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Caribbean Islands The Sugar Revolutions and Slavery
The sugar revolutions were both cause and consequence of the
demographic revolution. Sugar production required a greater labor
supply than was available through the importation of European
servants and irregularly supplied African slaves. At first the
Dutch supplied the slaves, as well as the credit, capital,
technological expertise, and marketing arrangements. After the
restoration of the English monarch following the Commonwealth
(1642-60), the King and other members of the royal family invested
in the Company of Royal Adventurers, chartered in 1663, to pursue
of the lucrative African slave trade. That company was succeeded by
the Royal Africa Company in 1672, but the supply still failed to
meet the demand, and all types of private traders entered the
transatlantic commerce.
Between 1518 and 1870, the transatlantic slave trade supplied
the greatest proportion of the Caribbean population. As sugarcane
cultivation increased and spread from island to island--and to the
neighboring mainland as well--more Africans were brought to replace
those who died rapidly and easily under the rigorous demands of
labor on the plantations, in the sugar factories, and in the mines.
Acquiring and transporting Africans to the New World became a big
and extremely lucrative business. From a modest trickle in the
early sixteenth century, the trade increased to an annual import
rate of about 2,000 in 1600, 13,000 in 1700, and 55,000 in 1810.
Between 1811 and 1870, about 32,000 slaves per year were imported.
As with all trade, the operation fluctuated widely, affected by
regular market factors of supply and demand as well as the
irregular and often unexpected interruptions of international war.
The eighteenth century represented the apogee of the system,
and before the century had ended, the signs of its demise were
clear. About 60 percent of all the Africans who arrived as slaves
in the New World came between 1700 and 1810, the time period during
which Jamaica, Barbados, and the Leeward Islands peaked as sugar
producers. Antislavery societies sprang up in Britain and France,
using the secular, rationalist arguments of the Enlightenment--the
intellectual movement centered in France in the eighteenth century-
-to challenge the moral and legal basis for slavery. A significant
moral victory was achieved when the British Chief Justice, Lord
Mansfield, ruled in 1772 that slavery was illegal in Britain,
thereby freeing about 15,000 slaves who had accompanied their
masters there--and abruptly terminating the practice of black
slaves ostentatiously escorting their masters about the kingdom. In
the British Parliament, antislavery voices grew stronger until
eventually a bill to abolish the slave trade passed both houses in
1807. The British, being the major carriers of slaves and having
abolished the trade themselves, energetically set about
discouraging other states from continuing. The abolition of the
slave trade was a blow from which the slave system in the Caribbean
could not recover.
Before the slave trade ended, the Caribbean had taken
approximately 47 percent of the 10 million African slaves brought
to the Americas. Of this number, about 17 percent came to the
British Caribbean. Although the white populations maintained their
superior social positions, they became a numerical minority in all
the islands. In the early nineteenth century, fewer than 5 percent
of the total population of Jamaica, Grenada, Nevis, St. Vincent,
and Tobago was white, fewer than 10 percent of the population of
Anguilla, Montserrat, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, and the Virgin Islands.
Only in the Bahamas, Barbados, and Trinidad was more than 10
percent of the total population white. By sharp contrast, Trinidad
was the only colony in the British Caribbean to have fewer than 80
percent of its population enslaved. Sugar and slavery gave to the
region a predominantly African population.
This demographic revolution had important social consequences.
Rather than being a relatively homogeneous ethnic group divided
into categories based on economic criteria, Caribbean society had
complex overlapping divisions of class and caste. The three basic
divisions were free white persons, free nonwhite persons, and
slaves.
Whites were divided along status lines based on wealth. In the
British colonies these were called "principal whites" and "poor
whites." In reality they formed three ranks. At the top, forming an
elite, were families who owned slaves and successful plantations.
Some of their names became important in the history of one or more
islands, names such as Guy, Modyford, Drax, Sutton, Price,
Bannington, Needham, Tharp, and Beckford in Jamaica; Drax, Hallet,
Littleton, Codrington, and Middleton in Barbados; and Warner,
Winthrop, Pinney, and Jeaffreson in the Leeward Islands. Next in
rank came the merchants, officials, and such professionals as
doctors and clergymen, who were just a shade below the big
planters.
