Of the Caribbean producers Cuba, with considerable tracts of flat land, was best suited for these adaptations, and the coastal plains of Puerto Rico also had a significant potential. Cane sugar could only be kept competitive through the construction of larger and more efficient processing factories, usually supplied by railways from a wider field area than had been customary before. continental Europe (see Graph and Table II). In the 1880s its international price was sharply reduced by the growth of subsidised beet sugar exports from. Thereafter the themes are more diversified, although sugar remains the most important single influence.
The black legend described free#
Author points out, however, how Merivale's views were in part paradoxical and ambiguous, as he favoured a social hierarchy and an imperial authoritarianism limiting free labour.įor the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century the economic history of the Caribbean may be presented in terms of slavery and the effects of its abolition on the sugar industry. He shows how Merivale as part of this criticized the mismanagement, slavery, brutality, mercantilism, and the concentration of power and wealth in Cuba and other Spanish colonies, as negative examples contrasted to the British approach. Author elaborates on this Black Legend tradition, going back to writings of Las Casas, and how it served as justification for "better" imperialisms of other colonial powers than Spain, and how Merivale's views followed this tradition. criticizing Spanish colonialism, to caricaturize the second British Empire, and thus justify imperial policy reforms. Author specifically shows how Merivale propagated the free trade imperialism of the reformed British Empire by using the "Black Legend" way of thinking, i.e. Focusses on the lectures and theories of economist and colonial bureaucrat Herman Merivale on the imperial transition of British colonialism from slave labour to free labour, and toward free trade, in 1839.
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