Columbus’s 1493 sugar introduction triggered an Atlantic slave-sugar industry reordering the world

Evidence

By then, Spain and Portugal had already begun to put enslaved Africans to work growing sugarcane on the Atlantic islands off the coast of North Africa, and the potential for an industry based on forced labor, fertile land, and a dawning era of global trade had reached an inflection point. “The true Age of Sugar had begun,” Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos write in their book Sugar Changed the World. “And it was doing more to reshape the world than any ruler, empire or war had ever done.” Over the next two centuries, on the sugar islands of the Greater Antilles—Saint-Domingue, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, among others—and the mainlands of Mexico and Brazil, European powers destroyed countless Indigenous lives as colonists staked out vast agricultural operations on their land and enslaved millions of Africans to work the fields. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 270

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘inflection point’ moment connects to the reader’s core case study: when you date the Atlantic slave system from determines what counts as the American origin. — connects to: Linnaean botany’s founding collections depended on slave-based world trade — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 766