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. 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. A law was passed in Nevis in 1682 to force plantation owners to provide land for food crops to prevent starving slaves from stealing food. The plantation relied almost solely on an imported enslaved workforce, and became an agricultural factory concentrating on one profitable crop for sale. Prints depicting enslaved people producing sugar in Antigua, 1823. 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. Black slavery was a modern form of racial plunder, and the obvious consequences of this economic extraction are seen in structural underdevelopment. Cite This Work Focuses on sugar production in the Caribbean, the destruction of indigenous people, and the suffering of the Africans who grew the crop. Enter your email address to receive notifications of new posts by email. World History Encyclopedia is a non-profit organization. In the second half of the century the trade averaged twenty thousand slaves, and . Slaves lived in simple mud huts or wooden shacks with little more than matting for beds and only rudimentary furniture. 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. Life on a Colonial Sugar Plantation. 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. By the early 18th century when sugar production was fully established nearly 80% of the population was Black. 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. Cane plantations soon spread throughout the Caribbean and South America and made immense profits for planters and merchants. The many legacies of over 300 years of slavery weighing on popular culture and consciousness persist as ferociously debilitating factors. ST GEORGE'S, Grenada, CMC - Surviving relatives of a family in the United Kingdom who in the 18th and 19th centuries jointly owned approximately 1,200 slaves on six plantations in Grenada on Monday apologised for the actions of their forefathers. It is labelled as the Negro Ground attached to Jessups plantation, high up the mountain. For this reason, European colonial settlers in Africa and the Americas used slaves on their plantations, almost all of whom came from Africa. A hat hangs on the wall, a group of large pots stands on a shelf and there is a small bed in the corner. Written by a noted nutritionist later in his career. Most plantation slaves were shipped from Africa, in the case of those destined for Portuguese colonies, to a holding depot like the Cape Verde Islands. A In 1777 as many as 400 slaves died from starvation or diseases caused by malnutrition on St Kitts and on Nevis. On Portuguese plantations, perhaps one in three slaves were. The houses measured 15 to 20 feet long and had two rooms. This portal is managed by the United Nations Information Centre for the Caribbean Area. Let's Take Action Towards the Sustainable Development Goals. 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. 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. 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. The sugar cane industry was a labour-intensive one, both in terms of skilled and unskilled work. The main source of labor, until the abolition of chattel slavery, was enslaved Africans. William Penn (1644-1718), founder of Pennsylvania, he owned many slaves. 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 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. After emancipation, many newly freed labourers moved away from the plantations, emigrating or setting up new homes as squatters on abandoned estate land. 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. Capitalism and black slavery were intertwined. Brewminate uses Infolinks and is an Amazon Associate with links to items available there. Submitted by Mark Cartwright, published on 06 July 2021. Plantations, Sugar Cane and Slavery on JSTOR are two . 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. Special interests include art, architecture, and discovering the ideas that all civilizations share. 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. Slave labour has a connetion to sugar production. 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. He holds an MA in Political Philosophy and is the WHE Publishing Director. On the Caribbean island of Barbados, in 1643, there were 18,600 white farmers, their families and servants. After being established in the Caribbean islands, the plantation system spread during the 16th, . The Caribbean Sugar mill with vertical rollers, French West Indies, 1665. 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. All of the above tasks could be done by unskilled labour and were done mostly by slaves and a minority of paid labourers. Slave villages represent an important but little-known part of the Caribbean landscape. In the year 1706 there was a severe drought which caused most food crops to fail. It is frequently observed that 60 per cent of the black population in the region over the age of 60 years is afflicted with type 2 diabetes and hypertension. The legislators proceeded to define Africans as non-humana form of property to be owned by purchasers and their heirs forever. The main reason for importing enslaved Africans was economic. World History Encyclopedia, 06 Jul 2021. Sugar processing on the English colony of Antigua, drawing by William Clark, 1823, courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. When slavery was abolished across the British empire in 1833, the family received 4,293 12s 6d, a very large sum in 1836, in compensation for freeing 189 enslaved people. From African Atlantic islands, sugar plantations quickly spread to tropical Caribbean islands with European expansion into the New World. 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. 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.. 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. These lessons also eased traders consciences that they were somehow benefitting the slaves and giving them the opportunity of what they considered eternal salvation. The Caribbean is home to the Haitian Revolution, which produced the worlds first black freedom state and the subsequent proliferation of constitutional democracies. [Harper's New Monthly Magazine (Jan. 1853), vol. The plan of the 18th century slave village at Jessups is a good example of this kind of layout. No slave houses survive in St Kitts and Nevis, and very few in the Americas as a whole. The black blast. Another description of houses paints a similar picture; the architecture is so rudimentary as it is simple. Sugar of lesser quality with a brownish colour tended to be consumed locally or was only used to make preserves and crystallised fruit. 