"The experiment begun in 1492 was accompanied by a new relationship with the world and with each other, based on the novel idea that the prosperity of human societies lay in the submission of a wild and free nature to the rational act of exploitation. From then on, the entire living world was put to work, and in this first planetary empire, people, plants and animals became commodities circulating from one corner of the hemisphere to the other."
wrote Sylvie Laurent in her book "Capital et race : Histoire d'une hydre moderne"
In 1776, Scotsman Adam "Smith noted that the British West Indian sugar plantations were so profitable they their returns from rum exports, a byproduct of sugar production, paid for the entire overhead expenses of a sugar plantation. As far as Smith was concerned, this was an achievement without parallel in eighteen-century British imperial agriculture."
(excerpt from Seymour Drescher’s book "The Mighty Experiment: Free Labor versus Slavery in British Emancipation")