Based on the excerpt, the authors are primarily trying to answer the question: Why did some Europeans decide they wanted to speak out about slavery? The passage discusses the contradiction between the demand for equality among Europeans and the simultaneous exploitation of enslaved Africans in the sugar industry, highlighting the connection between slavery and the desire for freedom.
Read the passage from Sugar Changed the World.
Sugar was the connection, the tie, between slavery and freedom. In order to create sugar, Europeans and colonists in the Americas destroyed Africans, turned them into objects. Just at that very same moment, Europeans—at home and across the Atlantic—decided that they could no longer stand being objects themselves. They each needed to vote, to speak out, to challenge the rules of crowned kings and royal princes. How could that be? Why did people keep speaking of equality while profiting from slaves? In fact, the global hunger for slave-grown sugar led directly to the end of slavery. Following the strand of sugar and slavery leads directly into the tumult of the Age of Revolutions. For in North America, then England, France, Haiti, and once again North America, the Age of Sugar brought about the great, final clash between freedom and slavery.
Based on this excerpt, what question are the authors trying to answer?
How did colonists challenge the rules of crowned kings?
How did the Age of Sugar differ from the Age of Revolutions?
When did Europeans decide to speak about equality?
Why did some Europeans decide they wanted to speak out about slavery?
1 answer