Slavery in the British and French Caribbean refers to slavery in the parts of the Caribbean dominated by France or the British Empire. Some 5 million enslaved Africans were taken to the Caribbean, almost half of whom were brought to the British Caribbean (2.3 million). Estimates of these population losses vary from 8.4 million to 112.5 million.Although the sugar trade in the Americas was initially dominated by the During the colonial period, the arrival of sugar culture deeply impacted the society and economy in the Caribbean. The proportion of slaves ranged from about one third in Cuba to more than ninety percent in many of the islands.
Demand for slaves to cultivate sugarcane and other crops caused what came to be known as the triangle trade. Many of the plantation owners had returned to Europe, leaving their holdings in America to be managed by overseers who were often unstable or unsavory.
In the Caribbean, as well as in the slave states, the shift from small-scale farming to industrial agriculture transformed the culture of these societies, as their economic prosperity depended on the plantation.
The Caribbean Sugar mill with vertical rollers, French West Indies, 1665. Slaves were jammed into the hull; chained to one another in order to stop revolts; as many as one in five passengers did not survive the journey. Sugar plantations in the Caribbean were a major part of the economy of the islands in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
African men, women, and children were forced to work with little to eat or drink.The African slave population quickly began to outnumber the Europeans and Native Americans. Early sugar plantations made extensive use of slaves because sugar was considered a After the end of slavery in Saint Domingue at the turn of the 19th century, with the After slavery, sugar plantations used a variety of forms of labour including workers imported from colonial India and Southern China working as indentured servants on European owned plantations (see The sugar cane industry had a negative impact in terms of environment as this industry grew in Caribbean countries.
Conditions aboard the ship were dreadful. My new book, “Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic,” zeroes in on human experimentation on Caribbean slave plantations in the late 1700s.
Information about why Africans were enslaved, from a feature about the archaeology of slavery on St Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean. In Trinidad, about forty percent of the population is Asian.1659 – Queen Elizabeth I declared, “England was too pure an air for slaves to breathe in.” English law decreed “as soon as a man puts foot on English ground, he is free,” yet slavery in British held land in American continued for 238 years.1774 – Rhode Island became the first of the American colonies to abolish slavery.1807 – The United States forbade the importation of new African slaves.1807 – The British abolished the slave trade in all of their colonies.1865 – The fourteenth amendment to the United States Constitution declared that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except for punishment for crime shall exist within the United States. As slave rebellions became more frequent, European investors lost money. Only the youngest and healthiest people were taken for what was called the middle passage of the triangle trade, partly because they would be worth more in America, and partly because they were the most likely to reach their destination alive. The Portuguese introduced sugar plantations in the 1550s off the coast of their Brazilian settlement colony, located on the island Sao Vincente.Sugar was the most important crop throughout the Caribbean, although other crops such as Sugar created a unique political ecology, the relationship between labor, profits, and ecological consequences, in the Caribbean.Following European settlers’ entry into the Caribbean world, massive demographic changes occurred. Slave rebellions were common. An estimated 8 to 15 million Africans reached the Americas from the 16th through the 19th century.
Only the youngest and healthiest people were taken for what was called the middle passage of the triangle trade, partly because they would be worth more in America, and partly because they were the most likely to reach their destination alive. When one of the enslaved people was stricken with dysentery or smallpox, they were cast overboard.Those who survived the middle passage faced more abuses on the plantations. The costs of maintaining slavery grew higher when the European governments sent in armed forces to quell the revolts.Many Europeans began to pressure their governments to abolish slavery.