ing their first seven years in the colony), and a smaller number of skilled slaves, who tended to receive more preferential treatment Among mill slaves, industrial accidents were common, as many were crushed to death in the grinders and burned in the mill’s many boilers and kettles As sugar production skyrocketed so did the importation of African slaves into the sugar-producing zones The relationship between the two was direct, as most scholars agree In 1645, before widespread sugar production had taken root, Barbados counted 5,680 African slaves; by 1698, with sugar production having grown by more than 5,000 percent, its slave population exceeded 42,000 Jamaica counted 1,400 African slaves in 1658; by 1698, their numbers had risen to over 40,000 Slave population growth rates in Antigua, Saint-Domingue (later Haiti), and other English, French, and Dutch sugar islands were comparable The vast majority slaved in the sugar economy In 17th-century Brazil, sugar plantation slavery came to form the central pillar of the colonial economy Similarly, one of the colony’s core social institutions became the engenho (same root as the English engine), which came to mean both the machinery of the mill itself and the larger plantation complex The sugar harvest (safra in Portuguese, zafra in Spanish) began toward the end of July and continued without stop for the next eight or nine months Slaves were divided into crews: one to cut and haul cane to the mill, another to process the cane into sugar Water power turned the grinding mill in larger engenhos, oxen in smaller engenhos The highest strata of workers consisted of the boiler technicians and artisans, who could be either slave or free The average engenho had from 60 to 80 slaves, though some counted more than 200 Overall slave mortality rates averaged from to 10 percent annually but were higher among field slaves Sugar planters became the dominant social class in Brazil and almost everywhere else where sugar production formed the basis of the colonial economy Caribbean and Brazilian sugar production generated ripple effects throughout the Atlantic World Large quantities of West Indian sugar were exported to Britain’s North American colonies, where most of it was distilled into rum The West Indian trade also fueled the North American colonial economy through its large and growing demand for lumber, foodstuffs, and other goods produced for export to the sugar islands Rum exports to Britain similarly skyrocketed, from 100,000 gallons in 1700 to 3,341,000 gallons in 1776 The sugarcane plantations in the Americas 373 An engraving of sugarcane processing in the West Indies, with a white overseer directing Native laborers effects generated by West Indian sugar production on the British and British North American economies were enormous and remain the topic of ongoing scholarly research and debate In his book Capitalism and Slavery (1944), West Indian historian Eric Williams was the first to propose a direct causal relationship between the growth of African slavery in the New World, dominated by sugar production, and the development of capitalism in Europe, particularly in Britain Spawning a huge debate and literature, this book has been challenged in many specific points Yet the overall thrust of his thesis—that sugar, slavery, and British capitalism all emerged together as part of the same process of social transformation—has stood the test of time, its main arguments retaining credibility in the scholarly community six decades after the book’s publication African Slavery Expands After the French acquisition of the western portion of the Spanish island of Hispaniola in the Treaty of Ryswick of 1695 (henceforth Saint-Domingue), sugar production and African slavery exploded By the 1760s, slave imports averaged between 10,000 and 15,000 per year By 1787, the number exceeded 40,000 per year By the time of the French Revolution in 1789, Saint-Domingue was populated by an estimated 500,000 slaves, more than two-thirds born in Africa, vastly outnumbering