By the time of Columbus’s transatlantic voyages, cane had just been transplanted to the Spanish Canaries, from where his expeditions were staged. It quickly spread throughout the tropics of the New World and touched off an explosion of cane production that powered much of the world economy for the next three centuries. The “sugar belt” of the New World, which spread from northern Brazil to Surinam and up the Caribbean chain all the way to Cuba, attracted large numbers of European settlers lured by the relatively short transatlantic passage, the lack of organized native opposition, and
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