Madeira, sugar, and the conquest of nature in the "first" sixteenth century, Part II: From regional crisis to commodity frontier, 1506-1530

At the rosy dawn of sixteenth century capitalism, few places in this "vast but weak" world-economy were more pivotal than Madeira. A small island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, Madeira in 1500 was the greatest producer of early capitalism's most important cash crop, sugar. Every year between 1505 and 1509, some 2,000 tons of sugar flowed from Funchal, Madeira's capital, to Lisbon, Antwerp, Genoa, and many places beyond. Two decades later, the island's sugar complex had collapsed. In the second of two essays in Review, I illustrate how the socio-ecological regime that enabled Madeira's sugar revolution between 1450 and 1500 ensured the rapid decline of production after 1506. As we explored in Part I, this regime had everything to do with the forest. No cash crop devoured the forest so quickly as sugar. If dwindling fuel supplies were sugar's greatest vulnerability, the sources of sugar's boom and bust on Madeira were irreducibly world-historical and multi-layered. In Part II, I trace the connections between earth-moving and the broader structures of capital and empire, above all the socio-ecological architectures of the world market and the Portuguese Empire in Braudel's "first" sixteenth century (c. 450-1557). I build out the relations between deforestation, soil fertility, and faltering labor productivity in agriculture as decisive to sugar's rapid decline. Far from a narrowly regional phenomenon, this rapid decline was not only caused, but indeed necessitated, by the rise of capitalism as worldecology- a civilization that joins the endless conquest of nature and the endless accumulation in dialectical unity. Regional socio-ecological crises were not merely resolved through commodity-centered frontier movements; they were also created by them.