Colonial America: A Very Short Introduction by Alan Taylor

Author:Alan Taylor [Taylor, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199766239
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

West Indies and Carolina

Although few New Englanders owned slaves, their farms and ships serviced the slave-based economy of the West Indies: a set of fertile subtropical islands that framed the Caribbean Sea in an arc sweeping northward from South America and then westward beneath Florida. During the 1620s and early 1630s, the West Indies evolved from temporary bases for pirates into permanent colonies for planters. Devoting almost all of their land to raising tobacco or sugar cane, the West Indian planters had to import food and lumber from New England. In effect, seventeenth-century New England and the English West Indies developed in tandem as mutually sustaining parts of a common economic system. Each was incomplete without the other.

By producing sugar, the West Indies became the most valuable set of English colonies. Sugar could bear the costs of long-distance transportation (and the purchase of slaves by the thousand) because of the great and growing European demand to sweeten food and drink. Requiring a year-round growing season, fertile soil, and abundant water, sugarcane thrived in subtropical colonies rather than in Europe. In 1686, the West Indian exports to England were three times as valuable as all of the commodities shipped there from the mainland colonies of North America. Chesapeake tobacco was valuable to the empire—indeed, more precious than all other mainland produce combined—but West Indian sugar was king in the empire.

Despite their small size, the islands received most of the English emigrants to the Americas during the early seventeenth century. In 1650 more white colonists lived in the West Indies (44,000) than in the Chesapeake (12,000) and New England colonies (23,000) combined (35,000). Two-thirds of the English West Indians then lived on the single island of Barbados although it was only twenty-one miles long and fourteen miles wide. As in the Chesapeake, most of the West Indian immigrants were poor, single young men who arrived as indentured servants. Those who survived their five-year-long indentures obtained freedom and about five acres of land and the provisions, clothing, and tools to become small-scale farmers. Prior to 1640, they cultivated tobacco and raised livestock (hides) for export to Europe, while growing, for their own subsistence, corn, cassava, yams, plantains, and sweet potatoes.

During the 1640s, Barbadians shifted toward cultivating sugarcane and manufacturing sugar. By 1660 Barbados made most of the sugar consumed in England and generated more trade and capital than all other English colonies combined. To perform the long, hard work of raising sugarcane and making sugar, the planters imported thousands of slaves from Africa. By 1645 the £20 cost for a slave compared favorably to the £12 required to purchase just five years of indentured labor. The buyer of slaves also never had to pay the “freedom dues” owed to the servant at the expiration of his indenture. And, in contrast to servants, the children of a slave woman became the property of her master, providing additional returns on the original investment.

By 1660 Barbados became the first English colony with a black and enslaved majority: 27,000 compared to 26,000 whites.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.