Sugar cultivation’s labor hunger drove the English slave trade to Africa

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

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how the racialized labor-caste system of the Black radical tradition’s founding context emerged from economic rather than racial impulses. — connects to: Linnaean botany’s founding collections depended on slave-based world trade — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 766
• SEED: The Irish-to-African extension of unfree labor is a sharp origin-point angle for why racial hierarchy, not just slavery, became the transatlantic norm.