European substitutes for cane sugar undercut the Caribbean’s value as a slave economy

Evidence

In 1747, precisely the year when Beckford called sugar the wheat of the Caribbean, a Prussian chemist, Marggraf, in a communication to the Royal Academy of Science and Literature in Berlin, showed that various kinds of beetroot, the sweet taste of which was already known, contained sugar that could be extracted and crystallized in a fairly simple way. Where the Welsers and the Elector of Brandenburg-Prussia had failed in the attempt to gain for Germany a place in the Caribbean sun, beet sugar indicated that that place was after all unnecessary. … Thomas Jefferson, in his turn, in 1790, looked to maple sugar, produced by child labour, as a substitute for slave-grown cane. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 2043

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery argument about economic drivers of abolition, and to Robinson’s broader point that capitalism’s internal dynamics, not moral awakening, made slavery obsolete.