“The civilization from across the ocean that descended upon these lands was undergoing the creative explosion of the Renaissance: Latin America seemed like another invention to be incorporated, along with gunpowder, printing, paper, and the compass in the budding birth of the Modern Age.”
p. 16.
"Barbados was, starting in 1641, the first Caribbean island where sugar was grown for bulk export, although the Spaniards had planted cane earlier in Santo Domingo and Cuba. It was as we have seen the Dutch who introduced sugar into the British islands; by 1666 Barbados had 800 plantations and more than 80,000 slaves."
"Cane fields devoured all this (previously produced a variety of crops...) and devastated the dense forests in the name a glorious illusion. The island soon found that its soil exhausted, that it was unable to feed its population, and that it was producing sugar at uncompetitive prices.
65
Jamaica entered the eighteenth century with ten times more slaves than white colonists. Its soil too was exhausted."
"...sugar needed hands and more hands."
Haiti, "in 1786 the colony brought in 27,000 slaves, in the following year 40,000 (1787)."
66
"The country was born in ruins and never recovered: today it [Haiti] is the poorest in Latin America."
"by 1806, Cuba had doubled both its mills and its productivity."
67
"By 1850 the US was absorbing one-third of all Cuban trade, selling it more and buying more from it than Spain, whose colony it was..."
"A Spanish traveler found US-made sewing machines in remote Cuban villages in 1859."
71
""The country of sugar imported nearly half the fruit and vegetables it consumed, although only a third of the population had regular jobs and half of the sugar estate lands were idle acres where nothing was produced."
72
"Tropical lands produced sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo, turpentine; a small Caribbean Island had more economic importance for Europe than the thirteen colonies that would become the United States."
p. 133.
Galeano | Du Bois | Paz | Crosby | Mintz
Add to this the fact that the darker races of other parts of the world have, in the last four centuries, lagged behind the flying and even feverish footsteps of Europe, and we face today a widespread assumption throughout the dominant world that color is a mark of inferiority."
The Negro, p. 12.
"For four hundred years, from 1450 until 1850, European civilization carried on a systematic trade in human beings of such tremendous proportions that the physical, economic, and moral effects are still plainly to be marked throughout the world"
The Negro, p. 149.
Galeano | Du Bois | Paz | Crosby | Mintz
"Mexico is the most Spanish country in Latin America; at the same time it is most Indian. . . . . In the United States, the Indian element does not appear.
(362)
"The Indian presence means that one of the facets of Mexican culture is not Western.(363)
"The sickness of the West is moral rather than social and economic . . . But the real, most profound discord lies in the soul.(374)
"The hedonism of the West is the other face of desperation; its skepticism is not wisdom but renunciation; its nihilism ends in suicide and in inferior forms of credulity, such as political fanaticism."
"Our only recourse is the exercise of opposing virtues: tolerance and freedom of spirit."(375)
"the minorities inside as well as the marginal countries & nations outside – do exist. . . . we 'others' make up a majority of the human race, . . . . If the United States is to recover itself it must recover the 'others' -- the outcasts of the Western World."
"John Winthrop wrote from Connecticut in the 1680s that it [Maize] had been the usual diet of 'first Planters in these Parts,' and was still a common food. A half-century later Peter Kalm recorded that while "traveling in America one sees miles of nothing but maize fields."
by 1850: six times the amount of corn than wheat was grown in the US.
"maize was the primary or at least the secondary staple in the diet of a great mass of people. . . ."
Crosby p. 173 .
"History makes it clear that it was the Europeans who had the edge."
Greater Antilles, were the necessary base from which Spanish could "successfully invade the Americas from Europe."
p. 51.
Mintz understanding of culture (inheritance) & society becoming modern:
"the history of sugar in the United Kingdom has been marked by many 'accidental' events, such as the introduction of bitter stimulant beverages in the mid-seventeenth century [1650s]. But sugar consumption's rise thereafter was not accidental; it was the consequences of underlying forces in British society and of the exercise of power."
“Certain facts stand out in the history of sugar between early decades of the seventeenth century (1600s), when the British, Dutch, and French established Caribbean plantations and the middle of the nineteenth century, by which time Cuba and Brazil were the major centers of New World production.”
“Over this long period, sugar production grew steadily, as more Westerners consumed sugar and each consumer used it more heavily. Yet technological changes in the field, in grinding and even in refining itself were relatively minor.”
“Generally speaking, the enlarged market for sugar was satisfied by a steady extension of production rather than by sharp increases in yield per acre of land or ton of cane, or in productivity per worker.”
Page. 36.
Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. 1973-1997.
William Edward Burghardt Dubois, The Negro. New York: Henry Holt, 1915.
Sydney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, 1986.
Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude. New York: Grove Press, 1961 (1950).
Keen and Haynes, The History of Latin America, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.
