Brazil on the Atlantic Sugar Trade in the 17th Century

During the first half of the 17th century, trade in Brazilian sugar was as a profitable enterprise, despite Maghrebi piracy and imperial rivalry between the Netherlands and the Iberian Crowns. Then, Brazil was the Western Hemisphere’s main producer of sugar, which attracted high prices in Europe. Trade profitability diminished in the second half of the century as competition from the Caribbean dropped prices in Europe while nominal prices in Brazil were fixed. Regulated shipping reduced price gaps further and increased transaction costs. Finally, French and English mercantilist policies closed their markets to Brazilian sugar, and credit grew increasingly risky in Brazil. To make this trade feasible and profitable, merchants developed of a wide range of maritime transportation strategies, risk mitigation methods, and payment and credit practices. The organization of shipping sought to make the most of the supply and demand along the route and reduce transportation costs with idle cargo space. By mixing more expensive goods along with cheaper products, merchants tried to keep many vessels sailing between those ports to increase the flow of information, to profit from arbitrage, and to spread the risk. Being a semi-luxury item, the value sugar in absolute terms afforded insurance premiums more than the products with lower value per volume traditionally traded by the Dutch. Yet the value of sugar was not as high as Asian spices or Spanish American bullion, therefore, the costs of concentrating shipping in convoys protected by well-armed vessels was burdensome to the sugar trade. Attempts to coerce sailing in convoys and establish monopolies on certain exports (and imports) to Brazil by the Dutch and the Portuguese found fierce opposition among most traders, particularly modest ones. Being quite fungible, easily priced, and widely traded, sugar roughly fit the modern concept of a commodity. As such, it was convenient means of payment and also functioned as commodity money in Brazil, where it was the main merchandise sourced in the colony. As planters grew increasingly indebted, they secured various legal hindrances to their properties’ foreclosure and compulsory acceptance of sugar as payment at officially tariffed prices unless otherwise stipulated, which increased merchants’ credit risk while reducing their gains.

New Christian Family Networks in the First Visitation of the Inquisition to Brazil

This chapter provides a case study of João and Diogo Nunes during the First Visitation of the Inquisition to Brazil (1591–1595). The Nunes brothers were part of a broader commercial network of New Christian merchant families who controlled the sugar trade in northeastern Brazil during its rapid expansion in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. However, the social ascendency of New Christians in colonial Brazil threatened the existing elite who used the Inquisition to banish them via spurious denunciations. Using Inquisition testimony, this chapter will underscore the importance of New Christian networks to the sugar trade. It was their success, which both brought them to the attention of the Inquisition and saved them by virtue of royal intervention.

The rise of the sugar trade and sugar consumption in early British America, 1650–1720*

This article draws on new archival sources to explore how sugar pervaded British North America much earlier that previous scholarly literature has suggested. Sugar arrived in North America with the very first colonists, and was widely available to a variety of consumers across the socio-economic spectrum. The product was foundational to the development of the North American economic world – in the creation of rum distilleries, grocers’ shops and through the use of commodity money. While sugar brought North American colonists closer to Britain through similar consumption patterns and a shared sense of taste, it also began to pull the two countries apart. By 1733, sugar had become a central source of tension between the colony and the metropole; it allowed colonists’ economic relationships to spread much further than Britain, and consequently, as America’s sweet tooth developed, its relationship with Britain began to decay.

Rice in the Time of Sugar

How did Cuba’s long-established sugar trade result in the development of an agriculture that benefited consumers abroad at the dire expense of Cubans at home? In this history of Cuba, Louis A. Pérez proposes a new Cuban counterpoint: rice, a staple central to the island’s cuisine, and sugar, which dominated an export economy 150 years in the making. In the dynamic between the two, dependency on food imports—a signal feature of the Cuban economy—was set in place. Cuban efforts to diversify the economy through expanded rice production were met with keen resistance by U.S. rice producers, who were as reliant on the Cuban market as sugar growers were on the U.S. market. U.S. growers prepared to retaliate by cutting the sugar quota in a struggle to control Cuban rice markets. Pérez’s chronicle culminates in the 1950s, a period of deepening revolutionary tensions on the island, as U.S. rice producers and their allies in Congress clashed with Cuban producers supported by the government of Fulgencio Batista. U.S. interests prevailed—a success, Pérez argues, that contributed to undermining Batista’s capacity to govern. Cuba’s inability to develop self-sufficiency in rice production persists long after the triumph of the Cuban revolution. Cuba continues to import rice, but, in the face of the U.S. embargo, mainly from Asia. U.S. rice growers wait impatiently to recover the Cuban market.

Bringing China to Java

This paper discusses the paramount role of the Oei Tiong Ham Concern (OTHC) of Semarang in the “Buy Chinese Products” movement of the Republican Government during the period 1928–1937 and its attempts to control Java’s sugar trade with China during the same period. In doing so, the paper focuses on the personal relations between Chen Kung-po (Chen Gongbo), the Republican Minister of Trade and Industry, and the OTHC leadership, as well as the close collaboration between the Dutch-educated Peranakan and Totok Chinese business elites of Java in intensifying economic relations between China and Java. The paper thereby reassesses long-held views about attitudes and economic roles of the Westernized Peranakan Chinese elites and questions the usefulness of simplified political frameworks in analyzing the complex dynamics of intra-Asian trade and commerce in the highly politicized business environment of the 1930s.

WOMEN INVESTORS AND THE VIRGINIA COMPANY IN THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

This article explores the role of women investors in the Virginia Company during the early seventeenth century, arguing that women determined the success of English overseas expansion by ‘adventuring’ not just their person, but their purse. Trading companies relied on the capital of women, and yet in seminal work on Virginia Company investors women have received no attention at all. This is a significant oversight, as studying the women who invested in trading companies illuminates broader issues regarding the role of women in the early English empire. This article explores why and how two women from merchant backgrounds, Rebecca Romney (d. 1644) and Katherine Hueriblock (d. 1639), managed diverse, global investment portfolios in the period before the Financial Revolution. Through company records, wills, letters, court depositions, and a surviving church memorial tablet, it reconstructs Romney's and Hueriblock's interconnected interests in ‘New World’ ventures, including in Newfoundland, the North-West Passage Company, Virginia colony, and sugar trade. Studying women investors reveals how trade and colonization shaped economic activity and investment practices in the domestic sphere and also elucidates how women, in their role as investors, helped give birth to an English empire.