Sugar

Assembled from 16 blocks · 2 evidence · 10 related

1. Story
2. The commodity that supplies the mechanism connecting the exchange of plants to the trade in people. Sugar cane is an Old World crop; the Iberians carried it first to Madeira, the Canaries and São Tomé, where a template was assembled that had not existed before — a single-crop estate, a mill that must be fed continuously through the harvest, and a coerced labour force worked to a schedule set by the plant's biology, since cut cane spoils within about a day. Transplanted to Brazil and then to the Caribbean, that template consumed labour faster than any other agricultural system of the period, and the demand it generated is the principal reason the Atlantic slave trade reached the scale it did. Sugar is therefore not simply one item on the list of things that crossed. It is the piece of the Columbian Exchange in which a botanical transfer, an industrial process and a system of forced migration are the same fact seen from three sides.
3. Knowledge
4. Sugar
5. The transatlantic slave trade
6. Connections
7. The transatlantic slave trade
8. The transatlantic slave trade reaches its peak volume
9. Sugar
10. The post-contact population collapse of the Americas
11. The transatlantic slave trade reaches its peak volume
12. The Middle Passage
13. The transatlantic trade in enslaved people operates
14. Evidence
15. Voyage-level estimates of the number of captives embarked in Africa and disembarked in the Americas, by period and region, assembled from ship registers, insurance records and customs returns. V55 verification basis: NOT consulted in this session — slavevoyages.org was probed and refused by the egress proxy. The figures quoted in this pack (roughly 12.5 million embarked, roughly 10.7 million disembarked) are from the author's knowledge of the database. IT IS REVISED CONTINUOUSLY, so a curator must take current figures directly from the site rather than from this record.
16. Establishes the biological framing of post-1492 contact — crops, livestock and pathogens moving between hemispheres — used throughout this pack. V55 verification basis: this session had no outbound network access (WebFetch blocked by egress policy, WebSearch budget exhausted), so the book was not consulted; the citation is given from the author's knowledge and the work is a standard, widely held title that a curator can verify in any research library catalogue.