Sugar plantations have depended on coerced labor since at least the eighth century

Evidence

This was in part because it was incredibly labor-intensive to produce. To achieve scale for export and trade, cane required tremendous coerced and coordinated human labor in warm climates and on fertile land. Arab enslavers from as far back as the eighth century are credited with spreading sugar plantations throughout the Mediterranean basin of southern Europe and North Africa—Sicily, Cyprus, Malta, Spain, and Morocco—as Muslim rulers conquered parts of the region over the next two centuries. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 269

Categorization

• XREF: Establishes the pre-Atlantic world slave-sugar connection; connects to the reframing question of whether the Atlantic slave system was novel or continuous with Mediterranean precedent.