African slaves replaced white indentured peasants as the sugar labor force

Evidence

M. Debien has observed that the trickle of indentured peasants … dried up at various times in the second half of the seventeenth century: after 1666 few more such servants were sent to French St. Christopher; after 1685 few more to Guadeloupe. The same contrast can be seen between the older settled sugar colonies, like Barbados, which soon ceased to demand the services of any white men from Europe besides specialists, and the newer settlements, like Jamaica, which still, for a time, welcomed unskilled white labourers. Specialists—tradesmen, coachmen, refiners, private tutors—were still sent out to the plantations for another century; but the peasant, with his two hands and nothing much else, was no longer in demand. His place had been taken by an African. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1858

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the book’s core thesis on the racial structuring of labor — the substitution of African for white peasant labor as sugar colonies consolidated.