The Caribbean

views updated

THE CARIBBEAN

The British Empire that ended in the twentieth century began at the very end of the sixteenth century with chartered commercial ventures in the East Indies to secure tropical spices and cotton cloth. Peace then allowed further private ventures into the Caribbean (which was called the West Indies) in the early seventeenth century; these expanded into settlements to grow further high-value tropical crops, initially tobacco, later cotton and indigo and then, from the 1640s, sugar cane. With the spread of the plantation economy in the Caribbean after about 1650, the need for cheap labor helped support a booming slave trade. England's new North American colonies then found a ready market for their lumber and foodstuffs.

BEGINNINGS

The Caribbean islands consist primarily of three major groups: the Bahama Islands, including the Turks and Caicos islands, the Greater Antilles (Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico), and, southeast of Puerto Rico, the Lesser Antilles (Leeward Islands, Windward Islands, Barbados, Trinidad, and Tobago). European colonization of the Caribbean islands started after Christopher Columbus landed on several of them in the 1490s and claimed the entire area for Spain. Foreign traders were also excluded. From the mid-sixteenth century, English ships' captains began to participate in the highly profitable smuggling trade that supplied the Spanish-American settlements and continued into the late 1570s. Then, as Europe's Counter-Reformation became increasingly bitter, Caribbean voyages, on which captains threatened local officials with violent attacks before they commenced trading in order to allow the officials to claim overwhelming force, became ventures for both commerce and raiding. These targeted the Spanish plate fleets as they traversed the Caribbean as well as local coasting traffic. English, French, and Dutch all participated. The institution of a grudging peace in the early seventeenth century allowed the resumption of the earlier smuggling trade. England, France, and the Netherlands all began establishing their own colonies in the Caribbean in the 1620s and 1630s.

The first year-round British settlements in the region were in South America; these were established to grow tobacco in the first decade of the seventeenth century in the Amazon delta and later along the coast of Guyana. None lasted long, each one being expelled by Spanish forces. The mixed motives for these early settlements—with planters hoping to grow lucrative tropical crops and ship captains seeking havens for contraband deals with Spanish colonists, as well as courtiers' profit-taking and the conflicting objectives of European policies—would all complicate the region's subsequent development.

The British settlements in the Leeward Islands (Anguilla, Barbuda, Dominica [which became part of the Windward Islands in the nineteenth century], Saint Christopher's, Nevis, Antigua, and Montserrat) and Barbados in the Windward Islands, proved in the 1620s and 1630s more permanent than those earlier footholds on the South American mainland. Colonies were founded in St. Kitts in 1623 and in Barbados in 1627. Settlers from St. Kitts expanded onto Nevis in 1628 and Antigua and Montserrat in 1632. These island colonies got their start in part because they were established when Spain was preoccupied in European wars, although local Spanish forces still staged some successful attacks. Another reason was that these islands were mostly uninhabited, since the indigenous Carib tribes had been enslaved a century before or had fled to the Windward Islands (Dominica, Grenada, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, and the Grenadines) where they defended their independence, and the Spanish had neglected the Leewards and set up colonies primarily in the Greater Antilles.

After the English began settling the islands as plantations, West Indian havens offered operation bases for seamen engaged in smuggling or in raiding Spanish towns and ships. In the early 1660s, some of the buccaneers on Tortuga, off Hispaniola, moved their operations to the recently won English colony of Jamaica (taken from the Spanish in 1655), where, besides bringing in sorely needed cash, their ships helped deter Spanish attacks. In the Bahamas, which were first settled by the English in 1646, pirates operated until the 1720s.

