The sugar boom caused land prices to rise nearly thirtyfold

Evidence

Sugarcane production required good land, irrigation, a large labor force, and expensive equipment. It promised major profits, but it required an initial investment far greater than tobacco or indigo. Once the sugar boom hit Saint-Domingue, there was a rush to purchase the best land and a vertiginous rise in prices. The governor wrote in 1700 that a plantation that had sold for 70 écus eighteen months earlier could now not be purchased for 2,000, even when nothing was being cultivated there. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 79

Categorization

• SEED: The vertiginous land-price spiral in early Saint-Domingue is a clean economic-history hook for explaining how speculative booms reshape a colony’s social order.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 79