English Colonization of the Caribbean

Few parts of the empire generated wealth as quickly, or at such human cost, as the English Caribbean. Within a single generation of the first successful settlement in 1627, Barbados had become the richest small colony in the English Atlantic; within two, Jamaica had been captured and turned into the second great sugar island. By 1700 the English Caribbean was producing enormous quantities of sugar, drawing in more than a quarter of a million enslaved Africans a decade, and accumulating fortunes in Bristol, Liverpool, and London that helped finance the Industrial Revolution. Eric Williams, in Capitalism and Slavery (1944), would later argue that this Caribbean accumulation was not merely a contributor to British economic development but a necessary precondition for it. The argument remains debated; the wealth, and the human cost, do not.

Barbados: From Tobacco to Sugar

The first permanent English settlement in the Caribbean was Barbados in 1627, established by a group of around 80 settlers who had originally intended to colonise Virginia. The colony was initially tobacco-based, with small farms worked by indentured servants from England. By the late 1640s this had changed beyond recognition. Dutch merchants from Brazil, expelled by the Portuguese, brought sugar cultivation and refining technology to Barbados, and the colony’s soil and climate proved ideal. Sugar was not a crop that worked for small farmers; it required large estates, substantial capital investment, and a large, coerced labour force. The Barbadian planters who reorganised their holdings in the 1640s were among the first to discover what became the central fact of Caribbean economic life.

The indigenous Carib and Arawak populations, devastated by Old World diseases and by Spanish depredations in the previous century, could not supply that labour. The colonists turned to Africa. The 1650s and 1660s saw an explosion of English involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, and by 1660 Barbados had a black majority population. The model — large estate, small white elite, enslaved majority — was the template that would be applied across the English Caribbean.

Sugar, Slavery, and the Plantation System

The economic logic of sugar was brutal and simple. As the Barbadian planter Richard Ligon observed in 1647, “the works of a sugar plantation are like those of a war.” Sugar was enormously profitable when grown on a large scale by enslaved labour and unprofitable otherwise. The plantation system that emerged in the English Caribbean was not an aberration: it was the only system that could produce sugar at the price the European market would pay.

The trade that linked the Caribbean to West Africa and the North American colonies has been called the “triangular trade,” though the geometry was not really triangular — there were many overlapping routes, many commodities, and many different kinds of ship. The basic pattern is well established: manufactured goods, guns, and liquor from England to West Africa; enslaved Africans from West Africa to the Caribbean; sugar, molasses, and rum from the Caribbean to England and to the continental colonies. The trade was enormous: by the mid-eighteenth century, Britain was the largest slave-trading nation in Europe, transporting perhaps three million enslaved Africans across the Atlantic before abolition in 1807.

Cromwell’s Western Design and the Capture of Jamaica

Jamaica was captured in May 1655 by an English fleet of 38 ships and around 7,000 men, sent under Cromwell’s “Western Design” — an ambitious plan to attack Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and to secure a base for the English sugar and slave trades. The attack on Hispaniola failed; the assault on Jamaica, which was lightly defended, succeeded. Spain never seriously attempted to retake the island, and Jamaica became the principal English base in the western Caribbean.

The early years were hard. The Spanish withdrew to the mountains; the English settled around the coast; buccaneers and privateers used the harbours as bases. The island’s African population grew rapidly as the sugar economy developed. By the eve of emancipation in 1838, Jamaica was one of the most valuable and most unequal slave societies in the British Empire. The Maroons — communities of escaped enslaved Africans who had fled to the hills — fought two wars with the British (the First Maroon War of 1728–1740, ending in a treaty that gave them autonomy in return for returning future fugitives; the Second Maroon War of 1795–1796, ending in the deportation of the Trelawny Maroons to Nova Scotia and thence to Sierra Leone).

The Lesser Antilles and the Treaty of Madrid

The smaller islands of the Lesser Antilles — St Kitts (settled 1623), Nevis (1628), Antigua (1632), Montserrat (1632), the Bahamas (1648) — followed the Barbadian model on a smaller scale. Each had a distinctive history, but all shared the basic structure: a small white planter elite, an enslaved African majority, and a sugar export economy. The Treaty of Madrid of 1670, by which Spain finally recognised English possession of its Caribbean colonies, gave the islands a legal security they had previously lacked.

The English Caribbean of the early eighteenth century was, by some estimates, home to perhaps 100,000 Europeans and more than 100,000 enslaved Africans. The smaller islands were disproportionately dependent on the slave trade and on the production of tropical commodities. They were also disproportionately the testing ground for commercial practices — the credit instruments, the insurance arrangements, the marketing organisations — that would later be applied to larger and more elaborate colonial economies.

The Royal African Company and the Slave Trade

The English slave trade was not, at first, the monopoly of any single company. From 1660 Charles II chartered the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa, reorganised in 1672 as the Royal African Company, and gave it a monopoly on English trade with West Africa. The company never managed to enforce that monopoly. Bristol and Liverpool merchants, in particular, refused to be shut out, and in 1698 Parliament — under pressure from the Bristol and Liverpool lobbies — opened the trade to all English merchants paying a small duty of 10 percent on their African cargoes.

The result was a dramatic expansion. Liverpool, which had handled perhaps one-tenth of the English slave trade in the 1690s, was handling more than half of it by the 1750s, and the city’s economic growth in the eighteenth century — docks, warehouses, insurance houses, banks — was intimately connected to the trade. By the 1750s Britain was the largest slave-trading nation in Europe.

Buccaneers and the End of the Old Tradition

The English Caribbean was also a centre of buccaneering, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, that blurred the line between piracy and warfare. Henry Morgan’s career — from Welsh immigrant to buccaneer captain to lieutenant-governor of Jamaica and, eventually, to knighthood — captured the trajectory of the whole trade: from illegal predator to licensed agent of the English crown. The buccaneers were gradually suppressed in the early eighteenth century as imperial discipline tightened, but the traditions of sea raiding, intimate local knowledge of Caribbean waters, and English naval presence in the region were the legacy of this strange period.

The Caribbean did not generate a tradition of English settlement in the way that North America did. The islands remained overwhelmingly commercial — plantations, ports, and trading posts — and they remained dependent on the slave trade long after the American colonies had begun to find their own slave systems self-sustaining. The English Caribbean was, in this respect, a colonial economy without a colonial society in the deeper sense: a place of money, sugar, and forced labour, and not a place of farmhouses, town meetings, and self-government.

Historiographical Note

Caribbean historiography was, for most of the twentieth century, dominated by the Williams thesis: that British Caribbean slavery and the slave trade were the principal source of the capital that financed the British Industrial Revolution. The thesis, first advanced in Capitalism and Slavery (1944), was challenged in detail by Seymour Drescher in Econocide (1977), who argued that British abolition came when it was most economically costly rather than when it was most profitable, and by Patrick O’Brien, who has insisted that the Caribbean contribution to British industrial capital was a small fraction of total investment. The Williams thesis has had a long life — most recently in the work of Matthew Smith and the contributors to The Cambridge History of Slavery — but in its strong form, as a necessary precondition for industrialisation, it has been substantially modified. The Caribbean was important to British economic development; it was not, in the strong Williams sense, the only reason that development happened.

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