American Sugar Revolution

Sugar Cane Plantation 1500-1800

The American sugar industry evolved between 1500 and 1800 as planters adopted innovations in land use and in the mills. The Spanish began commercial sugar production in Hispaniola; the Portuguese followed shortly thereafter in Brazil. The sugar cane is not a native plant of the western hemisphere; it originated from New Guinea and subtropical India. Sugar plantation economy was based on agricultural mass production of sugar cane. Evidently, the rise of sugar economies points out to a transformative power of a single commodity, which resulted to crop determinism.(1) To this effect, economies of the Caribbean colonies expanded massively in the sense that sugar plantations shifted to production that realized
This led to the fact that labor shifted from free labor to slave labor in which slaves were bought from Africa in order to farm the plantations of sugar cane. Plantation owners in the New World needed slaves for agricultural labor of their plantations. The African slaves were preferred because of their strength. These slaves were seen as a necessity due to their cost effectiveness and ability to achieve a high output of picked sugar cane and their ability to survive in the extreme conditions. Slaves were chosen by these conditions because they were seen as more valuable than horses because of reports which indicated that horses were unsuitable; due to their short life span and limited working hours. The slaves became disciplined and were forced to work in bad conditions for long hours at young ages in harsh
The Barbadians then began to make their own innovations around 1700, and continued to adopt innovations well into the 18th century.(7) With the passage of time, the contrasts between the land use not only of Brazilian and Barbadian planters, but also between the innovative and the traditional planters elsewhere in tropical America became more marked and the industry took on distinct regional