RE: Disease in the tropics. Malaria actually came from Africa. That's why the Africans were so much better at surviving than the Natives, Northern Europeans or even the Southern Europeans/Berbers (who did better but not enough). If you don't have slaves it's going to take a lot longer for the African disease to migrate to the new world (for instance, Malaria went over with mosquitoes).
No. Sugar cane remains and extremely labor intensive crop even today. You can process it a lot faster, but harvesting it still happens by hand in the developing world. Wiki says there are mechanical harvesters developed in Australia but those make the sugar cane go bad faster. I grew up where sugar beets were grown and until the late 1980s the harvest was heavily labor intensive. We got a LOT of Latino migrants every year to work the sugar beet fields--including my grandparents and uncles. It's the reason my parents went to college in the area and why I was born and raised there and not in Texas. It was only in the mid-90s that the MN/ND area went to heavily mechanical harvesting. Technological solutions are not going to be available so you are going to want to find some sort of social or organizational way to do it.You seem to be assuming that a small but growing population would never be able to find other ways of increasing sugar output without vast numbers of slaves?
Maybe a quicker adoption of European techniques then, they probably won't reach parity but it might go better for them.Hmm, seems more likely that if they wanted to distance themselves from potential abuse or re-indebture that they would more likely end up as members instead of rulers.
Or found small settlements of their own.
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