Sugar planters vastly outearned tobacco and rice planters

Evidence

The absentee sugar planters were, with the East India Nabobs, the most conspicuous rich men of their time. Other absentee planters were nothing to them. There were some coffee and indigo absentees in France, but the tobacco planters of Virginia and even the rice planters of Carolina could not afford to behave in England like the sugar planters. They might go to England for their education but, unlike the sugar planters, they returned home when it was over; for in Virginia and Maryland, unlike the islands, life was tolerable and a real local patriotism came more easily to the planters; besides, their estates were mostly too small to support an absentee owner for the whole of his life. Yet they lived a luxurious life at home. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 577