Sugar’s labor demands drove the English to mass importation of African slaves

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 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Ex-slaves’ refusal to sell disciplined labor led Brazilians to import European workers; Sugar’s labor demands drove England from Irish to West African slavery; Ottoman expansion, sugar cultivation, and Genoese-Iberian alliance made slave labor central to capitalism — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 556 (+12 more)

Related

• Sixteenth-century sugar plantations required enormous capital and labor investment. (similarity 0.92)
• Sugar’s labor demands drove England’s expansion into the West African slave trade. (similarity 0.91)
• Ottoman expansion, sugar cultivation, and Genoese-Iberian alliance made slave labor central to capitalism (similarity 0.91)
• Sugar cultivation’s labor hunger drove the English slave trade to Africa (similarity 0.90)
• Madeira’s sugar plantations first institutionalized slave labor as capitalist commodity production (similarity 0.88)
• Sugar’s labor demands pushed the English to enslave West Africans (similarity 0.87)
• Medieval Mediterranean slavery foreshadowed Atlantic colonial slavery (similarity 0.86)
• Slave labor was integral to modern capitalism, not a pre-capitalist stage (similarity 0.86)
• Columbus’s success depended on three centuries of Genoese capitalist infrastructure, not personal qualities (similarity 0.84)
• English capital subsidized both Brazilian independence and slave imports (similarity 0.84)
• Slave labor sustained the extra-European market that industrial capitalism built on (similarity 0.84)
• Forced transport across the Atlantic made the colony the Africans’ new birthplace (similarity 0.83)
• English slave-trade dominance by 1700 grew from sugar-driven demand (similarity 0.83)
• Caribbean sugar colonies drove the rise of Atlantic capitalism (similarity 0.82)
• Sugar dominated Atlantic trade with slaves second by 1750 (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Sugar’s labor demands drove England from Irish to West African slavery #expands (0.90)
• Ottoman expansion, sugar cultivation, and Genoese-Iberian alliance made slave labor central to capitalism #complicates (0.60) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 556
• Africa supplied slave labor because its region lay outside Europe’s world-economy #expands (0.60)
• Madeira’s sugar plantations first institutionalized slave labor as capitalist commodity production #complicates (0.55)
• Half of newly arrived African slaves died within a few years. #qualifies (0.30)