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 modernity. And it was from the harbors of São Tomé that the model soon spread to the New World, with all of the grotesque inhumanity inherent to it.
