What is the connection between sugar and the emergence of a black slave labor force in the Americas?

Résumé du document

Sugar production is definitely essential to understand Black slave trade between Africa and America. While referring to American slavery, one often thinks about the old American cotton plantations in the south. Nevertheless, sugar played a significant role than other productions like cotton or tobacco at the beginning of the slave trade. Robert William Fogel writes: "To those who identify slavery with cotton and tobacco, the small size of the U.S. share in the slave trade may seem surprising. The temporal pattern of slaves' imports, however, clearly reveals that the course of the Atlantic slave trade cannot be explained by the demand of these crops.?

Extraits

[...] The eligibility question must be considered in order to understand why White people were not enslaved in America. Slaves were usually “outsiders”, people coming from a different region who had a different culture. Therefore, the color of the skin became a criterion that could define who belonged to the community and who did not, who could be enslaved and who could not. The Europeans were also not very resistant to some diseases like malaria (Plasmodium vivax) that existed in West Indies, whereas the Africans were immunized against them: “West Africans, moreover, have inherited protection against vivax malaria, associated with certain hemoglobin characteristics, and their ancestors carried this protection with them to the Americas.”[10] Even though the Africans also died at high rates on the American plantations, they died more slowly than Europeans and Native Americans. [...]

[...] The high demand and the high prices of sugar in Europe were very efficient incentives to make entrepreneurs invest in the American plantations. The idea of the “Plantation Complex”, developed by Philip Curtin might be useful to understand the American slave societies. According to him, the plantation complex was a specific form of domination, which existed “where the Europeans conquered and then replaced the vanishing native peoples with settlers but not settlers from Europe”[2]. Besides, the Atlantic slave trade is definitely linked to the sugar monoproduction since both of these activities appeared at the same time in the Americas. [...]

[...] The Europeans tried to use them as their labor force but many obstacles prevented them to do it on a large scale. At first, some of the isles where the entrepreneurs set their industries up were not densely inhabited enough before their arrival. In such situations, the producers were obliged to find some labor force elsewhere. Moreover, even though some places were populated enough like the Caribbean islands of Jamaica, Hispaniola or Puerto Rico, the epidemic disasters that occurred in the Americas at that time dried up many potential sources of labor force. [...]

[...] Besides, the shipping conditions were not very good and many people were dying on the boats. The shorter the trip was, the higher were the chances to survive: “Mortality at sea on the voyages from Angola to Brazil was normally 30 to 50 percent less than it was on voyages from Angola to the Caribbean.”[11] The sugar industry is actually highly linked to the emergence of a Black labor force in the Americas: great majority of the slaves brought into the British, French and Dutch Caribbean colonies were engaged in sugar production and its ancillary industries.”[12] Cane sugar was indeed in the early modern period one of the most popular products imported in Europe from the Americas. [...]

[...] It was more difficult to coerce a labor force that exactly knew the area and could easily escape from the plantations. Finally, some legal obstacles sometimes prevented Europeans from enslaving Native Americans. For instance, the Portuguese State forbade the enslavement of Indians after 1570. The sugar producers could also have used Europeans, enslaved or not, in order to work for them but those men were reluctant to go in the hostile tropical regions and the cost of the travel was very high. [...]