c. 1500 CE–c. 1650 CE
Atlantic sugar plantations and enslaved labour
Trade & global routes · Azúcar · Plantaciones · Esclavitud y trata · Coerción colonial
In Portuguese Atlantic islands, Brazil, and by the mid-seventeenth century parts of the Caribbean, sugar expansion was linked to the capture, sale, and forced labour of enslaved Africans. Plantations were regimes of violence, dispossession, and resistance, not simple productive units; rhythms, scales, and mortality rates varied by colony and are not fixed here as single figures. Commercial wealth depended on these coercive relations and on their contestation.
Precision, calendar, and review
- Start
- year · approximate
- End
- year · approximate
- Calendar and convention
- Historical-era years; the source calendar is not identified. No conversion of days is assumed.
- Year zero
- The scale goes from 1 BCE to 1 CE without year zero. Changing era names changes labels only.
- Documentary review
- Date not recorded
Reading the date: duration of a process.
Sources
- globalcapitalism.history.ox.ac.uk (opens in a new tab)
Source provenance and scope
- Publication date
- 2022-12
- What this date describes
- The cited source or edition; it may postdate the historical event.
- Bibliographic date checked
- 2026-09-23
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This record is an editorial synthesis. Consult the sources to check claims and their limits. Chronological relationships alone do not establish causation.