Sugar’s labor demands drove England’s expansion into the West African slave trade.

Evidence

The cultivation of sugar in the English colonies began consequently in the late 1630s. Once the techniques of sugar cultivation and refining were mastered, it rapidly displaced the less profitable crops of tobacco, indigo, and ginger in the islands. With the massive demands for labor that sugar production engendered, the appetite of colonial production for labor increasingly outpaced supply. Having already decimated those aboriginal populations they had encountered in the West Indies, the English mercantile and planter bourgeoisie found it necessary and expedient to expand their Irish (and homeland) strategy to West Africa. As they did so, the scale of their enterprise grew beyond anything seen in English history. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 589

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

Related

• Sugar cultivation’s labor hunger drove the English slave trade to Africa (similarity 0.94)
• Sugar’s labor demands drove the English to mass importation of African slaves (similarity 0.93)
• Sugar’s labor demands pushed the English to enslave West Africans (similarity 0.93)
• Sixteenth-century sugar plantations required enormous capital and labor investment. (similarity 0.86)
• English slave-trade dominance by 1700 grew from sugar-driven demand (similarity 0.84)
• Labor shortages and Atlantic commerce drove West African slavery’s expansion. (similarity 0.84)
• The transatlantic slave trade was largely driven by sugar demand over two centuries. (similarity 0.84)
• Tobacco glut and Brazil’s sugar wars drove the English to sugar cultivation (similarity 0.83)
• Tobacco demand drove the rise of African slave labor in the colonies (similarity 0.83)
• Sugar plantations have depended on coerced labor since at least the eighth century (similarity 0.82)
• European labor fully supplied the English colonies until sugar arrived in the 1640s (similarity 0.82)
• Ottoman expansion, sugar cultivation, and Genoese-Iberian alliance made slave labor central to capitalism (similarity 0.82)
• English capital subsidized both Brazilian independence and slave imports (similarity 0.81)
• Sugar topped the eighteenth-century westward trade ahead of slaves (similarity 0.81)
• Sugar dominated Atlantic trade with slaves second by 1750 (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Sugar’s labor demands drove the English to mass importation of African slaves #corroborates (0.95)
• Sugar’s labor demands drove England from Irish to West African slavery #expands (0.80)