Grant was reading George the Poet’s (highly important) book, Track Record, when he learned why Demerara sugar is named so. Curious for more detail, and knowing that I, Lewis, had recently completed a Masters in History prior to joining Smaller Footprints on a short-term internship, Grant asked me to further investigate Demerara and its history, including links to Britain and Bristol.
Demerara is a lightly refined sugar. This means that, unlike white sugar, there are still traces of molasses, the dark sticky syrup extracted from sugar cane, giving the sugar a golden brown colour and rich flavour.
Demerara is named after a region in Guyana, on the north coast of South America, bordering Brazil, Venezuela, and Suriname. The river Demerara runs through the region and empties into the Caribbean Sea. The first European colonists of the region were the Dutch who were later ousted by the British.
Let’s continue to explore the not-so-sweet history of this common baking ingredient.
Sugar was a valuable commodity in the 1700s. Before the imperial expansion of European nations, sugar was an extremely prized commodity that was usually only available to the rich and royalty. However, as European powers expanded their colonial Empires, sugar became more available within society and, with that, demand.
The Dutch established (by force, of course) its Guyana colony in 1745, including plantations of sugar cane, coffee, and cotton.
In order to maximise profits they minimised humanity, forcing huge amounts of enslaved people to provide labour, taken from both Africa and Indigenous South American populations.
In 1814, the Dutch ceded the region to the British in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. Demerara, along with its colonies, eventually merged with neighbouring territories, Berbice and Essequibo, to become “British Guiana” in 1831.
Demerara was an important colony to the British imperialists and merchants who wanted to extend their domination in the British and European sugar markets. As a result, the number of sugar plantations expanded and so did the enslaved population in Guyana, rising to around 75,000 in the 1820s.
Slave revolt in the Demerara colony, August 18, 1823, Bachelor’s Adventure, Plate 4, (Joshua Bryant, 1823)
In 1823, the Demerara Rebellion occurred in which around 10,000 enslaved persons rose up and revolted at their living conditions, fighting to be freed. The revolt lasted a couple of days before colonial authorities suppressed, imprisoned and executed members of the uprising. The uprising was one of numerous in the Caribbean at the time, especially in the wake of the influential and successful Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), which saw several large populations of enslaved Africans and Indigenous populations rise up against their oppressors.
Now we know where it was grown and refined, and by whom, let’s look closer to home at a later stage in its life cycle; consumption. Port cities such as Bristol, London, and Liverpool unloaded the fleet of ships that were full of sugar.
Bristol dominated the sugar market in the eighteenth century, until Liverpool surpassed it in 1799. Old sugar stores and distilleries can be found around the city centre in Bristol, with one located near the city centre in Lewins Mead; converted into a luxury hotel.
The infamous sugar merchants in Bristol, such as John Pinney and William Beckford, who enslaved people, forcing them to produce commodities for sale in Europe regrettably benefited massively, such that the effects are still felt today. For example, even after Guyana gained independence from Britain in 1966, the owners of the sugar factories remained almost exclusively European.
Our supply of demerara sugar currently comes to us via the Bristolian worker cooperative, Essential Trading, in Fishponds. Ultimately, the supplier is Billingtons who source it from Mauritius. It comes via sea, never air.
Billingtons was founded in 1858 by Edward Billington importing tea, coffee and sugar to Liverpool. It is believed that neither he or his family has a direct connection to the enslaved persons’ trade due to the timeline of the company. The University College London published a comprehensive database which contains the names and details of people involved within the enslaved persons trade, there is no result for Billington. (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/search/)
Now we know the history of this product, we can decide how we want to move on from this.
While the name Demerara comes from the geographical region of Guyana, it has a deeply rooted colonial past attached to it, which should not be forgotten. Only recently, in 2015, did the British Government pay off the debt that they owed after having borrowed an eye-wateringly large amount of money in the 1830s to ‘compensate’ the enslaved person traders for their ‘loss’. That is to say that British taxpayers have, until very recently, been compensating the beneficiaries of these very real crimes.
If you have made it this far we hope that you have found our investigation into Demerara sugar interesting and enlightening. For more information about the sugar that we stock, and the difference between them, click here.
