Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as we have shown, its contribution to the overall commercializing process in the Americas and Western Europe pales in comparison with the contribution of the plantations in Brazil, the Caribbean and the United States in the critical centuries, 1650-1850. Large-scale plantation production of export commodities (sugar, tobacco, raw cotton, indigo, rice, coffee, etc.) in the Americas, which depended almost entirely on the labour of enslaved Africans, brought down production costs manifold, which allowed those products to be sold at prices affordable by all classes in Europe. The consumerist culture which the American products (especially sugar and tobacco) helped to create in Western Europe produced the phenomenon historians have labelled the industrious revolution (De Vries, 2008), as the mass of consumers worked extra hard to secure the wherewithal to purchase these products. Because this mass of consumers had to produce to sell in order to buy the new products, market-oriented production grew and the market economy expanded at the expense of subsistence production.