Lecture 12: The English Caribbean, 1626-1700

The English Caribbean, 1626-1700

Introduction

The Caribbean, or West Indies, played a crucial role in the development of British America, despite often being overlooked in American history courses.
The Caribbean was the initial center of European exploration and colonization, starting with Columbus in 1492.
The French, Dutch, Danish, and English developed colonies there.
The Caribbean was economically more valuable than the 13 mainland colonies.
In the Treaty of Paris of 1763, France ceded Canada to retain sugar-producing islands.
The islands were known for both great wealth and high mortality due to plantation slavery, which was later exported to British North America.
The lecture covers the development of English West Indian colonies in the 17th-century Caribbean.

Piracy and Privateering

The early 17th-century Caribbean was a hub for privateers seeking Spanish treasure fleets.
The area west of the Prime Meridian and south of the Tropic of Cancer was essentially a no man's land for pirates and privateers.
Pirates frequently attacked island settlements.
The distinction between piracy and privateering was often blurred. During wars, the English government issued letters of marque, allowing privateers to attack enemies in exchange for a share of the loot.
English investors often financed privateering missions.
Privateers often turned to piracy when peace was declared.
Over time, tolerance for piracy decreased as islands became more integrated into European economies, with European powers favoring commercial stability.
Famous pirates like Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, and Calico Jack emerged late in the pirate period when the English were already suppressing piracy.
Captain Henry Morgan, a successful pirate in the 1670s, eventually became the governor of Jamaica and suppressed piracy.

Cromwell's Western Design

Oliver Cromwell launched the Western Design in the 1650s, aiming to capture Spanish Caribbean islands to increase English wealth and diminish Spanish Catholic power.
The Western Design was reminiscent of the Elizabethan Sea Dogs.
In 1655, Admiral William Penn and General Robert Venables were sent to Hispaniola but failed, suffering over 1,000 casualties.
The English successfully seized Jamaica, which lacked strong defenses.

English Colonization of the Lesser Antilles

The Caribbean offered economic prospects beyond plundering.
The Spanish colonies demonstrated the potential for valuable plantation crops like tobacco and sugar.
European nations focused on the Lesser Antilles, inhabited by Native Americans.
The lecture concentrates on English-settled islands in the Lesser Antilles after 1624, including Providence Island, the Leeward Islands, and Barbados.
The Carib peoples inhabited these islands and offered resistance to European colonizers, retaining control of some islands into the 18th century.
Anglo-Carib relations involved both conflict and cooperation, such as warnings about hurricanes and the return of runaway slaves.

Providence Island

In the early 1630s, Puritans settled Providence Island, financed by wealthy Puritans in England.
The island was intended to be godly and profitable, serving as a model Christian society, a base to counter Spanish Catholicism, and a source of wealth.
Providence Island, located near Nicaragua and protected by reefs, was a "natural fortress" for privateers.
The colony successfully grew tobacco and operated as a privateering center.
However, it failed as a Puritan beacon and was referred to as a "den of thieves" by the Spanish.
In 1641, a Spanish force attacked and expelled the English.

Leeward Islands

Around the same time, the English colonized the Leeward Islands: St. Christopher (St. Kitts), Nevis, Antigua, and Montserrat.
These islands were frequently contested by European powers. St. Christopher changed hands seven times between 1650 and 1713.
These islands were primarily home to small property holders, often former indentured servants who grew tobacco on small plots (10-12 acres) due to limited access to credit and labor.
The Leeward Islands remained "preserves of mostly small planters with limited prospects and chronically frustrated hopes."

Barbados

Barbados, settled in 1626, was located far from the Spanish and remained free from attack.
It attracted over 9,000 indentured servants in the 1630s to convert rainforest into tobacco fields.
Servants were drawn by the potential for wealth and independence after their indentures.
The island's owner, the Earl of Carlisle, sold both large and small plots of land.
However, Barbadian tobacco was of poor quality, leading planters to switch to sugar production in the early 1640s, learning sugar production techniques from the Dutch.

Sugar Boom in Barbados

Planters converted all available land to sugar cultivation.
Barbadians opted to import food rather than using land for growing it.
Merchants in New England and the Middle Colonies made profits by supplying food to the Caribbean islands.
The sugar boom enriched some planters, with some selling their plantations for substantial sums (e.g., £16,000 for a 500-acre plantation).
Investors, often based in London, bought up land on the island.
Sugar planters with access to land and labor amassed significant wealth.
In 1680, Henry Drax's 705-acre plantation generated £5,000 worth of sugar, molasses, and rum with over 300 laborers.
The sugar boom negatively affected small landowners and indentured servants as land costs soared.
Few former indentured servants could afford to buy land after attaining their freedom, and those who did were relegated to marginal lands.

Shift to African Slavery

As Barbados became less attractive to indentured servants due to limited opportunities, the number of servants willing to migrate decreased in the 1640s.
English planters began sending convicts and prisoners of war to the island.
Sugar transformed Barbados into the wealthiest colony in British America.
By the 1650s, Barbados competed with Brazil as the leading sugar producer.
The shortage of indentured labor made it "fatally easy" for English planters to embrace African slavery.
The cultivation of sugar required one worker per acre of sugarcane, creating a need for a constant labor source.
Planters adopted the model of race-based plantation slavery, importing large numbers of slaves, initially working with Dutch slave traders.
By 1650, 20,000 Africans were enslaved on the island.
Plantation slavery in the Caribbean predated widespread slavery in the Chesapeake.
Indentured servitude did not immediately cease after the introduction of plantation slavery; some servants continued to migrate.
By 1675, Africans constituted 75% of the population of Barbados.
By 1700, blacks outnumbered whites 3 to 1 on Barbados
Slavery spread from Barbados to other islands in the English Caribbean.
By 1713, the English colony of Jamaica had eight slaves for every white person.

