island) decided to go legit and moved there.
What other title was Saint-Domingue known by? What kind of economy led to this?
The “Pearl of the Antilles”, the richest producer of raw materials in the French Empire. The colony doesn’t profit though, only France (extraction economy).
What is mercantilism an early form of?
Capitalism.
In the 1780s, what percentage of the European sugar market came from Saint-Domingue? What about the European coffee market?
Sugar: 40%
Coffee: 60%
How did the mercantile triangle work between Europe, Africa, and the New World colonies?
- Colonies supply raw materials to Europe
- Europe manufactures goods from raw materials and trades them in Africa for slaves
- Slaves shipped to the colonies to produce more raw materials for Europe
Because the human capital required for sugar production was so unsustainable, how many new slaves had to be brought in each year to replace the ones who’d died producing sugar?
~40 000 slaves/year (yikes).
