Sugar cane only thrived in the American colonies’ one subtropical region, Louisiana.

Evidence

In New Orleans in 1751, French Jesuit priests planted the first cane stalks in the area, near Baronne Street. In the Gulf region of southern Louisiana, weather conditions were more like those in the Caribbean, a geographic space the historian Matthew Guterl called the American Mediterranean. Given the city’s tropical climate, the plant thrived, which it had failed to do in the British colonies of Georgia and South Carolina. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 290

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘American Mediterranean’ framing fits the reader’s infrastructure lens — a geographic niche determining what a region can underwrite, like the cedar forests enabling shipbuilding.