Part of the National Museums Liverpool group. and more. When republishing on the web a hyperlink back to the original content source URL must be included. His Ten Views, published in 1823, portrays the key steps in the growing, harvesting and processing of sugarcane. 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. In the hot Caribbean climate, it took about a year for sugar canes to ripen. 04 Mar 2023. Before the arrival and devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Caribbean region was buckling under the strain of proliferating, chronic non-communicable diseases. Fifty years ago, in 1972, George Beckford, an Economics Professor at the University of the West Indies, published a seminal monograph entitledPersistent 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. Jamaica and Barbados, the two historic giants of plantation sugar production and slavery, now struggle to avoid amputations that are often necessitated by medical complications resulting from the uncontrolled management of these diseases. However, plantation life was terrible. Some 5 million enslaved Africans were taken to the Caribbean, almost half of whom were brought to the British Caribbean (2.3 million). Disease and death were common outcomes in this human tragedy. The Portuguese Crown parcelled out land or captaincies (donatarias) to noble settlers, much like they did in the feudal system of Europe. Popular and grass-roots activism have created a legacy of opposition to racism and ethnic dominance. This book covers the changing preference of growing sugar rather than tobacco which had been the leading crop in the trans-Atlantic colonies. 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. By the middle of the 18th century the slave plantation system was fully implemented in the Caribbean sugar colonies. This portal is managed by the United Nations Information Centre for the Caribbean Area. ", 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. 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 . 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. Science, technology and innovation are critical to responding to this pressing need. License. In most societies, slavery investors emerged as the political and economic elite. Focuses on sugar production in the Caribbean, the destruction of indigenous people, and the suffering of the Africans who grew the crop. They were little more than huts, with a single storey and thatched with cane trash. Before the arrival and devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Caribbean region was buckling under the strain of proliferating, chronic non-communicable diseases. The Drax family also owned a plantation in Jamaica, which they sold in the 19th century. The black blast. 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. Capitalism and black slavery were intertwined. The system was then applied on an even larger scale to the new colony of Portuguese Brazil from the 1530s. The idea was first tested following the Portuguese colonization of Madeira in 1420. The slaves working the sugar plantation were caught in an unceasing rhythm of arduous labor . Bibliography Historic illustrations of plantations in the Caribbean occasionally show slave villages as part of a wider landscape setting, though they are often romanticised views, rather than realistic depictions. At the time there were some people that argued that the free labor system was more Learn about employment opportunities across the UN in the Caribbean. The houses measured 15 to 20 feet long and had two rooms. In the second half of the century the trade averaged twenty thousand slaves, and . Barbados, nearing a half million slaves to work the cane fields in the heyday of Caribbean sugar exportation, used 90 percent of its arable land to grow sugar cane. 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. Making Sugar LoavesThe British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA). Slaves could be acquired locally but in places like Portuguese Brazil, enslaving the Amerindians was prohibited from 1570. The enslaved population soared, quadrupling over a 20-year period to 125,000 souls in the mid-19th century. A water mill was in lower right with a cane field in the center. plantation life with slavery included was a mainstay since the start of the United States, up until the Civil War. 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. Boyd was the son of a wealthy London slave trader, Edward Boyd, whose business shipped several thousand enslaved people to sugar plantations in the Caribbean and fought against the abolition of . Proceedings of the Fifth . Plantation life and labor were difficult and . John Pinney (1740-1818) who owned the plantation of Mountravers on Nevis gives two reasons for this layout. Web. 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. For this reason, European colonial settlers in Africa and the Americas used slaves on their plantations, almost all of whom came from Africa. By the early 18th century enslaved Africans trading in their own produce dominated the market on Nevis. The Caribbean has the lowest youth enrolment in higher education in the hemisphere, an indication of the hostility to popular education under colonialism that is resilient in recent public policy. 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). It is labelled as the Negro Ground attached to Jessups plantation, high up the mountain. 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 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. Laura Trevelyan's aristocratic relatives had more than 1,000 slaves across six sugar plantations on the Caribbean island in the 19th century. Plantations, Sugar Cane and Slavery on JSTOR are two . 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 Contemporary illustrations show that slave villages were often wooded. 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. This necessity was sometimes a problem in tropical climates. 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. 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. Slave villages represent an important but little-known part of the Caribbean landscape. 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. The practice was abolished in most places during the 19th century. The legislators proceeded to define Africans as non-humana form of property to be owned by purchasers and their heirs forever. 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 St Kitts plantations, the slave villages were usually located downwind of the main house from the prevailing north-easterly wind. Placing them in these locations ensured that they did not take up valuable cane-growing land. In addition, it serves as a model for new forms of equity, including in climate and public health justice. Most Caribbean societies possess large or majority populations of African descendants. 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. London: Heinemann, 1967. Presenting evidence of past wrongs now facilitates the call for a new global order that includes fairness in access and equality in participation. In addition, it serves as a model for new forms of equity, including in climate and public health justice. 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. There was a complex division of labor needed to . 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. Alan H. Adamson, Sugar Without Slaves: The Political Economy of British Guiana, 1838-1904 (New Haven, 1972), 119-21 . Books With profits at only around 10-15% for sugar plantation owners, most, however, would have lived more modest lives and only the owners of very large or multiple estates lived a life of luxury. . Those engaged in the slave trade were primarily driven by the huge profits to be gained, both in the Caribbean and at home. During the 1800's, three out of every five Africans who came to the Caribbean were brought as slaves for sugar plantations. Often parents were separated from children, and husbands from wives. 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. Examining the archaeology of slavery in the Caribbean sugar plantations. 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. These plantations produced eighty to ninety percent of the . Another constant worry was unfamiliar tropical diseases which often proved fatal with the colonists, and particularly new arrivals. 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 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 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. African slaves became increasingly sought after to work in the unpleasant conditions of heat and humidity. The planters increasingly turned to buying enslaved men, women and children who were brought from Africa. While colonialism has been in retreat since the nationalist reforms of the mid-20th century, it persists as a political feature of the region.