Those engaged in the slave trade were primarily driven by the huge profits to be gained, both in the Caribbean and at home. Part of a feature about the archaeology of slavery on St Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean, from the International Slavery Museum's website. Irrigation networks had to be built and kept clear. He also planted coconut and breadfruit trees for his enslaved labourers (Pares 1950, 127). Others lay in the base of valleys, such as The Spring, beside a much steeper gut or gully, where access for laden carts of sugar cane was difficult. Special interests include art, architecture, and discovering the ideas that all civilizations share. When the Haitian Revolution occurred around 1800, it affected 43 per cent of Europe's entire sugar supply. In the 1650s when sugar started to take over from tobacco as the main cash crop on Nevis, enslaved Africans formed only 20% of the population. Slave houses in Nevis were described as composed of posts in the ground, thatched around the sides and upon the roof, with boarded partitions. All of these factors conspired to create a situation where plantations changed ownership with some frequency. World History Encyclopedia, 06 Jul 2021. Enslaved Africans were forced to engage in a variety of laborious activities, all of them back-breaking. Within a few decades, Brazil had become the worlds largest producer of sugar. Atlantic Ocean. . It was from Sicily that the various varieties of sugar cane were brought to Madeira. Popular and grass-roots activism have created a legacy of opposition to racism and ethnic dominance. Submitted by Mark Cartwright, published on 06 July 2021. UN Photo/Manuel Elias, Detail from the "Ark of Return", the permanent memorial honouring the victims of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, located at UN Headquarters in New York. Focuses on sugar production in the Caribbean, the destruction of indigenous people, and the suffering of the Africans who grew the crop. Blocks of sugar were packed into hogsheads for shipment. Capitalism and black slavery were intertwined. TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE VOYAGES. The demographics that the juggernaut economic enterprise of the slave trade and slavery represented are today well known, in large measure thanks to nearly three decades of dedicated scientific and historical research, driven significantly by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and by recent initiatives, including theUnited Nations Outreach Programme on the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery. African slaves became increasingly sought after to work in the unpleasant conditions of heat and humidity. 2. It is labelled as the Negro Ground attached to Jessups plantation, high up the mountain. Slaves were also not allowed to work more than 14 hours a day. The rate of increase in the occurrence of type 2 diabetes and hypertension within the adult population, mostly people of African descent, was galloping. In the 15th century, it was the Portuguese who first adapted a plantation system for growing sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum) on a large scale. Although the volcanic soils of the two islands were highly fertile, plantation owners and managers were so eager to maximise profits from sugar that they preferred to import food from North America rather than lose cane land by growing food. Before the arrival and devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Caribbean region was buckling under the strain of proliferating, chronic non-communicable diseases. Of this number, about 17 percent came to the British Caribbean. Revolts on slave ships cascaded into rebellions on plantations and in towns. All of the above tasks could be done by unskilled labour and were done mostly by slaves and a minority of paid labourers. In most societies, slavery investors emerged as the political and economic elite. Please note that content linked from this page may have different licensing terms. The demographics that the juggernaut economic enterprise of the slave trade and slavery represented are today well known, in large measure thanks to nearly three decades of dedicated scientific and historical research, driven significantly by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and by recent initiatives, including the United Nations Outreach Programme on the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery. Archaeology is often the only way to recover detailed information on the possessions of the enslaved workers, since the items were rarely recorded in documents. The copyright holder has published this content under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. UN Photo/Rick Bajornas, Ambassador A. Missouri Sherman-Peter, Permanent Observer of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to the United Nations, at UN Headquarters in New York, 13 May 2016. Furnishings within were always sparse and crude, most occupants sleeping in hammocks, or on the earth floor.. Some 5 million enslaved Africans were taken to the Caribbean, almost half of whom were brought to the British Caribbean (2.3 million). After emancipation the actions of many British Caribbean sugar plantation workers created conditions that led to new relations with former masters, separate communities away from the plantations for themselves, and renewed migration from Africa. Most Caribbean societies possess large or majority populations of African descendants. Madeira, a group of unpopulated