First and foremost, without a solid agricultural basis, it is unlikely the sugar trade would have flourished at all. It is thus incredibly fortunate that much of British land designated to the production of sugar fell under near ideal settings in terms of geography, as will be discussed in documents 1 and 6. For instance, in 1750, an extensive portion of the Caribbean islands fell under British ownership (Doc 1). Therefore, not only was land easily and readily available for colonial use, but the islands also created an abundance of ports from which to better transport goods. Consequently, an island format surrounded by easy access would have led people to travel shorter distances from their plantations to trading ships, and thus the British might have possessed an advantage over the Spanish’s fewer, larger islands. Furthermore, according to William Belgrove, uncleared Jamaican land in 1775 could be purchased at well under £1 per acre (Doc 6). …show more content…
More specifically, African peoples were in no shortage of supplying the much-needed labor to the Caribbean islands. Documents 6 and 8 highlight the extent to which such plantations were labor-intensive. Namely, a 500 acre plantation in 1755 required 300 slaves to tend to the land (Doc 6), and depictions of such plantations are filled with Africans performing labor such as planting sugarcane “setts” or running cane juice through a boiling gutter (Doc 8). It thus seems to follow that African slaves would become increasing implemented into the sugar producing business. Indeed, in order to keep pace with the booming demand for additional labor, the labor supply continued to grow: in Jamaica, the slave population rose by more than 200,000 individuals between 1703 and 1789 (Doc 10). In short, slavery played an enormous role in ensuring sugar could continue to be supplied to
Sugar plantations have a field where sugar cane stalks are cut and grown and then there are boiling house where sugar cane stalks are crushed and boiled which is all runned by slave labor. Because slaves planted the cane stalks, harvested sugar stalks, crushed them, and boiled the sugar stalks sugar was made(8). According to David richardson the slave Trade, Sugar, and British Economic growth, “An Average purchase price of adult male slave on west African coast in 1748 was 14£ and in 1768 was 16£”(9a).Because slaves were so cheap slave traders may profit by, selling adult male slaves to sugar plantation owners for twice as much as they bought them in Africa. John Campbell Candid and Impartial Considerations on the Nature of the Sugar Trade describes the slaves as “so necessary Negro slaves purchased in Africa by English merchants”(11). Because africa trade slaves to English merchants Africans got things they did not
Slave labor is the final factor that drove the sugar trade and made it so successful. Slaves were the manual laborers on the plantations, doing the actual harvesting and boiling because the owner wasn’t there to do so (Document 8). Without the slaves working the farm, everything was pretty much useless. There is also a direct correlation between the number of slaves and the tons of sugar produced. This is shown in Document 9, where the island of Jamaica starts out with 45,000 slaves, and produces 4,782 tons of sugar. When the number of slaves increases by less than half to 74,500, the amount of sugar produced is more than tripled at 15, 972 tons. This clearly exhibits how slaves were essential to sugar
For years, the sugar plantations of the French colony of Martinique have been a major contribution to their economy. The amount of labour needed for the continued production of sugar lead to the immigration of contracted French labourers, enslavement of the remaining Indigenous population, and importation of enslaved Africans. The procurement of slaves was one of the methods used to curb the large capital required for the operation of these plantations. Although these slaves were emancipated in 1948, they still remained the majority of labourers working in the sugar plantations, even as ‘freed men’. The plantation systems are a huge part of Martinique’s economic history. Sugar plantation systems constituted a significant facet of France’s colonization of
This essay is really a legacy of that introduction, as it is this event which foreshadowed the sugar related explosion of trade in slaves. Indeed Henry Hobhouse in `Seeds of Change' goes so far as to say that "Sugar was the first dependance upon which led Europeans to establish tropical mono cultures to satisfy their own addiction. " I wish, then, to show the repurcussions of sugar's introduction into Europe and consequently into the New World, and outline especially that parallel between the suga... ... middle of paper ... ... enterprise and the genesis of the British empire, 1480-1630 (Cambridge,1984) Boxer, C.R):
A-1: The pursuit of it's own imperial interests meant for a stronger England. Initially, the two main motives for colonizing were religious and economic. The colonization meant that England could exploit the natural resources in North America, which turned out to be a rather lucrative move. Additionally, the colonies would be able to spread Christianity. Although the production of crops required laborers, what was found was that the native peoples of America could either be conquered, or enslaved with little ease. In turn, the enslaved natives could produce crops that could be exported to Europe. Items like horses, sugar, and tobacco also had an impact on trade. In 1493, Christopher Columbus transported sugar canes to Hispaniola. Roughly 20
Eventually they started importing slaves because they were not only cheaper, but easier to replace when they died, as most people who came to these islands did. By 1650, there were approximately 20,000 black slaves in Barbados; and by 1700, nearly as many as 45,000 black slaves in Jamaica (the prevalent sugar producer at this point in time). It was in these West Indian Islands that slavery not only got started for the English, but grew the fastest.
