In the early modern period, cacao, coffee, tobacco, and sugar were overwhelmingly grown by enslaved Africans on colonial plantations; their popularity in Europe thus drove the brutalisation of Black bodies within the English, Dutch, French, and Iberian empires. (1/12) A large number of the c.10.5 million Africans who survived transportation to the New World cultivated these new intoxicants, especially sugar, the most lucrative cash crop of the tropical Americas; c.5.1 million captives worked on sugar estates, mainly in the Caribbean. (2/12)