Cultivating cane—transforming tall green stalks into sweet crystals—is backbreaking labor on a time crunch. Once cut, cane must be pressed and boiled within a day or else the juice ferments and is ruined. Sugar thus required lots of fuel and an abundant, coordinated labor force, working around the clock during the harvest—cutting, hauling, pressing, stoking, and stirring on an endless loop. With so much work to be done and so much money to be made, the sugar plantation complex ascended. Barbados, the first island to seriously adopt cane cultivation, saw its population soar from 1,400 in 1629 to 40,000 by 1642, an upsurge mirrored in Jamaica, the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the Spanish colony of Cuba, as well as most smaller islands. Enslaved Africans did nearly all the work. By 1750, Africans constituted three-quarters of the Caribbean’s total population, and up to 90 percent on some islands.
Sugar plantations proved voracious consumers of wood and people, and efficient producers of riches. As the plantation complex intensified and spread across the Caribbean, a dangerous ecological cycle emerged. Sugar meant more enslaved Africans; enslaved Africans meant more slave ships; and slave ships meant more A. aegypti [a type of mosquito, which transmits yellow fever.] These bugs thrived in the tropics. Deforestation across vast acreages led to the eradication (or near eradication) of their bat and bird predators. With no direct competition, the A. aegypti had ample time to find people to feed on and comfortable places to breed. Sweaty, panting, nonimmune food sources were present in abundance—trench-digging soldiers and cane-cutting slaves. Caribbean port cities and sugar plantations contained millions of clean-water breeding places, especially the hundreds of clay pots (or concave pot fragments) that collected water during the rainy season. By the mid-seventeenth century, colonists frequently commented on the clouds of mosquitoes that hovered low to the ground or flitted around their cabins. The Caribbean had unwittingly put itself on the precipice of a disease disaster.
Kathryn Olivarius, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom
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