Sugar slavery predated and anchored the Atlantic economy before North America mattered

Evidence

What little Americans are taught or think they know about the slavery-based economy is largely a success story of how cotton became the nation’s leading export in the nineteenth century. Some people might also think of tobacco as a cash crop worked by enslaved people in places like Virginia in earlier eras. But even though cotton and tobacco dominated the colonial American economy, it was sugar that anchored the economy of the larger Atlantic world from the sixteenth century onward. Sugar slavery, which was uniquely destructive and deadly, made Brazil the focal point in the triangular trade in the century before twenty to thirty Africans landed in Point Comfort, Virginia, in 1619. Until then, European colonists had considered North America little more than an afterthought. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 262

Categorization

• QUESTION: This reframes the 1619 date itself: if sugar slavery in Brazil was the Atlantic anchor for a century prior, what makes 1619 the origin moment rather than a much earlier Brazilian hinge?
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the reframing-vs-specific-claims task: this is a specific empirical claim (sugar anchored the Atlantic economy from the 16th century) separable from the foundational-infrastructure thesis.
• XREF: connects to: Slavery made Euro-American trade uniquely self-catalyzing before industrialization. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 873