slavery in the caribbean sugar plantations

Slave houses in Barbados have been described as; consisting most frequently of wattle or stick huts, which were roofed with palm thatch. 1995 "Imagen y realidad en el paisaje Antillano de plantaciones," in Malpica, Antonio, ed., Paisajes del Azcar. Life on a Colonial Sugar Plantation. Capitalism and black slavery were intertwined. Most were destined for Brazil and the mainland Spanish colonies. In the Caribbean, as well as in the slave states, the shift from small-scale farming to industrial agriculture . Barbados in the Caribbean became the first large-scale colony populated by a black majority, and South Carolina in the United States assumed the same status. For the most part the layout of slave villages was not rigidly organised, as they grew up over time and the inhabitants had some choice about the location of their houses. The number of enslaved labor crews doubled on sugar plantations. The German noble Heinrich von Uchteritz who was captured in battle in England and sold to a planter in Barbados in 1652 described houses of the enslaved Africans on the island. Focuses on sugar production in the Caribbean, the destruction of indigenous people, and the suffering of the Africans who grew the crop. He part-owned at least two slave ships, the Samuel and the Hope. During the 1800's, three out of every five Africans who came to the Caribbean were brought as slaves for sugar plantations. Most Caribbean islands were covered with sugar cane fields and mills for refining the crop. Slaves could be acquired locally but in places like Portuguese Brazil, enslaving the Amerindians was prohibited from 1570. The main source of labor, until the abolition of chattel slavery, was enslaved Africans.After the abolition of slavery, indentured laborers from India, China, Portugal and other . Barbados in the Caribbean became the first large-scale colony populated by a black majority, and South Carolina in the United States assumed the same status. The maroon communities, landed pirate settlements, news reports, and the methods in which the government responded to Caribbean piracy highlighted the intertwined relationship between piracy, plantations, and the slave trade. This voyage, now known as the Middle Passage, consumed some 20 per cent of its human cargo. The houses measured 15 to 20 feet long and had two rooms. His Ten Views, published in 1823, portrays the key steps in the growing, harvesting and processing of sugarcane. A mill plant needed anywhere from 60 to 200 workers to operate it. In most societies, slavery investors emerged as the political and economic elite. Sugar PlantationsSugar cane cultivation best takes place in tropical and subtropical climates; consequently, sugar plantations in the United States that utilized slave labor were located predominantly along the Gulf coast, particularly in the southern half of Louisiana. Higman, Barry W. "The Sugar Revolution." Economic History Review 53, no. In most societies, slavery investors emerged as the political and economic elite. In the St Kitts plantations, the slave villages were usually located downwind of the main house from the prevailing north-easterly wind. It is labelled as the Negro Ground attached to Jessups plantation, high up the mountain. This voyage was called the Middle Passage, and was notorious for its brutality and inhumaneness. "Life on a Colonial Sugar Plantation." Running a website with millions of readers every month is expensive. At that time the Black slaves did not sleep in hammocks but on boards laid on the dirt floor. Some 40 per cent of enslaved Africans were shipped to the Caribbean Islands, which, in the seventeenth century, surpassed Portuguese Brazil as the principal market for enslaved labour. Salted meat and fish, along with building timber and animals to drive the mills, were shipped from New England. The many legacies of over 300 years of slavery weighing on popular culture and consciousness persist as ferociously debilitating factors. 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. This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon this content non-commercially, as long as they credit the author and license their new creations under the identical terms. Cane plantations soon spread throughout the Caribbean and South America and made immense profits for planters and merchants. The Caribbean is home to some of the most economically and socially exploited people of modernity. They were no more than small cabins or huts, none above six foot square and built of inferior wood, almost like dog huts, and covered with leaves from trees which they call plantain, which is very broad and almost shelf-like and serves very well against rain. 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%. Before the slave trade ended, the Caribbean had taken approximately 47 percent of the 10 million African slaves brought to the Americas. 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. Presenting evidence of past wrongs now facilitates the call for a new global order that includes fairness in access and equality in participation. The eighteen visible huts of the village are arranged in no particular order within a stone-walled enclosure, which is surrounded by cane fields on three sides. The Estado da India (1505-1961) was the name the Portuguese gave Sugar & the Rise of the Plantation System, Dibia's World: Life on an Early Sugar Plantation, An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. Slaves on an Antiguan Sugar PlantationThomas Hearne (CC BY-NC-SA). Finally they were sold to local buyers. Enter your email address to receive notifications of new posts by email. . 