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 make out led to the settlement of the colonies. The indigenous peoples, according to our sources mostly peaceful Tainos and warlike Caribs, proved to be unsuitable for slave labour in the fresh formed plantations, and they were quickly and brut every last(predicate)y decimated. The descendants of this once thriving federation can now only be found in Guiana and Trinidad.The slave trade which had already begun on the West Coast of Africa provided the needed labour, and a period from 1496 (Columbuss second voyage) to 1838 saw Africans flogged and tortured in an effort to clear them into the plantation economy. Slave labour supplied the most coveted and important items in Atlantic and European commerce the sugar, coffee, cotton and cacao of the Caribbean the tobacco, rice and colored of North America the gold and sugar of Portuguese and Spanish south-central America. These commodities comprised about a third of the value of European commerce, a realize inflated by regulations that obliged colonial products to be brought to the metropolis precedent to their re-export to other destinations. Atlantic navigation and European settlement of the New humanness made the Americas Europes most convenient and practical source of tropical and sub-tropical produce. The send of growth of Atlantic trade in the eighteenth century had outstripped all other branches of European commerce and created fabulous fortunes.An estimate of the slave state in the British Caribbean in Robin Blackburns study, The Overthrow of Colonial slaveholding 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 white owners and overseers. Absentee plantation owners added to the unrest. Rebellion was common, with the forms including egotism mutilation, suicide and infanticide as well as escape and maroonage (whereby the slaves escaped into the hills and scrubby interiors of the islands and set up potentially threatening communities of their own. See references in coarse Sargasso Sea). Jamaica holds the record for slave revolts, with serious uprisings in 1655, 1673, 1760 and continued pain after that. The documentation of revolts in Trinidad is less complete, but we know of at least one serious plot in 1805. Guiana was actually governed by a slave named Cuffy for a year after the revolt in 1763, and Barbados also had numerous plots, including six between 1649 and 1701.