The sugar industry or “White Gold” (Funchal)
With the collaboration of the team at the A Cidade do Açúcar Museum, a set of artifacts was selected, highlighting the ceramic sugar loaf shape, which is part of the archaeological collection unearthed during the excavation of the house of sugar merchant Janine Esmenaut, João Esmeraldo for the Portuguese, one of the oldest from the 16th century. This cultural asset, recovered by Modern Archaeology in Portugal, illustrates the important and profitable sugar production industry on the island, which began in 1425 with the planting of sugar cane, a central activity in the economy of the Atlantic islands, shortly after the colonization of the island, which was discovered in 1419.
In thirty years, Madeira, driven by capital mainly from Genoa, initially using labor hired in Morocco and, later, African slave labor, as well as intensive deforestation used to feed sugar mills (about fifty kilos of wood were needed to produce one kilo of sugar), became the largest sugar producer in Europe, which earned it the title of “Islands of White Gold”. From the first decades of the 16th century, production began to decline, with São Tomé and Príncipe and, fundamentally, Brazil gradually emerging as new production locations, until it finally ceased in 1986, with the closure of the William Hinton factory.
