Killer Sugar

I'm reading A Nation Under Our Feet at the moment, and noticed that the "southern slave population began to reproduce itself naturally sometime around the middle of the eighteenth century." Apparently part of the reason for this was increasing crop diversity and a move away from the sugar economy. I was reading a history of Jamaica earlier this year, which emphasized the lethal nature of sugar plantations. The Jamaican slave population was constantly falling and constantly having to be replenished from Africa because the work of culling and processing sugar was so backbreaking and deadly. The Jamaican slave population never got a chance to reproduce itself, unlike the slaves of the American South.

Update: There were other factors making the West Indies deadlier--climate and disease, in particular--but the fact that the American slave population couldn't replenish itself either, at first, suggests the type of plantation may have been decisive.

The slave plantation, as an economic entity, first developed for the cultivation of sugar, in Brazil.