This blog will run like horses, turning cogs and sprockets in the name of milling cane sugar.

Making sugar was intense back in the good 'ol days. Back when human beings had a work expectancy of seven years, and you couldn't point to one piece of food in Campus Center Dining Hall that wasn't injected with sugar.

The first sugar plantations used African slaves, but this wasn't the original conception. As we all know, 90 to 95 percent of the Aztecs were killed by European cooties, not their several dozen men with guns. Now, Europeans are in no way immune to disease, some have argued that Syphilis was brought back to Europe from the "New World." Knowing this, you can understand that when Europeans mozy'd down to the Canary Islands, their deathbeds received them with an unheard of vigor. What would replace this European import labor? Simple, the African slave trade.

Slaves were routinely kept in Africa; war captives, pickers of the short straw, et cetera. When brought to work the plantations, they were treated as a commodity. Slaves were machines that held up for 7 years, give or take. Sugar was terribly labor-intensive, with steps that required heavy micromanagement. The reciprocal of the sugar practices was best displayed by Haiti in 1791.

So with these modest beginnings we have the African Slave Trade. Soon African slaves would supplant the Aztecs and Incas who died of European disease. Oh the cruel and unbelievable irony!