Research Program: The Second Industrial Revolution, 1850-1914, as seen through the cane sugar industry
The years from roughly 1850 to 1914 are known as “The Second Industrial Revolution” when science and engineering led to new mechanical technologies, to improvements in steam engines, to advanced chemical engineering, and to large-scale production across a range of industries. That period is also called “The Great Divergence” because productivity increased rapidly in some regions and slowly or not at all in others.
My research program is to study the cane sugar industry during these years to gain insights in two directions: from the cane sugar industry to the second industrial revolution and from the second industrial revolution to the cane sugar industry. Factories producing sugar from cane had the distinction of having to be located in the tropics and subtropics. Since cane is bulky and spoils rapidly, the sugar factories had to be close to the cane fields. The cane sugar industry provides an opportunity to study the adoption of the technology of the second revolution in and near the tropics.
I am happy to share all data that I have and am grateful for any data or information or ideas that you are willing to share.
My study has five parts, arranged in chronological order:
The use of steam-powered cane mills around 1860. Most of the mills in Louisiana and Cuba were powered by steam. In northeastern Brazil, steam engines were scarce, with most mills powered by animals. Java had few steam engines because water wheels were common. My goal is to look at a broad array of regions and explain differences both among them and within them in the adoption of steam power, especially when water wheels and windmills were infeasible, so that the choice was between animals and steam engines.
In 1875-6 Hawaii signed a reciprocity treaty with the United States, which gave its sugar advantageous entry to the United States. Argentina built a railroad that connected the sugar region around Tucuman to the coastal markets. Brazil initiated an industrial program of subsidizing central sugar factories. Sugar production grew rapidly in Hawaii and fairly rapidly around Tucuman, whereas the Brazilian industrial program stalled until 1880.
In 1884 the price of sugar plunged. This section will explore how various cane sugar regions reacted to this collapse in the market, with particular emphasis on the guarantees granted for building central factories in Brazil.
The 1890s saw large factories take over the production of sugar from cane. This phase of my research will take advantage of many sources, but in particular little-used books by Paasche (of the Paasche index) that have information, much of it from German consuls, about the industry in this decade and the years before and after it. Paasche’s observations about the industry, not surprisingly, are insightful.
The U.S. Department of Commerce collected detailed cost data from some 150 sugar factories in Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Louisiana for the 1913-14 harvest. It disguised those factories by reporting the costs only per ton of sugar produced. A member of the study team, Philip Wright, published a paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1917 that has graphs showing those costs per ton on the vertical axis against accumulated output on the horizontal. The graphs are small, with limited numbers of pixels. Nonetheless, using information from other sources, I have managed to identify half of the factories. I hope to identify all of them, then use that information along with other sources to yield a rich analysis of the economics and technology of sugar production.