Sugar Plantation Quotes & Sayings

You can be up to your boobies in
white satin, with gardenias in your hair
and no sugar cane for miles, but you
can still be working on a plantation. — Billie Holiday

I grew up on a sugar plantation in Trinidad, on an expat estate, and that meant I had no idea about money until a lot later than most children. — Andrea McLean

To me, entertainment is really the new plantation. It's the new sugar, the new cotton, that black people work for somebody else to be richer than them. — Haile Gerima

The slave trade was not controlled by any state or government. It was a purely economic enterprise, organised and financed by the free market according to the laws of supply and demand. Private slave-trading companies sold shares on the Amsterdam, London and Paris stock exchanges. Middle-class Europeans looking for a good investment bought these shares. Relying on this money, the companies bought ships, hired sailors and soldiers, purchased slaves in Africa, and transported them to America. There they sold the slaves to the plantation owners, using the proceeds to purchase plantation products such as sugar, cocoa, coffee, tobacco, cotton and rum. — Yuval Noah Harari

My forebears refused to cut the sugar cane for plantation owners, and I am recognisably a product of that background. — Diane Abbott

Greece is a sort of American vassal; the Netherlands is the country of American bases that grow like tulip bulbs; Cuba is the main sugar plantation of the American monopolies; Turkey is prepared to kowtow before any United States proconsul and Canada is the boring second fiddle in the American symphony. — Andrei Gromyko

A laborer might last ten years or so before expiring. But individual workers in the death camp of sugar were survived by their culture, which was constantly re-Africanized by fresh arrivals. To that plantation culture, the music of our hemisphere owes no small debt. — Ned Sublette

To understand the hidden secret of the modern industrial world in which I find myself, I have to return to another world. That world is at once wartime Nice and the plantation - the sugar isles on which Europe's prosperity was built. — J.M.G. Le Clezio

The cultivation of cotton and sugar, which the Arabs brought from the East across North Africa and into Spain, most probably entailed some kind of plantation system. — Bernard Lewis