The relentless revolution: a history of capitalism by Joyce Appleby, Joyce Oldham Appleby Page A

the earth. In China, Poland, and especially Ireland the potato’s bounty translated into earlier marriages and more children. When an airborne blight struck potato plants in 1846, 1848, and 1852, Ireland lost an eighth of its population from starvation or disease—one million of its eight million people. Whole families died in their cottages; corpses were found in the fields. The devastation, acerbated by British trade policies, sent another quarter of Ireland’s men and women to the New World.
    The greatest New World contribution to the feeding of Europe came from the sugar produced in the islands of the Caribbean. Columbus brought sugarcanes from Portuguese Madeira on his second voyage. The Portuguese brought sugar cultivation from São Tomé off the West African coast to their New World colony of Brazil in the early sixteenth century. Quickly exhausting the gold deposits on Santo Domingo, settlers turned to the production of sugar as a surer source of profit. Spanish colonial administrators helped by making available sugarcanes and the slaves to cultivate them. An intensive kind of agriculture, usually involving work gangs of slaves, sprang up quickly. Unknown in the European world of family-based farming, these factories in the fields were the first examples of highly capitalized agriculture. Farm work, always drudgery, became brutal when the workers were enslaved and beaten to work harder. The sex ratio in the sugar plantations was often as high as thirteen men to one woman. Sugar was instantly popular in Europe. Soon the English, Dutch, and French seized Caribbean islands of their own during the seventeenth century to exploit this new and lucrative crop.
    We all know the appeal of sugar in our candies, cookies, cakes, and coffees, but we’ve lost an appreciation of the critical role it played in the European diet. Sugar did more than furnish calories and sweetness; it made possible storing fruits and vegetables throughout the year. There were only three ways to keep food before artificial refrigeration: salting it, preserving it, or drying it. Sugar was the essential ingredient for preserves. Before a nineteenth-century German chemist showed how to extract sugar from beets, people had to import it from those tropical areas where sugarcane flourished. Its desirability and rarity did for the islands of the West Indies what oil later did for the Middle East: It gave them a monopoly of a commodity whose demand continued to climb for two centuries.
    While the trade in exotic spices, luxury fabrics, and precious metals from the East and West Indies added great variety to the lives of well-off Europeans, they only slowly penetrated the closets and tables of ordinary men and women. Cities had grown, and trade among European countries had greatly increased, but in the rural areas men and women, their children and servants continued to work as they had for centuries, tilling the soil, cutting timber, and caring for livestock. People did not assign themselves parts in these agrarian activities; rather these responsibilities were allocated through the inherited statuses of landlord, tenant, cottager, and laborer. Supplying the food, fabric, and shelter for survival occupied the time of the whole family with a strict gender division of labor persisting. Customs, not incentives, regulated the flow of tasks that followed the calendar. Mix in a little ignorance, isolation, and superstition, and you can see that changing this order would involve a complicated choreography of incentive, innovation, and pure chance.
    It took two hundred years before the volume coming from Caribbean plantations lowered the price of sugar enough to bring this wonderful ingredient into most people’s pantries. In 1750, 1 percent of calories in the English diet came from sugar; by the opening of the twentieth century it was 14 percent. The prospect of high profits suppressed any qualms about enslaved labor. Sugar became one more item in the expanding