Answer: "By contrast, the plantation had only one purpose: to create a single product that could be grown, ground, boiled, dried, and sold to distant markets."
Step-by-step explanation: the author's claim in this excerpt is that the idea of the plantation, was revolutionary to the world of sugar because they could do all the process from planting the sugar cane to making the sugar, all in one place, it says that never in human history had farms be run like that, they always had multiple products to work on. The phrase that better represents that claim is option B.