Sugar plantations in the Caribbean
After the abolition of slavery, indentured laborers from India, China, Portugal and other places were brought to the Caribbean to work in the sugar industry.
The Portuguese introduced sugar plantations in the 1550s off the coast of their Brazilian settlement colony, located on the island of Sao Vincente.
[2] As the Portuguese and Spanish maintained a strong colonial presence in the Caribbean, the Iberian Peninsula amassed tremendous wealth from the cultivation of this cash crop.
They began colonizing the remaining American territories, hoping to capitalize on the lucrative cultivation and trade of natural resources.
The coastal placement of commercial ports gave imperial states a geographic advantage in shipping crops throughout the transatlantic world.
By exploiting labor and the natural world, imperial conflicts arose in the Caribbean vying for political and economic control.
For example, conflicts among the English, Spanish, French, Dutch, and various indigenous peoples manifested for territorial gain; regarding the region's political ecology, these European states exploited the environment's resources to such an extent that sugar production stagnated.
[4] Due to the loss of trees, needed for timber in the sugar refinement process, European imperial powers began competing and fighting over the Caribbean during the middle 17th century.
Indigenous populations began dying at unprecedented rates due to the influx of old-world diseases brought by colonists.
[6] This extreme diminishment of native populations cleared room for plantation construction and lessened the conflicts between Europeans and indigenous peoples.
[8][10] By 1706, the laws against Jews owning sugar plantations in Barbados were dropped, by which time Jewish involvement in rum production was reduced to a nominal status.
According to a 2021 study, "historical property rights institutions [in Haiti] created high transaction costs for converting land to cane production", relative to the other Caribbean countries.
[11] After the end of slavery in Saint Domingue at the turn of the 19th century, with the Haitian Revolution, Cuba became the most substantial sugar plantation colony in the Caribbean, outperforming the British islands.
During the late 19th and 20th centuries, the sugar cane industry came to dominate Puerto Rico's economy, both under the colonial rule of Spain and under the United States.
The Europeans forced the indigenous peoples of various Caribbean islands to provide the physical labor necessary for the production of sugarcane.
[14] Slavery on Plantations in the Caribbean involved a series of interconnected relationships and power dynamics between the enslaved and the more elite population on the island.
[17] Although these nations have taken measures to mitigate the impacts of the sugar revolution, in some there are still traces of what the environmental historian of the Caribbean and Latin America, Reinaldo Funes Monzote, describes as a "serious deterioration" of the natural environment, with socio-economic consequences.
