Sugar Changed the World

Aronson and Budhos begin this part with the story of Madame Villeneuve’s trip from the Caribbean to France in 1714 with her slave, Pauline. After Pauline was left at a convent, she refused to return to the Caribbean with Madame Villeneuve. Under French law established by King Louis XIV, slavery was legal in the Caribbean colonies, but not on French soil. Madame Villeneuve tried taking the case to court, but the judges ruled in Pauline’s favor: “she was real to them, human, not a piece of property” (72).

In the English colonies in North America, the modern-day United States, the colonists began protesting against the English Parliament’s tax on sugar. For them, this and other attacks on their property rights reduced them to the same level as slaves. In fact, Aronson and Budhos explain that taxes on sugar came about because of plantation owners’ influence on the English Parliament in order to pressure colonists into buying their sugar from the Caribbean. In 1733, Parliament passed the Molasses Act (later called the Sugar Act), which put a tax on every gallon of molasses that did not come from an English source, discouraging colonists from trading with the French. This new tax only increased smuggling and tensions between the American colonists and England.