Throughout the Atlantic world, from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, technology trumped humanity in visual representations of sugar plantations and their enslaved workforces. European artists presented the production of sugar as technologically progressive, while minimizing its crucial conjunction with slave labor. The sugarmill, with its vertical three-roller mills and trains of evaporative vats, became a synecdoche of the most intensive and expansive industry in the early modern world. Yet a major historiographic debate—whether the dependence on slave labor made the production of sugar economically regressive—has simply ignored the abundant visual evidence on the issue. As a humanitarian abolitionist movement mobilized in late-eighteenth-century Britain, its images emphasized the abuse of slaves individually but overlooked plantations, while artistic clients of anti-abolitionist patrons responded with picturesque landscapes showing slave plantations as tranquil manorial communities that happened to have intensive productive technology. And in defiance of abolitionism elsewhere, planters in mid-nineteenth-century Cuba visually advertised their global economic predominance with hypertechnological images of factories requiring only minuscule inputs of enslaved labor. The visual privileging of sugar’s technology manifested how easily Europeans could be distracted from concerns about the millions of enslaved people in their colonies.
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