WORLD HISTORY

Detailed explanation-1: -Sugar was the most important crop throughout the Caribbean, although other crops such as coffee, indigo, and rice were also grown.

Detailed explanation-2: -From Egypt, sugar cane was spread westward by the Arabs across Northern Africa reaching Morocco and Spain in the middle of the 7th century. Significant sugar production began in Morocco in the late 800s, reaching its peak from 1000 to 1200.

Detailed explanation-3: -The change from the cultivation of tobacco to sugar profoundly modified agriculture in the British West Indies, the society became one of monoculture (the cultivation of a single crop in a given area).

Detailed explanation-4: -Life on the fields meant working sunup to sundown six days a week and having food sometimes not suitable for an animal to eat. Plantation slaves lived in small shacks with a dirt floor and little or no furniture. Life on large plantations with a cruel overseer was oftentimes the worst.

Detailed explanation-5: -Moreover, slave labor did produce the major consumer goods that were the basis of world trade during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: coffee, cotton, rum, sugar, and tobacco. In the pre-Civil War United States, a stronger case can be made that slavery played a critical role in economic development.