Sugar Production as Proto-Industry

Sidney Mintz called the Caribbean’s sugar boom "the closest thing to industry that was typical of the seventeenth century."
Sugar production required substantial investment in workers and equipment, hazardous labor, and sophisticated management.
English sugar production was the 17th-century version of big business, with large-scale production, marketing, and lobbying.
However, sugar production came at a deadly human cost.
English investors bought up land and labor, often hiring overseers to manage their business affairs.
The largest Caribbean sugar plantations had over 1,000 acres and relied on hundreds of workers to cut more than 80 tons of sugarcane a year.

The Process of Sugar Production

Fields were cleared of trees and tilled using axes and hoes by slaves and indentured servants.
Fresh sugarcane cuttings were planted, taking 16 months to mature.
Rows of sugarcane needed to be hoed and fertilized with manure.
After growing to about eight feet tall, slaves and indentured servants harvested the canes using heavy knives called bills.
The stalks were stripped of leaves, bundled together, and rushed to a sugar mill.
Wind or animals turned heavy stones that pressed the stalks and released their juice into a collecting trough.
The pace was relentless to preserve the juice, and the work was exhausting, often going late into the night.
Accidents were common, with workers' limbs often caught in the rollers.
The extracted juice flowed into a boiling house where it was boiled and re-boiled to evaporate its water content, with workers skimming off impurities.
Sugar-boiling was performed under difficult and hazardous conditions due to heat, smoke, and the risk of scalding.
The sugar was cooled, placed in clay pots with drainage holes, and cured in special curing houses kept extremely hot.
Molasses, a byproduct, was used in rum production, generating profits for planters.
The cured sugar was packed into hogsheads and shipped to English markets.
In 1683, English planters in Barbados shipped 20,000 tons of sugar to England.
Sugar production was brutal, especially during the harvesting and production season between January and May.
Slaves worked long hours in dangerous conditions, and sugar production extracted a terrible price in human misery from servants and slaves.

The Impact of Slavery

The Leeward Islands followed Barbados in embracing sugar production and African slavery.
By 1700, the Caribbean Islands had imported more than 260,000 African slaves and, in the next century, European slave traders shipped more than 1.2 million slaves to the islands.
Slaves faced high mortality rates due to malnutrition, exhaustion, and disease, with a life expectancy of about one year upon arrival.
Those who survived lived in hellish conditions for 7-17 years.
High death rates necessitated a constant supply of new slaves.
Birth rates among Caribbean slaves did not exceed death rates until the 1790s.
Enslaved women worked in the fields until delivery and returned to work soon after giving birth.
In 1661, planters on Barbados legally affirmed slavery by passing the colony’s first comprehensive slave code.
The Barbadian slave code rooted slavery in skin color and differentiated treatment between African slaves and European indentured servants.
Killing a white servant during punishment was manslaughter, but killing a slave was not punishable.
Slaves could be executed for rebellion, assault, rape, murder, and theft of items worth over 1 shilling.
Slaves could not choose marriage partners, control the upbringing of children, own property, enter contracts, participate in civil government, serve on juries, take oaths, or serve in the military.
Slaves needed permission to leave the plantation, carry passes, and could not practice medicine, gather in groups, or move at night.
Accused slaves were tried by courts consisting of their master’s friends and neighbors, without rights to witnesses or jury.
Any free person had the right to "correct" unruly slaves or punish their "insolence."
The Barbados slave code influenced other English planters in the Caribbean.

Resistance and Culture

African slaves developed unique cultures to cope with violence, including new languages, religious beliefs, and musical forms that combined African traditions.
They also established marriages and family bonds.
Slaves resisted their masters through running away, although the small islands made this difficult.
Some slaves escaped to Carib-dominated islands like St. Lucia and St. Vincent, forming maroon communities.
Runaway slaves on Antigua established maroon settlements that were raided and destroyed in 1687.
Only on mountainous Jamaica were maroon settlements successful for long periods.
Slaves also staged rebellions, but the costs of defeat were high, as demonstrated by the aftermath of a 1675 rebellion in Barbados.

Gender Imbalance and Interracial Relations

English culture in the Caribbean was characterized by a gender imbalance, with early migrants being overwhelmingly male.
In 1680, male migrants to Barbados outnumbered females by 3 to 1.
Unlike the Chesapeake, English women in the Caribbean did not enjoy significant agency.
Many widows of poorer planters relied on charity.
Planters increasingly engaged in sexual relations with enslaved women, which were fundamentally non-consensual due to the power dynamics of slavery.
Planters in the Caribbean openly accepted interracial sexual contact.
Some masters openly lived with their slave mistresses.
The open acceptance of interracial sex in the Caribbean contrasts with the hidden nature of such relationships in the Chesapeake, as exemplified by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings.

Other Colonial Powers

England was not the only colonial power in the Caribbean. The French, Dutch, and Danish also claimed islands in the region.
The French developed sugar colonies on Guadeloupe, Martinique, St. Vincent, Grenada, St. Domingue, and other islands.
By 1750, slaves outnumbered the French in the Caribbean by 10 to 1.
In 1685, the French government issued the Code Noir, meant to mitigate some of the worst effects of slavery but was not enforced.

Conclusion

By 1700, the English were heavily involved in the slave trade, with ships operated by the Royal African Company transporting enslaved people to the Caribbean.
The sugar produced on these islands created vast fortunes for a few but inflicted misery and death on many.
The lecture will return to the Atlantic Slave Trade and the development of plantation slavery in mainland British North America in later lectures.