Sugar Trade Dbq

What Drove The Sugar Trade What do we use in almost every food today, but was a large cause of death, slavery, and the first globalized product? Sugar. Sugar cane is a difficult plant to grow, it can only be grown in hot, humid climates, and after it is cut it has to be crushed and pressed during the first 24 hours after harvested or it will rot. This plant was first discovered in New Guinea, then was grown in Asia. It was not traded widely until around 1317 where the Europeans first tasted it, and became obsessed, starting the sugar trade between South America, Europe, and Africa. Many factors drove the sugar trade, including African slave labor, European capital and Europeans demand for sugar. Humans are naturally greedy for foods that taste good, and the Europeans exploited that greed to make money for themselves through the sugar trade. To start a sugar plantation in South America was a difficult and expensive process. According to document I, you not only had to buy the land, but the curing house, a trash house windmills and at least three hundred slaves. The slaves alone would cost $7500, versus the 18 pounds a year if you were to …show more content…
Slavery was a cheaper form of labor, you would have to pay a starting fee of around $7,500 (Doc. I), but they would not be paid for the rest of their lives. Slaves didn’t have rights, so they could be put to work in the most dangerous places and would be worked until they either died of exhaustion or had ligaments torn off by the machine (Doc G). The European business owners knew that with more workers, more work gets done faster; therefore, as the population of slaves rises the tons of sugar produced rises, in Saint-Domingue, between 1764 and 1791 the slave population increased from 206,000 to 480,000. Additionally the tons of sugar produced annually rose from 60,000 to 78,696 (Doc C). As more slaves were bought, more sugar was produced, allowing more to be