Brazil was by far the largest importer of slaves in the Americas throughout the 17th century. It is labelled as the Negro Ground attached to Jessups plantation, high up the mountain. One painting illustrates a slave village near the foot of Brimstone Hill. Enslaved Africans were forced to engage in a variety of laborious activities, all of them back-breaking. The first type consists of accounts from travel writers or former residents of the West Indies from the 17th and 18th centuries who describe slave houses that they saw in the Caribbean; the second are contemporary illustrations of slave housing. The idea was first tested following the Portuguese colonization of Madeira in 1420. Plantation owners obviously had a much better life than the slaves who worked for them, and if successful in their estate management, they could live lives far superior to anything they could have expected back in Europe. Europe remains a colonial power over some 15 per cent of the regions population, and the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico is generally understood as colonialist. These nobles in turn distributed parts of their estate called semarias to their followers on the condition that the land was cleared and used to grow first wheat and then, from the 1440s, sugar cane, a portion of the crop being given back to the overlord. Slaveholders encouraged complex social hierarchies on the plantations that amounted to something like a system of 'class'. Then came the dreaded 'middle passage' to the Americas, with as many enslaved people as possible were crammed below decks. Extreme social and racial inequality is a legacy of slavery in the region that continues to haunt and hinder the development efforts of regional and global institutions. By the early seventeenth century, some 170,000 Africans had been imported to Brazil and Brazilian sugar now dominated the European market. The plantation system was first developed by the Portuguese on their Atlantic island colonies and then transferred to Brazil, beginning with Pernambuco and So Vicente in the 1530s. Sugar - Sidney Mintz The village contains eighteen small huts, each with the door in the narrow end, set at roughly equal distances, some with ridged garden plots beside them. Huts like this needed constant maintenance and frequent replacement. Sugar of lesser quality with a brownish colour tended to be consumed locally or was only used to make preserves and crystallised fruit. Caribbean Islands - The Sugar Revolutions and Slavery - Country Studies Many slaves would have died from starvation had not a prickly type of edible cucumber grown that year in great profusion.
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