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. Cane plantations soon spread throughout the Caribbean and South America and made immense profits for planters and merchants. Running a website with millions of readers every month is expensive. The houses have hipped roofs, thickly thatched with cane trash. Some 12 to 20 million Africans were enslaved in the western hemisphere after an Atlantic voyage of 6 to 10 weeks. They were usually close enough to the main house and plantation works that they could be seen from the house. 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. Raising sugar cane could be a very profitable business, but producing refined sugar was a highly labour-intensive process. "Life on a Colonial Sugar Plantation." The Legacy of Slavery in the Caribbean and the Journey Towards Justice, Welcome to the portal to United Nations country team websites in the Caribbean. The Black Lives Matter Movement is therefore equally rooted in Caribbean political culture, which served to nurture the indigenous United States upsurge. It is frequently observed that 60 per cent of the black population in the region over the age of 60 years is afflicted with type 2 diabetes and hypertension. Please note that content linked from this page may have different licensing terms. Michael Tadman, 'The demographic costs of sugar: debates on slave societies and natural increase in the Americas', American Historical Review, 105.5 (2000); B.W. 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. When the Haitian Revolution occurred around 1800, it affected 43 per cent of Europe's entire sugar supply. So, between 1748 and 1788 over 1,200 ships brought over 335,000 enslaved Africans to Jamaica, Britain's largest sugar-producing colony. New Orleans became the Walmart of people-selling. 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 scourge of racism based on white supremacy, for example, remains virulent in the region. Richard Pennant, 1st Baron Penrhyn (1737-1808), owned six sugar plantations in Jamaica and was an outspoken anti-abolitionist. Some owners permitted marriages between slaves - formal or informal - while others actively separated couples. The relevance of Beckfords thesis remains striking today, and conversations about the legitimacy of democracy still reverberate around his research. In this way, black enslavement became the primary institution for social and economic governance in the hemisphere. Presenting evidence of past wrongs now facilitates the call for a new global order that includes fairness in access and equality in participation. World History Foundation is a non-profit organization registered in Canada. Slaves on sugar plantations in the Caribbean had a hard time of it, since growing and processing sugarcane was backbreaking work that killed many. The copyright holder has published this content under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. Slave houses in Nevis were described as composed of posts in the ground, thatched around the sides and upon the roof, with boarded partitions. Please support World History Encyclopedia. Part of a feature about the archaeology of slavery on St Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean, from the International Slavery Museum's website. Most Caribbean islands were covered with sugar cane fields and mills for refining the crop. Enslaved Africans were brought to the Caribbean as an abundant and cheap source of labour for sugar plantations. 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. One painting illustrates a slave village near the foot of Brimstone Hill. Alan H. Adamson, Sugar Without Slaves: The Political Economy of British Guiana, 1838-1904 (New Haven, 1972), 119-21 . Presenting evidence of past wrongs now facilitates the call for a new global order that includes fairness in access and equality in participation. During the 18th century Cuba depended increasingly on the sugarcane crop and on the expansive, slave-based plantations that produced it. When Brazilian sugar production was at its peak from 1600 to 1625, 150,000 African slaves were brought across the Atlantic. 121-158; ibid., Vernacular Houses and Domestic Material Culture on Barbados Sugar Plantations, 1650-1838, Jl of Caribbean History 43 (2009): 1-36. This illustration shows the layout of a sugar plantation. Food crops had to be grown to feed the paid labour, technicians, and the owners family. Slaves could be acquired locally but in places like Portuguese Brazil, enslaving the Amerindians was prohibited from 1570. 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. There were 6,400 African . 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. 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. Six million out of them worked in sugarcane plantations. 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. World History Encyclopedia. . Bibliography 2 (2000): 213-236. Sugar and Slavery. To save transportation costs, plantations were located as near as possible to a port or major water route. We found no architectural trace however of the houses at any of the slave villages. In Charlestown today there is a place now known as the Slave Market. 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. As cane was planted each month in one part of a plantation, the harvesting was an ongoing process for much of the year, with the more intense periods requiring slaves to work night and day. Disease and death were common outcomes in this human tragedy. 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. In most societies, slavery investors emerged as the political and economic elite. Slave houses in Barbados have been described as; consisting most frequently of wattle or stick huts, which were roofed with palm thatch. From the 17th century onwards, it became customary for plantation owners to give enslaved Africans Sundays off, even though many were not Christian. 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. Enslaved Africans used some of this free time to cultivate garden plots close to their houses, as well as in nearby provision grounds. 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.