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 most well-known portrait of the Louisiana sugar country comes from Solomon Northup, the free black New Yorker famously kidnapped into slavery in 1841 and rented out by his master for work on . In comparison, in the 17th century a white indentured labourer or servant would cost a planter 10 for only a few years work but would cost the same in food, shelter and clothing. Once they arrived in the Caribbean islands, the Africans were prepared for sale. Then there are concerns regarding the standard markers of economic underdevelopment, such as widespread illiteracy, endemic hunger, systemic child abuse, inadequate public health facilities, primitive communications infrastructure, widespread slum dwelling, and chronically low enrolment and student performance at all levels of the education system. After being established in the Caribbean islands, the plantation system spread during the 16th, . In addition, it serves as a model for new forms of equity, including in climate and public health justice. Richard Pennant, 1st Baron Penrhyn (1737-1808), owned six sugar plantations in Jamaica and was an outspoken anti-abolitionist. Blocks of sugar were packed into hogsheads for shipment. Slaves had to learn the local pidgin such as creole Portuguese in Brazil. A picture published in 1820 by John Augustine Waller, shows slave huts on Barbados. In addition, it serves as a model for new forms of equity, including in climate and public health justice. In 1724 Father Labat drew his idealised design for an estate layout based on his 12 years experience of managing an estate on the French island of Martinique. In the Caribbean, many plantations held 150 enslaved persons or more. London: Heinemann, 1967. 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. Examining the archaeology of slavery in the Caribbean sugar plantations. Once cut, the stalks were taken to a mill, where the juice was extracted. Footnote 65 Through their work planning slave trading voyages and corresponding with RAC employees in West Africa and the Caribbean, serving on the directorate of the RAC would have provided these merchants with useful business contacts and knowledge pertaining to West African commerce, the Caribbean sugar trade, and plantation management. World History Encyclopedia. At the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1776 trade was closed between North America and the British islands in the West Indies, leading to disastrous food shortages. Many slaves would have died from starvation had not a prickly type of edible cucumber grown that year in great profusion. It is now universally understood and accepted that the transatlantic trade in enchained, enslaved Africans was the greatest crime against humanity committed in what is now defined as the modern era. The rise of slavery. Sugar Cane Plantation. License. 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. 2 (2000): 213-236. Jamaica has been by far the major producer of sugar, but The Lesser Antilles had the advantage of a shorter sea trip to deliver produce and rum to the . Alan H. Adamson, Sugar Without Slaves: The Political Economy of British Guiana, 1838-1904 (New Haven, 1972), 119-21 . Brewminate: A Bold Blend of News and Ideas. And in every sugar parish, black people outnumbered whites. The Sugar Islands were Antigua, Barbados, St. Christopher, Dominica, and Cuba through Trinidad. During this time period there was 1.4 million slaves in the caribbean which was 40 percent of the 3.5 million slaves in america. Villages were often located on the edge of the estate lands or in places that were difficult to cultivate such as areas near the edge of the deep guts or gullies. Illustration of slaves cutting sugar cane on a southern plantation in the 1800s. The Caribbean was at the core of the crime against humanity induced by the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. 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 clash of cultures, warfare, missionary work, European-born diseases, and wanton destruction of ecosystems, ultimately caused the disintegration of many of these indigenous societies. After emancipation, many newly freed labourers moved away from the plantations, emigrating or setting up new homes as squatters on abandoned estate land. ", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sugar_plantations_in_the_Caribbean&oldid=1142688340, This page was last edited on 3 March 2023, at 21:15. Plantation owners obviously had a much better life than the slaves who worked for them, and if successful in their estate management, they could live lives far superior to anything they could have expected back in Europe. Plantations, Sugar Cane and Slavery on JSTOR are two . All of these factors conspired to create a situation where plantations changed ownership with some frequency. Current forms of slavery and extreme social oppression are now identified more clearly and treated with similar public and policy opposition as traditional forms. UN Photo/Manuel Elias, Caption: 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. On early plantations, hand-presses were used to crush the cane, but these were soon replaced by animal-powered presses and then windmills or, more often, watermills; hence plantations were usually located near a stream or river. A hat hangs on the wall, a group of large pots stands on a shelf and there is a small bed in the corner. The main reason for importing enslaved Africans was economic. John Pinney (1740-1818) who owned the plantation of Mountravers on Nevis gives two reasons for this layout. Before the arrival and devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Caribbean region was buckling under the strain of proliferating, chronic non-communicable diseases. Learn more on the geographical spread of the colonial sugar plantation system in our article Sugar & the Rise of the Plantation System. Food crops had to be grown to feed the paid labour, technicians, and the owners family. Our work on the Sustainable Development Goals. 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. These findings regarding the social and economic ramifications of Caribbean plantation slavery, as well those regarding Asian immigrants, put the traditional interpretation of the post-slavery period into question. By 1750, British and French plantations produced most of the world's sugar and its byproducts, molasses and rum.At the heart of the plantation system was the labor of millions of enslaved workers . The Portuguese Crown parcelled out land or captaincies (donatarias) to noble settlers, much like they did in the feudal system of Europe. 