Small Spice Plantation (ETW building)
| Small Spice Plantation | |||||||
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| Category: | Spice | ||||||
| Level: | 0 | ||||||
| Turns to build: | 2 | ||||||
| Building cost: | 1500 | ||||||
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| Enables | |||||||
 Large Spice Plantation | |||||||
A plantation is an estate carved from the virgin forests of a new territory for growing one cash crop for export to the home market.
There are tremendous profits to be made in growing crops to satisfy the demand for luxury goods in Europe and elsewhere. There are also tremendous risks: crops may fail, slaves may revolt and, once a cargo is gathered, the ships carrying it home may sink!
Plantations are labour-intensive, especially during harvest time. They would not necessarily be profitable without indentured or slave labour. Slaves are self-explanatory, but indentured labour was the result of the European taste for transporting convicted felons to their colonies. Once a criminal arrived, several years of forced or cheap labour would be imposed on him or her, and this indenture could be traded to a plantation owner. It was possible to buy out an indenture and become free, an option that was rarely available to slaves.
Originally, the English word “plantation” was used to refer to any colony “planted” in a new location: even the Scottish settlers in Ulster were a plantation. There was no implication of farming one cash crop.