The refined sugar then had to be dried thoroughly if it was to be as white and pure as the top merchants demanded. 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. World History Encyclopedia. The plantation relied on an imported enslaved workforce, rather than family labour, and became an agricultural factory concentrating on one profitable crop for sale. 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. 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. And in every sugar parish, black people outnumbered whites. TRANS-ATLANTIC SLAVE VOYAGES. There were the challenges of growing any kind of crops in tropical climates in the pre-modern era: soil exhaustion, storm damage, and losses to pests - insects that bored into the roots of sugarcane plants were particularly bothersome. 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. 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. The major exception to the rule was North America, where slaves began to procreate in significant numbers in the mid-18th . 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. Plantation life and labor were difficult and . So, between 1748 and 1788 over 1,200 ships brought over 335,000 enslaved Africans to Jamaica, Britain's largest sugar-producing colony. 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 Black Lives Matter Movement is therefore equally rooted in Caribbean political culture, which served to nurture the indigenous United States upsurge. Their houses were little different from those of the white servants at the time. Find out more about our work towards the Sustainable Development Goals. 22 May 2015. By the census of 1678 the Black population had risen to 3849 against a white population of 3521. ", 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. Alan H. Adamson, Sugar Without Slaves: The Political Economy of British Guiana, 1838-1904 (New Haven, 1972), 119-21 . View images from this item (3) William Clark was a 19th century British artist who was invited to Antigua by some of its planters. Douglas V. Armstrong is an anthropologist from New York whose studies on plantation slavery have been focused on the Caribbean. Raising sugar cane could be a very profitable business, but producing refined sugar was a highly labour-intensive process. By the mid-16th century, Brazil had become the worlds largest producer of sugar. The juice from the crushed cane was then boiled in huge vats or cauldrons. 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. Before the slave trade ended, the Caribbean had taken approximately 47 percent of the 10 million African slaves brought to the Americas. Most Caribbean islands were covered with sugar cane fields and mills for refining the crop. 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. Cane plantations soon spread throughout the Caribbean and South America and made immense profits for planters and merchants. On the St Kitts plantations, the slave villages were usually located downwind of the main house from the prevailing north-easterly wind. The villages were located carefully with respect to the plantation works and main house. In Charlestown today there is a place now known as the Slave Market. Pulses have a broad genetic diversity, from which the necessary traits for adapting to future climate scenarios can be obtained through the development of climate-resilient cultivars. 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 . 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. In part the Act was a response to the increasingly powerful arguments of abolitionists. Provision grounds were areas of land often of poor quality, mountainous or stony, and often at some distance from the villages which plantation owners set aside for the enslaved Africans to grow their own food, such as sweet potatoes, yams and plantains. In this way, black enslavement became the primary institution for social and economic governance in the hemisphere. TheUN Chronicleis not an official record. A hat hangs on the wall, a group of large pots stands on a shelf and there is a small bed in the corner. Nearly 350,000 Africans were transported to the Leeward Islands by 1810,but many died on the voyage through disease or ill treatment; some were driven by despair to commit suicide by jumping into the sea. 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. Capitalism and black slavery were intertwined. Whatever the crop, labouring life was dictated by the cycles of the agricultural year. Fifty years ago, in 1972, George Beckford, an Economics Professor at the University of the West Indies, published a seminal monograph entitled Persistent Poverty, in which he explained the impoverishment of the black majority in the Caribbean in terms of the institutional mechanism of the colonial economy and society. It was the worst form of sugar blight, capable of ruining a crop within a matter of days. 