Title: The Turning Point: European Conquests of the Americas (1492-1800)
Headings: The Turning Point: European Conquests of the Americas (1492-1800)
The Turning Point: European Conquests of the Americas (1492-1800)
Content: Ironically, the Europeans’ insatiable appetite for sweetness led to this brutal trade. Wherever the sugarcane crop dominated, so too did plantations with enslaved labor. Unlike Mexico or Peru, the Portuguese colony of Brazil lacked precious metals near the coast. So the Portuguese developed sugar plantations outfitted with enslaved Africans. The Portuguese took sugarcane grass from its native homeland in South and East Asia, transplanted it to Brazil, and then sold the sugar to Europe and colonial North America. The first truly global trade was also the most nefarious. It set the precedent of using African slaves to create cash crops to be sold abroad in a global market. Eighty percent of the 11 million enslaved Africans who came to the Americas went to sugar plantation regions of Brazil and the Caribbean (90). The slave trade certainly had enormous political, economic, and social implications in western and central Africa. Europeans could not conquer African nations because many were powerful and because various diseases, such as malaria and yellow fever, made it extremely dangerous for Europeans to enter into the interior of the continent.