Release for the Oppressed (Part 3)

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(July 19, 09 – Mike Nichols)
Heather Whipps, a freelance writer with an anthropology degree from McGill University, writes on How Sugar Changed The World. White Gold, as British called it, was the engine of the slave trade that brought millions of Africans to the Americas beginning in the early 16th-century. Every nation in the Caribbean was forever shaped by the sugar trade. Sugar, Slavery and the Americas came to be known as the Devil in a threesome.

Sugar cane, native to Southeast Asia, first made its way to the New World with Christopher Columbus during his 1492 voyage to the Dominican Republic. It wasn’t long, however, before early settlers realized they were lacking sufficient manpower to plant, harvest and process the backbreaking crop. The first slave ships arrived in 1505 and continued unabated for more than 300 years.

Sugar slavery was the key component in The Trade Triangle –slaves worked the plantations; the product sent to Europe; profits bought more slaves in Africa. By the mid-19th century, 10+ million Africans had been forcibly removed to the sugar plantations of Brazil and the Caribbean.

During those three centuries, the sugar trade accounted for a third of Europe’s entire economy. The sugar trade even helped America achieve independence from Great Britain–its military was busy protecting its sugar holdings in the Caribbean and Brazil.

The documentary, The Price of Sugar is about the slavery of Haitians working the Dominican Republic sugar plantations. What does releasing these slaves from oppression have to do with the gospel of Christ—that is today’s topic.

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