Luscious Capitalism: Sugar, Peaches & the Motor of History

The Motor of History: Scale and Causation
Perhaps no two thinkers have influenced academic history as much as Karl Marx and Max Weber. Both sought to explain the rise of capitalism, but came to very different conclusions about the “motor of history”, or what causes change over time. For Marx, the answer was simple: material conditions cause change. The development of capitalism was “the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.” Ideologies may have changed, but only in answer to this economic base. In fact, Marx writes to his middle class reader, “Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property.” Or as he puts it later, one’s consciousness “changes with every change of his material existence.”

Change is somewhat more complex in Weber’s account, resulting from a “tremendous confusion of interdependent influences.” But ideas and beliefs—what Weber calls “the magical and religious forces”—are his most important causal motors. Weber roots the rise of capitalist accumulation in “the permanent intrinsic character of [the capitalists’] religious beliefs”—predestinarian Calvinism, to be precise. People had to believe certain things before the organization of European society could change from feudal to capitalist.

Apart from the question of causation is the problem of scale. Immanuel Wallerstein is Marxian in his notion of what causes change, but he argues forcefully (against other Marxists) for a global scale. The appropriate unit of analysis, for Wallerstein, is the world-system. “The only totalities that exist or have historically existed,” he declares, “are mini-systems and world-systems, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there has been only one world-system, the capitalist world-economy.” Nation-states and regions, according to Wallerstein, fall into one of “three structural positions” of world capitalism: core (northwest Europe), periphery (Latin America), and semi-periphery (southern Europe). He is adamant that comparative studies that do not take these structural positions into account are misguided, since from the beginning, “capitalism was . . . an affair of the world-economy and not of nation-states.” It is incorrect to speak of the Cuban plantation economy when it was merely the plantation sector of the world economy that happened to be located in Cuba.

Latin American historian Steve Stern responds with case studies from the periphery, asking if “production, labor, and commerce in the silver and sugar sectors [are] best explained by their functional value to the world-system.” His answer, in short, is no. The world-system, rather, “constituted only one of several great ‘motor forces’” which also included “popular strategies of resistance and survival within the periphery” and elite American interests. In practice, labor relations in Latin America and the Caribbean obeyed a “law of diversity”—as Stern describes it, “a shifting combination of heterogeneous relations of production in a pragmatic package.” In other words, Wallerstein’s theory does not adequately account for the ability of local actors to limit and redirect forces of global capitalism toward their own interests.

Caribbean Sugar: Explanatory Models
These two tensions—material or ideological causes, global or local scales—appear throughout the literature on slavery, emancipation, and sugar plantations. As Stern notes, Caribbean sugar represents a case study singularly “sympathetic” to world-systems theory. Eric Williams, one of the earliest scholars on the topic, takes a decidedly Marxian approach to causation. “Without a grasp of these economic changes,” he argues, “the history of the period is meaningless.” This materialism can also be seen in his explanation of African slavery. “The reason [for Negro slavery] was economic, not racial,” he insists; “it had to do not with the color of the laborer, but the cheapness of the labor.” Abolition, in the same way, had less to do with humanitarian idealism and more to do with the British movement against mercantilist monopolies: “The rise and fall of mercantilism is the rise and fall of slavery.”

Williams also holds to an essentially Wallersteinian conception of the world-system, although he preceded Wallerstein by thirty years. Williams argues that mercantile capitalism begat slavery, which begat industrial capitalism, which in turn destroyed slavery. Although he gives credit to the slaves’ many forms of resistance—“indolence, sabotage, and revolt”—his analysis emphasizes the power of global capitalism over the struggles of local actors. Williams makes clear early on that his framework is global, going back and forth between Parliament and businessmen in England and planters and slaves in the Caribbean.

Manuel Moreno Fraginals agrees with Williams that ideology played little role in the abolition of slavery, which he describes as “a means to the end of rationalizing the confused labor system efficiently.” And like Williams, he emphasizes the forces of international capitalism in transforming Cuban sugar production and society in the late nineteenth century. But he also plays particular attention to the importance of technological change in effecting this transformation of sugar plantations into industrial sugar plants, from ingenios to centrales.

This change increased demand for raw cane, accelerated production and consolidation of smaller farms, and widened the gap between industry and agriculture, which retained some “traditional backwardness.” Mechanization of the milling process replaced the slave-owning planters with a “new type of industrial entrepreneur” and, by making labor demand more uneven, exchanged slaves for an “army of unemployed workers” eight months out of the year. Even the sugar itself changed. Whereas some importers had offered up to 21 different grades of sugar packed in various containers; the new industrial sugar was of one grade in standardized packages. The storability of this white sugar and the increased production quickly created a surplus, which allowed importers to force down prices. This, combined with the expansion of beet sugar and the hegemonic U.S. Sugar Act of 1871, forced the Spanish Caribbean into the U.S. economic orbit. Political annexation would follow with the Spanish-American War of 1898.

