Sugar’s labor demands pushed the English to enslave West Africans

Evidence

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. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 589

Categorization

• XREF: Robinson frames British slavery as an extension of an earlier Irish strategy — connects to his broader thesis in this book about racial capitalism and to his treatment of England’s internal colonization.