Sugar wealth and the slave trade financed the British North American colonies

Evidence

“White gold,” as sugar was called, drove trade in goods and people, fueled the wealth of European nations, and, for the British in particular, shored up the financing of the North American colonies. Over the span of nearly three hundred years, from the mid-sixteenth century on, a succession of European nations—Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France, and Britain—plied an international slave trade, with African elites and dealers on one side of the ocean and an insatiable demand by white colonists for enslaved labor on the other. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 263

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s core ‘origin stories are infrastructure’ reframing — sugar as the economic engine that made colonial settlement viable, positioning slavery as foundational rather than peripheral. — connects to: American territorial expansion, slavery, and cotton drove the Industrial Revolution symbiotically — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 199; Linnaean botany’s founding collections depended on slave-based world trade — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 766