volcanic islands in the North Atlantic, had rich soil and a beneficial climate for growing sugar cane all year round. One hut is cut away to reveal the inside. University of Minnesota Libraries", "The role of sugar cane in Brazil's history and economy", "Sephardic trading connections between Barbados, Curaao and Jamaica, 1670-1720", "Half-Truths and History: The Debate over Jews and Slavery", "How Jewish Immigrants Spurred the Barbadian Rum Trade", "Small Farms, Large Transaction Costs: Haiti's Missing Sugar", "The Greater Caribbean: From Plantations to Tourism", "Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History", "NEW PERSPECTIVES ON SLAVERY AND EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH CARIBBEAN", "Sugar Mills, Technology, and Environmental Change: A Case Study of Colonial Agro-Industrial Development in the Caribbean", "El Caribe comparte los impactos causados por industrias azucarera y ganadera", "Sugar and the Environment - Encouraging Better Management Practices in Sugar Production and Processing | WWF", "High dietary fructose intake: Sweet or bitter life? William McMahons map drawn in 1828 records shows the landscape of plantation estates shortly before emancipation, after nearly three centuries of development. Colonialism has persisted for over a century after the ending of formal slavery, leaving black communities to deal with economic despair and the emerging political class to clean up the inherited colonial disarray. London: Heinemann, 1967. The sugar plantations grew exponentially so that 90% of the island consisted of sugar plantations by the year 1680. Let's Take Action Towards the Sustainable Development Goals. The Drax family pioneered the plantation system in the 17th century and played a major role in the development of sugar and slavery across the Caribbean and the US. "The Price of Sugar" is a powerful documentary about the . A water mill was in lower right with a cane field in the center. The Sugar Islands were Antigua, Barbados, St. Christopher, Dominica, and Cuba through Trinidad. Europeans introduced sugarcane to the New World in the 1490s. 23 March 2015. Food crops had to be grown to feed the paid labour, technicians, and the owners family. In the St Kitts plantations, the slave villages were usually located downwind of the main house from the prevailing north-easterly wind. B. British merchants transported slaves to Caribbean sugar plantations and to Britain's colonies in North America. What was the role of the . Running a website with millions of readers every month is expensive. World History Encyclopedia. Current forms of slavery and extreme social oppression are now identified more clearly and treated with similar public and policy opposition as traditional forms. the Caribbean was . They are small low rectangular, one room structures, under roofs thatched with leaves. The practice of political democracy has been effective in driving a culture of economic equity, but there remains a considerable amount of work to be done in creating a level playing field for all. In Islamic slave-owning societies, castration and infibulation curtailed slave reproduction. So Tom and Principe were really the first European colonies to develop large-scale sugar plantations employing a sizeable workforce of African slaves. Presenting evidence of past wrongs now facilitates the call for a new global order that includes fairness in access and equality in participation. Originally published by National Museums Liverpool to the public domain. In Charlestown today there is a place now known as the Slave Market. . Brazil was by far the largest importer of slaves in the Americas throughout the 17th century. And in every sugar parish, black people outnumbered whites. The region can and must be the incubator for a new global leadership that celebrates cultural plurality, multi-ethnic magnificence, and the domestication of equal human and civil rights for all as a matter of common sense and common living. These plantations produced eighty to ninety percent of the . By Khalil Gibran Muhammad AUG. 14, 2019. By the end of the 15th century, the plantation owners knew they were on to a good thing, but their number one problem was labour. One painting illustrates a slave village near the foot of Brimstone Hill. Passed in 1661, this comprehensive law defined Africans as heathens and brutes not fit to be governed by the same laws as Christians. As a consequence of these events, the size of the Black population in the Caribbean rose dramatically in the latter part of the 17th century. The post-colonial, post-modern world will never be the same as a result of this legacy of resistance and the symbolism of racial justicekey elements of humanity rising to its finest and highest potential. The enslaved were then sold in the southern USA, the Caribbean Islands and South America, where they were used to work the plantations. Thank you! The cane leftovers from the whole process were usually given to feed pigs on the plantation. Institutional racism continues to be a critical force explaining the persistence of white economic dominance. Douglas V. Armstrong is an anthropologist from New York whose studies on plantation slavery have been focused on the Caribbean. Presenting evidence of past wrongs now facilitates the call for a new global order that includes fairness in access and equality in participation. The death rate was high. View images from this item (3) William Clark was a 19th century British artist who was invited to Antigua by some