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

1505-00-00: (Sugarcane Cultivation Introduced to the Island, Beginning the Crop Cycle That Would Transform It Into the Engine of Caribbean Slavery): In 1505, sugarcane cultivation was introduced to the island, 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.