(^122) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
World countries and their sympathizers want to enhance the bill of
charges against the rich, imperialist countries, the better to justify not
only recriminations but claims for indemnity. For the rich, imperialist
countries, honor and self-esteem demand denial. This argument about
the effects of slavery will go on indefinitely, because it is not suscepti
ble of factual settlement and is a proxy for other issues.)
The Sugar Plantation as Hacienda^22
The Spanish were never important players in the sugar trade. They
had quicker ways to get rich, and when they did turn to sugar, they
saw it essentially as a material basis of status and lifestyle. They never
understood, as the English planters did, the advantages of
specialization and division of labor, of the integration of sugar
plantations as production units into a larger economic system.
Sugar cane came early to New Spain. Already in 1524, just a few
years after the capture of Tenochtitlan and overthrow of the Aztecs,
Hernan Cortés was growing cane and building a mill (ingenio) near
Vera Cruz. (In that sultry sea-level plain, wheat and maize grew
poorly, and the Spanish were quick to see the potential for
semitropical crops.) Others followed suit, and soon Indians were
growing cane to sell to the mills. In 1550, the Spanish crown
recognized the possibilities and ordered the viceroy of New Spain to
grant land to would-be sugar cultivators and mill operators. By
1600, there were over forty mills in the country, representing a
substantial industrial as well as agricultural investment. These mills
were small units (tmpiches), using animal power and even manpower
(tmpichillos a mano); or larger, water-driven ingenios, which
accounted for by far the greater part of output. One of the largest of
the mills, Santisima Trinidad in Jalapa, had seven boilers and two
purging houses. It employed more than two hundred African slaves,
was valued at 700,000 pesos, and netted 40,000 gold pesos a year.
In the beginning, the sugar estates tried to use Indian labor, and
the fact that some Indians voluntarily cultivated cane on their own
lands would indicate that they had no distaste for this crop; on the
contrary. But there is cultivation and cultivation, and the whole
point of the plantation economy was to extract a maximum of
output by the imposition of long hours and infernal rhythms, driving
nora
(Nora)
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