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The Portuguese introduced sugar plantations in the 1550s off the coast of their Brazilian settlement colony, located on the island of Sao Vincente. [2] As the Portuguese and Spanish maintained a strong colonial presence in the Caribbean, the Iberian Peninsula amassed tremendous wealth from the cultivation of this cash crop.
José Ramon Fernández, 1st Marquis of La Esperanza (1808–1883), was the wealthiest sugar baron in Puerto Rico in the 19th century. He was also one of the most powerful men of the entire Spanish Caribbean. [1] He owned an immense plantation of nearly 2300 acres on the northern coast of Puerto Rico, and a sugar mill with an advanced steam engine.
The success of Spanish Caribbean sugar plantations was a model for other European powers. The Portuguese colony of Brazil also developed large-scale sugar plantations. The high demand in Europe for sugar attracted other European powers to stake claims on Caribbean islands claimed by the Spanish but not effectively held.
The average sugar plantation employed 300 slaves, and the largest sugar plantation on record employed 1400 slaves. These plantations took up only 14% of Saint-Domingue's cultivated land; comparatively, coffee was 50% of all cultivated land, indigo was 22%, and cotton only 5%.
The island became the world's foremost producer of sugar during the late 18th and 19th centuries, when sugar production was the main industry. The climate and soil were perfect for the cultivation of sugar cane , and good ports and interior connections facilitated transport and exportation of the refined sugar.
Historically, coastal areas of Spanish Florida and the Caribbean South America (cf. the Spanish Main) were closely tied to the Spanish Caribbean. During the period of Spanish settlement and colonization of the New World, the Spanish West Indies referred to those settlements in islands of the Caribbean Sea under political administration of Spain ...
Originally settled by indigenous people, the island was subject to Spanish slave raids in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century and colonisation attempts by the Dutch, British, French, and Courlanders beginning in 1628, though most colonies failed due to indigenous resistance. After 1763 Tobago was converted to a plantation economy by ...
Caribbean colonies in 1723. The colonial molasses trade occurred throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the European colonies in the Americas. Molasses was a major trading product in the Americas, being produced by enslaved Africans on sugar plantations on European colonies.