Sugar and Tobacco Islands: Canary Islands, Looking at Madeira and Azores from the Window of the Second Globalization (1850-1914)

Abstract

The archipelagos of the Azores and Madeira in relation to the Canary Islands have had parallel but separate lives, and have even been in open competition with each other. We have chosen a first long-term approach, focusing on two stages, the one corresponding to the proto-globalization and the one during the period of the Second Industrial Revolution. Our discourse tries to define the paths that were chosen for the modernization of the economy. A fiscal economic regime differentiated from the continental territory and a path that relied on the industrial transformation of its agricultural products (sugar and tobacco) and on the development of new infrastructures, especially port infrastructures. In the second part, our gaze is more focused on the Canary Islands and we try to highlight, as far as possible, the efforts of a generation of enterprising Canary Islanders that we personify in the figures of Juan and Fernando León y Castillo.

Keywords

Sugar; Tobacco; Canary Islands; Madeira; Azores.