As a background to the subsequent development of plantation economies two
centuries later in the Caribbean and then Virginia, there is a very
interesting article in last week's issue of the journal *Antiquity*:

A pdf of the journal article is accessible at
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/bitter-legacy-archaeology-of-early-sugar-plantation-and-slavery-in-sao-tome/D924CD6992FEF2504FD543330CB2A23D

In summary:  Plantation slavery may have originated on a tiny west African
island at the equator, according to archaeologists who investigated a
16th-century sugar mill and estate.

São Tomé (Portuguese for "Saint Thomas"), an island 150 miles (240
kilometers) west of Gabon in the Gulf of Guinea, was first settled by the
Portuguese in the late 15th century. Until now the historical significance
of the island has been mostly overlooked.

While other Portuguese sugar mills relied on enslaved people solely for
manual labor, in the São Tomé sugar plantation system, enslaved people —
largely from what are now Benin, the Republic of the Congo, Angola and the
Democratic Republic of the Congo — performed nearly all the tasks, from the
harvesting and processing of sugarcane to the carpentry and stone masonry
needed to build and run the mills.

This made São Tomé "the first plantation economy in the tropics based on
sugar monoculture and slave labour, a model exported to the New World where
it developed and expanded," the researchers wrote in a new study, published
last week (Aug. 14) in the journal Antiquity.

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