Jane Austen's worlds of sweetness conceal a dark chapter of slavery

Time of India

20-07-2025

On January 24, 1809,
Jane Austen
wrote to her sister Cassandra that their brother Charles, a Royal Navy officer, had almost captured an enemy ship. 'A French schooner, laden with sugar, but bad weather parted them,' she wrote. If he had brought it to a British port, he would have received a share in its lucrative cargo .
Austen lived from December 16, 1775, to July 18, 1817, and the 250th anniversary of her birth is a big occasion. All her novels, even unfinished works, have been repeatedly adapted for TV and film, including Indian films like Aisha and Kandukondain Kandukondain . Many writers have produced alternate or extended versions, and a whole genre of fiction has been built on her
Regency England
world. All this will be celebrated this year, often with food inspired by the dishes she mentions.
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Sugar is never mentioned directly in the novels, yet is central to this world. It sweetened the tea and cakes the characters are always consuming, a real change from an earlier era where sweetness mostly came from honey or fruits. Sugar first came to Europe along with Asian spices, and was treated like a spice itself, expensive and for the rich .
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The 18th century growth of plantations in Caribbean colonies made sugar affordable for middleclass families like the Austens. It was still a luxury, which is why Charles would have profited, but it was now imperative. Austen's letters include relief that the guests have left, because of the cost of tea and sugar for them. Another sign of change comes from a letter in 1816: 'We hear now that there is to be no honey this year. Bad news for us.' Sugar was displacing this most ancient source of sweetness.
Yet, sugar was controversial. Caribbean plantations used slave labour and this abuse was becoming harder for the professedly pious British to ignore. The problem wasn't just consuming sugar, but the fact that the profits of the trade financed the lifestyles of Austen's world. This tension surfaces in
Mansfield Park
, where Fanny Price, the impoverished heroine, lives with her uncle who owns a plantation in Antigua. But when she asks him about the slave trade, 'there was such a dead silence!'
Austen has been criticised for not writing more about such issues — which has drawn counter criticism for imposing current values on a past era. It would be sad to cancel her works for this reason, but it is fair to look at their financial compulsions. Sense And Sensibility , her first published novel, opens with a brutal dissection of the finances required to support a family like Austen's, and there are other hints of harsher realities behind their lives. For example, the reason women of that time valued fine Kashmir shawls wasn't just for their warmth and beauty; clothes were among the few possessions women could directly control, and the discreet secondary market for such shawls says a lot about hidden hardships.
India became involved in the slavery debate in 1790 when the first load of sugar from the subcontinent arrived in London. Abolitionists who were agitating for the end of slavery, celebrated this as a way to undermine slave-produced sugar. Ulbe Bosma, in The Sugar Plantation in India and Indonesia , quotes Elizabeth Heyrick, a prominent activist, arguing in 1824 that the sugar boycott, which abolitionists had tried to promote, was no longer needed: 'We only need to substitute East India, for West India sugar.'
The East India Company was no friend of progressive activists, but an unlikely alliance seemed possible over sugar.
This never quite worked out, mostly because of the influence of West Indian planters, but Indian sugar found other markets. Bosma notes that much went to Germany where the Schröder family built a trading empire on sugar, then diversified into the financial management firm that still exists. And when slavery ended, plantation owners imported Indian indentured labour, continuing the cruelties that sweetness concealed.