«Sugar» warehouses in the port of Havana, 1840-1880
At the end of the 18th century, the massive arrival of enslaved Africans prompted the sugar boom in Cuba. As the plantation economy was implemented, the demographic structure and the commercial dynamics of the island suffered profound transformations. Since the decade of 1840, during the consolidati...
| Published in: | Pasado y Memoria |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article in Journal/Newspaper |
| Language: | Spanish |
| Published: |
Universidad de Alicante
2023
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://pasadoymemoria.ua.es/article/view/21742 https://doi.org/10.14198/pasado.21742 |
| Summary: | At the end of the 18th century, the massive arrival of enslaved Africans prompted the sugar boom in Cuba. As the plantation economy was implemented, the demographic structure and the commercial dynamics of the island suffered profound transformations. Since the decade of 1840, during the consolidation of the Second Slavery in Cuba, a new port complex emerged in Havana Bay: warehouses. The new sugar warehouses were replicated in other settlements of the island, increasingly connected to the export of commodities. This paper examines how the logistic system of the agro-industrial sugar complex, whose epicenter was located in the port of Havana, was organized. A logistic system that was articulated on three axes: the expansion of the railroad, steam navigation, and warehouses. All that allowed the establishment of a commercial sugar geography in Western Cuba, increasingly interconnected with capitalist world-economy. The «sugar» warehouses built in Havana during this period emulated the warehousing system, which had already been successfully implemented in the North-Atlantic ports of London and Liverpool. Only in the Bay of Havana, five companies –with their respective port infrastructures (wharfs, warehouses, cranes, etc.)– were in operation in the second half of the 19th century, competing for the control of commercial traffic. The subsequent evolution was conditioned by the socio-economic effects of the world crises of 1857 and 1866, as well as by the insertion of monopolistic interests and transnational capital in the Cuban economy, in the context of the depletion and dissolution of the Second Slavery. La entrada masiva de africanos esclavizados impulsó el boom azucarero de Cuba a finales del siglo XVIII. La implementación de la economía de plantación conllevó a profundas transformaciones en la estructura demográfica y en la dinámica comercial de la Isla. A partir de la década de 1840, en plena consolidación de la Segunda Esclavitud en Cuba, emergió en la bahía habanera un nuevo complejo portuario: los ... |
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