English slave-trade dominance by 1700 grew from sugar-driven demand

Evidence

Curtin’s approximations reveal that while imports by the Portuguese and Dutch merchants during the first half of the century exceeded the English trade by a substantial margin (a combined 327,000 for the Dutch and Portuguese as compared to 20,700 for English traders), by the third quarter, the English territories had overtaken the Spanish colonies in labor imports. By the last 25 years of the seventeenth century, English merchants had more than doubled their performance in human trading for the previous quarter (69,000 for the earlier period versus 174,000) thereby besting their commercial contemporaries. This achievement, again, was largely due to the demands of sugar production. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 590

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Linnaean botany’s founding collections depended on slave-based world trade — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 766