Hence an incredibly lucrative trade developed. A second important commodity that swept much of the western world between the 14th and 18th centuries, a commodity to which we are all addicted, was sugar. Sugar was a tasty, lucrative, and safe sweetner. I say safe because most Europeans sweetened things with honey for centuries and procuring natural honey could be painful. In their natural states these beverages are bitter.
Sugar plantations appear to have first emerged in Egypt over a thousand years ago.
However, by the 17th century New World sugar plantations in the Caribbean and South America were fantastically lucrative. They were absolutely hellish places to work. Sugar cultivation was exhausting, exceptionally unhealthy labor. The mortality rates for sugar plantation laborers and owners were staggering in southern North America, the Caribbean, and South America. Hence, the eventual and great need for African slaves in the 17th and 18th centuries in the New World.