Read the passage and study the image from Sugar Changed the World. The owner of a sugar plantation built a home—called the Great
House—usually high on a hill, where the tropical breezes blow. The open windows provided a kind of air conditioning, making even the hottest days more pleasant. These grand homes, with their high, cool rooms, their polished mahogany furniture, and their servants flitting between the main house and the separate cooking building, were meant to command attention, to show power and wealth. A plantation owner was a kind of god or king, ruling over his empire of sugar. In the Great House the owners could sit on the verandahs, rest their legs on special chairs made for pulling off high rubber boots, drink their rum swizzlers, while their slaves labored on hundreds and hundreds of acres of cane fields. The furniture was imported from abroad, along with all the other comforts—silverware, silk-covered chairs, white christening gowns, porcelain washing bowls. To this day, you can find the Great Houses of old plantations on hilltops throughout the Caribbean, and yet the strange thing is that the men who built and owned the homes hardly used them. For as soon as a sugar planter made enough money, he took his family and moved back to Europe. You can find the planters in the great English novels of the 1800s, such as Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, settled into their English homes and watching, through their account books, how the sugar crop was doing back in the Caribbean. While the masters enjoyed the life of wealth in Europe, the daily routine of the plantations was left in the hands of the overseers. Most often poor men who came to the New World to make their fortunes, the overseers had not the slightest sympathy for their enslaved workers. The exterior of a great house on a plantation in Jamaica. This is a picture of a Great House in Jamaica. How does the illustration relate to the description of a Great House in the text? The text describes the purpose of a Great House, but the illustration shows only the enslaved people’s quarters. The text describes the enslaved people’s quarters of a Great House, but the illustration shows only the Great House. The illustration shows what a Great House looked like from the outside, while the text explains what a Great House looked like from the inside. The illustration shows an empty Great House, while the text explains that wealthy plantation owners lived mostly in their European residences.
