Sugar-cane was introduced into Spain by the Moors early in the eighth century. The Moorish empire sank before the combined might of Spain in 1492, and in that year Columbus added a new world to the realm of Castile. Within a few years the sugar industry had taken firm root in the West Indies, and on every isle dotting the Spanish Main waved countless fields of cane, yielding crops beside which the production of Andalusia, already waning under the dead hand of Spain, paled into insignificance.
To the first Spanish planters is due the system upon which the sugar industry was conducted in the tropics for more than three hundred years. The haughty hidalgo, scorning to labour with his own hands, forced into his service the unresisting natives of the West. Unused to strenuous toil, they sank beneath the burden. Touched with pity for their sad lot, and anxious to save them from extirpation, Las Casas, "the Apostle of the Indians," urged the substitution of the children of Ham, whom he and all good Christians believed to have been doomed to perpetual bondage; and African slavery thus became an established institution in the West.
Whether under Spanish or British rule, the sugar industry of the West Indies, and of all other tropical countries to which it was extended, was carried on under a system of large plantations, owned as a rule by men of good family, who, deeming personal control beneath their dignity, deputed to overseers of meaner rank the supervision of their servile labourers. The profusion of Nature, coupled with vicarious management and the absence of competition, engendered extravagance, improvident husbandry, and wasteful and unscientific manufacture, the while there rose to Heaven—
"Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong,
Like a tale of little-meaning, tho' the words are strong;
Chanted from an ill-used race of men that cleave the soil,
Sow the seed, and reap the harvest with enduring toil."
SUGAR-MILL, CHILDERS, NORTH COAST RAILWAY
Until well on in the nineteenth century little progress was made either in cultivation or manufacture. For more than three hundred years the history of the industry was one of slave labour, crude methods, and planters to whom life in the tropics meant exile from Europe, and whose sole object was to amass wealth to be spent in the pleasures of the courts of St. James, Versailles, or Madrid.