Sugar, Chains, and Empire – How the Caribbean Was Engineered for Profit
Podcast: History of the Caribbeans | Exploring Resilience and CulturePublished On: Mon Dec 29 2025
Description: This episode traces how the Caribbean was deliberately engineered into the engine room of empire through sugar. From the early plantation experiments in Barbados to the brutal expansion across Jamaica, Saint Domingue, and Cuba, the story shows how land, law, labor, and violence were organized into a single profit machine. Sugar is treated not as a crop, but as an industrial system that reshaped societies, erased communities, and financed European power. The episode follows the rise of this system, its escalation into total exploitation, and the aftermath left behind once the wealth was extracted. This is a history of design, not accident, and of consequences that did not end with abolition.
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