From the mid-seventeenth century, sugar cultivation expanded rapidly across Brazil and the Caribbean, driven by rising European demand and organized around large plantations that depended on the forced labor of enslaved Africans. Islands such as Barbados and later Saint-Domingue and Jamaica became major sugar producers, generating substantial profits for planters and merchants while subjecting enslaved workers to brutal, often fatal working conditions. The scale of this labor demand became a primary driver of the transatlantic slave trade through the eighteenth century.
Relevance to Trade History
The sugar economy was the single largest driver of the transatlantic slave trade and shaped Atlantic trade patterns for over two centuries.
Read the full story in our article Sugar and the Plantation Economy of the Atlantic World.
Source: Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. See our Sources & Methodology page for how we select and verify references.