Sugar plantations in the Caribbean

• 1. Introduction

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  Sugar plantations in the Caribbean shaped the modern world in ways that are still felt today. At their height, these plantations produced 80 to 90 percent of all the sugar consumed in Western Europe. The islands, most of them small and modest in size, were transformed almost entirely into engines of production. Sugarcane fields and refining mills covered the land from shore to hillside. What drove that transformation, who paid the cost of it, and how did it finally unravel? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Crop Takes Root

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  Portuguese colonizers planted the first sugar plantations in the Americas in the 1550s at a place called Engenho dos Erasmos, on the island of Sao Vincente off the coast of their Brazilian settlement. Sugar moved quickly from a curiosity to an obsession. It grew best on flat coastal land with naturally yellow, fertile soil; the mountainous interiors of most Caribbean islands were too difficult for cane cultivation. The ports that lined those same coasts gave colonial powers a ready path to ship harvested sugar across the Atlantic. As Spain and Portugal amassed enormous wealth from the crop, other imperial states took notice and began moving into the remaining territories of the Americas, eager to replicate what they had witnessed.

  Sugar was not the only crop grown in the Caribbean. Coffee, indigo, and rice also had their place. But none came close to sugar in terms of political weight or economic volume. The sheer scale of production created what historians describe as a unique political ecology, a web of relationships connecting labor, profit, and environmental consequence. European powers competed fiercely, and sometimes violently, for control of the islands. By the middle of the 17th century, the loss of timber needed for the sugar refinement process was already forcing colonial powers into direct conflict with one another over access to the remaining forests. Windmills, introduced to process cane more efficiently, became a critical piece of infrastructure in that contest.

• 3. Dutch Pivot and Island Rivalries

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  In 1630, Dutch forces seized Recife near Pernambuco in what they renamed New Holland, in what is today Brazil. The territory they took over included sugar plantations already worked by enslaved Africans. Among the plantation owners there were Sephardic Jews, described in period sources using the Spanish-coined term Cristao-Novo, or "New Christian." These were people who had adopted a public Christian identity under pressure from the Portuguese Inquisition while maintaining their private traditions. The Dutch, who had long offered support and asylum to Jews fleeing Spanish persecution, folded these owners and overseers into their colonial structure without friction. In 1636, the Dutch even founded the first public synagogue in the Americas in the territory: the Kahal Zur Israel Synagogue.

  Further north, England was pressing its own claims. Colonel James Drax, with interests in Barbados, traveled to Dutch Brazil in 1640 and returned with a triple-roller sugar mill and copper cauldrons for turning sugarcane juice into molasses. That technology had originated in Sicily before spreading to the New World. Barbados absorbed this knowledge and these tools, and it became the sugar capital of the Caribbean and the rum capital of the world. The island held that position of regional dominance for roughly 100 years, until production expanded in larger colonies like Saint-Domingue and Jamaica. By 1706, laws in Barbados that had blocked Jewish ownership of sugar plantations were dropped, though by that point Jewish involvement in rum production had already faded to a minimal role.

• 4. Scale, Slavery, and Power

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  Before 1650, more than three-quarters of the Caribbean islands' population was of European descent. That balance shifted fast. In 1680, the median Barbados plantation held about 60 enslaved people. By 1832, the median plantation in Jamaica had grown to roughly 150 enslaved workers, and nearly one in four enslaved people on the island lived on units holding at least 250. Sugar, as a cash crop, rewarded scale. More hands meant more output, and the system expanded relentlessly.

  The labor of producing sugar was severe. Sugarcane was harvested by hand, and the sucrose inside the stalk spoiled quickly, so the work moved without pause. Extracting the juice required chopping, grinding, pressing, pounding, or soaking, followed by heating until the liquid evaporated and crystals remained. Every step demanded physical effort and technical skill. Women made up the majority of field slaves, and they continued to work through pregnancy and after childbirth. Evidence from the Newton Slave Burial Ground pointed to what researchers described as elevated levels of interpersonal abuse and domestic violence against enslaved women.

  In 1807, the British Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act, which prohibited the trade of enslaved people across the British Empire, including its Caribbean territories. The supply of new enslaved laborers slowed and the system grew harder to sustain. In 1838, following the 1833 Emancipation Bill, more than half a million people in the Caribbean were freed from slavery. After emancipation, plantation owners turned to indentured laborers brought from India, China, Portugal, and other places to continue production.

• 5. The Environmental Toll

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  Christopher Columbus reached the northern coast of Hispaniola in 1492, and Spanish colonization began soon after. By the late 16th century, sugar had become one of the island's central exports, and the forests and soils were already paying for it. Larger farms replaced smaller pre-colonial ones, and those farms demanded moist soil near water sources, which meant deforestation and water pollution appeared early.

  The pattern repeated island by island across different centuries. The Dominican Republic saw the damage in the 16th century. Martinique experienced it in the 17th. Jamaica and Haiti in the 18th. Cuba and Puerto Rico in the 19th. On Nevis in particular, the island was nearly stripped of its forest cover during the mid-17th century as plantations multiplied. Historian Reinaldo Funes Monzote described the result as a "serious deterioration" of the natural environment, carrying socio-economic consequences that persisted long after the plantation era. Among all the environmental problems sugar cultivation produced, the impacts on irrigation and water runoff pollution came to be seen as the most lasting and profound.

• 6. After Slavery

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  The Haitian Revolution ended slavery in Saint-Domingue at the turn of the 19th century, and Haiti's sugar output collapsed. A 2021 study found that historical property rights institutions in Haiti created high transaction costs for converting land to cane production, relative to other Caribbean countries, and those structural barriers kept Haiti from recovering its position as the leading sugar producer. Cuba stepped into that gap. With access to newer technology, including the modern sugar mill that was beginning to spread at the time, Cuba became the most substantial sugar plantation colony in the Caribbean, outperforming the British islands.

  In the 1740s, Jamaica and Saint-Domingue had already emerged as the world's main sugar producers. French engineers in Saint-Domingue built an irrigation system with reservoirs, diversion dams, levees, aqueducts, and canals to push production higher still. That kind of infrastructure investment showed how deeply the sugar trade had embedded itself in the Caribbean economy. The West India Interest, formed in the 1740s when British merchants joined with West Indian sugar planters, gave the trade a direct voice in the British Parliament. In the late 19th and 20th centuries, Puerto Rico's economy came to be dominated by the cane industry, first under Spanish colonial rule and then under the United States. The plantations that remained in the 20th century shifted to wage labor, but large-scale sugar production continued across much of the region well into that century, before European sugar beet cultivation eventually displaced the Caribbean's long dominance of Western Europe's supply.