Plantation ProÞtable Worlds
More than twelve million enslaved Africans transported to the Americas made the rise of plantation systems possible. Tobacco, rice, indigo, and especially sugar plantations drove the development of merchant capitalism.
Shaped by international exchanges and competitive markets, these estates did not exist in isolation. Cotton, sugarcane, and coffee fields, as well as mills, furnaces, terraces, and workshops, sustained the operations of estates of all sizes in the Americas. Particular crops cultivated and processed in these estates also shaped the development of slavery in the Americas. These interrelated configurations created a world in itself, a world that enslaved men, women, and children were forced to inhabit on a daily basis. Enslaved people had literally fed the plantation systems established in the Americas since the sixteenth century. In Brazil and the West Indies, plantation slavery, especially in sugar estates, was a brutal, often deadly, system. Mortality rates among enslaved men, women, and children were high in sugar plantations in the West Indies and remained higher than birth rates until the abolition of slavery.Nineteenth-century technological innovations transformed plantation slavery as well. The invention of new machinery such as the cotton gin, the water-powered press, the steam-powered grinding mill, and the water-steamed coffee hulling and cleaning machine allowed the production of cotton, sugar, and coffee to increase at unprecedented levels. The capable and strong hands of enslaved men, women, and children planted, harvested, and processed crops by operating new machinery that transformed these crops into valued commodities.
Ultimately, the work of bondspeople not only sustained the rise and persistence of plantation economies in the Americas, but their labor also financed industrialization and pushed slave societies to enter a new era of global capitalism during the second half of the nineteenth century. Yet, as we will see in chapter 8, the work provided by enslaved people was also widespread in urban areas all over the Americas.