The Sugar Barons

choi

本文通过一路BBS站telnet客户端发布

The sugar trade |  Sweet and Rich. Economist, Aug 13, 2011
http://www.economist.com/node/21525808
(book review on Matthew Parker, The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies. 2011)

Quote: "A hundred years later [in late 18th century], the trade flowing from Jamaica alone—sugar, slaves and rum, which was made from molasses—was worth more than all the traffic with North America. No wonder the French chose their sugar islands over Canada and Britain’s attempt to hold onto its American colonies was so half-hearted.


Note:
(a) The review says, "In the 15th century Europeans first encountered its sweet delights."

sugar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar

Quote:

"Crusaders brought sugar home with them to Europe after their campaigns in the Holy Land, where they encountered caravans carrying 'sweet salt.'

"In August 1492 Christopher Columbus [in his first voyage] stopped at La Gomera in the Canary Islands, for wine and water, intending to stay only four days. He became romantically involved with the Governor of the island, Beatriz de Bobadilla y Ossorio, and stayed a month. When he finally sailed she gave him cuttings of sugarcane, which became the first to reach the New World.

(b) rum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rum

Quote:

"Rum is a distilled alcoholic beverage made from sugarcane by-products such as molasses, or, directly from sugarcane juice, by a process of fermentation and distillation.

"The first distillation of rum took place on the sugarcane plantations of the Caribbean in the 17th century. Plantation slaves first discovered that molasses, a by-product of the sugar refining process, can be fermented into alcohol.[10] Later, distillation of these alcoholic by-products concentrated the alcohol and removed impurities, producing the first true rums. Tradition suggests that rum first originated on the island of Barbados.

(c) molasses
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molasses
(d) For War of Jenkins’s Ear, see War of Jenkins’ Ear
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Jenkins%27_Ear
(e) buccaneer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buccaneer
(f) The Middle Passage: c.1600 - 1800. PBS, undated.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1p277.html
("The [African] captives were about to embark on the infamous Middle Passage, so called because it was the middle leg of a three-part voyage" from Africa to the New World)

* Triangular trade
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangular_trade
(g) Slave Trade Act 1807
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Trade_Act_1807
("The act abolished the slave trade in the British Empire, but not slavery itself; slavery on English soil was unsupported in English law and that position was confirmed in Somersett's Case in 1772, but it remained legal in most of the British Empire until the Slavery Abolition Act 1833")


--