The beginning of the end of the plantation complex is correctly associated with the Democratic Revolution. The full liquidation of the complex was a longer process extending through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. It had grown by adding one feature after another; it came apart by dropping one after another. Even when legal slavery ended, plantations often continued as the dominant economic unit – still managed by people of mainly European descent, still worked by people of mainly African descent. Even the old work organization of gang labor under intense supervision continued on some Caribbean islands into the twentieth century. After slavery ended, other forms of coercion continued – debt peonage, contract labor with penal sanctions, vagrancy laws, or regressive taxation aimed at forcing peasants to become wage laborers in order to meet the demands of the tax collector.

In spite of these holdovers, the nineteenth century brought fundamental changes throughout the world economy. Some were clear consequences of industrialism. Others were more nearly the long-run results of much older processes in world history. A fundamental demographic change was one of these. The plantation complex and the slave trade had been linked by net natural decrease in plantation populations. The slave population of the United States began to grow by natural increase in the eighteenth century. During the nineteenth century, one tropical plantation society after another passed from net natural decrease to population growth – often at explosive rates.