Their most important innovation, though, stands out both in terms of its impact on the lives of the human beings brought by force to work there and in the way it shaped the global economy, society, and geopolitics of the next five hundred years. Here, for the very first time, we find fully racialized slavery for the production of processed agricultural exports into foreign markets. São Tomé’s plantations, in other words, were designed for and run exclusively on the basis of the violent domination of Black African slave labor. This would prove to be the indispensable killer apparatus of
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