Sugar

Sugar has long played a complex role in American history, affecting economics, politics, and diet. Supporting early colonial empires of the Dutch, French, and English, sugar was the most important commodity coming from the tropics, emerging as the dominant plantation crop of Barbados by the 1640s and Jamaica by the early 1700s. Throughout the eighteenth century, sugar was Britain’s most important colonial import, surpassing the value of all other imports combined. With sugar as its anchoring crop, the Caribbean formed the center of a growing Atlantic commerce involving three continents: Africa supplied the vast number of bodies, through human bondage, needed to cultivate the labor-intensive crop; North America provided raw materials, including the timber used to build the increasing number of ships for transporting the commodity; and Europe generated goods and luxuries for its own and export markets.