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Reading34-1 (dragged) 25

Reading34-1 (dragged) 25 - Reading 34-1 25 sweet potatoes...


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25 Reading 34-1 sweet potatoes, yams, bananas, maize, most of the beans we now know, yuccas, and the American pumpkins and squashes. The Spaniards were not as ef fi cient as the Indians, and were wasteful of land as indeed they could afford to be. In 1763 the density per square mile was less than fi ve, far less than in medieval Spain or Italy. A hundred years later it was 8 times as much, with a total population of 1.6 million and a density of 40 per square mile. It was still not very crowded, but the difference was caused by sugar. The introduction of sugar culture entailed not only the discovery of markets other than Spain, which was self-suf fi cient in sugar, but also the entry of Cuba into world trade, including the slave trade. While there might have been a few thousand black slaves introduced into Cuba before sugar, they were relatively well treated and reproduced themselves without dif fi culty in an island devoid of the intense pressures apparently inevitable in commercial sugar production.
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