Ghost Emissions: Sugar Slavery’s Carbon Footprint in the Northern Colonies of British America

• In Event: Sugar, Water, and Electricity: New Origin Stories for Today’s Climate Crisis

Abstract

On the eve of the American Revolution, the northern colonies of British America deforested an astonishing amount of land to provision the slave-based sugar plantations of the British Caribbean. With land at a premium, sugar enslavers in the Caribbean reserved most of their arable land for sugarcane, turning to the family farms of the northern colonies, from Connecticut to Pennsylvania, to provide them with the meat, wheat, corn, and livestock necessary to feed their enslaved workforce and power their mills. When these exports are converted into carbon emissions, they comprised the northern colonies’ largest share of export-driven emissions. Northern carbon emissions were, in effect, the “ghost emissions” of Caribbean plantations—emissions that only become visible when sugar plantations are understood as vast carbon complexes that sucked in distant landscapes far beyond the plantation’s immediate site of production. Relying on British customs data and a carbon emissions model created with the help of climate scientists, this paper offers the first estimate of the carbon impact of northern colonial provisions to the British Caribbean for the entire colonial period. Using this newest research as a window into a broader project on the role of racial slavery in origins of climate change, it ultimately argues that well before the transition to coal in the nineteenth century, early modern slave plantations—including the ghost emissions from agricultural fields far beyond the plantation itself—were a critical accelerant in the shift toward a more carbon-intensive global economy.

Author

• Eric Herschthal, University of Utah