Latin America in Colonial Times by Restall Matthew & Lane Kris

Author:Restall, Matthew & Lane, Kris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2011-11-13T16:00:00+00:00

Sugar and Slaves, Gold and Diamonds

Enslaved Africans did not end up evenly spread throughout the Americas. Most were taken to the Caribbean islands (a reasonable estimate is 4.7 million) and to Brazil (4.2 million) (see Map 9.1). Sugar plantations dominated the economies of Portuguese Brazil and of the English, French, and other European colonies in the Caribbean; it was thus in those places that the greatest demand for slave labor developed in response to soaring overseas consumer demand for sugar. Another half million Africans ended up in British North America, many to work on the tobacco, rice, and later cotton plantations that developed there in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. British North America was unique in that the enslaved population grew naturally, with substantial encouragement from slave owners, whereas the tropical colonies relied on constant imports, mostly of young men. Thus, the majority of Africans brought to the Americas had the misfortune of being mass slaves, mostly plantation workers, and the largest portion was absorbed into the Brazilian plantation system.

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