THE PLANTATIONS. In the film, the slaves are working cotton fields, whereas in the Guianas, the crop was sugar.
By the 1700s, Europe was addicted to the stuff, and anyone enterprising enough to plant it could double his capital in less than three years. In places like Bristol and Amsterdam, it created a new class of millionaire: the exotic, silk-slippered nawabs of Wild Coast sugar. Meanwhile, the Guianas themselves were transformed. Sugar dominated the economy for over three hundred years, creating its own ruling class, known as ‘The Plantocracy’.
Even on the eve of its decline in about 1860, sugar still accounted for 95% of British Guiana’s exports. The region’s history since then could almost be summarised as the struggle for life after sugar.
Nowhere is sugar’s hold on Guianese life more obvious than from the air. Examine this coast on Google.earth and you’ll skim over mile after mile of ghostly oblongs. These are the old cane fields, each one a work of almost pharaonic effort. For every square mile of cane, it was necessary to dig over sixty-five miles of drainage canals (see photo), and shift over ten million tons of earth. None of this, of course, was done by the Europeans. It’s entirely the creation of slaves.