Europe could not supply the labor force sugar production demanded

Evidence

Apparently, it took no longer than the period between Columbus’s first and third voyages (1497) for the Spanish government to recognize and respond to the special problems it faced in depending upon its nationals for supplemental colonial labor. In June 1497, “a general order was issued to all justices in Spain authorizing the transportation to Hispaniola of criminals—with the exception of heretics, traitors, counterfeiters, and sodomites—in commutation of death or prison sentences.” This supply proving inadequate, the crown successively and contemporaneously resorted to white slavery (1504, 1512, 1521), foreign immigrants (1526), and inducing non-Castilian Spanish emigration (1511) as the shortage of Indian labor became more acute in the West Indies. Nevertheless, by the mid-sixteenth century, Iberian capitalists had come to understand something that their English successors would only need to take to heart a hundred years later: the production of sugar required a labor force that was larger and more politically and morally unencumbering than Europe could supply. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 620

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Bolivian MAS survived because of commodity boom and labor links Europe lacked — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 32