Sixteenth-century sugar plantations required enormous capital and labor investment.

Evidence

The use of slave labor in the New World of the sixteenth century by the Spanish Crown (and soon after the Portuguese) and its merchant concessionaires was consequently a most natural step. Slave labor had been a basis for colonial trade in the Mediterranean, Africa, and the Indies; it was already the foundation of colonization in the Canaries, the Azores, and the Madeiran islands. At first, the relationship between capitalism, colonization, and slave labor had appeared almost coincidental. … As Italian capitalism matured, however, this emphasis on trade was to change for three reasons. Briefly, they were the expansion of the power of the Ottoman Turks in the eastern Mediterranean in the fifteenth century, the extension of sugar-cane cultivation from Asia Minor to Cyprus, Sicily, and the Atlantic islands (Madeira, Cape Verde, and the Azores) at the end of that century, and the collaboration of Genoese capitalists with the ruling classes of Iberia. These events transformed the incidental relationship between capitalism and slave labor into the very foundation of New World enterprise. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 556 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Madeira’s sugar plantations first institutionalized slave labor as capitalist commodity production; Sugar’s labor demands drove the English to mass importation of African slaves; Caribbean sugar colonies drove the rise of Atlantic capitalism — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 75 (+3 more)

Related

• Sugar’s labor demands drove the English to mass importation of African slaves (similarity 0.92)
• Madeira’s sugar plantations first institutionalized slave labor as capitalist commodity production (similarity 0.91)
• Ottoman expansion, sugar cultivation, and Genoese-Iberian alliance made slave labor central to capitalism (similarity 0.91)
• Caribbean sugar colonies drove the rise of Atlantic capitalism (similarity 0.89)
• Slave labor was integral to modern capitalism, not a pre-capitalist stage (similarity 0.88)
• Columbus’s success depended on three centuries of Genoese capitalist infrastructure, not personal qualities (similarity 0.87)
• Medieval Mediterranean slavery foreshadowed Atlantic colonial slavery (similarity 0.86)
• Sugar cultivation’s labor hunger drove the English slave trade to Africa (similarity 0.83)
• Sugar’s labor demands drove England’s expansion into the West African slave trade. (similarity 0.83)
• Slave labor sustained the extra-European market that industrial capitalism built on (similarity 0.82)
• Italian capitalist networks enabled the Portuguese Empire and its slave trade (similarity 0.81)
• Slave trading rescued the Mediterranean bourgeoisie from eclipse by northern merchants (similarity 0.81)
• African slaves replaced white indentured peasants as the sugar labor force (similarity 0.81)
• Sugar plantations have depended on coerced labor since at least the eighth century (similarity 0.81)
• European colonization employed slave labor as its foundational institution, not incidentally (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Madeira’s sugar plantations first institutionalized slave labor as capitalist commodity production #expands (0.60)
• Sugar’s labor demands drove the English to mass importation of African slaves #expands (0.55)
• Ottoman expansion, sugar cultivation, and Genoese-Iberian alliance made slave labor central to capitalism #expands (0.55) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 556
• Caribbean sugar colonies drove the rise of Atlantic capitalism #expands (0.45) — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 75
• Sugar plantations organized slaves into disciplined work-gangs under drivers. #expands (0.45)
• Sugar topped the eighteenth-century westward trade ahead of slaves #qualifies (0.30)