Plantations

In the Caribbean, Europeans found the perfect place to grow sugar.

Growing sugar was like minting money...but physically much harder.

Growing sugar and getting it from cane to cube required enormous and unpleasant labor.  This led directly to African slavery.

It's easy to imagine that without the taste for sugar, African slavery would not have existed.  Neither tobacco nor cotton, the two other slave crops, had the labor demands or the value of sugar (at least until the late 1700s).

slaves/sugar