Plantation Slavery Across the Americas and the Many Forms of Resistance

Sugar was the principal economic engine driving the demand for enslaved labor from the seventeenth century onward. Barbados became the model for the British slaveholding plantation society from the 1640s, Jamaica (conquered by England in 1655) became the largest sugar producer in the British Caribbean, and Saint-Domingue, under France's 1685 Code Noir, reached the point of producing as much as 40 percent of the world's sugar by 1789. Sugar plantations recorded the highest mortality rates of enslaved people anywhere in the Americas — life expectancy after arrival on a Caribbean sugar plantation could fall below seven years — a relentless death toll that itself explains much of the enormous scale of the Caribbean slave trade, while Brazil, as the largest single recipient of enslaved Africans in the Americas at close to 4.8 million people, developed a comparable plantation regime built on its own sugar engenhos.