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. Enslaved Africans were brought to the Caribbean as an abundant and cheap source of labour for sugar plantations. In this way, black enslavement became the primary institution for social and economic governance in the hemisphere. The main source of labor, until the abolition of chattel slavery, was enslaved Africans. The cane leftovers from the whole process were usually given to feed pigs on the plantation. The many legacies of over 300 years of slavery weighing on popular culture and consciousness persist as ferociously debilitating factors. The plantation relied almost solely on an imported enslaved workforce, and became an agricultural factory concentrating on one profitable crop for sale. In the inventory of property lost in the French raid on St Kitts in February 1706 they were generally valued at as little as 2 each. The Amelioration Act of 1798 improved conditions for slaves, forcing plantation owners to provide clothes, food, medical treatment and basic education, as well as prohibiting severe and cruel punishment. According to slave records, over 11 million African slaves were captured and enslaved from Africa before 1800. Sugar and the people who reaped its profits, like many industries before and since, caused massive disruption and destruction, changing forever both the people and places where plantations were established, managed, and all too often abandoned. On the Caribbean island of Barbados, in 1643, there were 18,600 white farmers, their families and servants. Carts had to be loaded and oxen tended to take the cane to the processing plant. 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. 2. The production of sugar required - and killed - hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans. The rate of increase in the occurrence of type 2 diabetes and hypertension within the adult population, mostly people of African descent, was galloping. 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. He also planted coconut and breadfruit trees for his enslaved labourers (Pares 1950, 127). Contemporary pictures of slave villages drawn by visitors or residents in the Caribbean show that slave houses often consisted of small rectangular huts. New Orleans became the Walmart of people-selling. In the mid-18th century Reverend William Smith described a similar scene when characterising the location of the slave villages on Nevis; They live in Huts, on the Western Side of our Dwelling-Houses, so that every Plantation resembles a small Town. Focuses on sugar production in the Caribbean, the destruction of indigenous people, and the suffering of the Africans who grew the crop. This illustration shows the layout of a sugar plantation. The first village for newly free labourers, Challengers on St Kitts, was set up in 1840 when a customs officer John Challenger sold or rented small lots out of a tract of land to newly free labourers. 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. In the American South, only one . Sugar production was important on a number of Caribbean islands in the late 1600s. London: Heinemann, 1967. There were 6,400 African . On Portuguese plantations, perhaps one in three slaves were. Copyright 2023 United Nations in the Caribbean, Caption: The "Ark of Return", the permanent memorial to honour the victims of slavery and the transatlantic slave trade, located at the Visitors' Plaza of United Nations Headquarters in New York. They are close to the animal enclosures, so the labourers could keep watch over the livestock, and set below the plantation house which stands on a small hill. A roof of plantain-leaves with a few rough boards, nailed to the coarse pillars which support it, form the whole building.. Sugar production in the United States Virgin Islands was an important part of the economy of the United States Virgin Islands for over two hundred years. Offers a . Raymond's book, which is an essential source for any study of . 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. By the early seventeenth century, some 170,000 Africans had been imported to Brazil and Brazilian sugar now dominated the European market. Raising sugar cane could be a very profitable business, but producing refined sugar was a highly labour-intensive process. 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. It is for this and related reasons that the Caribbean has emerged as an epicenter of the global reparatory justice movement. Current forms of slavery and extreme social oppression are now identified more clearly and treated with similar public and policy opposition as traditional forms. His paintings mainly depict the British fort on Brimstone Hill, but also show groups of slave houses. The enslaved were then sold in the southern USA, the Caribbean Islands and South America, where they were used to work the plantations. Those plantation owners who could not afford their own mill plant used those of the larger concerns and paid a percentage of the resulting crop for the privilege. Enslaved domestic workers or craftsmen had larger houses, with boarded floors, and; a few have even good beds, linen sheets, and musquito nets, and display a shelf or two of plates and dishes of Queens or Staffordshire ware.. Richard Pennant, 1st Baron Penrhyn (1737-1808), owned six sugar plantations in Jamaica and was an outspoken anti-abolitionist. World History Encyclopedia. Often parents were separated from children, and husbands from wives. 23 March 2015. The World History Encyclopedia logo is a registered trademark. This allowed the owner or manager to keep an eye on his enslaved workforce, while also reinforcing the inferior social status of the enslaved. and more. Sugar of lesser quality with a brownish colour tended to be consumed locally or was only used to make preserves and crystallised fruit. 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. Proceedings of the Fifth . Images of Caribbean Slavery (Coconut Beach, Florida: Caribbean Studies Press, 2016). 