“Slaves are the hands and feet of the owner of sugar plantations and mills; because without them, in Brazil, it is neither possible to create, maintain, and develop a plantation, nor to run a sugar mill,” wrote Jesuit missionary André João Antonil in 1711.1
More than one century later in the United States, Solomon Northup, who was kidnapped in Washington, DC, in 1841 and sold and sent into slavery to Louisiana, described “the dexterous fingers and quick motion of Patsey, who could fly along one side of a row of cotton, stripping it of its undefiled and fleecy whiteness miraculously fast.”2 According to Northup, Patsey was “the most remarkable cotton picker of Bayou Boeuf” and picking “five hundred pounds a day was not unusual for her.”3
Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the rise of plantations of sugar, rice, tobacco, cotton, indigo, and coffee in the Americas drew upon the Atlantic slave trade and relied on the workforce of enslaved Africans.
The work provided by bondspeople such as Patsey and Northup made possible the production of highly profitable crops on plantations that were vital for the formation of a wider mercantilist economic system sustained by European powers and their colonial empires. During the era of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, these developments intensified international commercial exchanges and contributed to the rise of industrial capitalism as a new global economic and political order.4Scholars have differentiated slave societies from societies with slaves, as briefly discussed in the introduction of this book.5 Although greater nuance can be brought to this distinction, it is nonetheless helpful in allowing us to understand why plantations were so influential in the development of slavery in the Americas.6 Put in a blunt way, in slave societies, the institution of slavery was a central element of social, political, and economic life, whereas in societies with slaves, slavery had a marginal role, and the number of slaves was normally small. Therefore, although slavery existed to a greater or to a lesser extent in all societies of the Americas, the regions where plantations dominated contained the largest concentration of enslaved laborers. The labor provided by bondspeople like Patsey and Northup remained the main force behind the development of sugar, indigo, wheat, tobacco, rice, cotton, and coffee plantations in the Americas until the late nineteenth century. Ultimately, as Antonil hinted, plantation slavery shaped the development of all American societies where slavery played a central role in the economy.