appropriate to specialized crops for European and world markets: sugar
(most important of all), tobacco, cacao, coffee, tea, rice, indigo, sea-island
(long staple) cotton, upland cotton, mulberry trees (for silkworms), maize,
and small grains—not to mention opium.^2
Plantations resemble modern factories, and in fact plantations with pro-
cessing facilities on the premises—mills for crushing and boiling cane
sugar, for example, or special sheds for flue-curing tobacco—were literally
factories within giant farms, without a hint of contradiction. These were
early modern capitalist enterprises, after all, whether owned by individual
entrepreneurs, groups in joint-stock arrangements, governments, or the
church. Everywhere risks to investors were considerable: from hostile in-
digenous populations that had been displaced and/or enslaved; from exotic
landscapes with dangerous climates; from strange (to Europeans) preda-
tors, vipers, and varmints; from wars with colonial rivals; from brigandage
and piracy along shipping lanes to markets; and much else. Yet hopes of
profit, even enormous profit, were often enough realized. No wonder, then,
that by the eighteenth century many London merchants’ coffee shops had
evolved into insurance brokerages and banks. Financiers and insurers also
stood behind Britain’s emergent dominance on the west coast of Africa,
which supplied the millions of laborers New World plantations ultimately
required.^3
If plantation production cannot be accomplished with machines, then
it has ever been done with dependent, coerced labor of some sort. Euro-
pean Christian Crusaders encountered Muslim-owned cane sugar planta-
tions worked by dark-skinned imported slaves on eastern Mediterranean
islands such as Cyprus—this half a millennium before the English coined
‘‘plantation.’’ By the mid-fifteenth century the Portuguese had finally at-
tained their own sugar plantations—in the Madeiras. The horrendous labor
of tunneling and digging irrigation systems through volcanic rock and then
establishing terraced cane fields fell first to European, North African, and
Guanche (from the Canary Islands) slaves. Later, dark-skinned Africans
joined what was for a good while the Western world’s premier sugar factory.
Various European expeditionary forces spent much of the fifteenth century
trying to conquer the Canaries and their ferocious Guanche defenders. The
Spanish persisted and finally succeeded—and established their own cane
plantations. Guanches were driven to extinction, like so many peoples in
the Americas. In La Florida, the northern fringe of Spain’s American em-
pire of precious metals and sugar, Spanish soldiers and priests enchained
large numbers of Timucuans and other natives to work huge farms devoted