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. Disease and death were common outcomes in this human tragedy. Brewminate uses Infolinks and is an Amazon Associate with links to items available there. Washington, D.C. Email powered by MailChimp (Privacy Policy & Terms of Use), African American History Curatorial Collective, The Wreck and Rescue of an Immigrant Ship, Disaster! As these new plantation zones had lower costs and the ability to increase the scale of production, they provided opportunities for British capital. At the same time, local populations had to be wary of regular slave-hunting expeditions in such places as Brazil before the practice was prohibited. Science, technology and innovation are critical to responding to this pressing need. 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. Sugar and strife. We would much rather spend this money on producing more free history content for the world. This industry and the slave trade made British ports and merchants involved very wealthy. Sugar from Madeira was exported to Portugal, to merchants in Flanders, to Italy, England, France, Greece, and even Constantinople. The first type consists of accounts from travel writers or former residents of the West Indies from the 17th and 18th centuries who describe slave houses that they saw in the Caribbean; the second are contemporary illustrations of slave housing. 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. The Caribbean is home to the Haitian Revolution, which produced the worlds first black freedom state and the subsequent proliferation of constitutional democracies. 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. 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. Yet in 1788 a Jamaican census recorded that only 226,432 enslaved men, women and children were alive on the island. 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). Then there were the indigenous people who might have been subdued by initial military campaigns but, nevertheless, remained in many places a significant threat to European settlements. The Atlantic economy, in every aspect, was effectively sustained by African enslavement. Let's Take Action Towards the Sustainable Development Goals. Wars with other Europeans were another threat as the Spanish, Dutch, British, French, and others jostled for control of the New World colonies and to expand their trade interests in the Old one. In Barbados for example, the houses on some plantations were upgraded to wooden cabins covered with shingles (thin wooden tiles) and placed in a common yard to encourage family relations to develop. Slaves lived in simple mud huts or wooden shacks with little more than matting for beds and only rudimentary furniture. Bibliography 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 village contains eighteen small huts, each with the door in the narrow end, set at roughly equal distances, some with ridged garden plots beside them. The Caribbean is home to some of the most economically and socially exploited people of modernity. Plantations were farms growing only crops that Europe wanted: tobacco, sugar, cotton. Up to two-thirds of these slaves were bound for sugar cane plantations in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Brazil to produce "White Gold." Over the course of the 380 years of the Atlantic slave trade, millions of Africans were enslaved to satisfy the world's sweet tooth. However, as this village may have been associated with the garrison of the fort it may not have been typicalof villages at sugar plantations. C. The Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Dutch also participated in the transatlantic slave trade. However, possible platforms where houses may have stood have been observed at Ottleys and the Hermitage within the areas shown on the McMahon map as slave villages in 1828. Retrieved from https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1795/life-on-a-colonial-sugar-plantation/. If they survived the horrific conditions of transportation, slaves could expect a hard life indeed working on plantations in the . The spread of sugar 'plantations' in the Caribbean created a great need for workers. This structural transformation of the world market was the condition for the development of the sugar plantation and slave labor in Cuba during the first half of the nineteenth century. However, plantation life was terrible. 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 . 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%. 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. Sugar processing on the English colony of Antigua, drawing by William Clark, 1823, courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. It is labelled as the Negro Ground attached to Jessups plantation, high up the mountain. 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. New slaves were constantly brought in . By the late 18th century, some plantation owners laid out slave villages in neat orderly rows, as we can see from estate maps and contemporary views. In the 17th and 18th centuries slaves were moved from Africa to the West Indies to work on sugar plantations. Part of the National Museums Liverpool group. By the middle of the 18th century the slave plantation system was fully implemented in the Caribbean sugar colonies. 