In the early modern period, cacao, coffee, tobacco, and sugar were overwhelmingly grown by enslaved Africans on colonial plantations; their popularity in Europe thus drove the brutalisation of Black bodies within the English, Dutch, French, and Iberian empires. (1/12) 
A large number of the c.10.5 million Africans who survived transportation to the New World cultivated these new intoxicants, especially sugar, the most lucrative cash crop of the tropical Americas; c.5.1 million captives worked on sugar estates, mainly in the Caribbean. (2/12)
Harsh and relentless working conditions were a common feature of all plantations, but West Indian sugar estates were ‘in a class of their own’ in terms of barbarity; their mortality rates are thought to have been 50% higher than those of coffee plantations. (3/12)
The production of sugar (and its by-products, molasses and rum) entailed skilled but gruelling labour in hot, swampy conditions over a long crop cycle; cane-holing, tending, and cutting, and the carting of stalks to mills, boiling houses, and distilleries for processing. (4/12)
As on other plantations, this backbreaking work was supervised by drivers, overseers, and estate managers, under constant threat of punishments that included whipping, branding, ear-cropping, castration, and amputation. Diseases such as yellow fever and malaria were rife. (5/12)
These cruelties were rationalised by emerging, institutionalised, and insidious discourses of scientific racism, a spurious theory of white superiority that constructed the exploited Black labourer as a mentally inferior Other. (6/12)
Following its translatlantic export and refinement sugar was enjoyed in various forms by European consumers, but one of its main uses was to sweeten tea and coffee, around which – in a savage irony – C17th/C18th cultures of civility, gentility, luxury, and taste revolved. (7/12)
A ‘discursive or conceptual gap’ insulated the pleasurable consumption of sugar from the violent circumstances of its production; when coerced Black labour was acknowledged, especially in visual representations, it was aestheticised, fetishised, and sanitised. (8/12)
Slavery was also premeditated in the intoxicating spaces of European cities; in London, the Jamaica Coffeehouse, Lloyd’s Coffeehouse, and Garraway’s Coffeehouse were main venues in which captives, slaving vessels, and plantations were bankrolled, insured, and sold. (9/12)
For all of these traumas and indignities, enslaved Africans incorporated the consumption of new intoxicants into their own vibrant cultures; archaeological assemblages from plantation cabins frequently contain tobacco pipes and ceramic tea wares. (10/12)
The boycott of sugar by ‘anti-saccharites’ in the late C18th also played a role in the abolitionist movement, while slavery was also challenged by self-liberated Africans (notably in the Haitian Revolution of 1791) and multi-ethnic crews of rebels, sailors, and bandits. (11/12)
All illustrations via @ExploreWellcome and the Slavery Images database: slaveryimages.org. See also slavevoyages.org, this bibliography (glasgow.rl.talis.com/lists/A8448051…), and the texts below. (12/12)
