Beaky's Blather

Sugar arrived on the streets in Britain in the early 18th century. It found a market in exactly the same way as, almost simultaneously, did tea, coffee and tobacco.

The oldest sweet shop in the UK has traded continuously since 1827. We think of its stock in trade – sugar in its various forms, as a relatively harmless product. The sweet shop is in consequence thought a safe haunt of our children

Urbanisation and the rise of a wage economy provided a population freed from the cashless subsistence of an agrarian society. For the first time – responsibly or not – Europeans of the lowest class had funds that they could use to buy non-essentials. Sugar also, most significantly, allowed the rapid and cheap manufacture of alcohol  that in its turn as spirits, found a receptive market. Sugar at first glance therefore, whilst seeming an innocuous product, led directly to – ripe for the poor – brandy, rum and gin; mother’s ruin. It also accelerated a previously rare disability, tooth decay. Sugar has much to answer for and – as did its derivative spirit drink, it latched onto our susceptibility to consume more than we should and in time, addiction. 

In the Caribbean, the settlement of Sixteenth Century wars with Spain led to British colonisation of Jamaica and in time other Caribbean islands. New World ‘Bubble’ investment schemes, launched onto the newly formed London Stock Market that had taken root in the new coffee houses of Bond Street, sponsored entrepreneurs to undertake dangerous voyages to the New World. Their enterprises – directed to extract wealth from the lands they were allocated – initially deployed the labour of the indigenous people who had populated the North and South of America for fifty thousand years.  The Indians, a primitive, Stone Age people used to a hunter-gatherer existence however, when subjected to hard labour in the heat, took to dying so prodigiously that by the end of the 17th Century, a new work force became clearly essential; a strong, hardy one, inured to the hot sun and less predisposed to die wilfully in such numbers. 

Sugar we see therefore, led directly to the rapid expansion of an ancient practice, the Slave Trade. Arab and Viking traders across Europe and the Mediterranean had – for centuries since the pre-Roman Greek and Persian Civilisations – snatched people of all races from the coastal towns of Europe and sold them into slavery. In 1634, Barbary pirates captured and sold into slavery the entire 65 inhabitants of a Cornish village and also another village in Iceland. The new market for slaves to work the sugar plantations in the Caribbean – and in time the cotton fields of the southern states of America – attracted the arab traders south into the Sub Sahara lands.  There, the local tribal chiefs readily traded their people, who were led away to the coastal villages of West Africa and sold on, disappearing forever into ships from Liverpool and Bristol that traded there. 

The sweet shop is less innocent therefore than we might imagine. Our fondness for a little sweetness in our tea and a lumpy bag of gobstoppers to dissolve our children’s teeth associates us with a product that has inflicted much that ails us as a civilised people. Sugar has led directly to slavery and thence to alcohol abuse, fecklessness, crime, obesity, and tooth decay; each a downstream consequence of the white-dust bowl sitting quietly on our tabletops, a legacy that haunts the consciences of all Western Societies today.