César Ayala is similarly convinced of the power of international capitalism in the Spanish Caribbean. Indeed, for Ayala, the large-scale industrial capitalism introduced by the U.S. after 1898 is the most direct cause of the region’s underdevelopment. But like Stern, he is also convinced of the importance of local conditions in limiting the effect of global forces. The U.S. “imperial construction,” he writes, “was created jointly with local allies.” In Cuba, the industrial transformation was welcomed by an Adam-Smith-inspired ideology of free trade and free labor—a nod to Weber, perhaps—and mitigated by the power of prosperous local farmers. In the Dominican Republic, on the other hand, which supported a large peasantry but few yeomen, sugar became a “foreign enclave” of imported employers and workers. Despite the overwhelming power of the “worldwide economic system,” then, Ayala is hopeful. If we understand “how much of the stuff of empires is made of local class relations,” we can also see “how, and how much, it can be transformed locally.”

Sidney Mintz is a Marxian materialist. Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez was a Cuban nationalist. But like Ayala, both emphasize local relations of production over global. For Guerra, writing in 1927 as one of the earliest historians of sugar, Cuba represents a potential counterexample to the sad fate of most Caribbean plantation societies. Unlike the English and French colonies, Guerra argues, Cuba had had time to develop a more self-sufficient society. This autonomy provided initial protection from the ravages of plantation monoculture—which was not established in Cuba until the late 1800s—and suggests hopeful possibilities for the future. “As long as Cubans own and till most of the land,” Guerra concludes, “Cuban society will be a vigorous reality.”

Mintz is somewhat friendlier to a global framework, stressing as he does the importance of European consumption in the development of sugar plantations. But local conditions are also important in his account of Caribbean history. Mintz attends particularly to the transformation of slaves into peasants. “Caribbean peasantries,” he argues, “represent a mode of response to the plantation system and its connotations, and a mode of resistance to imposed styles of life.” These peasantries and the alternative lifestyle they represented crippled the plantation economies in some places, especially Haiti. In other places, they generated a wide array of legal, political, and economic responses, as ruling elites sought to maintain a landless labor force.

Other students of Caribbean sugar plantations argue that political power was as critical as economic in shaping the history of sugar production. In his explanation of the persistence of sugar plantations after slavery in British Guiana, Alan Adamson focuses on the ability of planters to preserve their political power. “Sugar survived,” Adamson concludes, “and the colony remained economically monocultural, politically oligarchic, and socially exclusive.” Indeed, he goes as far as to argue that in terms of social relations, emancipation changed almost nothing.

Rebecca Scott also privileges local politics above global capitalism. But she takes a very different view from Adamson, arguing that, in Cuba, slaves and former slaves played a significant role in the transition from slavery to free labor. “Slaves and, later, patrocinados [apprentices] had their own ideas about freedom,” she intones, rejecting rigid Marxist materialism, “and through their actions they altered and accelerated the transition.” The strategies they employed had important “consequences for both subsistence and citizenship,” for even a small piece of land could confer suffrage in Cuba after independence. Scott notes that the public activity of former slaves was only effective “if the state did not close down that public space”—in Louisiana, the state succeeded in shutting down that space. But her story is one of local actors checked by large scale forces, an interesting twist on the more common Caribbean tale of large scale forces limited by local actors.

Georgia Peaches: Suggestions for Further Study
The peach industry has never had the international scale of sugar. In part this is because the peach is one of dozens of fruits, while cane sugar is one of only two main sources of sucrose (the other being sugar beets). But peaches are also a fresh market crop. They are not easily stored, like sugar, and even less easily shipped than other fresh goods. Nevertheless, the extensive historical literature on sugar suggests some helpful questions for the neglected history of peaches. What follows, then, is a series of speculative remarks on how scholarship on sugar might—forgive me—sweeten the study of peaches.

Large-scale market forces—although more regional and national than global—have had a direct effect on the commercialization of the peach crop. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, peaches were primarily grown for hog fodder and for making peach brandy. In cash-poor frontier areas of the south, fruit brandy even served as a kind of currency. With the decline of cotton cultivation around the turn of the century, however, peaches began to be produced in larger numbers for more distant markets. Dependence on these markets also had a hand in the decline of the southern peach industry, as growers in South Carolina and Georgia struggled to compete with their Californian counterparts. In a limited way, this process parallels the way the most profitable sugar cultivation moved from Barbados to Saint-Domingue (Haiti) to Cuba.

Technological change also helps explain the rise of peaches. Manuel Moreno Fraginals would likely have appreciated the role played by the refrigerated railroad car in making the peach a viable commodity. Suddenly, northern markets were in reach of southern growers, who took advantage of a longer growing season and supposedly sweeter peaches. The growers—some of whom were northerners themselves—in turn competed among themselves for access to rail lines. The most successful peach farmers had spur lines laid directly to their packing houses.

