Sugar Plantations in the Caribbean

The sugar plantation was the foundational institution of the British Caribbean. The 3,000-odd estates of Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, St Kitts, Nevis, Montserrat, the British Virgin Islands, Trinidad, Tobago, St Lucia, St Vincent, Grenada, Dominica, British Guiana, and British Honduras produced, in the 1770s and 1780s, perhaps 80,000 tons of sugar a year — the bulk of which was shipped to Britain. The wealth that these estates generated, and the enslaved labour on which that wealth depended, financed the British merchant class that in turn financed the Industrial Revolution. Eric Williams, in Capitalism and Slavery (1944), argued that the British industrial economy was built on the back of the Caribbean plantation. The argument has been the subject of a long and serious scholarly debate, and the debate is itself the most useful way of understanding the historical importance of the Caribbean sugar plantation.

As Orlando Patterson, in Slavery and Social Death (1982), has argued, the plantation was the most extreme form of unfreedom — a total institution in which the enslaved person was, in the eyes of the law, a piece of moveable property. As Robin Blackburn, in The Making of New World Slavery (1997), has shown, the British Caribbean sugar plantation was the model for the modern racialised labour regime that, in attenuated form, has survived into the twenty-first century.

The Plantation System

The British Caribbean sugar plantation was established in the seventeenth century on the basis of land appropriated from Indigenous Carib and Arawak peoples and labour imported from West Africa. The earliest substantial British settlements were in Barbados (1627), Nevis (1628), Antigua (1632), and Montserrat (1632). The 1655 English conquest of Jamaica, followed by the 1697 Treaty of Ryswick — which ceded the western third of Hispaniola to France and confirmed the British possession of Jamaica — gave the British the largest single island in the Caribbean and the foundation of a plantation economy that, at its late-eighteenth-century peak, employed perhaps 300,000 enslaved Africans.

The sugar plantation was a forced-labour camp with a particular economic logic. The capital cost of a typical Jamaican sugar estate in the 1770s was perhaps £10,000 to £15,000, of which perhaps half was the “value” of the enslaved labour force. The annual surplus produced by the enslaved — what we would now call the rate of exploitation — was, by the calculations of the economic historians Kenneth Pomeranz and Stanley Engerman, comparable to that of the most profitable investments in the British industrial economy. The argument is contested; the data are not. As Pomeranz argued in The Great Divergence (2000), the profitability of the plantation was the necessary condition for British industrial capital accumulation in the eighteenth century.

Slave Labour and the Sugar Plantation

The British Caribbean sugar plantation depended, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, on the labour of enslaved Africans, transported across the Atlantic in the British slave trade. The British slave trade, conducted principally by the Royal African Company and a substantial number of private British, Bristol, and Liverpool merchants, transported perhaps 3.4 million Africans to the Americas between 1660 and 1807. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, established at Emory University in 2008, has identified the names of more than 91,000 survivors of the British slave trade — a small but evocative fraction of the total. Hugh Thomas, in The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (1997), has described the trade as the largest forced migration in human history before the twentieth century.

The 1807 Slave Trade Act, which received the Royal Assent on 25 March 1807, prohibited the British slave trade throughout the British Empire from 1 May 1807. The 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act, which took effect on 1 August 1834, abolished slavery itself (see [/british-empire-economy/labor-and-slavery/abolition-slavery-act-1833/]). The 1833 Act provided for the payment of £20 million in compensation to slave-owners (see [/british-empire-economy/labor-and-slavery/compensation-payments-slave-owners/]) and for a system of “apprenticeship” that obliged the formerly enslaved to continue to work for their former masters for a period of years.

The Compensation Payments

The 1833 Act provided for £20 million in compensation payments to slave-owners, financed by a British government loan. The loan was, in 1835, converted into a long-term government debt, repayable from the British Treasury; the debt was, in 2015, finally paid off, with the Treasury writing the final cheque of £17.7 million to the successors of the original lenders. The total cost of the compensation scheme, including interest, has been estimated at more than £17 billion in present-day terms.

