Sugar and the Visual Imagination in the Atlantic World, circa 1600-1860 (JCB Digital Catalogue)

Sugarcane and its products were imaged in many ways in the early modern period, but least often as the white crystals that we commonly associate with the sweetener. The cane itself was frequently depicted in a variety of contexts, didactic, symbolic, and aesthetic; it can be found on title pages of travel literature, in satiric prints and children’s books. Molasses and rum made their way into visual representation less frequently, although here we see how rum came to signify in both pro- and anti-slavery imagery.

One of the costs of slave-produced sugar was conflict at every level. Slaves rebelled individually and collectively against their masters. Wars were waged in the Atlantic and around its perimeter over control of sugar colonies and the slave trade. Nature was often viewed as a hostile force, bringing hurricanes, extreme heat, and diseases that attacked both humans and the sugarcane. Although most prints concerned with the sugar economy projected peace and harmony, others—across a wide range of genres—portrayed conflict as violent, grotesque, and even comic.

Early modern maps of the sugar colonies signaled the importance of sugar in a number of ways—most of all in delineating the ever-increasing amount of land given over to plantations, forts, ports, and other infra-structure required for the cultivation, processing, transportation, and defense of the commodity. Left unmapped is what this huge agro-industrial complex destroyed—such as the forests (and the animals that lived within in them) in islands like Barbados. A striking exception to this is Hapcott's manuscript estate plan. These maps were all produced between the 1630s and '70s—a period of huge growth of the sugar industry in Barbados and the initial British conquest and development of Jamaica. Their makers all used cartographic conventions like icons and vignettes to enliven the pictorial effect, but represented the sugar economy in different ways. Like other printed images, maps were frequently reprinted and re-published, often without the permission of the original designer or publisher. Such printing practices remind us that questions of intellectual property, as well as real property, were involved in the culture of sugar.

The natural history of sugarcane (saccharum offinarum, a member of the grass family) claimed the interest of early modern travellers and natural historians as well as planters and others involved in the sugar trade. Many of the artists and designers had not seen an actual plant, and based their images on other images. How the cane is represented and used varies considerably over time and genre. These examples from the JCB collection show that the didactic and the symbolic function of the sugarcane were often closely interlinked.

Sugar production was an agro-industrial process; it began with sugarcane cultivation, followed by a multi-step extraction that usually ended with the production of semi-refined sugar. This muscovado sugar was then shipped to Europe for further refining. Rum and molasses were also made, but rarely pictured in production. Images that focus on the agricultural part of the process tend to rework the European genre of the georgic landscape, which pictures rural life as happy, bounteous, and harmonious. The extraction/refinement process often centers on the mill and uses another European genre, the composite view, which condenses into one composition stages of a process that usually take place at different times and in different spaces.

The sugar mill is an icon of American sugar production. Called ingenio (engine) in Spanish and engenho in Portuguese, these words were used to describe entire sugar estates, rather than “plantation.” In print culture the mill signifies white ingenuity (from the same root as ingenio). What remains invisible in these images is the knowledge of sugar production possessed by the slaves who did the work.

Cannibalism was long associated with the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Sub-Saharan Africa. It acquired new meaning when abolitionists used it to dramatize the suffering and death of slaves who produced sugar for European consumption. Abolitionists turned the tables on Europeans by accusing them of being cannibals when they ate sugar tainted with the flesh and blood of slaves. White abolitionists and black abolitionist Olaudah Equiano also famously wrote that Africans believed white people were cannibals. Europeans were rarely pictured as cannibals—this was a literary trope. The pro-slavery caricature by Gillray shown here is a sensationalized exception.

While sugar underwrote the Jamaican economy, artist George Robertson avoided all but a distant view of a plantation in order to make the Jamaican landscape a suitable subject for high art. The artist drew on European landscape conventions such as framing side-screens; alternating planes of light and shadow; and winding roads and rivers, designed to draw the viewer's eye into the center of the compositions.

These are the most aesthetically ambitious views of Jamaica published in the eighteenth century. The engravings (four from a set of six) are based on paintings by Robertson, who was brought to Jamaica by William Beckford of Somerley. Beckford was a planter who hoped to use Robertson's views in his history of Jamaica, but he ended up in debt and in prison, and published his book without illustrations.

These lithographs were copied from a set of ten aquatints designed by William Clark, an overseer on an Antiguan plantation. Clark's set, titled Ten Views of the Island of Antigua, was published in 1823, a decade before slavery ended in the British West Indies. The lithographs were published for a women's society dedicated to charity work in the colonies sometime between 1833 and 1837—around Emancipation. Accompanied by a large-print narrative describing each image, they were designed for use in front of the classroom as teaching aids for blacks—likely black children, given the child-centered focus of the Ladies' Society. Through this re-use of images, the West Indian interest attempted to maintain the structure of the master-slave labor regime on the sugar plantations after the end of slavery.

K. Dian Kriz (Professor Emerita of History of Art and Architecture, Brown University), guest curator, with assistance from Susan Danforth (Curator of Maps and Prints); Elena Daniele (JCB Stuart Fellow 2012-13), curatorial assistant.