Preface to first edition

Summary

The plantation complex was an economic and political order centering on slave plantations in the New World tropics. During the century centered on about 1800, these plantations played an extremely important role in the European-dominated portion of the world economy. Though the core of the complex was the slave plantations growing tropical staples, the system had much broader ramifications. Political control lay in Europe. Much of the labor force came from Africa, though some came from Amerindian societies on the South American mainland. In a final phase in the middle to late nineteenth century, most of the labor was to come from India and China. At its peak, many of the trade goods to buy African slaves came from India, and silver to buy these same Indian goods came from mainland South America. Northern North America and Europe were important trading partners, supplying timber and food to the plantations and consuming the sugar, rum, indigo, coffee, and cotton they produced.

The origins of this economic complex lay much further back in time. Its earliest clear forerunner was the group of plantations that began growing cane sugar in the eastern Mediterranean at the time of the European Crusades into the Levant. These plantations, like their successors, produced mainly for a distant market in Europe, thus becoming the center for a widespread commercial network to bring in labor and supplies and to carry off the finished product.