Early colonial populations on the islands were shaped by economic downturns and high death rates. Agricultural colonies such as Barbados began growing tobacco as an export crop, but, after the tobacco boom collapsed Barbados's planters, leaving them with only poor-quality tobacco to sell, they turned to experimenting with cotton, then with indigo. However, during the 1640s these commodities became early casualties of Britain's civil war, with the market for imports collapsing. The planters then welcomed Dutch merchants who gave easier credit, had access to shipments of slaves from West Africa, and helped teach them how to process sugar. The resulting "sugar revolution" transformed Barbados's society. Sugar promised a profitable crop, but setting up a sugar estate demanded sizable initial outlays for labor to gather the crop and for machinery to process the canes. Large estates benefited from economies of scale while small plantations could no longer compete. Large-scale planters then found it cheaper to buy out their neighbors than clear virgin land.

Whatever the crop, labor remained a pressing issue. From the first, planters aimed to control their workforces. They restricted their indentured servants' mobility, punished them for time lost to pregnancies or running away, and limited appeals against even the worst masters. These harsh "customs of the country" underlay the slave codes that were developed to deal with a type of property not discussed in English case law. To secure workers, the planters would grab whomever they could find. These included African slaves purchased from passing ships and some enslaved Native Americans. In the first stages of settlement, narrow profit margins left little room for extensive slave purchases. The early planters used white workers. Unemployment in Britain and Ireland during the 1630s produced a succession of English, Irish, and some Scots willing to mortgage their future labor in exchange for a passage to the West Indies and the hope of a new start at the end of their service. During the 1650s, prisoners of war or survivors from failed uprisings provided more field hands. However, during the late seventeenth century, recruitment shrank as Britain's demographic growth slowed, pushing up the price for individual contracts, while the cost of acquiring slaves from Africa fell. African slaves then comprised increasing proportions of the work gangs. These social transformations took place on different islands at different times. Barbados was generally the path-breaker while the Bahamas were spared the introduction of large-scale sugar estates.

New settlements provided new opportunities. Groups of colonists had leap-frogged out from St. Kitts to the other Leeward Islands in the 1630s. After the Surinam settlement was captured by the Dutch, the planters in Barbados helped promote settlement in South Carolina. In 1647 a religious split in the Bahamas pushed a puritan group to establish a settlement there, while in 1651 proroyalist planters in Barbados established new plantations on the South American mainland along the Surinam River. An expedition sent out from England secured a footing in Jamaica in 1655 and the ousting of Jamaica's last Spanish holdouts in 1661 gave the newly restored king of England an excuse to retain the island. Later, in the 1680s, Jamaican merchants encouraged timber cutters on the coast of Central America (today's Belize). Local initiatives shaped English settlements in the West Indies through to the 1690s.

Natural disasters hampered development across the Caribbean during the late seventeenth century. Hurricanes—a term that English readers did not encounter until the mid-seventeenth century—further harmed the islands' fragile ecosystems, which had already been damaged by various droughts and floods and by erosion due to land clearance. In the 1670s, a blight wiped out Jamaica's cacao plantations. Earthquakes and fires destroyed several towns and plantations. In the 1680s, yellow fever became prevalent, making a region already susceptible to outbreaks of other diseases still more inhospitable. By the 1690s yields were falling in the older settled islands.

Wars compounded the damage. As Britain fought conventional wars in Europe with the Netherlands and France, vicious local campaigns took place where governors allied with Carib warriors or undertook raids to seize slaves and burn plantations. Few major slave uprisings occurred, but all slaveholding societies feared that one such uprising might succeed and spread. The elaborate conspiracies discovered in almost every colony demonstrated how real the threat was. Defenses proved costly: erecting coastal fortifications, building barracks, paying garrisons of European regulars, and requiring frequent militia service from free resident males drained island economies. Some churches were built, but few schools were established. Successful planters who had initially sent their daughters "home" to England for an education now sent their sons back too, and planned to become absentees themselves.