By 700 A.D., it was seen that sugar was diffused to the Mediterranean region by Islamic expansion and trade as sucrose was viewed as an exotic spice and medicine (Nunn, Nathan). In 1452, Portuguese sugar production began on Madeira, an uninhabited island off the northwest coast of Africa. Indigenous peoples were the first workers brought to island of Madeira to work on the sugar mills, but the need for labor was too much. To get help with more labor, the enslaved African Americans were brought in and they became the main labor force for the sugar industry. By 1500, Madeira became the largest exporter of sugar in the world (Dunn, R.). With the success of the cash crop and the labor provided by the African Americans, sugar production was seen to have spread to other Atlantic islands; first it was the Canaries, then Santiago in the Cape Verde islands but these islands lacked the required rainfall for good cane culture. This is where the Portuguese, and then later the Spanish, Dutch, and English came to set their sights on other areas to continue this white gold sugar industry hoping to expand the production and gain
In document 9, it shows Jamaica's (British colony)time span of the years 1703-1789 and how the slave population was at 45,000 at 1703 and now it's at 250,000 at 1789. Threw all of these slaves the amount of sugar produced was at 4,782 tons in the year of 1703 and now that it is 1789, 250,000 slaves produced 59,400 tons
One facet of this unique system involved the numerous economic differences between England and the colonies. The English government subscribed to the economic theory of mercantilism, which demanded that the individual subordinate his economic activity to the interests of the state (Text, 49). In order to promote mercantilism in all her colonies, Great Britain passed the Navigation Acts in 1651, which controlled the output of British holdings by subsidizing. Under the Navigation Acts, each holding was assigned a product, and the Crown dictated the quantity to be produced. The West Indies, for example, were assigned sugar production and any other colony exporting sugar would face stiff penalties (Text, 50). This was done in order to ensure the economic prosperity of King Charles II, but it also served to restrict economic freedom. The geographical layout of the American colonies made mercantilism impractical there. The cit...
The majority of the nearly 500,000 slaves on the island, at the end of the eighteenth century endured some of the worst slave conditions in the Caribbean. These people were seen as disposable economic inputs in a colony driven by greed. Thus, they receive...
The Slave Revolution in the Caribbean Colonists in the eighteenth century created plantations that produced goods such as tobacco, cotton, indigo, and more importantly, sugar. These plantations required forced labor, and thus slaves were shipped from Africa to the new world. “The Caribbean was a major plantation that was a big source of Europe’s sugar, and increasing economic expansion. The French had many colonies, including its most prized possession Saint- Domingue (Haiti). ”
Spain never really developed the land, however, and thus when British forces invaded in 1655, Spain chose not to focus much energy on defending the island. The British found Jamaica to be much more profitable than the Spanish had. It eventually became one of the most lucrative colonies in the British empire due to its dominance in sugar exports: from the mid 1700’s until the close of the slave trade in Jamaica in the 1830’s, Jamaica accounted for 42 percent of sugar imported into Britain (Burnard and Morgan 3). Unfortunately, these benefits for the British empire came at a significant cost to the hundreds of thousands of Africans who became unwillingly caught up in the trade triangle between England, Africa and the Caribbean. In their essay "The Dynamics of the Slave Market and Slave Purchasing Patterns in Jamaica, 1655-1788," Trevor Burnard and Kenneth Morgan say: "Jamaica had the largest demand for slaves of any British colony in the Americas" (2).
Saint-Domingue, a French colony located on the western third of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti) was developing so rapidly that by the 1750’s colony was the world’s leading producer of sugar; 40 percent of the world’s sugar trading belonged to France. “Under French rule, cultivation of coffee, sugarcane, cotton, and indigo turned Haiti into the richest European colony in the Western Hemisphere” (Girard). The French were so focused on the production of sugar that “most necessities, including food, were imported” (Rosenburg). Not only was Saint-Domigue dense in its exports, it also had around 500,000 slaves, almost half the entire population of slaves in the Caribbean. The Caribbean as a whole was described as being “dominated by the 1680s and 1690s by African slaves” (Slavery). New slaves from Africa were constantly being brought in due to the colonies rapid growth and horrible conditions of living which led to higher death rates among the slaves already there; there more slaves born on the continent of Africa than in colonies. Along with agricultural contribution to France’s economy, there were also other economic contributions to the global economy. For every ship of slaves transported captains had to be paid, “wood, water, and other provisions from shore” (Behrendt), as well as the ship’s crew. This distributed money all over Europe. It is said that “British West Indian production
“For the island colony was divided into three main groups in a political and social way. The descendants of the slaves were three-fourths of the population and classified as black or dark brown. The descendants of Europeans and slaves were about one-fifth of the population and classified as coloured or light brown. The rest were a few thousand East Indians and Chinese and perhaps the same number of pure European decent.” (Pg. 4) Claude Mckay blatantly describes the historical reality here in his novel, Banana Bottom. The reality that McKay is describing in Jamaica, directly relates to the history of the Caribbean and Jamaica specifically in the 19th Century.
Barbados is located in the Lesser Antilles, and is the easternmost of the Caribbean SIDS. It is highly urbanized and has a population of around 300,000 and a landmass of 432 km2. (Rawlins, 2003); (World Health Organization , 2013; Henshall, 1966). The Caribbean is mostly comprised of SIDS and is the island group that is most predisposed to natural disasters and extreme weather events (Pelling & Uitto, 2001). The metamorphosis of the land development in Barbados is closely related to the islands socio-cultural history. On account of their colonial legacy, the Barbados was a rural landscape. The dominance of sugar as a mono crop, therefore, favoured the development of the interior agricultural land. It is only recently that the locus of development has shifted outwards to the coast in order to respond to the tourism demands (Scruggs & Bassett, 2013).