![]() ![]() In 1807 the British parliament passed the Slave Trade Act, but it did not prevent slaves being used – merely traded. ![]() It is well-documented that the conditions for slaves was terrible, but a good summing up of the life of a slave and the conditions they faced was made in a speech given by abolitionist Thomas Clark (in 1840). The sugar that would have ended up on a Cornish kitchen table in the early 1800s would have come from slave labour. 70% of those enslaved ended up working on sugar plantations. The lack of labour in the Islands meant that huge numbers of Africans were trafficked to work as slaves on the plantations. Sugar came from vast plantations in the Caribbean and South America, with high levels of demand from Britain and other European countries – although Britain seems to have had the sweetest tooth. It is no wonder that sugar was referred to as ‘white gold’. To keep these figures in context, today, the consumption is around 106lbs per person – or 22 teaspoons of sugar per week. He estimates that Britain’s per capita consumption of sugar was as follows: Mintz has provided estimates of sugar consumption at the turn of the last few centuries. Slavery made sugar cheaper, and the cheaper it became, the more central it became to the British diet. According to Sidney Mintz, the poorest families in Britain were taking sugar in their tea in the mid-1800s, and there was jam on their tables too (made with three-quarters sugar, one-quarter fruit pulp). Sugar nips were not only something that graced the kitchens of the well-off. The ones in the photograph are listed as Victorian. Sugar cubes and granulated sugar arrived in the second half of the nineteenth century, and therefore we can say that they were in use the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They are more like pincers, with sharp blades designed to cut sugar from a block, the sugar loaf. There are several pairs of sugar nips listed in the museum’s collection, and were an everyday domestic item until advances in sugar production made them redundant. ![]()
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