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. Contemporary pictures of slave villages drawn by visitors or residents in the Caribbean show that slave houses often consisted of small rectangular huts. Of this number, about 17 percent came to the British Caribbean. It is privileged to host senior United Nations officials as well as distinguished contributors from outside the United Nations system whose views are not necessarily those of the United Nations. Slave houses in Nevis were described as composed of posts in the ground, thatched around the sides and upon the roof, with boarded partitions. 04 Mar 2023. Once at the plantation, their treatment depended on the plantation owner who had paid to have them transported or bought the slaves at auction locally. Revolts on slave ships cascaded into rebellions on plantations and in towns. 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. The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana. The slaves working the sugar plantation were caught in an unceasing rhythm of arduous labor . This voyage, now known as the Middle Passage, consumed some 20 per cent of its human cargo. The World History Encyclopedia logo is a registered trademark. 23 March 2015. the Caribbean was . Slaves were also not allowed to work more than 14 hours a day. The bedstead is a platform of boards, and the bed a mat covered with a blanket; a small table; two or three low stools; an earthen jar for holding water; a few smaller ones; a pail; an iron pot; calabashes [hollowed out gourds] of different sizes (serving very tolerably for plates, dishes and bowls) make up the rest. Black slavery was a modern form of racial plunder, and the obvious consequences of this economic extraction are seen in structural underdevelopment. The sugar cane plant was the main crop produced on the numerous plantations throughout the Caribbean through the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, as almost every island was covered with sugar plantations and mills for refining the cane for its sweet properties. The sugar cane industry was a labour-intensive one, both in terms of skilled and unskilled work. Sugar production was important on a number of Caribbean islands in the late 1600s. Its campaign for reparations for the crimes of slavery and colonialism has served as a template for the Global South in seeking a level playing field for development within the international economic order. Offers a . Here they were given a number of basic lessons in Portuguese and Christianity, both of which made them more valuable if they survived the voyage to the Americas. Cartwright, Mark. 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. Last modified July 06, 2021. The spread of sugar 'plantations' in the Caribbean created a great need for workers. Carts had to be loaded and oxen tended to take the cane to the processing plant. The system was then applied on an even larger scale to the new colony of Portuguese Brazil from the 1530s. "The Price of Sugar" is a powerful documentary about the . Making Sugar LoavesThe British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA). Slave villages represent an important but little-known part of the Caribbean landscape. The Atlantic economy, in every aspect, was effectively sustained by African enslavement. But as the growth of the sugar plantations took off, and the demand for labour grew, the numbers of enslaved Africans transported to the Caribbean islands and to mainland North and South America increased hugely. This portal is managed by the United Nations Information Centre for the Caribbean Area. Sugar of lesser quality with a brownish colour tended to be consumed locally or was only used to make preserves and crystallised fruit. It is for this and related reasons that the Caribbean has emerged as an epicenter of the global reparatory justice movement. and more. Enslaved Africans were also much less expensive to maintain than indenturedEuropean servants or paid wage labourers. Plantation life and labor were difficult and . 23 March 2015. Europeans introduced sugarcane to the New World in the 1490s. 1700: About 50 slaves per plantation 1730: About 100 slaves per plantation Jamaica 1740: average estate had 99 slaves of the island's slave population was employed because of sugar 1770: average estate had 204 slaves Saint Domingue More diversified economy Harshest slave system in the Americas Barbados Most Caribbean societies possess large or majority populations of African descendants. Atlantic Ocean. The British planter Bryan Edwards observed that in Jamaica slave cottages were; seldom placed with much regard to order, but, being always intermingled with fruit-trees, particularly the banana, the avocado-pear, and the orange (the Negroes own planting and property) they sometimes exhibit a pleasing and picturesque appearance.. The legacy of the social and economic institution of slavery is to be found everywhere within these societies and is particularly dominant in the Caribbean. The floors were of beaten earth and a fire was lit at night in the middle of one room. The introduction of sugar cultivation to St Kitts in the 1640s and its subsequent rapid growth led to the development of the plantation economy which depended on the labour of imported enslaved Africans. Sugar plantations in the Caribbean were a major part of the economy of the islands in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. He holds an MA in Political Philosophy and is the WHE Publishing Director. Consequently, after 1660 very few new white servants reached St Kitts or Nevis; the Black enslaved Africans had taken their place. 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. The death rate was high. World History Encyclopedia. Europeans introduced sugarcane to the New World in the 1490s. Between 12th and 14th Streets 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. 22 May 2015. Tasks ranged from clearing land, planting cane, and harvesting canes by hand, to manuring and weeding. 