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British slave emancipation and the demand for Brazilian sugar

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Abstract

This paper studies the effect of British slave emancipation on the sugar industry in the north-east of Brazil. Combining pre-existing annual data on Brazilian exports and British, French, American and Hanseatic imports with a new monthly series of imports to Liverpool and New York, I argue that the British policies following emancipation were related to a rapid increase in the demand for Brazilian sugar in the British market towards the end of mid-century. The results of an interrupted time series analysis show that the effect was particularly large following the end of apprenticeship in 1838 and the passage of the Sugar Act in 1846. I estimate that over the period 1827–1853, slave emancipation increased Brazil’s market share by around five per cent, which corresponded to between 15 and 28 per cent of the volume of Brazilian exports. A comparison with markets unaffected by such policy treatments demonstrates that these trends were confined to the British market.

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Notes

  1. The effect of emancipation on the sugar industry, however, differed across colonies. The immediate effect of emancipation on sugar output depended on the ratio of land to labour in each colony. Those colonies with higher land to labour ratios (Guiana, Jamaica) suffered the most during the transition as a large proportion of the labour force exited the plantation system. On this point, see Engerman 1984: 134. For a critique of this argument, see Monteith 2000.

  2. Brief accounts of the effect of the decline of the British West Indies and the passage of the Sugar Act on Brazilian sugar exports are given in Barickman, 1998: 38; Klein and Vidal Luna 2010: 79–80; Batista Jr. 1980.

  3. For an overview of the sugar in the south-east during the emergence of the coffee sector, see Petrone 1968; Corrêa do Lago 2014. On the relationship between the coffee and sugar sectors during the former’s later consolidation, see Vieira de Melo 2012.

  4. In terms of the share of total exports by value, sugar peaked at an average of 32 per cent during the 1840s, before declining with the growth of coffee. See Absell and Tena-Junguito (2017: 118).

  5. For an overview of the political situation in Brazil and its relationship with the export economy during this period, see Bethell and Carvalho 1989.

  6. Like all historical data, these data may contain errors or omissions and thus may over-exaggerate the primacy of the British market in the geographical distribution of Brazil’s exports.

  7. In November 1844, a tariff was introduced that differentiated slave-grown and non-slave grown sugar, the latter being admitted at just under 36 shillings per hundredweight. However, this system was abolished less than two years later, perhaps with the sad realisation that most of the non-colonial sugar being imported was slave-grown.

  8. Both newspapers are available in digitised form through the British Newspaper Archive. As the two sources overlap in 1843, I have verified that they published the same trade data. Thus, the change of source does not affect the consistency of the series.

  9. See online appendix 1 for a more comprehensive discussion of series construction and representativeness.

  10. Preliminary panel unit root tests generally reject the null hypothesis of a unit root for the series of Brazilian imports to Liverpool and New York, confirming the validity of the methodological approach used here. See online appendix 2.

  11. The dummy is not statistically significant for other suppliers to the British market, indicating that the increase was only associated with the Brazilian trade.

  12. The estimation is performed in Stata using the user-written itsa and actest commands. See Linden 2015.

  13. In itsa, the post-trend is calculated as the sum of the pre-trend T and pre-post trend difference XT for each treatment.

  14. The structural breaks tests are performed in Stata using the xtbreak user-written program. See Ditzen et al. 2021.

  15. See online appendix Tables 3B and 3C for the results of the structural break tests and the itsa with the 1832 break date.

  16. It must be kept in mind, however, that these counterfactual estimates are sensitive to the size of the pre-trend coefficient; the use of the coefficient without the dummy (shown in Col. 2 of Table 2) reduces Brazil’s 1827–1853 market share gain to one per cent.

  17. The deficiencies of trade statistics for the first half of the nineteenth century are well known. A representative cross section of sugar imports by country is unavailable for the period under study. Those official records that do exist either start later (Hamburg (1831), Belgium (1834), Portugal (1837), Spain (1849)), do not disaggregate total sugar imports by country (France until 1831), or are for countries characterised by colonial preferences and, in the French case, a roughly contemporaneous slave emancipation shock (in 1848). Perhaps the single exception is the American sources (beginning in 1821), although, like all official trade records, these are annual compilations, which severely restricts the window of time series observations. On the quality and availability of data for this period, see Federico and Tena-Junguito 2019: 13–20.

  18. In terms of Brazilian sugar prices in New York, the specific duty represented an average ad valorem equivalent of 39 per cent from 1827 to 1846.

  19. Calculated as the share of the total New York series in total imports of unrefined cane sugar, from United States, Commerce and Navigation, various years.

  20. Brazil, Collecção. Sugar imports for Brazil’s other two important trading partners, the Austrian Empire and Portugal, are unavailable for the period.

  21. The results are reported in online appendix Table 4A.

  22. The market share of imports from New Orleans also fell (from 44 to 28 per cent) although it is unclear whether these are re-exports from the Caribbean or imports of domestically produced cane sugar.

  23. Imports from Great Britain to Bahia accounted for 67 per cent of the total value in 1835 (United Kingdom Tables 1835: 437). The United States occupied 31 per cent of the total value of Cuban imports in 1833, while England held 11 per cent (United Kingdom Tables 1820–33: 648).

  24. The share calculations for Bahia and Pernambuco do not include Brazilian vessels, which were largely relegated to the coastwise trade. The situation was completely different in the coffee-exporting southeast. By the mid-1830s, American vessels dominated the export trade from the port of Rio de Janeiro. See Absell (2020: 981–985).

  25. United Kingdom Tables 1820–33: 650; Tables 1835: 437; Tables 1836: 390.

  26. Roland Ely (1960: 62–64) dates the origins of North American predominance in the Cuban market to the opening of the Spanish West Indian ports to foreign trade by the Spanish Crown in 1818 and the restricted access to the British West Indian colonies. On the American presence in early-nineteenth century Cuba, see also Marques 2016: 109–10; Pérez Jr. 2003: Ch. 1.

  27. This, of course, would change from mid-century with the expansion of the railroads and modernisation of the sugar industry in Cuba. See Zanetti and García 1998; Santamaría García and Álvarez 2004.

  28. A notable exception being Barickman 1998: 33–43.

  29. For an overview, see Lampe and Sharp 2016.

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Acknowledgements

For their kind comments and suggestions on previous versions of this article, the author would like to thank Herbert Klein, James Simpson, William Summerhill, Antonio Tena-Junguito, seminar participants at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, two anonymous referees and editor Claude Diebolt.

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    Christopher David Absell

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Absell, C.D. British slave emancipation and the demand for Brazilian sugar. Cliometrica 17, 125–154 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11698-021-00241-6

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