wi Carribean Sugar cane does not take off`

I guess the best chance is some kind of combination of diseases and pests preventing the crop growing well in that area

I wonder what would be the consequences.

The worst of the triangual trade, with the slave 'middle passage' would not emerge with the power that it did in otl.

Also with refined sugar delayed maybe Europeans would be healthier.

What impact does this have on

1) Britain's Industrial revolution (less money)?

2) US Society?
 
There's still tobacco and cotton, though even at their worst plantations of these crops didn't have the death tolls of sugarcane. So there could still be a triangular slave trade, albeit a smaller one and more indentured servitude or other systems where slavery is not necessarily inherited or even racialized. To your questions:

1. No idea. Though IIRC, steam technology developed in Britain partly in order to pump water out of coal mines, and coal mines were necessary due to deforestation, no Caribbean sugar needed. I don't know to what degree sugar funded the industrial revolution, but I'm sure equivalent capital could be raised elsewhere.

2. Sugar was not exactly a major foundational crop in the U.S. Even assuming some equivalent of the ARW occurs, the biggest immediate change I can think of is that Louisiana and New Orleans would be much less developed, with a much smaller Francophone population and overall white population.
 
Sugar was a pretty expensive commodity. It ate up a lot of disposable income over the years and Europe never being able to satiate its sweet tooth would have significant economic impact.

Maybe the sugar beet would become more valuable and spur additional emigration to North America where many areas could host a thriving trade. Slavery would not necessarily follow. Indeed, the sugar beet may prove more profitable than cotton and tobacco and be less destructive to the soil. However, sugar from cane is still significantly cheaper than sugar beet sugar and people have been trying to genetically modify/selectively breed varieties with higher sugar content for centuries and are still not close.

For the West Indies, I suspect there would be a marked decrease in settlement and demand for slaves. That is not to say that there are no products that could be economically profitable there, just not remotely as profitable. Lowered property values could result in less centralization onto large plantations and more poorer Europeans arriving. In OTL, most sugar islands were broken up into only a few hundred (or less) plantations. The average lifespan of a European was about 7 years there. Africans didn't do much better. No one could hope to own a small farm. Disease would make European settlement light. Slavery could occur but they would have to find a good product and I don't know what that would be (coffee, tea, cocoa?).

As for Britain itself, basically they were buying their own sugar so I'm not sure if money would be taken out of circulation and Britain would be that much poorer. I don't know if it affected Britain's balance of trade as I don't know if they were a net importer or exporter of sugar/molasses/rum. If it was a wash, they'd just buy something else with their money.

Note that sugar was a very easily taxable commodity and that may have restricted government collections. Trying to squeeze that out of a property tax would not be politically viable.

Maybe a net reduction in European warfare as the easily conquerable West Indies islands wouldn't be quote so valuable and less likely to spur wars between the mother country. Colonialism as a whole would be less viable or desirable as sugar, for centuries, was the most profitable trade in the world.

I don't see a viable foreign source of sugar in any quantities, maybe parts of Africa, which could spur some local development.
 
Well, the Brazilian Northeast remains the main producer of Sugar, so Portugal regains a bit of lost wealth. :p
 
Sugar is still a hugely desirable commodity and will have to come from somewhere. Not having it grown in the Caribbean puts a huge dent in Europe's trade one way or the other. If the mainland is still viable, Brazil would be the most likely main supplier. It may change hands more often than it did IOTL as a result.

If the new world is out entirely, the Mediterranean islands may continue to supply much more. This could become interesting once the Ottomans gobble up a large number of them, resulting in a regular money flow from the Christian countries to the Porte. The European powers might fight harder, though who wanted to support Venice? More likely, disunity prevails and Ottoman sugar plays a role in funding the armies and navies menacing the west. I don't think it would be decisive, but it would certainly be interesting.

A possible direction to avoid this would be Africa. Sugarcane thrives here. Europeans generally don't, which is why the New World was preferred for plantations. African sugar would more likely be a trade good. It could do interesting things to internal economics (absent the large-scale demand for salves, West Africa remains a much more varied and safer place where cash-crop peasant agriculture would be viable as a tax base).

Europe would develop very differently. Spain would still have the mines (probably), but the competitors are facing a much steeper climb. Without the profits from the ridiculously lucrative sugar business, French, English, Dutch and Portuguese engagement in the Americas will be smaller and harder to fund. Especially Britain may see its international role greatly diminished, and the industrial revolution is liable to kick off much later and more slowly.

And there would most likely be no banqueting course, i.e. no sweet dessert tradition today. Absent large-scale African slavery, probably also no cotton plantations, no blue jeans, and no 'Manchester model' of free trade economics.

If you want to go overbnoard with this, imagine a world where industrialisation kicks off in the 1840s in a French-dominated 'sugar beet belt' that reaches from Belarus to the Pas de Calais. Engineers from Belgium, Germany and France travel to established centres of mass production in Bengal and Fujian to learn, sailing past a West African coast whose rentier states are withering in the relentless grip of a demand crisis or traveling overland via Ottoman Vienna whose inhabitants relax drinking coffee while the call to prayer drifts over the city.
 
Sugar is still a hugely desirable commodity and will have to come from somewhere. Not having it grown in the Caribbean puts a huge dent in Europe's trade one way or the other. If the mainland is still viable, Brazil would be the most likely main supplier. It may change hands more often than it did IOTL as a result.

Is sugar pretty much a guaranteed option for the Caribbean? It seems pretty obvious to me, and it's not like there's much else to do with it.

On the other hand, Taiwan was a huge sugar field for the Chinese, but they avoided a monoculture based on blood and tears. (In part due to Qing concerns about what that would lead to).
 
Is sugar pretty much a guaranteed option for the Caribbean? It seems pretty obvious to me, and it's not like there's much else to do with it.

On the other hand, Taiwan was a huge sugar field for the Chinese, but they avoided a monoculture based on blood and tears. (In part due to Qing concerns about what that would lead to).

As long as it's viable, sugar will be grown in any Caribbean plugged into the global trade system. It was grown everywhere feasible in the European sphere of influence, after all. But the emergence of almost completely monocultural slave plantation was not foreordained. That was copying a model that had been used by the Spanish on the Atlantic islands. A different history could well have resulted in a peasant or encomienda model producing sugar for the landowner's mill alongside other local crops.
 
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