ABSTRACT
A deluge of publications on the sugar industry appeared in 1695 about how best to promote it and how to most equitably and effectively raise revenue from it. The Irregular and Disorderly State of the Plantation-Trade, however, presented the sugar refiners’ position. The author takes a broad view in the hopes of appealing to national interests by relating the sugar trade to a perceived drain on the English population. Sugar should be refined in England, so the author claims, to avoid depopulating the country. According to this writer, a minority of Caribbean planters refined their own sugar, an anomalous practice with dire consequences for others in the industry and for England as a whole. The author, who was apparently a planter, argues that policy favoured a small group of English sugar bakers. Barbados paid for expeditions against the French which suggested to the author that colonies, far from a drain on state resources, augmented them.
