For one, slave uprisings were inseparable from plantation sugar production. In the ensuing centuries, as many as 70 percent of the slaves shipped in chains to the Americas would go on to be employed in this singularly cruel pursuit. Seen in one light, the history of sugar’s migratory spread, driven by devastating deforestation and soil exhaustion, as well as by the relentless search for greater and greater scales of production, was a remarkable, if terrible economic story. Seen in another, though, it was essentially the history of violent rebellion.