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. The sugar that saturates the American diet has a barbaric history as the 'white gold' that fueled slavery. Some 40 per cent of enslaved Africans were shipped to the Caribbean Islands, which, in the seventeenth century, surpassed Portuguese Brazil as the principal market for enslaved labour. While colonialism has been in retreat since the nationalist reforms of the mid-20th century, it persists as a political feature of the region. Special interests include art, architecture, and discovering the ideas that all civilizations share. Over time, as the populations of colonies evolved, mixed-race European-locals, freed slaves, and sometimes even slaves were employed in these technical positions. Though morally wrong in some aspects, the use of slaves in the sugar cane plantations conveys a representation of the situations in areas that also used slaves, for example, other agricultural estates not dealing with sugar cane. By 1750, British and French plantations produced most of the worlds sugar and its byproducts, molasses and rum. It is privileged to host senior United Nations officials as well as distinguished contributors from outside the United Nations system whose views are not necessarily those of the United Nations. The plantation owner distributed to his slaves North American corn, salted herrings and beef, while horse beans and biscuit bread were sent from England on occasion. They had their own gardens in which they grew yams, maize and other food, and were allowed to keep chickens to provide eggs for their children. 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. While the historic pictures provide us with some useful information, theytell us little of the people who inhabited the houses, the furniture and fittings in the interior, and the materials from which they were built. Institutional racism continues to be a critical force explaining the persistence of white economic dominance. These nobles in turn distributed parts of their estate called semarias to their followers on the condition that the land was cleared and used to grow first wheat and then, from the 1440s, sugar cane, a portion of the crop being given back to the overlord. The plantation system was first developed by the Portuguese on their Atlantic island colonies and then transferred to Brazil, beginning with Pernambuco and So Vicente in the 1530s. Six million out of them worked in sugarcane plantations. The Caribbean plantation economy became so lucrative that it turned piracy into an unprofitable and hazardous enterprise. . In this way, black enslavement became the primary institution for social and economic governance in the hemisphere. During the 18th century Cuba depended increasingly on the sugarcane crop and on the expansive, slave-based plantations that produced it. Disease and death were common outcomes in this human tragedy. By the mid-16th century, African slavery predominated on the sugar plantations of Brazil, although the enslavement of the indigenous people continued well into the 17th century. The practice was abolished in most places during the 19th century. World History Encyclopedia, 06 Jul 2021. William McMahons map drawn in 1828 records shows the landscape of plantation estates shortly before emancipation, after nearly three centuries of development. The estate map of Clarkes estate in Nevis, dated early 19th century, shows a slave village on a strip of land between a road on one side and a steep ravine on the other. They were usually close enough to the main house and plantation works that they could be seen from the house. When the Haitian Revolution occurred around 1800, it affected 43 per cent of Europe's entire sugar supply. William Penn (1644-1718), founder of Pennsylvania, he owned many slaves. Please note that some of these recommendations are listed under our old name, Ancient History Encyclopedia. slave frontiers. 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. Slaves lived in simple mud huts or wooden shacks with little more than matting for beds and only rudimentary furniture. Fields had to be cleared and burned with the remaining ash then used as a fertilizer. It is also true that, just as with farming today, most of the profits in the sugar industry went to the shippers and merchants, not the producers. The enslaved were then sold in the southern USA, the Caribbean Islands and South America, where they were used to work the plantations. The Caribbean is well positioned to discharge this diplomatic obligation to the world in the aftermath of its own tortured history and long journey towards justice. Some owners permitted marriages between slaves - formal or informal - while others actively separated couples. Furnishings within were always sparse and crude, most occupants sleeping in hammocks, or on the earth floor.. Slaves were thereafter supervised by paid labour, usually armed with whips. It was not uncommon to give new arrivals a whipping just to show them, if they had not already realised, that their owners had no more sympathy for their situation than the cattle they owned. Revolts on slave ships cascaded into rebellions on plantations and in towns. It was the basis of wealth creation in both production and commerce. At nine or ten feet high, they towered above the workers, who used sharp, double-edged knives to cut the stalks. As they are virtually invisible on the landscape today, village locations are particularly liable to destruction or development, unlike the more substantial stone constructed houses of the European plantation owners. The location of the provision grounds at the Jessups estate, one of the Nevis plantations studied by the St Kitts-Nevis Digital Archaeology Initiative, is shown on a 1755 plan of the plantation. When republishing on the web a hyperlink back to the original content source URL must be included. Thank you! Proceeds are donated to charity. Raising sugar cane could be a very profitable business, but producing refined sugar was a highly labour-intensive process. 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.