More than Brown Teeth, Black Lungs & Brown Sugar

[alice malice]

Sugar was intimately related to the growth in the slave trade in the
Americas. While the Spanish began the importation of Africans into the
Caribbean early in the sixteenth century, it was in the colonies of
her rivals in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Caribbean where
it flourished most. Slavery became the most defining quality of
plantation society throughout the American tropics and beyond. The
trading of slaves became was much an industry in New England as in the
Caribbean, and the profits made by the traders provided capital for
economic development well beyond the region. It was especially
important to rise of the North American maritime industry and defense
of the slave trade became an economic interest of both private and
government interests in North America, Britain, France, and the
Netherlands. The 1974 suggestion of Thomas and Bean that "the only
group of clear gainers from the British transatlantic slave trade . .
. were the European consumers of sugar and tobacco and other
plantation crops" who "were given the chance to purchase dental decay
and lung cancer at somewhat lower prices than would have been the case
without the slave trade" (5) underestimates the close relationship
between the Caribbean slave trade and production and the rise of
northeastern US capitalism.(6) More recently, William Darity, Jr., has
reenforced the argument that West Indian plantations and the slave
trade were intimately bound to the rise of British industry and
maritime power. He challenges those who have neglected the role of the
West Indies and argues that the ratio of profits from the slave trade
and plantation production in the Americas to the national income and
to total investment in England was quite large, and that the share of
imports and exports in the gross domestic product of England during
the period in question was also large. He concluded that the British
mercantilists thoroughly understood the economic forces of their time,
and because Britain was the most through and single-minded
mercantilist power "in pursuit of the grand mercantilist scheme of
commercial conquest, naval power, colonialism, slavery, and
metropolitan industrialization," she became "the world's industrial
leader by the start of the nineteenth century."(7)

http://www.tulane.edu/~woodward/olemiss.htm
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