Madeira, as it turned out, was the physical and historical juncture where these processes congealed. … [W]ith the introduction of sugar cane and its commercial success … Canary Islanders and Moors—followed by Africans—as slaves, performed the necessary physical labor that enabled the upwardly mobile settlers of Madeira to develop a life style, derived from the tradition of the continental nobility but based upon the physical efforts of slaves producing commercial crops for sale on the markets of the continent, that characterized the emerging social institution of the slave plantation.

Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making o…, loc. 586