Slavery and the Caribbean :: Slavery Essays

Slavery and the CaribbeanEuropeans came into contact with the Caribbean afterward Columbuss momentous journeys in 1492, 1496 and 1498. The intrust for expansion and trade led to the settlement of the colonies. The indigenous peoples, according to our sources mostly peaceful Tainos and warlike Caribs, proved to be unsuitable for hard worker labour in the newly formed orchards, and they were quickly and brutally decimated. The descendants of this once thriving community can now only be found in Guiana and Trinidad.The buckle down trade which had already begun on the West Coast of Africa provided the needed labour, and a period from 1496 (Columbuss second voyage) to 1838 saw Africans flogged and tortured in an effort to assimilate them into the plantation economy. Slave labour supplied the most coveted and important items in Atlantic and European commerce the sugar, coffee, cotton and cacao of the Caribbean the tobacco, rice and indigo of North the States the gold and sugar of Port uguese and Spanish South America. These commodities comprised about a third of the value of European commerce, a figure inflated by regulations that stimulate colonial products to be brought to the metropolis prior to their re-export to other destinations. Atlantic navigation and European settlement of the New World made the Americas Europes most convenient and matter-of-fact source of tropical and sub-tropical produce. The rate of growth of Atlantic trade in the eighteenth century had outstripped all other branches of European commerce and created fabulous fortunes.An depend of the slave population in the British Caribbean in Robin Blackburns study, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776-1848, puts the slave numbers at 428,000 out of a population of 500,000, so the number of slaves vastly exceeded the number of white owners and overseers. Absentee plantation owners added to the unrest. Rebellion was common, with the forms including self mutilation, suicide and infanticide as we ll as escape and maroonage (whereby the slaves escaped into the hills and forested interiors of the islands and set up potentially threatening communities of their own. See references in Wide Sargasso Sea). Jamaica holds the record for slave revolts, with serious uprisings in 1655, 1673, 1760 and continued disquiet after that. The documentation of revolts in Trinidad is less complete, but we know of at least one serious plot in 1805. Guiana was actually governed by a slave named Cuffy for a year after the revolt in 1763, and Barbados also had numerous plots, including six between 1649 and 1701.