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 |