Between the Ingenio and the Ingeniero: The Spanish Sugar Master and the Development of the Ibero-Amercian Sugar Industry, 1450–1650

Date of Award

4-2025

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

History

First Advisor

Lewis Pyenson, Ph.D.

Second Advisor

Larry Simon, Ph.D.

Third Advisor

Lynne Heasley, Ph.D.

Fourth Advisor

Natalio Ohanna, Ph.D.

Keywords

Agriculture, Atlantic world, Mediterranean world, sugar, technology and society

Abstract

This dissertation engages the development of commercial sugar production in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ibero-American world and examines how claims to knowledge about sugar were leveraged to both define skilled labor associated with its manufacture and to assert control over production. The history of sugar production in the Mediterranean world and its subsequent diffusion to the Americas has long fascinated scholars, particularly economic historians, due to sugar’s vanguard position in the advent of the Atlantic system, the expansion of overseas commerce and exchange, and the increasing regimentation of land, labor, and resources that prefaced the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalist enterprise. The sugar mill’s organizational strictures and the ultimate goal of production for export to international markets has led most scholars to see sugar as one of the earliest industrial capitalist enterprises. The great labor requirements of sugar production and the shortage of manpower experienced by colonial sugar operations abetted increasing utilization of enslaved labor in colonial sugar production. Finally, the often brutal working conditions associated with the sugar mill have given sugar production the disturbing distinction of pioneer in the development of plantation slavery and capitalist oppression.

Many of the details regarding the foundations of early commercial production and its practitioners remain obscure despite the decisive transition accorded sugar’s diffusion from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic World. The early centuries of the Ibero-American sugar industry’s development, particularly the creation of knowledge about sugar and its commercial manufacture, are crucial for our understanding of this transition and of an agro-industry closely associated with the emergence of modernity. This dissertation characterizes the nature of expert labor involved in the manufacture of sugar by focusing on the figure of the sugar master or maestro de azúcar, whose knowledge of the processes of sugar refining was central to the mill’s productive capacity. The sugar master’s expertise constituted a tacit form of experiential, often local, knowledge that was tapped at great expense. Planters, aristocrats, learned advisors, purported experts, and agents of the crown contested this knowledge as the commercial industry developed across the early modern period and as each sought to claim knowledge about sugar through efforts to rationalize the industry. While understanding of the chemical processes underpinning the elaboration of sugar remained rudimentary, the basis of the sugar master’s claims to expertise remained his long experience with the processes of production and the empirical signs of their progress. Efforts to rationalize the industry, however, increasingly shifted control over the processes of production from the sugar master or refiner to the planter over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This shift in the possession of knowledge over the processes of production, just as with growing emphasis on the exploitation of enslaved labor, was a defining feature of the reorganization of labor relations that would go on to facilitate the expansion of sugar production within the plantation system during the later seventeenth century.

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