of its planters. Popular and grass-roots activism have created a legacy of opposition to racism and ethnic dominance. Archaeology can reveal their tools and domestic vessels and utensils, such as ceramic pots. Many plantation owners preferred to import new slaves rather than providing the means and conditions for the survival of their existing slaves. In the 1790s Pinney instructed that the houses in the slave village should be; built at approximate distances in right lines to prevent accidents from fire and to afford each negro a proper piece of land around the house. So Tom took on all the characteristics later assumed by the islands of the Lesser Antilles; it was a Caribbean island on the wrong side of the Atlantic. As a slave owner, he received compensation when slavery was abolished in Grenada. In the decades that followed complete emancipation in 1838, ex-slaves in Guyana (formerly Bibliography Once cut, the stalks were taken to a mill, where the juice was extracted. In 1820-21 James Hakewill drew a number of sugar plantations in Jamaica showing the slave villages in several cases set within wooded areas, which served not only as shade but also as fruit trees to provide food for the enslaved populations. Enslaved Africans were brought to the Caribbean as an abundant and cheap source of labour for sugar plantations. With household slaves and personal attendants, the wealthiest white Europeans could afford a life of ease surrounded by the best things money could buy such as a large villa, the finest clothing, exotic furniture of the best materials, and imported artworks by Flemish masters. The scale of human traffic was relatively small, but the model was now in place that would be copied and refined elsewhere following the Portuguese colonization of the Azores in 1439, the Cape Verde Islands (1462), and So Tom and Principe (1486). Enslaved Africans used some of this free time to cultivate garden plots close to their houses, as well as in nearby provision grounds. In short, the Caribbean that began its modern history as a centre of crimes against humanity can turn this world on its head and be recast as the centre of a new consciousness that celebrates justice and freedom for all. Before the arrival and devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Caribbean region was buckling under the strain of proliferating, chronic non-communicable diseases. Extreme social and racial inequality is a legacy of slavery in the region that continues to haunt and hinder the development efforts of regional and global institutions. However, plantation life was terrible. A problem for all male slaves was the fact that there were far more of them than females brought from Africa. In parts of Brazil and the Caribbean, where African slave labor on sugar plantations dominated the economy, most enslaved people were put to work directly or indirectly in the sugar industry. The Drax family also owned a plantation in Jamaica, which they sold in the 19th century. The rise of slavery. Whatever the crop, labouring life was dictated by the cycles of the agricultural year. Institutional racism continues to be a critical force explaining the persistence of white economic dominance. Sugar Cane Plantation. It is for this and related reasons that the Caribbean has emerged as an epicenter of the global reparatory justice movement. In 1777 as many as 400 slaves died from starvation or diseases caused by malnutrition on St Kitts and on Nevis. European planters thought Africans would be more suited to the conditions than their own countrymen, asthe climate resembled that the climate of their homeland in West Africa. The demand for sugar drove the transatlantic slave trade, which saw 10-12 million enslaved people transported from Africa to the Americas, often to toil on sugar plantations. The liquid was then poured into large moulds and left to set to create conical sugar 'loaves', each 'loaf' weighing 15-20 lbs (6.8 to 9 kg). Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Caribbean became the largest producer of sugar in the world. The slave houses of the 18th century show a close resemblance to the late 19th century wooden houses with thatched roofs that appear in the earliest photographs of rural houses in St Kitts. The sugar plantations of the region, owned and operated primarily by English, French, Dutch, Spanish and Danish colonists, consumed black life as quickly as it was imported. The Caribbean contribution, therefore, will help make the world a safer place for citizens who insist that it is a human right to live free from fear of violence, ethnic targeting and racial discrimination. Several descriptions survive from the island of Barbados. In recent years, a third source of information, archaeology, has begun to contribute to our understanding. Eliminating the toxic contaminant of hierarchical ethnic racism from all societies, and allowing them to embrace a horizontal perspective on ethnic and cultural diversity and ways of living, will enable the twenty-first century to be better than any prior period in modernity. The production of sugar required - and killed - hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans. These plantations produced 80 to 90 percent of the sugar consumed in Western Europe. In addition, it serves as a model for new forms of equity, including in climate and public health justice. The houses measured 15 to 20 feet long and had two rooms. World History Publishing is a non-profit company registered in the United Kingdom. Yet in 1788 