1505-00-00: (Sugarcane Cultivation Introduced to Hispaniola, Beginning the Crop Cycle That Would Transform the Island Into the Engine of Caribbean Slavery): …

1505-00-00: (Sugarcane Cultivation Introduced to Hispaniola, Beginning the Crop Cycle That Would Transform the Island Into the Engine of Caribbean Slavery): In 1505, sugarcane cultivation was introduced to Hispaniola, a development whose consequences would reverberate across centuries. The crop that Columbus had brought from the Canary Islands would eventually become the economic foundation of the colony, but it was a crop that demanded enormous labor, labor that could only be supplied, in the colonial calculus, by enslaved human beings. The introduction of sugarcane was not an agricultural event; it was the beginning of a system.