Sugar mill of Hispaniola
Ingenio azucarero de La Española
- Date
- c. 1516 · confidence low
- Place
- Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
- Credited to
- Spanish colonists (Gonzalo de Velosa and others)
- Field
- Life & health
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
A horse- or water-driven mill to press cane and crystallise sugar, the first step of the American sugar plantation. It was established on enslaved labour, first Indigenous and then African.
The date of the first mill is disputed: 1516 (Velosa), 1520 and the first water-powered mills of the 1520s-1530s are cited; Columbus introduced cane in 1493.
What it led to
- The Atlantic sugar plantation complex (Brazil, the Caribbean)
- Expansion of the transatlantic slave trade
- The first major American agricultural export crop