Editing Plantation (section)

==Slave plantation==
{{Main|Slave plantation}}

[[File:CottonpickHoustonWhere17.png|thumb|1913 photo: African-Americans picking cotton on a plantation in the [[Southern United States|South]]]]
Plantation owners extensively used enslaved Africans to work on early plantations (such as tobacco, rice, cotton, hemp, and sugar plantations) in the American colonies and the United States, throughout the Caribbean, the Americas, and in European-occupied areas of Africa.

In modern times, the low wages typically paid to plantation workers are the basis of plantation profitability in some areas.

In more recent times, overt slavery has been replaced by ''para-slavery'' or ''slavery-in-kind'', including the [[sharecropping system]], and even that has been severely reduced. At its most extreme, workers are in "[[debt bondage]]": they must work to pay off a debt at such punitive interest rates that it may never be paid off. Others work unreasonably long hours and are paid subsistence wages that (in practice) may only be spent in the [[truck system|company store]].

In Brazil, a sugarcane plantation was termed an ''[[engenho]]'' ("engine"), and the 17th-century English usage for organized colonial production was "factory." Such colonial social and economic structures are discussed at [[Plantation economy]].

Sugar workers on plantations in [[Cuba]] and elsewhere in the Caribbean lived in [[company town]]s known as ''[[Batey (sugar workers' town)|bateyes]]''.

=== American South ===
{{Excerpt|Plantations in the American South}}