Factory-like system of growing and refining sugar that spread across tropical Americas from the fifteenth century — large estates joining cane field to boiling-house, worked by the forced labor of enslaved Africans. Pioneered on Madeira and São Tomé and then driven across the Caribbean and Brazil, it turned a costly luxury into a daily European craving and a fortune for planters. It did so by consuming enslaved lives faster than they could be replaced, making the sugar plantation complex the single largest engine of the transatlantic slave trade and an early model of mass production organized for profit.
Europe's craving for something sweet helped build one of the deadliest labor systems in history. To feed it, planters in the Caribbean and Brazil ran their estates like factories: enslaved Africans cut the cane by hand under the lash, then fed it into crushing rollers and boiling vats that had to run day and night, because cut cane rots fast and had to be crushed and boiled almost at once. The work was so lethal — from the killing pace, the mill, disease, hunger, and cruelty — that on the worst sugar islands the enslaved died faster than children were born among them. So the planters simply bought more people. The overwhelming majority of the roughly twelve million Africans carried across the Atlantic in chains were sent to sugar-growing regions, above all Brazil and the Caribbean. This was the sugar plantation complex: the machine that turned sweetness into slavery, and the largest single reason the slave trade grew as vast as it did.