People tend to think of activism, protests, and boycotts as a modern (i.e started with hippies in the 60’s) phenomena, but they aren’t. Political and social activists have been protesting/rioting and boycotting goods to ‘vote with their money’ for hundreds of years. One of the biggest products to be boycotted from the mid 18th century until the complete abolition of slavery in England and it’s territories in 1833 was sugar.
The sugar sold in England in this time period was made predominately on English-owned sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and those plantations relied on slave labour to produce their product. The very act of buying sugar meant that you were were economically supporting slavery. Abolitionists, determined to end slavery as soon as possible by whatever means possible, therefore went after sugar with a vengeance.
Abolitionist William Fox and a Baptist activist named Martha Gurney produced a pamphlet entitled An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Refraining from the Use of West India Sugar and Rum (1791), which neatly summed the problem up: “If we purchase the commodity we participate in the crime. The slave dealer, the slave holder, and the slave driver, are virtually agents of the consumer, and may be considered as employed and hired by him to procure the commodity…In every pound of sugar used we may be considered as consuming two ounces of human flesh.”
Female abolitionists, many of whom were part of the new evangelical movements in the UK, would deliver these pamphlets door to door. To aid the cause, the most popular cartoonists of the day, men like Gillray and Cruikshank, joined in to make the reasons for the boycott understandable to anyone who couldn’t read the pamphlets.
The British people, most of whom were repelled at the idea of being the kind of rubbish person who would suborn slavery, duly started boycotting sugar with a fervour. However, many people still had a sweet tooth. What to do? The way to have one’s cake but eat cake too was to buy the slightly more expensive sugar that wasn’t made by slaves. Thus, people started buying sugar from India. (Granted, the working conditions in India weren’t great, but they were at least not enslaved and were no worse off than the working poor in England itself.) By the early Regency period, people would use special sugar bowls to announce to any guests that their sugar was not the gross byproduct of wretched misery. (Well, it probably was, but it wasn’t technically made by slaves.)
Of course, there were some people still avoided all sugar, much in the way that modern vegans avoid all animal products regardless of how ‘cruelty-free’ the milk and eggs are proclaimed to be, because they were aware that no one was producing truly non-exploitative sugar. The purists who eschewed all sugar were most likely rewarded by the continued use of their cavity-free teeth — since cavities don’t become common in a population until the use of sugar in the diet does — so there is probably a karmic lesson for us there.
Although the sugar boycott could a big bite out of the plantation owner’s bottom line, the plantations were driven into bankruptcy more by the government sucking up the millions of pounds of tax revenue from the sugar trade as from the boycott. Anglo-European plantation owners could have survived either the taxes or the boycott or the influx of cheaper American sugar undercutting them on the larger world market, but most of them could not survive all three. Nevertheless, the plantation system of sugar production would not truly disappear until the abolition of English slavery in 1833. In the end, the sugar boycott and abolitionists won not because they economically hurt the sugar planter, but because the boycott raised public awareness of the horrific reality of the slave system. The boycott helped turn the tide of public opinion against slavery.
There has been a similar modern attempt to encourage consumers to boycott buying clothes that have been made in sweatshops by an exploited developing-world labour. Most clothes offered in stores today are the product of de facto slave labor. For example, the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights released a report “alleging that workers producing clothing for Walmart, Target, Macy’s, Kohl’s and Hanes at a factory in Jordan have been routinely beaten, underpaid and forced to work hours in excess of what the local law allows. The report added that workers have been forced to live in bed bug-infested dormitories that lack heat and hot water, despite the snow and ice that are a feature of local winters.” Clothes produced in humanitarian conditions cost more, but it allows the consumer to be at least one step removed from something they find to be morally or ethically or environmentally or sociopolitically repugnant. Alas, it is hard as hell to find clothes not made by low-wage slaves … or, come to think of it, electronics or chocolate or produce.
It’s depressing, really.