Sweetness and exile: Madeiran sugar connections in motion

Madeira is often referred to as the birthplace of the modern plantation. In the fifteenth century, this newly settled North Atlantic subtropical island was the locus of a turning point in the economics, technology and social engineering of sugar production. Madeira hosted a brief yet transformative moment in sugarcane’s trajectory from its Mediterranean and Asian fields to the large-scale, capital- and labor- intensive plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil. In that moment, a plant species, land, technology, capital and labor were assembled in ways that radically changed the world. Mintz’s Sweetness and Power accounts for the interconnection of production and consumption of the prized commodity. Along those lines and adding the cropscape approach, I will address in this article the co-production of plants and people in the context of sugar production, the persisting links between Madeirans and sugarcanes, and the plantation imaginaries that co-exist with them.