In a satirical cartoon, George III and his family discuss how much sugar they use. All those employed in the shipping and selling of sugar reaped benefits, and so did the navy, which depended on the skills of sailors trained on the long-distance voyages of the sugar trade.
The British treasury made money from this business too, through import duties on sugar. So too did the British merchants who transported Jamaican sugar across the Atlantic for sale in Europe or who supplied the colonists with slaves. It was not only planters like Taylor who made money from colonial sugar and slavery. David Olusoga: “Thousands of Britons opposed abolition – because they owned slaves”.Taylor, who died in the same year Austen’s novel was published, received an annual income from his slave-run properties that could make even Mr Darcy’s fortune seem small in comparison. To put that into context, when Jane Austen (who took details of wealth, status and money very seriously indeed) wanted to create a character of extraordinary wealth for her 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, she came up with Mr Darcy and his famous £10,000 a year. By 1792, he had become one of three super-rich Caribbean sugar tycoons whose individual annual income was reported to have exceeded £50,000. Their lives were characterised by back-breaking labour and grinding poverty, but their exploitation made Taylor a fortune. His Jamaican properties eventually had a combined workforce of more than 2,000 slaves – men, women and children - and every one of them was owned by Taylor as a personal ‘possession’. Taylor became one of the biggest slaveholders in the Caribbean. He soon owned three plantations: vast estates with cane fields covering hundreds of acres, and each with a costly set of buildings for the industrialised process of boiling and refining raw cane-juice into sugar for export. His 20s were spent capitalising on his inheritance and taking financial gambles to invest heavily in Jamaican sugar. By the time he was a young man, he had received an English education at Eton College and returned to his native Jamaica, having inherited his recently deceased father’s wealth. This was the colonial world into which Simon Taylor was born. Almost a quarter of them left on vessels heading for the British sugar islands in the Caribbean, where Jamaica would be the primary destination.
A brief history and timeline of the transatlantic slave tradeīetween the 16th and 19th centuries, at least 12.5 million captive Africans were forcibly boarded onto merchant ships bound for the New World, where they toiled for the profit of Europeans.Lord Nelson and slavery: Nelson’s dark side.It was also distinctively divisive, characterised by stark racism: black people were enslaved, white people were not. Many systems of forced labour have existed before and since, but the Atlantic slave trade was especially violent and deadly. The dangerous physical labour of cultivation was being done by slaves, imported into Jamaica via the slave trade from West Africa. Sugar created the wealth of the white Jamaican elite, but it also created one of the most unequal societies in human history. It was being transformed into more lucrative sugar plantations for the benefit of ambitious risk-taking British entrepreneurs.