An Economy of Slaves - Sugar and Slaves—The Caribbean
The  immensity of land necessitated the need for cheap labor in the English Colonies.

 

 

 

 

 

Work Exchange and Technology (WXT) Explain the development of labor systems such as slavery, indentured servitude, free labor, and sharecropping from the colonial period through the end of the 18th century

 

LEQ Essay Prompt:  Analyze the origins and development of slavery in Britain’s North American colonies in the period 1607 to 1776

 

 

 

 

 

 

Greatest asset in British colonial America = the immensity of land  

 

Greatest deficit in British colonial America = shortage of hands to develop land

 

The British government  showed little interest in sponsoring emigration.  Those who did emigrate were often the least prepared or the most anti-social (for religious or other reasons).

 

 

 

 

Q? How did settlers in the British colonies address the labor deficit?

 

 

Colonists already on America paid for the importation of convicts, beggars, prisoners-of-war, and indentured servants

 

The colonists turned to an existing trade in forced labor  in the form of slaves carried by Spanish, Portuguese , and Dutch traders

 

The Colonies developed their own domestic slave trading  industry , based on the Middle Passage centered in Newport, Rhode Island

 

 

 

The Economics of the Slave Trade:  

 

 

Royal African Company (1660-1698) 

 

In 1660, Charles II created the Royal African Company to trade in slaves and African goods. His brother, James II, led the company before ascending the throne. Under both these kings, the Royal African Company enjoyed a legally based monopoly  to transport slaves to the English colonies. Between 1672 and 1713, the company bought 125,000 captives on the African coast, losing 20% of them to death on the Middle Passage, the journey from the African coast to the Americas.

 

In the North American colonies, the importation of African slaves was directed mainly southward, where extensive tobacco, rice, and later, cotton plantation economies, demanded extensive labor forces for cultivation. In contrast to the high mortality rates of the Caribbean sugar plantations, North American slave populations tended to live longer. By the 19th century, many southern farmers found that natural increase was a viable alternative to importation in order to replenish their slave populations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Slavery by the Numbers #  [CONTAINED IN NOTES on PAGE 7 RIGHT COLUMN]

 

Of the 10 to 16 million Africans who survived the voyage to the New World,  60 -70% ended up in Brazil or the sugar colonies of the Caribbean. Only 6% percent arrived in what is now the United States

 

 

Absentee ownership was  common in the West Indies, Planters relied heavily on paid managers and on a distinct class of free blacks and mulattos to serve as intermediaries with the slave population 

 

Slaves constituted 80 -90 %  of the population, Many plantations holding 150 slaves or more.

 

Starting in the 17th century, some British colonies adopted slave codes from Barbados that led to strict racial categories in colonial societies

 

 

 

 

The West Indies:  Waystation to Mainland America
Spain, weakened by military overextension and distracted by its rebellious Dutch provinces, 
relaxed its grip on much of the Caribbean in the early 1600s.  

 

 

 

 

Sugar formed the foundation of the West Indian economy.

 

Source: Alfred W. Crosby Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, Greenwood Publishing (adapted)

 

It all began in Española [Hispaniola] with sugar, which was already a profitable plantation crop in the Canaries and Portugal’s Atlantic islands in the fifteenth century. Columbus himself had shipped sugar from Madeira to Genoa in 1478, and the mother of his first wife owned a sugar estate on that island. He brought sugar cane with him to Española in 1493, and the cane grew well in American soil. But the growth of the sugar industry was painfully slow until Charles V intervened, ordering that sugar masters and mill technicians be recruited from the Canaries, and authorizing loans to build sugar mills on Española. There were thirty-four mills on the island by the late 1530s and sugar was one of the two staples of the island’s economy (the other being cattle ranching) until the latter part of the sixteenth century.… 

 

 

Sugar cane was a rich man’s crop. It had to be planted extensively to yield commercially 
viable quantities of sugar.  Extensive planting, in turn, required extensive and arduous land clearing

 

Source: Guide to the Essentials of World History, Prentice Hall

 

… Growing sugar cane became a large business. At first, Native Americans were forced to work on sugar plantations, large estates run by an owner or overseer. They were treated cruelly, and many died. The Spanish then brought slaves from Africa to do the work. A new social structure developed. People born in Spain made up the highest social class. Those of European descent born in the colonies were next. People of mixed European and Indian or African descent were in the middle. Native Americans and people of African descent were in the lowest classes.…

 

 

 

 

To work their sprawling plantations, they imported enormous numbers of African slaves

(One of the notable atrocities wrought by European colonial expansion)

 

Scene on the Coast of Africa', by Francois-Auguste Biard c.1840. 
Presented to Sir Thomas Foxwell Buxton to commemorate the Abolition of Slavery in 1833

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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SLAVERY [ NOTES for PAGE 8 RIGHT COLUMN]

An attractive option for labor starved colonists

 

The "fusion of cultures" - Miscegenation is the mixing of different racial groups through marriage, cohabitation, sexual relations, or procreation. Because of the term's historical use in contexts that typically implied disapproval, more unambiguously neutral terms such as interracial, inter ethnic, or cross-cultural are more common in contemporary usage.

 

 

Permanent – it could be passed on generationally

 

“Social death” at birth eliminated a slaves political life

 

Slavery becomes race based, because racial coloring offered an easy basis for marking the enslaved apart from the English and Indians

 

All told 11 million Africans were torn from their homes “African Diaspora”

 

 Most of them were shipped to the West Indes and South America, but a sizable portion went to the North American colonies

 

 

 

 

 

Not all European servants came willingly. Several instances of kidnapping for transportation to the Americas are recorded, though these were often indentured in the same way as their willing counterparts. An illustrative example is that of Peter Williamson (1730–1799). As historian Richard Hofstadter pointed out, "Although efforts were made to regulate or check their activities, and they diminished in importance in the eighteenth century, it remains true that a certain small part of the white colonial population of America was brought by force, and a much larger portion came in response to deceit and misrepresentation on the part of the spirits [recruiting agents]."^[6]

 

 

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