In 1776 Adam Smith Attacked Mercantilism, the Policy Whereby British Sugar Was Given an Effective Monopoly on the Home Market in Return for Using British Ships and Buying British Manufactures

In other ways the sugar barons were losing their lustre. In 1776, the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith published his hugely influential The Wealth of Nations, in which he argued in favour of free trade and against mercantilism, the policy whereby British sugar was given an effective monopoly on the home market in return for using British ships and buying British manufactures. The first sugar barons had hated the Navigation Acts, but by the middle of the eighteenth century, the protected British market that was part of the original deal was of overwhelming importance to the British sugar producers. Because of soil exhaustion and a failure to invest in new technologies, the British islands now needed four times the labour to produce the same sugar as the newer French possessions, led in production by St Domingue. This, of course, made British sugar more expensive, thus the British consumer paid up to 30 per cent more for his sugar than customers in other parts of Europe. A pamphleteer of 1761 estimated that what he called the ‘fraudulent Trading of the Sugar Planters’ had deprived the kingdom of ‘over and above Twelve Million Pounds Sterling’.

--Matthew Parker, The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), 314.