Women and the Politics of Sugar, 1792

Abstract

IN THE LAST DECADE of eighteenth century, West Indian became an important symbol of proliferating chains of interdependence between England and its Caribbean colonies. Grown in farthest reaches of British Empire, was eaten in intimacy of British homes; it linked colonial sites of production of raw materials with domestic sites of their consumption. To analyze discourse surrounding consumption in late eighteenth century is thus to examine intersection of colonial policy and domestic policy. Such an analysis also must interrogate semantic slippage between the domestic, meaning British national territory, and the domestic, meaning interior of family. Defining these two domestic sites in terms of one another helps to reveal crucial role played by constructions of female virtue in articulating relationship between Britain and its West Indian colonies. The following analysis concerns innovative role that female domestic virtue played in deciding nature of Britain's involvement with Caribbean slavery. To understand how an idea of female virtue, specifically compassion and sympathy, could assume such an important part in abolitionist campaign, however, we first need to understand how that campaign played these disembodied virtues off against threats of bodily contamination that were suggested in abolitionist rhetoric surrounding Britain's investment in slave economies of Caribbean. Although refined cane was all but unknown in England before seventeenth century,2 by beginning of eighteenth century a supporter of production of sugarcane in Caribbean could declare that sugar has been called a superfluity. Undoubtedly at its first introduction it was so. But constitution, from long habits of luxury, becomes so much changed as to render that at last necessary, which originally owed its introduction to caprice and effeminacy.3 In this formulation, fruits of colonial expansion have a direct effect on bodies of consumers: transatlantic trade has altered British constitution. Supporters of trade in slave-grown described it not as a sensuous luxury, but as a physical necessity. One such supporter says, my reason tells me, and