sugar plantations
Tropical sweetener farms
Sugar plantations were large agricultural estates devoted to growing sugarcane and processing it into sugar.
From the 16th through 19th centuries, these operations—concentrated in the Caribbean, Brazil, and the American South—depended heavily on enslaved African labor.
The term evokes the brutal economics of colonial slavery: Her ancestors worked sugar plantations in Jamaica.
Today it may refer to historical sites or modern large-scale sugarcane farms.
- slave tradeCommerce in human beings
- Middle PassageTransatlantic slave trade crossing
- big houseInformal term for prison
- transatlantic tradeExchange across the Atlantic
- sugarcaneSucrose-yielding tropical grass
cane fields · colonialism · colonial powers · indentured labor · abolition movement · deforestation · milling · mercantilism · molasses · monoculture · cash crops · rum production · folk songs · irrigation · oral histories · Atlantic slave trade · forced labor · indentured
- New Orleans HeritageNew Orleans, French Quarter, Cajuns, Creoles, Creole culture
- Indo-CaribbeanIndo-Caribbean, indentured labor, indenture, coolie, Hindu temples
- Caribbean Jewssynagogues, Jewish heritage, crypto-Jews, colonial era, merchant families
- CaribbeanJamaica, Bahamas, Barbados, Cuba, Haiti
- HawaiiHawaii, Pearl Harbor, Honolulu, Maui, Waikiki Beach
- slaverychattel slavery, enslaved, slave, enslavement, slave traders
sugar plantationssubsistence farms
Self-sufficient agricultural plots
smallholdings · homesteads · kitchen gardens · allotments · crofts