Reddit reviews A History of Business in Medieval Europe, 1200-1550 (Cambridge Medieval Textbooks)

Hunt and Murray's History of Business in Medieval Europe

Jan Morris's Venetian Empire

Roger Crowley's City of Fortune

Graeber makes a passing mention to it in Debt that has his usual detailed citations and further reading. There are others whose titles escape me, and it turns out I didn't have these listed in my Amazon wishlist or Goodreads after all.

Hell, it's even on the wikipedia page:

>The crucial problem with sugar production was that it was highly labour-intensive in both growing and processing. Because of the huge weight and bulk of the raw cane it was very costly to transport, especially by land, and therefore each estate had to have its own factory. There the cane had to be crushed to extract the juices, which were boiled to concentrate them, in a series of backbreaking and intensive operations lasting many hours. However, once it had been processed and concentrated, the sugar had a very high value for its bulk and could be traded over long distances by ship at a considerable profit. The [European sugar] industry only began on a major scale after the loss of the Levant to a resurgent Islam and the shift of production to Cyprus under a mixture of Crusader aristocrats and Venetian merchants. The local population on Cyprus spent most of their time growing their own food and few would work on the sugar estates. The owners therefore brought in slaves from the Black Sea area (and a few from Africa) to do most of the work. The level of demand and production was low and therefore so was the trade in slaves — no more than about a thousand people a year. It was little greater when sugar production began in Sicily.

>In the Atlantic ocean [the Canaries, Madeira, and the Cape Verde Islands], once the initial exploitation of the timber and raw materials was over, it rapidly became clear that sugar production would be the most profitable way of using the new territories. The problem was the heavy labour involved — the Europeans refused to work as more than supervisors. The solution was to bring in slaves from Africa. The crucial developments in this trade began in the 1440s...

The Crusades introduced sugar to European markets and it was expensive as hell, so merchants were all over it, especially Venice and Genoa. Venice managed to seize Cyprus and Venetians and Cypriot landlords enlisted their Turkish and Greek serfs to work the plantations (and they were plantations in every sense of the New World term). Alongside this, Venice and Genoa made regular adventures to Azov and the Crimea and Black Sea coast, and among the commodities they would return with were slaves. Eventually sugar harvesting proved so labor intensive that they switched to slave labor.

Also during this time, Europeans were trying to grow sugar everywhere they could -- which wasn't very many places. There was some success in Sicily and in Spain, but the real gamechanger was the discovery and settlement of the Atlantic islands. Genovese merchants approached the Portuguese almost immediately about establishing sugar plantations in the usual model, and the proximity to Africa made importing slaves from there instead of across the Mediterranean a logistical sensibility.

This didn't happen overnight, it took a couple hundred years for these interlocking developments to progress, but there you have it.

The Hanseatic League and its Hansa cities served as the main source of inspiration for the 'Eschaneatic League' of my setting. Here are a couple of books I bought and would recommend.

The Hansa: History and Culture by Johannes Schildhauer. You can grab a used copy from off of Amazon for under 20 dollars.

A History of Business in Medieval Europe, 1200-1550 by Edwin S. Hunt and James Murray. Again, you could grab a used copy from Amazon for around the 20 dollar mark. It covers business in Europe in general during the time period, but it is still a great resource to read through if you want to world-build a trading league.

I would also suggest researching the some of the individual Hanseatic Cities themselves as well. Wikipedia has a list of the Hansa cities as well as links to their reference in online or printed material.

I also used Venice as a source of inspiration for my 'Eschaneatic League', so I would also recommend researching the economic history of Venice and its affects on world trade prior to the discovery and colonization of the New World.