INTRODUCTION

How did the representation of sugar interact with discourses on trade and slavery? As a supplement produced by slaves, consumed and discussed by the British, sugar is ideal for testing connections between colonialism, materialism and representation. The rhetoric of abstinence from West Indian sugar and rum, where East Indian sugar or honey was substituted for the former, operated in the discourse of the Anti-Slavery Society, reaching its peak in the late 1780s and early 1790s. The texts discussed here are belated in relation both to this tradition of abstinence, and to the slave uprisings with which they are preoccupied. During the period, anti-slavery came to be used by different factions.

The rhetoric of abstinence involved an aversive topos, often directed towards the female consumer, here called the ‘blood sugar’ topos. Sweetened drinks of tea, coffee and chocolate were rendered suddenly nauseating by the notion that they contained the blood of slaves. As a poem in the Scots Magazine for 1788 put it, ‘Are drops of blood the horrible manure / That fills with luscious juice the teeming cane?’ Cowper's ‘Epigram’ contains the lines, ‘No nostrum, planters say, is half so good / To make fine sugar, as a Negro's blood.’ Cowper employed the topos in ‘Sweet Meat has Sour Sauce, or, the Slave Trader in the Dumps’ (1788, a potent year for anti-slavery poetry).