Finally, there are the local political dynamics and worker-employer relations highlighted by Sidney Mintz, Rebecca Scott, and Alan Adamson. Most germane, perhaps, is the question of land ownership. How was land distributed in peach-growing regions? Did large-scale growers attempt to prevent their labor supply from procuring their own plots, like Caribbean planters? To what extent did smallholder agriculture constitute a counterpoint to the vast orchards of the powerful?

There was no transition from slave to free labor for peach cultivation, since the commercialization of the crop occurred entirely after emancipation in the U.S. But labor in the peach industry has experienced another kind of transition. It seems clear that blacks—former slaves and their children—composed most of the initial labor force, joined, no doubt, by some poor whites. Today, nearly all workers are Latinos on temporary work visas. What explains this transition? How much were laborers able to redirect the momentum of market forces and the decisions of the growers?

Like small-scale versions of West Indian planters, growers and their families often formed a kind of local aristocracy. Some acquired a reputation for fast living and inspired the resentment of working-class whites. Were these peach growers forward-looking members of Marx’s entrepreneurial bourgeoisie, or wistful patriarchs driven by a Weberian nostalgia? To what degree did their understanding of themselves as men, Christians, or southerners affect their decisions?

It is “strange,” Eric Williams famously lamented, “that an article like sugar, so sweet and necessary to human existence, should have occasioned such crimes and bloodshed!” This perspective would seem to be alien to the history of US peach cultivation. Peaches are a happy crop, sweet, sensual, and nostalgic. And certainly there have been no crimes on the scale of the sugar industry. No destruction of native populations, no enslaving of Africans, no economic imperialism for the sake of the peach.

But it is precisely at this point that the historiography of sugar can contribute to the history of peaches, because nothing is produced without cost. What were the costs—social, economic, ecological, political—of peach production? The sense of tragedy that informs the history of sugar need not overwhelm the peach with melodrama to be illuminating.

NOTES
Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Elizabeth Sifton Books of Viking Press, 1985), xxiv
Mintz, Sweetness and Power, xxiv.
See Matthew Klingle, “Spaces of Consumption in Environmental History,” History and Theory 42 (December 2003): 94-110; Coffee, Society, and Power in Latin America, ed. William Roseberry, Lowell Gudmundson, and Mario Sampler Kutschbach, (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); The Second Conquest of Latin America: Coffee, Henequen, and Oil during the Export Boom, 1850-1930, ed. Steven C. Topik and Allen Wells (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998); Sterling Evans, Bound in Twine: the history and ecology of the henequen-wheat complex for Mexico and the American and Canadian Plains, 1880-1950 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007); Warren Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Tucker, Richard. Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Pete Daniel, Breaking the Land: The Transformation of Cotton, Tobacco, and Rice Cultures since 1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Douglas Sackman, Orange Empire : California and the Fruits of Eden (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Pierre Laszlo, Citrus: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels and Ernest Untermann (New York: The Modern Library, 1936), 786.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto with selections from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Capital by Karl Marx, ed. Samuel H. Beer (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1955), 27.
Marx and Engels, 30.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 91.
Weber, 27.
Weber, 40.
Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 16, no. 4 (Sept., 1974), 390.
Wallerstein, 401.
Steve J. Stern, “Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World-System in the Perspective Latin America and the Caribbean,” The American Historical Review 93, no. 4 (Oct., 1988), 849.
Stern, 857-858.
Stern, 870.
Stern, 858.
Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994 [1944]), 210.
Williams, 19.
Williams, 136.
Williams, 202.
Williams, ix.
Manuel Moreno Fraginals, “Plantations in the Caribbean: Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Stanley L. Engerman, Manuel Moreno Fraginals, and Frank Moya Pons, eds., Between Slavery and Free Labor: The Spanish-Speaking Caribbean in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 19.
Moreno Fraginals, 5.
Moreno Fraginals, 5, 6.
César J. Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom: The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean, 1898-1934 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 184.
Ayala, 246.
Ayala, 246-247.
Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez, Sugar and Society in the Caribbean: An Economic History of Cuban Agriculture: New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964 [1927]), 155.
Mintz, Caribbean Transformations, 97. See also his Sweetness and Power.
Mintz, Caribbean Transformations, 132-133.
Alan Adamson, Sugar without Slaves: The Political Economy of British Guiana, 1838-1904 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 255.
Adamson, 11.
Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860-1899 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), xii.
Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 119.
Scott, Degrees of Freedom, 264.
Jack Temple Kirby, Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 14-15.
PJ Newcomb, “Culture and Horticulture: Making the Georgia Peach, 1850-1900,” presentation given at the Workshop on the History of the Environment, Agriculture, Technology, and Society, University of Georgia, October 2007; Marilyn Neisler Windham, Peach County: The World’s Peach Paradise (Dover, NH: Arcadia Publishing, 1997), 31.
Williams, 27.