a Jamaican census recorded that only 226,432 enslaved men, women and children were alive on the island. The clash of cultures, warfare, missionary work, European-born diseases, and wanton destruction of ecosystems, ultimately caused the disintegration of many of these indigenous societies. Plantations, Sugar Cane and Slavery on JSTOR are two . Tasks ranged from clearing land, planting cane, and harvesting canes by hand, to manuring and weeding. McDonald, Roderick A. The movement of emancipated slave populations and establishment of new villages away from the old plantation lands suggest that some slave villages were abandoned soon after emancipation; others may have remained in use for the labourers who chose to stay on the plantation as paid workers and rented their house and land. Black slavery was a modern form of racial plunder, and the obvious consequences of this economic extraction are seen in structural underdevelopment. The Caribbean is home to the Haitian Revolution, which produced the worlds first black freedom state and the subsequent proliferation of constitutional democracies. A great number of planters and harvesters were required to plant, weed, and cut the cane which was ready for harvest five or six months after planting in the most fertile areas. Consequently, slaves were imported from West Africa, particularly the Kingdom of Kongo and Ndongo (Angola). Fields had to be cleared and burned with the remaining ash then used as a fertilizer. Prints depicting enslaved people producing sugar in Antigua, 1823. This other pandemic is discussed in terms of the racist culture of colonialism, in which the black population is generally considered addicted to foods containing high levels of sugar and salt. Copyright 2021 Some Rights Reserved (See Terms of Service), Slavery on Caribbean Sugar Plantations from the 17th to 19th Centuries, Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window), Click to share on Skype (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window), Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window), Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window), A Supervisors Advice to a Young Scribe in Ancient Sumer, Numbers of Registered and Actual Young Voters Continue to Rise, Forever Young: The Strange Youth of Ancient Macedonian Kings, Gen Z Voters Have Proven to Be a Force for Progressive Politics, Just Between You and Me:A History of Childrens Letters to Presidents. An overview of sugar plantations in the Caribbean. UN Photo/Rick Bajornas, Caption: Ambassador A. Missouri Sherman-Peter, Permanent Observer of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to the United Nations, at UN Headquarters in New York, 13 May 2016. In part the Act was a response to the increasingly powerful arguments of abolitionists. We would much rather spend this money on producing more free history content for the world. This necessity was sometimes a problem in tropical climates. In pursuit of sugar fortunes, millions of people were worked to death, and then replaced by more enslaved Africans brought by still more slave ships. Until the Amelioration Act was passed in 1798, which forced planters to improve conditions for enslaved workers, many owners simply replaced the casualties by importing more slaves from West Africa. A picture published in 1820 by John Augustine Waller, shows slave huts on Barbados. Plantation life and labor were difficult and . World History Foundation is a non-profit organization registered in Canada. Nevertheless, the plantation system was so successful that it was soon adopted throughout the colonial Americas and for many other crops such as tobacco and cotton. Slaves could be acquired locally but in places like Portuguese Brazil, enslaving the Amerindians was prohibited from 1570. Part of the National Museums Liverpool group. In the second half of the century the trade averaged twenty thousand slaves, and . Brazil was the world's first sugar plantation in 1518, and it was the leading exporter of sugar to Europe by the late 1500s. This voyage was called the Middle Passage, and was notorious for its brutality and inhumaneness. Sugar processing on the English colony of Antigua, drawing by William Clark, 1823, courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. Our work on the Sustainable Development Goals. The Caribbean is home to some of the most economically and socially exploited people of modernity. UN Photo/Devra Berkowitz, United Nations Outreach Programme on the Transatlantic Slave Trade and Slavery, Barbados in the Caribbean became the first large-scale colony populated by a black majority, The Caribbean has the lowest youth enrolment in higher education in the hemisphere, The rate of increase in the occurrence of type 2 diabetes and hypertension within the adult population, mostly people of African descent, was galloping, campaign for reparations for the crimes of slavery and colonialism. On the St Kitts plantations, the slave villages were usually located downwind of the main house from the prevailing north-easterly wind. By the mid-16th century, Brazil had become the worlds largest producer of sugar. C. The Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Dutch also participated in the transatlantic slave trade. This portal is managed by the United Nations Information Centre for the Caribbean Area. Current forms of slavery and extreme social oppression are now identified more clearly and treated with similar public and policy opposition as traditional forms. In terms of its