6 - Plantation economies and societies in the Spanish Caribbean, 1860–1930

Summary

>An overview

During the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries the patterns of sugar production and the sugar trade in the Caribbean changed very little, and what changes there were were either geographical (shifts in production from one island to another) or determined by limited technological innovation. From the 1860s to the 1890s the centuries-old structure of the sugar industry was shattered, to be replaced by completely new forms of production and commerce and by a new form of the end-product itself, a sugar produced to different standards and even shipped in different packaging. The successive developments that occurred in the sugar world during the thirty years from around 1860 affected sugar producers, merchants and consumers; they modified human and labour relations and they altered age-old habits of consumption. This great transformation was at once the cause and the consequence of other economic, social and political factors, and was at the same time connected by innumerable links to other world events such as the crisis of Spanish colonialism, the emergence of the United States as a world power, the rapid developments in science and technology, the universal increase in population and new systems of communications. This great transformation was at once the cause and the consequence of other economic, social and political factors, and was at the same time connected by innumerable links to other world events such as the crisis of Spanish colonialism, the emergence of the United States as a world power, the rapid developments in science and technology, the universal increase in population and new systems of communications.