But this flat claim is unfounded. Slavery played a part in the Moroccan sugar industry17 and probably elsewhere; a slave revolt involving thousands of East African agricultural laborers took place in the Tigris-Euphrates delta in the mid-ninth century, and they may even have been sugar-cane-plantation workers.18 But slavery did grow more important as the European Crusaders seized the sugar plantations of the eastern Mediterranean from their predecessors;
an important correction