At the bottom of the white ranks came the so-called "poor
whites," often given such pejorative names as "red legs" in
Barbados, or "walking buckras" in Jamaica. This group included
small independent farmers, servants, day laborers, and all the
service individuals from policemen to smiths, as well as the
various hangers-on required by the curious "Deficiency Laws." These
were laws designed to retain a minimum number of whites on each
plantation to safeguard against slave revolts. A Jamaica law of
1703 stipulated that there must be one white person for each ten
slaves up to the first twenty slaves and one for each twenty slaves
thereafter as well as one white person for the first sixty head of
cattle and one for each one hundred head after the first sixty
head. The law was modified in 1720, raising the ratios and lowering
the fines for noncompliance, but the planters seemed more prepared
to pay the fines for noncompliance than to recruit and maintain
white servants, so the law degenerated to another simple revenue
measure for the state. This was true throughout the British islands
during the eighteenth century.
Regardless of rank, skin color gave each person of European
descent a privileged position within plantation society. The
importance of race and color was a significant variation from the
norms of typical European society and accentuated the divergence
between the society "at home" and that overseas.
Each slave society in the colonies had an intermediate group,
called the "free persons of color," an ambiguous position. Governor
Francis Seaforth of Barbados colorfully expressed this dilemma in
1802: "There is, however, a third description of people from whom
I am more suspicious of evil than from either the whites or the
slaves: these are the Black and Colored people who are not slaves,
and yet whom I cannot bring myself to call free. I think
unappropriated people would be a more proper denomination
for them, for though not the property of other individuals they do
not enjoy the shadow of any civil right." This group originated in
the miscegenation of European masters and their African slaves. By
the nineteenth century, the group could be divided into blacks who
had gained their freedom or were the descendants of slaves, and the
mixed, or mulatto, descendants of the associations between
Europeans and non-Europeans. By the time of the abolition of
slavery in the 1830s, the heterogeneous free nonwhite population
represented about 10 percent of the population of Jamaica, 12
percent of the population of Barbados, and about 20 percent of the
population of Trinidad. A number of these free nonwhites had been
free for generations, if not centuries, and had carved a niche in
the local societies as successful merchants, planters,
professionals, and slave owners.
Throughout the British Caribbean the free nonwhites manifested
a number of common traits. They were predominantly female, largely
urban, and clearly differentiated from the slaves both by law and
by custom. Although adult females outnumbered males, the free
nonwhite population tended to be the most sexually balanced overall
and was the only group that consistently reproduced itself in the
British colonies during the era of the slave trade. Moreover, with
the exception of Trinidad, where, as Bridget Brereton indicates,
just as many free nonwhites lived in the rural parishes as in the
towns of Port of Spain, San Fernando, and St. Joseph, the free
nonwhites were strongly urban. After 1809, about 61 percent of all
the free nonwhites in Barbados lived in the parish of St. Michael
in the capital city, Bridgetown. More free nonwhites lived in
Kingston, Jamaica, than in all the other parishes combined.
The free nonwhite population faced competition from both ends
of the spectrum. At the lower end of the economic scale they had to
compete with jobbing slaves, who were often working arduously to
get enough money to purchase their freedom and so join the free
group. At the upper end they competed with the artisan, commercial,
and semi-skilled service sector of the lower orders of whites. The
whites often used their political power--or in some cases their
access to political power in Britain--to circumscribe the free
nonwhites as much as possible. Laws distinguishing comportment,
dress, and residence, denying nonwhites the right to practice
certain professions, or limiting the material legacy of individual
free nonwhites were common throughout the Caribbean. But at the
time of the abolition of slavery, nonwhites were aggressively
challenging the political hegemony of the whites, and their
successes were very important in the subsequent development of
British Caribbean society.
Data as of November 1987
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