1640s, the principal crop grown in barbados went from being tobacco to

The answer is sugar cane. Tobacco, the crop on which the economy of the Lesser Antilles was originated, began to decline as a result of competition from Virginia tobacco. In 1613 John Rolfe had presented tobacco to Virginia, the earliest of the North American colonies. A variation imported from Trinidad proved very satisfactory. A new market force at work was the increasing demand for sugar in Europe. After the colonization of India and the Far East, coffee and tea were becoming gradually popular in Europe and hence the request for sugar as a sweetener for these drinks. A transatlantic voyage made the West Indies available to the European market. This journey was much easier than that which brought coffee, tea and spices to the European market. Chance also played a share. The Dutch and the Portuguese were struggling for Brazil between 1624 and 1654, and once the Dutch were winning, at least in Northern Brazil, they sent Portuguese prisoners of war north to the islands to be sold as slaves. In 1643 a Dutch ship transported fifty Portuguese slaves to Barbados. They were freed because the enslaving of Christians was not accepted, but Barbados had fifty laborers experienced in the growing of sugar available. Then, when the Portuguese started appealing back Northern Brazil from the Dutch, the Dutch move towards to the islands of the eastern Caribbean as expats, bringing with them their skill in sugar production.