Publisher's Synopsis
Between the 15th and 17th centuries, sugar cultivation and processing, a Mediterranean industry throughout the Middle Ages, experienced what we can aptly describe as the first period of its prosperous Atlantic history. Following its introduction to Madeira by the Portuguese, sugarcane cultivation and sugar production became the epicentre of a lucrative trade that spread, in step with Iberian colonial expansion, to the Azores and the archipelagos off the African coast: the Canary Islands, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Prìncipe. From there, it reached the Caribbean and the Americas, where the sugar mills eventually outstripped their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic in the 16th century. The sugar estates that sprang up along the Atlantic at the time were manufacturing and residential complexes that epitomised much of the technological prowess of the period, while at the same time providing unique insights into social segregation, domination and exploitation, both of human beings and of the land and its resources. This book explores the material dimension of these sugar mills and the landscapes of which they are both cause and effect. As such, it attaches particular importance to the analytical perspectives and methodologies of archaeology and the history of technology. Notwithstanding, the editors of this book are convinced that the evidence and material traces of the past only exist and survive in the present. They have therefore chosen to give pride of place to the study of heritage in the broadest sense of the term.
