1505-00-00: (Sugarcane Cultivation Introduced to Hispaniola, the Crop That Would Transform the Island Into the Most Profitable Colony in the World and the Mo…

1505-00-00: (Sugarcane Cultivation Introduced to Hispaniola, the Crop That Would Transform the Island Into the Most Profitable Colony in the World and the Most Brutal Slave System in the Americas): In 1505, sugarcane cultivation was introduced to Hispaniola, the event that would determine the course of the island’s history for the next three centuries. Sugar required massive labor inputs, and the indigenous Taíno population, already devastated by European diseases and Spanish exploitation, could not supply it. The introduction of sugar created the demand for enslaved African labor that would eventually bring over half a million people across the Atlantic in chains. By the eighteenth century, Saint-Domingue had become the most profitable colony in the world, producing more sugar, coffee, and indigo than any other territory, wealth that financed the French economy and was extracted entirely through the systematic torture and murder of the enslaved. The crop that the Spanish planted in 1505 would generate the conditions for the Revolution of 1791.