The most important recent scholarship on the compensation payments is the work of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London, established in 2013. The UCL Centre has published the Legacies of British Slavery database, which identifies some 46,000 slave-owners who received compensation under the 1833 Act. The database has been used by Catherine Hall, Nick Draper, and other historians to demonstrate how deeply implicated British mercantile, professional, and aristocratic families were in the slavery-compensation system. Catherine Hall’s Legacies of British Slavery (2014) and Nick Draper’s The Price of Emancipation (2010) are, by common consent, the leading recent works on the compensation scheme.

The Apprenticeship System

The 1833 Act provided for a system of “apprenticeship” — a transitional system in which the formerly enslaved would continue to work for their former masters for a period of years (four years for the “praedials” or agricultural enslaved, six years for the non-praedials), in exchange for a continuation of the slave-owners’ labour obligations. The apprenticeship system was, in its design, a compromise. It was, in its operation, a continuation of slavery by another name. The 1836 special magistrates’ report documented a substantial number of abuses. The apprenticeship system was abolished in 1838, four years earlier than originally planned, in response to a substantial campaign by the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, the principal British abolitionist body of the period. The 1838 abolition of the apprenticeship system was the political conclusion of the abolition movement in the British Caribbean.

The Decline of the West Indian Sugar Economy

The 1880s were the turning point. The beet-sugar industry of continental Europe — developed in the Napoleonic era, protected by European tariffs, and rapidly mechanised in the 1870s and 1880s — overtook the cane-sugar industry of the West Indies as the principal supplier of the British sugar market. The 1880s dominance of beet sugar was the structural cause of the long decline of the British West Indian sugar economy. The 1931 Imperial Preference Act, the 1932 Ottawa Agreements, and the 1957 Imperial Preferences Act were attempts to arrest the decline through tariff protection. They failed. As Beckert has shown in Empire of Cotton (2014), the tropical commodity economies of the British Empire were, by the 1880s, structurally unable to compete with the protected and mechanised industries of continental Europe and the United States.

The Decolonisation of the West Indian Sugar Economy

The 1960s decolonisation of the West Indies — Jamaica and Trinidad in 1962, Barbados in 1966, and the rest over the next two decades — was the political conclusion of a process that was already economic. The independent West Indian sugar industries depended on the European sugar-protocol regime of the Lomé Convention (1975) and the Cotonou Agreement (2000). The 2006 reform of the European sugar regime, the 2017 abolition of EU sugar production quotas, and the ongoing disputes over the Cotonou successor agreements have left the surviving Caribbean sugar industries (notably in Belize and Guyana) in a precarious position.

A Primary Source: Williams on Slavery and the Slave Trade

Eric Williams, in Capitalism and Slavery (1944), wrote: “The British capitalists of the eighteenth century, therefore, owed their position to the slave trade and slavery. The slave trade provided the capital which financed the Industrial Revolution. … The abolition of the slave trade and of slavery was a necessary concomitant of the development of industrial capitalism.” The passage has been disputed, refined, and qualified, but it has never been ignored. The Williams thesis is the most influential single argument about the relationship between the British Empire and the Industrial Revolution, and it remains the necessary starting-point for any serious discussion of the Caribbean sugar plantation.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the British Caribbean sugar plantation has been transformed since the 1940s. Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944) opened the modern debate; Drescher’s Econocide (1977) and Davis’s The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (1975) established the moral and political dimensions; Blackburn’s The Making of New World Slavery (1997) and Hall’s Legacies of British Slavery (2014) have synthesised the older and newer literatures. The unresolved question is the relative weight of economic and moral causation in the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery; the consensus, as James Walvin has argued in The Slave Trade and Its Abolition (2013), is that the answer depends on the specific colony and period under consideration.

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