“Sugar Is Made with Blood”: Consumer Protests against Slave-Grown Sugar in the 18th- and 19th-Century Transatlantic World

This paper examines the transatlantic boycott of slave-grown sugar in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.  Cane sugar production used a brutal combination of agriculture and manufacture, requiring both substantial capital and a large, enslaved workforce.  Slave mortality rates on sugar plantations were fifty percent higher than on plantations producing other commodities.  As Cuban planters often said: “Con sangre se hace azúcar” — “Sugar is made with blood.”  Yet, the sweetness of sugar did not reflect the violence of its production.  For abolitionists, the challenge was to convince consumers that the crystalline substance had been tainted by the blood of African slaves. 

My paper traces the genealogy of the boycott of slave-grown sugar beginning with eighteenth-century Quaker reformers, notably John Woolman and Joshua Evans.  British activists transformed Quaker abstention into a popular, ecumenical movement in the 1790s and the 1820s.  In the 1810s and 1820s, African Americans appropriated the rhetoric of the slave-sugar boycott to protest colonization schemes and to demand black citizenship.  Additionally, Quaker poet Elizabeth Margaret Chandler used the metaphor of blood-stained sugar to justify the participation of women and children in the boycott.  Meanwhile, businessmen promoted ethical alternatives such as maple sugar and beet sugar. These varied responses to slave-grown sugar reveal the ways in which supporters appropriated the boycott for specific political, religious, and economic purposes. 

Tracing the development of the slave-sugar boycott reveals both the continuities and the changes of the boycott, as well as the shifting political context of the boycott and the abolitionist movement.  Understanding how abolitionists clarified the connection between slave labor and domestic goods has implications for modern consumers as activists continue to seek out new strategies for raising consumer awareness of how their goods are produced.