The Sugar Duties Act 1846 (9 & 10 Vict) was a statute of the United Kingdom which equalized import duties for sugar from British colonies. It was passed in 1846 at the same time as the repeal of the Corn laws by the Importation Act 1846 (9 & 10 Vict. c. 22). The Act, combined with the recent abolition of slavery had a devastating effect on Caribbean economies, which had previously enjoyed preferential treatment in relation to import duties from the West Indies. There were in fact two Sugar Duties Acts in 1846 (c.41 and c.63), one being a replacement for the other.
With no cheap labour force and no preferential tariff protection, the plantation-owners in the British West Indies could not compete with Cuba and Brazil, where sugar was still produced using slave labour. The rise of European sugar beet as a cheap alternative to sugar cane further worsened their position. Plantation owners in the West Indies felt a sense of betrayal in relation to the legislation, as they had taken understood it to be implicit in relation to their agreement to the abolition of slavery eight years earlier that the tariff protection would remain in place as a quid pro quo.
Famous quotes containing the words sugar, duties and/or act:
“The sugar maple is remarkable for its clean ankle. The groves of these trees looked like vast forest sheds, their branches stopping short at a uniform height, four or five feet from the ground, like eaves, as if they had been trimmed by art, so that you could look under and through the whole grove with its leafy canopy, as under a tent whose curtain is raised.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Of what use the friendliest dispositions even, if there are no hours given to Friendship, if it is forever postponed to unimportant duties and relations? Friendship is first, Friendship last.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We call the intention good which is right in itself, but the action is good, not because it contains within it some good, but because it issues from a good intention. The same act may be done by the same man at different times. According to the diversity of his intention, however, this act may be at one time good, at another bad.”
—Peter Abelard (1079–1142)