And sugar is of course a crop that African slaves later cultivated in the Caribbean. Camera 2 side note, none of the primary crops grown by slaves, sugar, tobacco, coffee, is necessary to sustain human life. So in a way, slavery is a very early byproduct of a consumer culture that revolves around the purchase of goods that bring us pleasure, but not sustenance. You are welcome to draw your own metaphorically resonant conclusions from this fact. One of the big misconceptions about slavery, at least when I was growing up, was that Europeans somehow captured Africans, put them in chains, stuck them on boats, and then took them to the Americas. The chains and ships bit is true, as is the America part, if you define America as America and not as Merica. But Africans were living in all kinds of conglomerations, from small villages to city-states to empires, and they were much too powerful for the Europeans to just conquer.