Covered sugar bowl, c. 1745, silver, 11.5 x 9.1 cm (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art)
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:04] We’re in the galleries at the Wadsworth Atheneum, looking at a lovely sugar bowl. We think about sugar as part of our everyday lives, but sugar has somewhat of a dark history.
Brandy Culp: [0:16] The history of sugar, in a nutshell, you go from India, the Middle East, where it’s grown, to Portugal, Madeira, the Azores, and then it hops to the New World.
Dr. Harris: [0:28] We know, for example, that Christopher Columbus brought a sugar plant to the New World on his second voyage.
Brandy: [0:34] He knew that it was a crop that might do very well in the New World environment.
Dr. Harris: [0:39] It was seen as a crop that could be incredibly profitable. People wanted sugar.
Brandy: [0:45] Sugar was called “white gold.” We think about our sugar addiction today, but that’s hundreds of years old, and our desire for sweetness may be as old as mankind.
Dr. Harris: [0:57] Imagine sugar as this luxury item, doled out a little bit at a time because it was so precious.
Brandy: [1:04] Mostly reserved for the absolute wealthiest individuals in European society. Kings and queens, nobility. It’s really in the 1530s, with the sugar industry developing in Brazil, that you’re starting to get this massive influx, and sugar prices go down.
Dr. Harris: [1:23] Sugar prices start to go down because production increases in the West Indies and the Caribbean.
Brandy: [1:29] Still, it is for only the highest echelons. There are four beverages that are very important to the popularity of sugar.
Dr. Harris: [1:39] I can think of three — coffee, tea, and chocolate. All of which would benefit from added sugar.
Brandy: [1:46] Absolutely, and then there’s punch.
Dr. Harris: [1:48] Growing sugar is very labor intensive. This is where the darker part of sugar’s history comes in.
Brandy: [1:55] The slave trade developed around the sugar industry as early as the 1440s in Madeira, in the sugar colonies in Portugal. Then it’s transplanted to Brazil, and millions of individuals are abducted, relocated to work in the plantations.
[2:15] The work is incredibly harsh, and the average enslaved worker on a sugar plantation had a working life expectancy of seven years.
Dr. Harris: [2:26] So a global trade between Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
Brandy: [2:32] From New England to England, to Africa, to the West Indies, sometimes you’re stopping in the South — Charleston, Norfolk. Then you’re coming back to New England with a cargo full of mostly sugar and rum — those are the big moneymakers — but also spices, citrus fruits, salt from the Turks and Caicos.
Dr. Harris: [2:55] It’s important to remember, too, that molasses is being produced as a byproduct of the production of sugar. Molasses is what you use to make rum, and it’s also used as sweetener.
Brandy: [3:06] Rum is used in the slave trade to literally purchase individuals in Africa who have been abducted.
Dr. Harris: [3:13] We’ve got tea coming from China and other places in the East.
Brandy: [3:18] When tea becomes a thing in the 1600s, there aren’t Western forms to use with this Eastern commodity, tea. You have artisans creating forms, sometimes directly based on objects imported from China, and this is shaped like a Chinese rice bowl, even with its delicate lid that could have been turned over and used as a separate vessel.
Dr. Harris: [3:45] So silver is clearly a sign of status and wealth that you displayed in your home. In the era before paper money, there were silver coins, and silver coins could be melted down and turned into beautiful silver objects like this one, or silver objects could be melted down into coinage. Making objects as beautiful as this is highly skilled labor.
Brandy: [4:10] There’s different types of labor that’s going to be happening in a silversmith shop. You have the master silversmith, possibly a journeyman, and then you have the apprentice.
Dr. Harris: [4:19] We’re talking about taking a block of silver, an ingot, and hammering it flat.
Brandy: [4:25] Silver, for instance this bowl, is going to be created through a process of raising, through hammering, and you’re going to do that on an anvil. You’re going to hammer around a concentric circle, and it’s going to cause this malleable material to start to rise up. But the more you hammer, the harder your silver is going to get.
Dr. Harris: [4:43] So you have to heat it again.
Brandy: [4:44] That process is called annealing. After you’ve annealed it and created your form, you’re going to go through a process called pickling, and that’s putting it in an acid vat and then polishing. Because silver is not this beautiful shiny substance in its natural state.
[5:00] We think that a global economy is new to our 20th, 21st century world, but the truth of the matter is, the global economy started in the 1500s. This might be a domestic item that would have sat on someone’s tea table, but it represents the interconnected globe of the 18th century.
[5:21] [music]
