How Sugar Had Become A Dominant Product Of Sugar Production

In the late 17th and 18th centuries, sugar had become a dominant product in numerous plantations in the Caribbean. The French and British continually competed over the dominance in these particular sites. The British sugar industry finally took hold in 1655, and lasted up until the mid-19th century (Background Essay). Due to the ideal land masses for sugar production (Doc. 1, 2, 6, 7), a large slave work force (Doc. 8, 9, 10, 11), high consumer demand (Doc. 3, 5), and competition in the trading industry (Doc. 4, 12), the sugar trade was able to flourish and remained a part of the global economy. As shown in documents 1, 2, 6 and 7, one driving force of the success of the sugar trade was finding the perfect area to establish sugar†¦show more content†¦However, it was undeniable that these conditions were significant in the success of producing this export. In document 6, Belgrove demonstrated that owning a plantation was a big deal, requiring the owner to obtain possessi on of a plethora of supplies and items, such as windmills, a boiling house, and the amount of slaves and animals necessary. All of these things were needed in order to run a fully-functioning plantation. The date that this document was made, 1755, indicates that it could be a credible source, for it was created in the middle of the diffusion of the sugar trading business. In document 7, Mintz states that mainly wealthy English families owned plantations. Men like Robert Hibbert and John Gladstone collected a great amount of wealth through the ownership of the large areas of land and through the amount of sugar produced by the African slaves (Doc. 7). This denotes the view that an effective way to gain wealth was through the ownership of the sugar plantations, thus encouraging others to do so as well; ultimately the desire for more wealth leads to an increase in the production of sugar and boosts the development of the sugar trade. However, Williams failed to mention how long it too k these plantation owners to acquire that much wealth, which can cause the readers of this excerpt to think that these owners had instant success.