ABSTRACT
The place to start is with colonial America, when, similarly to Brazil and the islands of the Caribbean, plantation agriculture in the American South demanded a labor force that was not filled by European colonists and which Amerindians could not be enslaved to do (knowing how to escape, Europeans thinking they were not conditioned for plantation work, and, in some places, being too few in number). The Spanish, French, Portuguese, British, and to a lesser extent Danish and Dutch, colonizers of their respective New World colonies entered the business of raising sugar cane, and later tobacco and cotton, that necessitated a forced labor regime. Sugar cane requires year-round manual labor for planting, harvesting, and the harsh work of the sugar mill to grind and boil down the cane and process the sugar, as cane itself cannot be exported, due to its bulkiness and tendency to spoil. Cane grew well in Florida and especially in Louisiana, where connections to the French Caribbean were already strong, and hence, growers moved in African slaves from Saint Domingue (Haiti) to work in the cane fields and processing mills. The wealthiest of French overseas colonies at the time was Haiti because of the lucrative world trade in sugar in the eighteenth century. The French also nominally owned that swath of land that stretched from New Orleans into much of the Midwest and Great Plains, with hopes that the region would become the breadbasket to feed the slaves in Haiti-that is,
until the slaves revolted there in 1803 and liberated themselves from the French to form an independent nation. The French then sold their American land (known as the Louisiana Purchase) to a new United States government that same year. By then, the French sugar plantation system stuck in what became the state of Louisiana, complete with the African slave labor system on which it depended.1