scale and its social, psychological, spiritual and physical brutality, specifically inflicted upon Africans as a targeted ethnicity, this vastly profitable business, and the considerable subsequent suppression of the inhumanity and criminal nature of slavery, was ubiquitous and usurping of moral values. One recent estimate is that 12% of all Africans transported on British ships between 1701 and 1807 died en route to the West Indies and North America; others put the figure as high as 25%. Books Finally it can also provide information on their dress and fashions, through the recovery and analysis of items such as dress fittings, buttons and beads. Please support World History Encyclopedia. Some owners permitted marriages between slaves - formal or informal - while others actively separated couples. Critically, the Caribbean was where chattel slavery took its most extreme judicial form in the instrument known as the Slave Code, which was first instituted by the English in Barbados. Slaves were permitted at weekends to grow food for their own sustenance on small plots of land. 6, p. 174]The Caribbean is a region of islands and coastal territory in the Americas that is roughly defined by . As the historian M. Newitt notes, Here [So Tom and Principe] the plantation system, dependent on slave labour, was developed and a monoculture established, which made it necessary for the settlers to import everything they needed, including food. It is for this and related reasons that the Caribbean has emerged as an epicenter of the global reparatory justice movement. The death rate on the plantations was high, a result of overwork, poor nutrition and work conditions, brutality and disease. From the 1650's to the 1670's, slaves were brought to work the fields of sugar plantations. Most people are familiar with slavery in the antebellum US South. The same system was adopted by other colonial powers, notably in the Caribbean. Placing them in these locations ensured that they did not take up valuable cane-growing land. He describes the possessions of the enslaved couple; of furniture they have not great matters to boast, nor, considering their habits of life, is much required. Many slaves would have died from starvation had not a prickly type of edible cucumber grown that year in great profusion. The sugar cane industry was a labour-intensive one, both in terms of skilled and unskilled work. At the Hermitage the slave village stood beside the high sea-cliff, and was marked by a boundary bank, which perhaps originally supported a fence or hedge. The Caribbean is home to some of the most economically and socially exploited people of modernity. The enslaved Africans supplemented their diet with other kinds of wild food. The plantation relied almost solely on an imported enslaved workforce, and became an agricultural factory concentrating on one profitable crop for sale. As the sugar industry grew, the amount of laborers that once was a working population had tremendously diminished. The black blast. The scourge of racism based on white supremacy, for example, remains virulent in the region. Eliminating the toxic contaminant of hierarchical ethnic racism from all societies, and allowing them to embrace a horizontal perspective on ethnic and cultural diversity and ways of living, will enable the twenty-first century to be better than any prior period in modernity. Over the period of the Atlantic Slave Trade, from approximately 1526 to 1867, some 12.5 million captured men, women, and children were put on ships in Africa, and 10.7 million arrived in the Americas. For details such as these we have to turn to written records from other islands and to the evidence of archaeology. Last week, leading figures in the Caribbean Community's Reparations Commission described the Drax Hall plantation as a "killing field" and a "crime scene" from the tens of thousands of . At the heart of the plantation system was the labor of millions of enslaved workers, transplanted across the Atlantic like the sugar they produced. The Caribbean Sugar mill with vertical rollers, French West Indies, 1665. Another major risk to the sugar planters was rebellions by the slaves. A When republishing on the web a hyperlink back to the original content source URL must be included. The Caribbean was at the core of the crime against humanity induced by the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. This allowed the owner or manager to keep an eye on his enslaved workforce, while also reinforcing the inferior social status of the enslaved. The UNChronicleisnot an official record. World History Encyclopedia. In 1750 St Kitts grew most of its own food but 25 years later and Nevis and St Kitts had come to rely heavilyon food supplies imported from North America. But the forced workers engaged in rice cultivation were given tasks and could regulate their own pace of work better than slaves on sugar plantations. 04 Mar 2023. We found no architectural trace however of the houses at any of the slave villages. The main source of labor until the abolition of slavery was African slaves. After the abolition of slavery, indentured laborers from India, China, and Java migrated to the Caribbean to mostly work on the sugar plantations. Higman, Barry W. Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807-1834 Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. A team of British archaeologists studied the slave villages in two areas of St Kitts in 2004 and 2005, using the detailed McMahon map to locate the sites.