Plantation economy

An economy centered on large estates that produce crops for export, often using enslaved or otherwise coerced labor. It ties landholding, labor control, and trade to the production of a few commodities.

Plantation: A large agricultural estate that specializes in producing crops, often for sale beyond its local region. The estate was the basic production unit around which this economy was organized.
European colonization of the Americas: The conquest and settlement of the Americas by European powers beginning in the late fifteenth century. Colonial states seized land and organized production for imperial markets.
Enslaved people in the United States: People held in hereditary bondage in the United States before slavery was abolished in 1865. Their labor generated plantation wealth, while their resistance challenged its foundations.
Haitian Revolution: The revolution in Saint-Domingue from 1791 to 1804 that ended French colonial rule and established Haiti. It destroyed a major plantation order through a successful revolt of enslaved people.
Cash crop: A crop grown primarily for sale rather than for the producer’s own consumption. Export demand encouraged estates to specialize in a small number of valuable crops.
Columbian exchange: The transfer of crops, animals, people, diseases, and technologies between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia after 1492. The exchange moved plantation crops and labor systems across the Atlantic.
Abolitionism: Movements seeking to end slavery and the slave trade. Abolitionist campaigns helped bring legal plantation slavery to an end.
Emancipation: The legal process of ending slavery and freeing enslaved people. Emancipation changed plantation labor relations without necessarily redistributing land or wealth.
Atlantic slave trade: The forced migration of millions of Africans across the Atlantic for enslavement in the Americas. It supplied enslaved labor to many plantation economies in the Americas.
Sugar plantations in the Caribbean: Large Caribbean estates that grew and processed sugarcane, especially from the seventeenth century onward. They became a major model of plantation production for export and coerced labor.

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