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY DEVELOPMENTS

The social structures that were hammered out by 1690 shaped the region for the next century. Although punitive labor laws and slave codes received little revision, a number of other changes occurred. Changes in the islands' populations were the result of the higher than average death rates from yellow fever among European groups, the reduced opportunities faced by European immigrants after planters claimed land reserves and, above all, the increased numbers of slaves imported after the inefficient official monopoly on the British slave trade was ended in 1698. Most new slaves simply replaced the dead, as the region's birth rates did not sustain the population well into the nineteenth century. Because women comprised a large proportion of the field gangs, overwork kept slave reproduction rates low. In most colonies, island-born Creole populations remained a minority. Populations of free people of color also remained small and mostly urban, but their reproduction levels were higher than other groups. Among the white settlers, reproduction rates were very low and population numbers fell. The makeup of this last group altered even more after England's 1707 Act of Union with Scotland, which joined the two kingdoms into the new United Kingdom of Great Britain. This union enabled Scotland to partake of free navigation and trade throughout the entire kingdom, including the British colonies. Thus, Scots from all social levels arrived in the Caribbean during the eighteenth century.

Regional political geographies also changed, as did the priorities of British politicians. Some helped the colonists by removing former local threats. In Jamaica, a 1739 treaty with the groups of free maroons there (fugitive black slaves and their descendants) ended forty years of skirmishing—and constrained slaves' options. In the eastern Caribbean, European colonization began on the Caribs' former island strongholds and grew to dominate each island. Meanwhile, threats from Europe grew. Military expeditions to the West Indies made conquest a real risk. Negotiators sometimes returned captured islands in peace treaties, but islands seized in the West Indies could be traded away for other imperial assets. After the Seven Years' War (1756–1763) Britain still acquired several new territories, securing Dominica, Saint Vincent, and Tobago, besides gaining Grenada in exchange for Saint Lucia. In this treaty Martinique and Guadeloupe were returned to France to end French claims to Canada. Afterward, a sizable proportion of British slave shipments to the West Indies carried slaves to the newly settled islands. Metropolitan schemes then extended further, as proposals to rein in slavery and the slave trade began to gain proponents among some senior colonial bureaucrats.

Whatever was intended, far broader social changes occurred during and after the American War of Independence (1775–1783). Only remarkable good fortune at the naval Battle of the Saints in 1782 allowed Britain to retain its West Indian colonies against the Americans' French and Spanish allies. The 1783 Peace of Paris that ended this war, where the British formally recognized their former American colonists' independence, also allowed the British to regain the eastern Caribbean islands seized by the French, along with the Bahamas, which the Spaniards had captured. Peace changed the British islands in the Caribbean, in part because the subjects of King George III (ruled 1760–1820) were forbidden to do business with their former American trading partners, and Canadian lumber and English and Irish provisions offered poor substitutes. After hurricanes flattened slaves' provision grounds, several islands endured famines. Attempts to introduce new food crops, such as breadfruit in the late eighteenth century, were impressive, but still failed to compensate for the lack of cheap American grain. The process of change continued as North American loyalists resettled across the West Indies after the war. In the Bahamas, they transformed the character of the hitherto sparsely settled archipelago. Several African Americans, free and slave, had, during this migration, encountered the evangelical revivals that had spread across British North America, and the congregations they founded then survived to transform the slaveholding societies.

In 1790 the British West Indies appeared at the height of their prosperity and influence. In the early years of the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802), Britain poured half of its total military expenditure into West Indian campaigns. The failure to acquire Saint Domingue (Haiti) and the return of most British gains in the Treaty of Amiens that concluded the French Revolutionary Wars was a watershed in British policy making. The costs of prolonged warfare on the islands' economies and on planters' profit margins further undercut the influence of the West Indies lobby. Retaining slavery no longer appeared a clear asset. At the same time, the spread of humanitarian revulsion toward slavery in Britain increasingly diverged from the West Indian colonists' stridently asserted "English" values. Meanwhile, evangelical missionaries' visits to the islands and the contacts that local evangelicals, black and white, made with their British co-religionists encouraged the circulation of harsher reports of slaveholders' brutality.

