Boles, John B. Black Southerners 1619-1869. Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1983.
Boles writes a history of the slaves of the South from the beginning of slavery until its end after the Civil War. Boles notes that the plantation system that would make use of slave labor was established as early as 1450 by the Portuguese, who created sugar plantations on Madeira and the Canary Islands. The labor shortage on these islands was reaching a crisis because European diseases decimated the native population and there were not enough Muslim prisoners of war when the Portuguese made their first successful forays into the traditional African slave trade.
Boles states that while cotton was a major crop in the South, other crops as well needed slave labor. Advances in the cultivation and manufacturing of sugar took place in Louisiana and turned the southeastern section of the Louisiana territory into a region for wealthy sugar plantations with thousands of slaves. Before the 1790s, sugarcane had been grown for decades in French Louisiana for domestic use and for making rum. production increased in the early 1790s. In 1795, Etienne de Boré imported a skilled sugar maker from Santo Domingo and constructed a modern sugar mill where today stands Tulane University. He started the large-scale cultivation of sugarcane, and this is when the crop started to bear profits. By 1801 there were 75 sugar plantations producing between 4 and 8 million pounds of sugar per year. The sugar crop helped differentiate Louisiana from the rest of the United States.
Davidson, Basil. The African Slave Trade. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1961.
In this book, Davidson recreates the history of the slave trade and delineates the nature of the relationship between Africa and the colonies in the New World. The first Spanish shipment of West Indian sugar grown by slave labor came to Europe in 1518. Royal authority was given...