The Triangle Trade that emerged in the 1500s resulted in an unprecedented level of economic, social, and military activity between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. The expansion of sugar cane plantations in South America and the Caribbean proved unsustainable due to a shortage of what essential commodity?

Workforce

Explanation:

Sugar was widely accepted in the European market and, moreover, was sold at exorbitant prices, so its production on the other side of the Atlantic was valid.

Work on these devices should be compulsorily done. Why? First, because it was a colonization aimed at exploitation, profit-making, so the harder one worked, the greater they would be; and second because the technical quality of the equipment was low, overloading the human work. As a result, slave labor became necessary. The first used was that of the Indigenous, but there were some problems regarding their use: first, they were in small quantity and still many died due to epidemics, and second, some clerics were against it; and third, they refused to work under the compulsory regime, since their way of life was completely different: the logic of surplus production, aimed at profit, did not belong to their culture.

Thus it was necessary from 1600 the coming of African slaves to perform the work on the mills. Here we have disagreements as to why these Africans came. The coming came because there was a supply of slaves in the market, because it was already used by the Portuguese in their other colonies that also produced sugar. But the theory in vogue today is that the fact that the scarcity of indigenous labor (as it has been exposed, many died due to epidemics or fled inland refusing to work) meant that african slave labor was to be resorted to.