British West Indian sugar collapsed via glut, depletion, and beet sugar competition.

Evidence

In Jamaica, and the older colonies, no combination of the events that were proving so fortunate for Brazil, Cuba, and other sugar-producing areas seemed to favor the colonial sugar producers. Having lost domination of the sugar market in the latter half of the previous century, their fortunes continued to plummet, buffeted by such diverse occurrences as market glut, drought, soil depletion, overproduction, and the re-routing of capital. Even the power of the West Indian planters was seen to turn against its possessors: the mercantilist trade restrictions that had preserved the English “home market” for them now became the limit to which they were bound. Technology even railed against them with the development by French interests of beet sugar to challenge the cane. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 773