The growth of sugar plantations in the Atlantic world changed the labor system by increasing demand for what?

• A. Indentured colonists from Germany
• B. Enslaved Africans
• C. Free settlers from England
• D. Indigenous laborers from the Americas

Answer: (B)

Growing sugar plantations required a large, year‑round labor force to plant, tend, harvest, and mill the cane, making labor the backbone of the economic system. Indigenous populations in the Americas were decimated by disease and displacement, so they could not supply the sustained, long‑term work needed. European indentured servants did work in the colonies, but their contracts were finite and the numbers available in the long run did not match the scale required. Enslaved Africans, by contrast, were forced into a system of perpetual, hereditary slavery that provided a continuous, controllable labor supply across generations. This combination of enormous demand and a supply willing or forced into lifelong labor made enslaved Africans the dominant labor force on these plantations. This shift also fed into the broader Atlantic economy, linking the sugar industry to the growth of the transatlantic slave trade.