The West Indian "sugar islands" would continue to prosper in the early nineteenth century. The West Indian political lobby had sufficient influence to veto proposals that Britain retain Martinique and Guadeloupe after the wars, for fear of the competition that these islands' output would offer to the existing British colonies, although the undeveloped Dutch mainland settlements of Demerara and Esquibo (modern Guyana) were kept. But, after 1783, the defenders of West Indian slavery had lost the support of the North American planters when they argued their case to an increasingly skeptical British public. In the face of competition from "free sugar" from the East Indies and from sugar beet from continental Europe, West Indian profits declined. The debts remained. Profits from the first British empire helped to generate the capital that funded Britain's industrial revolution. Afterward, the claims offered by the West Indian planters that their brutal slave societies were "English" no longer appeared so persuasive in England. The societies that the seventeenth-century "sugar revolution" had produced still took a very long time to pass away.

See also American Independence, War of (1775–1783) ; Colonialism ; Dutch Colonies: The Americas ; French Colonies: The Caribbean ; Mercantilism ; Seven Years' War (1756–1763) ; Shipping ; Slavery and the Slave Trade ; Spanish Colonies: The Caribbean ; Sugar ; Tobacco ; Trading Companies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Batie, Robert C. "Why Sugar? Economic Cycles and the Changing of Staples in the English and French Antilles, 1624–1654." Journal of Caribbean History 8–9 (1976): 1–42.

Beckles, Hilary McD. A History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to Nation-State. Cambridge, U.K., 1990.

——. "The 'Hub of the Empire': The Caribbean and Britain in the Seventeenth Century." In Oxford History of the British Empire, edited by William Roger Louis. Vol. 1, The Origins of Empire: British Overseas Enterprise to the Close of the Seventeenth Century, edited by Nicholas Patrick Canny and Alaine M. Low, pp. 218–240. Oxford, 1998.

——. Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados. New Brunswick, N.J., 1989.

——. White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 1627–1715. Knoxville, Tenn., 1989.

Braithwaite, Edward Kamau. The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820. 2nd ed. Oxford, 1978.

Brown, Christopher L. "Empire without Slaves: British Concepts of Emancipation in the Age of the American Revolution." William & Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 56 (1999): 273–306.

Buisseret, David. "The Process of Creolization in Seventeenth-Century Jamaica." In Historic Jamaica from the Air. 2nd. rev. ed. Kingston, Jamaica, 1996.

Buisseret, David, and Steven G. Reinhardt, eds. Creolization in the Americas. College Station, Tex., 2000.

Cateau, Heather, and S. H. H. Carrington, eds. Capitalism and Slavery Fifty Years Later: Eric Eustace Williams—A Reassessment of the Man and His Work. New York, 2000.

Craton, Michael, and Gail Saunders. Islanders in the Stream: A History of the Bahamian People. Vol. I, From Aboriginal Times to the End of Slavery. Athens, Ga., and London, 1992–1998.

Gaspar, David Barry. "'Rigid and Inclement': Origins of the Jamaican Slave Laws of the Seventeenth Century." In The Many Legalities of Early America, edited by Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann, pp. 78–96. Chapel Hill, N.C., and London, 2001.

Geggus, David Patrick. "The Enigma of Jamaica in the 1790s: New Light on the Causes of Slave Rebellions." William & Mary Quarterly 3rd ser. 44 (1987): 274–299.

Greene, Jack P. "Changing Identity in the British Caribbean: Barbados as a Case Study." In Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, edited by Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, pp. 213–266. Princeton, 1987.

Higman, Barry William. Montpelier, Jamaica: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739–1912. Kingston, Jamaica, 1998.

O'Shaughnessy, Andrew Jackson. An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean. Philadelphia, 2000.

Pares, Richard. Merchants and Planters. Economic History Review Supplement, no. 4. Cambridge, U.K., 1960.

Pulsipher, Lydia Mihelic. Seventeenth-Century Montserrat: An Environmental Impact Statement. Historical Geography Research Series, no. 17. Norwich, U.K., 1986.

Sheridan, Richard B. "The Formation of Caribbean Plantation Society, 1689–1748." In Oxford History of the British Empire. Edited by William Roger Louis. Vol. II, The Eighteenth Century, edited by P. J. Marshall, pp. 394–414. Oxford, 1998.