Europe's involvement in the plantation complex began when it encountered sugar in the eastern Mediterranean at the time of the Crusades. That encounter was, in turn, part of a larger pattern in world agricultural history. As human intercommunication grew, crops originating in one place spread to others where they could be grown. With regular contact between the Mediterranean basin and Mesopotamia, for example, date palms originally from Mesopotamia began to be grown wherever hot weather, low rainfall, and irrigation water were found together – as far west as southern Morocco.

With the rise of Islam after about 700 A.D., the old intercommunicating zone of the Indian Ocean came into much closer contact with the southern Mediterranean. As a result, a whole range of new crops from the Asian tropics began to be grown in the Mediterranean basin. Many of them came originally from Southeast Asia, though modified through several centuries of residence in India. The list includes rice, colocasia (taro or cocoyams), coconuts, sorrel, sour oranges, lemons and limes — probably sugarcane, plantains, bananas, and mangoes as well, though these may have originated in India. Taken together, these and other originally tropical crops from sub-Saharan Africa had a profound influence on the economic geography of the Mediterranean, not only on the Muslim south shore. In time, many of these crops could be grown in Christian Europe by diffusion through Cyprus, Sicily, Spain, and Portugal, though much of this diffusion came only in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.