Sugar’s capital and gang-labor demands permanently entrenched plantation control

Evidence

Sugar enslavers never lost their grip on the land. Compared with Black sharecropping on cotton plantations, where African Americans gained a small measure of physical independence as individual family units living and working on white-owned land, Black cane workers had little choice but to live in somebody’s old slave quarters. As had been the case for centuries, making cane into sugar required access to huge swaths of land, large amounts of capital, and gang labor to plant, harvest, and mill the crop. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 306

Categorization

• XREF: The structural constraint argument — crop characteristics drive labor organization — parallels the Causal Relationships reasoning in the book’s core reframing; also echoes the ADDENDUM on trees-as-infrastructure (sugar as crop infrastructure).