SW10: Psychovant Teaches American History #13: Sugar, Tar, and Fish

[Drew Perron]

On 1/14/2020 9:56 PM, Scott Eiler wrote:
> Psychovant the Duck here, with your weekly lesson...  What all came from the New 
> World?  Other than precious metals and (heh) beaver fur, sugar was the big 
> thing.  The mainland didn't figure in that; the Caribbean islands did.  Europe 
> had basically no sugar before that. 

Technically, sugar had been around in Europe since the Crusades (yay, *more* 
colonialism), but it was pretty rare. (And was one of the things that made 
Venice rich.)

> That means (among other things) no cake.  
> Royalty came to love cake.  French royalty was infamous for that... 
> https://www.bl.uk/west-india-regiment/articles/an-introduction-to-the-caribbean-empire-and-slavery 

So much slavery around sugar specifically. @-@ Sigh.

>    -  British Royal Navy loved pine trees and tar from North Carolina. And 
> tobacco from Virginia was what got England into mainland colonizing in the first 
> place.  Cotton didn't get big until industrialization. 
> https://www.cotton.org/pubs/cottoncounts/story/index.cfm

Which cotton-based industrialization was one of the things that made American 
slavery even worse, accelerating the path toward the Civil War.

>    -  Britain and France both loved fish.  Parts of Spain did too.  So they were 
> all interested in the waters around Newfoundland.  France still owns a small 
> island there! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_fishing#Cod_trade

Oh, neat! :> That I really didn't know.

Drew "more facts!!" Nilium