The transatlantic slave trade was largely driven by sugar demand over two centuries.

Evidence

The voracious appetite for wealth creation and the unyielding desire for sugar combined to create the foundation of the modern world. From the first time Royal African Company slavers set sail for North America, through the years of the American Revolution, until the abolition of the international slave trade in 1808, roughly three million souls, many of them forever branded with the company’s initials, RAC, on their bodies, would be forcibly removed from their homes, their kin, and their way of life, the majority of them to feed demand for a sweetener. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 277

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reframing-vs-empirical taxonomy the reader is building; sugar’s causal role is a specific contested empirical claim vs the broader foundational reframing thesis.