121-158; ibid., Vernacular Houses and Domestic Material Culture on Barbados Sugar Plantations, 1650-1838, Jl of Caribbean History 43 (2009): 1-36. When republishing on the web a hyperlink back to the original content source URL must be included. Yellow fever Many plantation owners preferred to import new slaves rather than providing the means and conditions for the survival of their existing slaves. I have known some of them to be fond of eating grasshoppers, or locusts; others will wrap up cane rats, in bonano [banana] leaves, and roast them in wood embers. Slave labour has a connetion to sugar production. In Jamaica too some planters improved slave housing at this time, reorganising the villages into regularly planned layouts, and building stone or shingled houses for their workforce. Placing them in these locations ensured that they did not take up valuable cane-growing land. (61), Colonial Sugar Cane ManufacturingUnknown Artist (Public Domain). The work in the fields was gruelling, with long hours spent in the hot sun, supervised by overseers who were quick to use the whip. Examining the archaeology of slavery in the Caribbean sugar plantations. Approximately 12.5 million Africans were forcibly brought to work on various plantations throughout the . 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. 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. The Caribbean Sugar mill with vertical rollers, French West Indies, 1665. Over one million Indian indentured workers went to sugar plantations from 1835 to 1917, 450,000 to Mauritius, 150, 000 to East Africa and Natal, and 450,000 to South America and the Caribbean. World History Publishing is a non-profit company registered in the United Kingdom. The team, Jon Brett and Rob Philpott, with colleagues Lorraine Darton and Eleanor Leech, surveyed a number of sugar plantations in the parishes of St Mary Cayon and Christ Church Nichola Town. By 1750, British and French plantations produced most of the worlds sugar and its byproducts, molasses and rum. In William Smiths day, the market in Charlestown was held from sunrise to 9am on Sunday mornings where the Negroes bring Fowls, Indian Corn, Yams, Garden-stuff of all sorts, etc. 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 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. The main source of labor until the abolition of slavery was African slaves. The Atlantic economy, in every aspect, was effectively sustained by African enslavement. . 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. The plan of the 18th century slave village at Jessups is a good example of this kind of layout. On Portuguese plantations, perhaps one in three slaves were women, but the Dutch and English plantation owners preferred a male-only workforce when possible. We do not know whether this was the place where enslaved Africans were sold on arriving in Nevis or whether it is where slaves used to sell their produce on Sundays. Enslaved Africans used some of this free time to cultivate garden plots close to their houses, as well as in nearby provision grounds. The lack of nutrition, hard working conditions, and regular beatings and whippings meant that the life expectancy of slaves was very low, and the annual mortality rate on plantations was at least 5%. Mark is a full-time author, researcher, historian, and editor. The Caribbean was at the core of the crime against humanity induced by the transatlantic slave trade and slavery. In the St Kitts plantations, the slave villages were usually located downwind of the main house from the prevailing north-easterly wind. The company was unsuccessful, selling fewer slaves in 21 years than the British . The legislators proceeded to define Africans as non-humana form of property to be owned by purchasers and their heirs forever. Prints depicting enslaved people producing sugar in Antigua, 1823. As the sugar industry grew, the amount of laborers that once was a working population had tremendously diminished. With most of the workforce consisting of unpaid labour, sugar plantations made fortunes for those owners who could operate on a large enough scale, but it was not an easy life for smaller plantation owners in territories rife with tropical diseases, indigenous populations keen to regain their territories, and the vagaries of pre-modern agriculture. Therefore documents provide our two main sources of information on slave houses. 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. A series of watercolour paintings by Lieutenant Lees, dated to the 1780s are one exception. Furnishings within were always sparse and crude, most occupants sleeping in hammocks, or on the earth floor.. The great increase in the Black population was feared by the white plantation owners and as a result treatment often became harsher as they felt a growing need to control a larger but discontented and potentially rebellious workforce. The plantation owners provided their enslaved Africans with weekly rations of salt herrings or mackerel, sweet potatoes, and maize, and sometimes salted West Indian turtle. Running a website with millions of readers every month is expensive. Itscampaign for reparations for the crimes of slavery and colonialismhas served as a template for the Global South in seeking a level playing field for development within the international economic order. Brazil was by far the largest importer of slaves in the Americas throughout the 17th century. In 1650 an African slave could be bought for as little as 7 although the price rose so that by 1690 a slave cost 17-22, and a century later between 40 and 50. 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. There were many instances of slave uprisings resulting in the deaths of the plantation owner, their family, and slaves who had remained loyal to their owner. Institutional racism continues to be a critical force explaining the persistence of white economic dominance.