Slavery and the Caribbean :: Slavery Essays

Slavery and the CaribbeanEuropeans came into contact with the Caribbean after Columbuss momentous journeys in 1492, 1496 and 1498. The desire for expansion and trade led to the settlement of the colonies. The indigenous peoples, match to our sources nearlyly peaceful Tainos and warlike Caribs, proved to be unsuitable for striver labour in the newly formed plantations, and they were quickly and brutally decimated. The posterity of this once thriving community can now only be found in Guiana and Trinidad.The slave trade which had already begun on the western United States Coast of Africa provided the needed labour, and a period from 1496 (Columbuss second voyage) to 1838 saw Africans flogged and anguish in an effort to assimilate them into the plantation economy. Slave labour supplied the most coveted and important items in Atlantic and European commerce the scrawl, coffee, cotton fiber and cacao of the Caribbean the tobacco, rice and indigo of North America the gold and sugar o f Portuguese and Spanish S turn uph America. These commodities comprised about a third of the valuate of European commerce, a figure inflated by regulations that obliged compound products to be brought to the metropolis prior to their re-export to other destinations. Atlantic navigation and European settlement of the New World made the Americas Europes most convenient and applicatory source of tropical and sub-tropical produce. The rate of growth of Atlantic trade in the eighteenth century had outstripped all other branches of European commerce and created fab fortunes.An estimate of the slave population in the British Caribbean in redbreast Blackburns study, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery 1776-1848, puts the slave numbers at 428,000 out of a population of 500,000, so the number of slaves vastly exceeded the number of sporting owners and overseers. Absentee plantation owners added to the unrest. Rebellion was common, with the forms including self mutilation, suicide and infa nticide as well as escape and maroonage (whereby the slaves escaped into the hills and wooded interiors of the islands and set up potentially forbidding communities of their own. See references in Wide Sargasso Sea). Jamaica holds the record for slave revolts, with honorable uprisings in 1655, 1673, 1760 and continued disquiet after that. The documentation of revolts in Trinidad is slight complete, but we know of at least one serious diagram in 1805. Guiana was actually governed by a slave named Cuffy for a twelvemonth after the revolt in 1763, and Barbados also had numerous plots, including six surrounded by 1649 and 1701.