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17th centuryReputable source · 2 sourcesWell documented

Sugar and Tobacco Fix the Plantation System in Place

By the seventeenth century enslaved labor on sugar, tobacco, and later cotton fields becomes the economic engine of colonial America

On the timeline · around 17th century · The Triangular Trade Takes Shape (1518-1700)The Triangular Trade Takes Shape (1518-1700)The Trade at Its Height (1700-1791)Sugar and Tobacco Fix the Plantation System in Place16001625165016751700

Quick facts

Major crops
Sugar, tobacco, later cotton
Sugar regions
Brazil, the Caribbean
Tobacco region
the Chesapeake
Cotton's rise
after the 1790s cotton gin

What happened

By the mid-seventeenth century, European colonists in the Caribbean, Brazil, and mainland North America had built distinct plantation economies around enslaved African labor, tied to the particular crop each region grew. Sugar, the most capital-intensive crop, required large enslaved workforces and produced Black population majorities across Brazil and the Caribbean islands. Tobacco in the Chesapeake could turn a profit with smaller numbers of enslaved workers, since planters there could rely on fresh land cleared by enslaved labor rather than the sustained investment sugar demanded. Cotton did not become a dominant crop in the American South until the invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s, after which it would eclipse tobacco and drive the internal expansion of slavery into the Deep South. Each crop, the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative notes, shaped the size and structure of the enslaved labor force differently, but all three depended on it entirely.

Why it matters

The crop-specific plantation economies built in this period are what generated the demand that kept the transatlantic trade running for two more centuries. Sugar alone consumed enslaved lives at a rate that required constant replacement through new shipments from Africa, since planters found it cheaper to work people to death and import more than to sustain a population through births.

How we know

The Lowcountry Digital History Initiative's African Passages exhibit and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello Foundation both document the crop-by-crop structure of colonial plantation slavery using plantation records, colonial correspondence, and probate inventories from Virginia, the Caribbean, and Brazil.

Sources

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Part of a timelineThe Atlantic Slave Trade29 events · Four centuries in which European traders forced an estimated 12.5 million Africans onto ships bound for the Americas, and the enslaved people, revolts, and abolitionists who fought it from the first crossing to the lastView all →
Sugar and Tobacco Fix the Plantation System in Place · The Atlantic Slave Trade · SourcedStory