The Dutch came
with a solution. They had previously conquered parts of northern
Brazil from the Portuguese, and there they had learned the
techniques of plantation sugar production. It could only be
carried on efficiently with plantations of two or three hundred
acres, and it required large numbers of unskilled laborers both
to plant and harvest the crop and to refine the sugar. The Dutch,
then, brought sugar cane to the West Indies. This gave them a new
plantation crop, and it also gave them a new outlet for the slave
trade which, at that point in history, they had come to dominate.
The development of the sugar cane economy in the West Indies
produced a basic social revolution. The small tobacco farmers did
not have the capital to develop the large sugar plantations.
Some of them went into other occupations, but most of them
returned to Europe. The new labor needs were filled by a gigantic
increase in the importation of African slaves. The ratio of
whites to blacks within the islands changed markedly within a
matter of one or two decades. The white population consisted of
a handful of exceedingly wealthy plantation owners and another
handful of white plantation managers.
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