Commodities.  The power and price of commodities is in direct relation to the cost of production and the want of consumers.  What we see of the world today, of war, corruption and global warming is a product of consumption and the demand of production.   I could be referring to oil, and our current debacle in the middle east, but I could just as easily be talking about sugar.  Sidney Mintz presents the argument in “Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History,” that it was the sugar industry of the mid-1800s that opened the door to the idea of an international capitalist world market.  The history of the sugar trade or Big Sugar defined a systemic world market which opened the doors to what has become over the last 50 years, Big  Oil.

Briefly, before sugar was established as a true capitalist model, it’s production followed a different model, slavery. The sugar plantations of the roughly 200 years before capitalism, was slave based.  In order for consumers on the European continent to sweeten their tea and cookies, and to meet the demand for the addiction to sugar that was taking place, a trade developed: in a nutshell, the transatlantic slave trade. European ships carried manufactured goods to Africa in exchange for African slaves; who went to the Caribbean or the South to trade slaves for commodiites like sugar, rum, tobacco, cotton and othe spices; which it delivered back to Europe to the hungry demands of consumers.  Other routes existed as well, (in China the commodity was opium; in India, spices; in Hawaii, whaling and sandalwood), but in the mid-1800s commodity market, sugar, like tobacco, was one of the big ones.  Wasn’t the Iran-Contra affair about oil, weapons and drugs?

Marx argued that slave plantations, although driven by motives of bourgeois production, was not truly capitalist because it was based on free labor.  In order for the plantation to be capitalist, there needed to be a working class, a proletarian with income in which they can invest the result of their labor.  In othe words, in a free-labor economy, workers are separated from commerce.  They cannot, as paid laborers do, go to Walmart, Burger King, subscribe to cable,  purchase gasoline for their SUVs, or pay the fees on their maxed-out credit cards.

Since the mid-1600s, sugar had found its way into all foods, and what at one time was a scarce commodity used only by royalty, was now available to all, and the demand never ceased since.

In the case of Hawaii, as the Sandalwood disappeared and the whaling industry shrank, new commodities were being experimented with.  Mercantalism in Hawaii was based almost entirely on ships moving in and out of Hawaiian ports.  If whaling disappeared, which it did shortly after 1859 when whale oil began to be replaced with manufactured crude oil, then the merchant’s investments in Hawaii would be lost.

Sugar cane and pineapple both took off, and by the mid-1860s, Hawaii was producing