sugar trade
Cane crop business
The sugar trade is the historical commerce in sugar, particularly the transatlantic system from the 16th through 19th centuries that linked Caribbean plantations with European markets.
The term evokes the brutal economics of slavery—sugar cultivation was notoriously labor-intensive, and the trade drove massive forced migration from Africa.
The sugar trade shaped the demographics of the entire Caribbean.
- slaveryOwnership of people
- slave laborCoerced unpaid servitude
- forced laborCompelled toil, no consent
- plantationsLarge-scale farming operations
- plantation ownersLarge-scale agricultural landholders
commodity markets · colonialism · monoculture · indentured labor · exports · mercantilism · abolition · emancipation · imports · rum production · plantation economy · tariffs · milling · Middle Passage · refining · sugarcane · Indies · white gold
- food tradealmonds, farm produce, walnuts, fresh produce, olive oil
- historical tradebarter, Silk Road, bartering, barter system, marketplaces
- Pacific expansionprovisional government, overthrow, Queen Liliuokalani, statehood, Guam
- Portuguese EmpirePortugal, Vasco da Gama, Age of Discovery, Goa, Angola
- rum historyrum, molasses, sugarcane, distillation, grog
- Caribbean Slaveryplantation, slave owners, chattel slavery, slave revolts, abolitionists
sugar tradespice trade
Historical exchange of aromatics
salt trade · fur trade · silk trade · tea trade · opium trade
sugar tradefair trade
Equitable exchange between parties
subsistence farming · smallholder farming · cooperative farming
sugar tradesubsistence economy
System without market surplus
domestic production · self-sufficiency · autarky · barter economy · gift economy