The British West Indies and Slavery

The British West Indies and the institution of slavery are inseparable. The plantation economy of the British Caribbean depended on the forced labour of millions of Africans transported across the Atlantic, and the brutality of the slave system shaped every aspect of Caribbean society. The abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and of slavery itself in 1834 was a major pivotal moment in the history of the empire and the moral history of the modern world. The legacy of slavery continues to influence the modern Caribbean, and the institution remains central to any understanding of the British Empire in the West Indies.

The Sugar Economy and the Demand for Labour

The development of large-scale sugar plantations in the British Caribbean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries created a vast demand for labour. The indigenous Carib population, which had been largely destroyed by disease, displacement, and violence, was unable to meet this demand. The English turned to the transatlantic slave trade to supply the labour for the plantations, and the Royal African Company, the South Sea Company, and various private operators organised the trade. The trade was carried on by ships operating out of British ports, particularly Bristol, Liverpool, and London, and it supplied enslaved Africans to the plantations of the Caribbean, the American South, and Brazil.

The sugar plantations of the British Caribbean were the most consequential destination, and they depended on a continuous supply of enslaved Africans. The standard scholarly estimate, in the work of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, is that British ships transported about 3.4 million Africans to the Americas between 1640 and 1807, of whom perhaps 2.7 million survived the Middle Passage. The mortality on the plantations was, in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, severe enough that the slave population could not reproduce itself; the trade was, in that sense, a system of permanent replenishment rather than a one-off transfer.

The Slave Trade

The British slave trade was carried on by ships operating out of British ports, particularly Bristol, Liverpool, and London. The trade was organised by merchant companies, including the Royal African Company, the South Sea Company, and various private operators, and it supplied enslaved Africans to the plantations of the Caribbean, the American South, and Brazil. By the late eighteenth century, Liverpool had become the largest slave-trading port in Europe, and British ships were responsible for transporting perhaps 3.5 million Africans to the Americas over the course of the trade. The triangular trade, which linked Britain, West Africa, and the Caribbean, was the commercial system of which the slave trade was a part, and the trade was central to the development of several British ports and to the industrialisation of the British economy.

Life and Labour on the Plantations

The conditions of plantation slavery were brutal. Slaves worked from before dawn to after dusk, in tropical heat, with inadequate food, clothing, and shelter. The disciplinary regime of the plantation included physical punishment, branding, and the threat of being sold to another plantation. Slave codes, which were introduced in all the British Caribbean colonies, restricted the movements of slaves, prohibited the assembly of large groups, and made it illegal to teach slaves to read or write. The slave codes of the British Caribbean, including the Jamaica Slave Code of 1696, the Barbados Slave Code of 1661, and the Leeward Islands Slave Code of 1706, were among the most restrictive in the Americas. The slave culture in the British Caribbean, which blended African and European elements, was the most distinctive social feature of the plantation economy.

The planter Thomas Thistlewood, whose diary was preserved at the family estate in Jamaica and published in 1999, left an unvarnished record of the daily life of a Caribbean slave owner. The diary describes floggings, the killing of runaways, and the sexual exploitation of enslaved women in unsentimental prose; the question of whether the British were kinder slave masters than the Spanish or the French — a question often asked in the older literature — gets the answer the diary most clearly offers: in the main, no.

Slave Resistance

The slave system produced a series of slave revolts and resistance movements. The most famous of these were the Jamaican Maroon Wars, in which escaped slaves established autonomous communities in the interior of Jamaica and fought a series of wars against the British colonial government. The First Maroon War of 1655–1740 ended with a treaty that recognised the autonomy of the Leeward Maroons, and the Second Maroon War of 1795–1796 ended with the deportation of the Windward Maroons to Nova Scotia and later to Sierra Leone.

Tacky’s War of 1760, an important slave revolt in Jamaica, was another major example of slave resistance, and the 1816 Barbados slave revolt led by Bussa was another important case. The resistance of the enslaved was a constant feature of the plantation economy. As the historian Hilary Beckles has shown in Caribbean Slavery (2013), the resistance of the enslaved was not a marginal fact about the system; it was central to it. The 1816 Barbados revolt, in which perhaps 400 enslaved people were killed, was the largest slave revolt in the history of the Anglophone Caribbean.

The Abolition Movement

The campaign for the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery itself was one of the defining moral movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The abolition movement was led by a network of Quakers, evangelicals, and political reformers, including William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, Olaudah Equiano, and many others.

The movement produced the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, which prohibited the British slave trade, and the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act, which abolished slavery throughout the British Empire. The compensation payments made to the slave owners, which totalled £20 million, were one of the largest financial transactions of the nineteenth century, and the loan that financed the compensation was only fully repaid in 2015. Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789) — the autobiography of an enslaved African who bought his own freedom and made his way to London — is, as the historian Vincent Carretta has shown, the founding text of the Black Atlantic literary tradition.

The Aftermath of Abolition

The abolition of slavery in 1834 had complex effects on the British West Indies. The plantation economy went into decline, unable to compete with sugar beet production in Europe and unable to maintain the same level of productivity with free labour. The transition to free labour was accompanied by a wave of indentured labour migration from India, China, and the Pacific islands, which transformed the demographic composition of the Caribbean. The apprenticeship system, which was supposed to last for several years, was ended in 1838 in the face of widespread criticism. The decline of the sugar economy was a long-running process, and the post-emancipation Caribbean faced major economic and social challenges that shaped its modern history.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of slavery in the British West Indies was, for a long time, dominated by the economic histories of the West Indian sugar economy — Lowell Ragatz’s The Fall of the Planter Class in the British Caribbean, 1763–1833 (1928) and the Cambridge history of the British West Indies produced by Eric Williams and C. V. Woodward. The post-independence revisionist literature of the last forty years, led by the work of CLR James, Eric Williams (in his classic Capitalism and Slavery, 1944), and more recently Hilary Beckles, Verene Shepherd, and the contributors to the Oxford History of the British Empire, has produced a more politically engaged picture, in which slavery is read as the foundation of British industrial capitalism. The current debate, exemplified in the writing of the British historians of slavery — Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital (2006) — is over the relationship between abolition and the British state, and over the degree to which the abolition movement was, in its time, a genuinely international campaign.

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