Madeira, Sugar, and the Conquest of Nature in the "First" Sixteenth Century: Part I: From "Island of Timber" to Sugar Revolution, 1420–1506

Madeira is a small island with a large place in the origins of the modern world. Lying 560-some kilometers west of north Africa, Madeira was home to the modern world's first cash crop boom, a sugar revolution. In the first of two successive essays in this journal, I explain how the epoch-making...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Review - Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations Historical Systems, and Civilizations, 2009-10, Vol.32 (4), p.345-390
Main Author: Moore, Jason W.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
16th century
Agricultural land
Cane sugar
Capitalism
Commodification
Commodities
Deceit
Deception
Deforestation
Fatigue
Islands
Madeira
North Africa
Old growth forests
Revolution
Revolutions
Sixteenth Century
Sugar
Sugar crops
Sugar industry
Sugars
Timber
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Summary:Madeira is a small island with a large place in the origins of the modern world. Lying 560-some kilometers west of north Africa, Madeira was home to the modern world's first cash crop boom, a sugar revolution. In the first of two successive essays in this journal, I explain how the epoch-making acceleration of boom and bust on Madeira, during Braudel's "first" sixteenth century (c. 1450-1557), marked a new crystallization of the nature-society relations pivotal to the rise of capitalism. This new crystallization represented an ensemble of new capacities to exploit and extract extra-human nature much faster, and on a much larger scale, than ever before. It was a mode of socio-ecological conquest and commodification that was possible because of early capitalism's "commodity frontier" strategy, one premised on global expansion as a constitutive moment in the formation of the modern world-system—as capitalist world-ecology no less than world-economy. From this standpoint, the very conditions of Madeira's rapid ascent were also the conditions of its rapid decline after 1506. These stemmed from the rapid commodity-centered organization, and consequent exhaustion, of the relations governing human and extra-human nature: labor and land.
ISSN:0147-9032
2327-445X