Sucre indigène and sucre colonial: Reconsidering the splitting of the French national sugar market, 1800–1860

In the early 1800s, the French beet sugar industry was established to provide sugar autarky for France. From the beginning, it competed with French Caribbean cane sugar. Over sixty years, the two complexes produced their own blocs that coexisted and split the French national sugar market, both claiming rights to governmental protection. This article argues that reconsidering the sugar question provides evidence for a shift in the political–economic concept of colony, drawing on pamphlets from the 1830s and 1840s as well as relevant secondary historiography. The blocs struggled over definitions of protection, indemnity, and, ultimately, the relationship of colony and nation. The splitting of the market thus amounted to a rupture of colonies from metropole, which provides an underplayed colonial dimension to economic liberalization and a history of liberal precepts quietly at work in the developing rift. The question des sucres bears witness to a fraught disintegration—symbolic, political, and economic—of the oldest French colonies from the nation that had built them.