Author Archives: Joel

by | 18 August 2024 · 8:30 pm

African Origins of Caribbean Slaves

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 246-247:

Between 1500 and 1870, the Caribbean region (construed as the islands and associated mainland rim) was the destination of about 5.75 million Africans, about 46% of all captives involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Four years after the first black slaves came from Seville in 1501, 17 African slaves arrived in Hispaniola to work in its copper mines and 100 or so in its gold mines. In 1525, 213 captives from São Tomé landed in Santo Domingo, marking probably the first slave voyage from Africa to the Americas. For the next century Africans continued to arrive in small numbers (perhaps 7,000 total) in the Spanish Caribbean islands. Not until the second quarter of the 17th century did a significant number (about 27,000) arrive in the British Caribbean. The 18th century was the high point of the trade, accounting for two-thirds of all Africans shipped to the Caribbean, although Cuba received most of its slaves (710,000) in the 19th century. The British Caribbean received the most Africans—almost 2.8 million—with the French next at 1.3 million, the Spanish about 1 million, the Dutch about 500,000, and the Danish just 130,000. About 15% to 20% of Africans arriving in the Caribbean were subsequently traded within the Americas.

The origins of these Africans varied. Overall, West-Central Africa supplied the most slaves—about 1.6 million. After 1595 Angola became the leading source of slaves for Spanish America; later it contributed about one-third of Africans brought into Cuba. The next most important region was the Bight of Biafra, which supplied about 1.3 million slaves, while the Gold Coast supplied just over a million, mostly to the British West Indies. The Bight of Benin exported just under a million, over a third of them to the French West Indies. The three regions of Upper Guinea—Senegambia (500,000), Sierra Leone (300,000), and the Windward Coast (300,000)—were minor suppliers despite being geographically the closest to the Caribbean. South East Africa sent fewer than 200,000.

Particular islands drew on specific regions of Africa for considerable periods of time. Before 1725, about three-quarters of Africans in Jamaica came from the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin, accounting for the early prominence of so-called “Coromantees” from the former coastal region and Adja-speakers from the latter on the island; later, however, Jamaica received most of its Africans from the Bight of Biafra. In the first quarter of the 18th century, 60% of African arrivals in Saint-Domingue were from the Bight of Benin; by the third quarter of the century, 60% came from West-Central Africa. Overall, about half of Saint-Domingue’s Africans came from Angola and the Congo. When the slave trade into Cuba began in earnest in the late 18th century, about a third of its Africans were from the Gold Coast. Thereafter, West-Central Africa and the Bight of Biafra predominated.

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by | 17 August 2024 · 4:57 pm

Caribbean Demographic Changes, 1600s

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 197-199:

European and African populations in the Caribbean grew quickly, almost exclusively through migration rather than natural increase. If the numbers are often vague, two patterns are clear. First, the white population in the islands was predominantly young and male until the late 17th century. Second, the population came to be dominated by enslaved Africans by the end of the century, first on the English islands and then on the French. The population of the French islands was 19% black by 1650 but 36% by 1660 (Boucher 2008, 115). By 1655 the population of Barbados contained some 20,000 Africans and 23,000 Europeans; 18 years later, the slave population outnumbered the European population, 33,184 to 21,309 (Dunn 1973, 87). Enslaved Africans came from a variety of ethnic groups, as did Europeans—especially on the English and Dutch islands.

Although most European migrants traveled as indentured laborers, there were some free migrants as well. Some were ambitious men eager to improve their economic condition: Tom Verney hoped in 1639 that his time in Barbados would “be an engagement for mee for my new lead-life,” promising both prosperity and personal redemption for past failures (Games 1999, 80). Some were men of the cloth. The presence of Caribs on French-occupied islands not only hindered French settlement but also inspired the French to send Catholic missionaries to proselytize. Jews found haven in Suriname, Curaçao, Barbados, and Jamaica. English Catholics, forbidden to practice their faith openly at home and banned from holding public office, inhabited all of the English colonies in the Caribbean. French Huguenots made their way to the islands, too, where many governors tolerated their presence. If for many the 17th-century Caribbean was a place of violence, premature death, and avarice, for others the islands offered relative sanctuary—whether prompted by indifference or acceptance from neighbors—from some of the religious and political violence of the era.

European affairs continued to punctuate Caribbean life in the middle of the 17th century, defining mature colonial settlements just as they had facilitated their creation. Other regions of the Atlantic also began to shape the Caribbean. Trading ties thickened connections to the American mainland, Europe, and Africa. One overpopulated Caribbean colony, Barbados, even spawned a supply colony on the American mainland, Carolina. Africans became a larger presence in the region, dominating some islands and posing strategic challenges and opportunities for residents and invaders. Several regional transitions illustrate these new intersections.

The first transition involved sugar, another commodity of growing popularity in Europe. Tobacco may have sparked interest in Caribbean land in the 1620s, but sugar wrought an even greater frenzy. It took hold gradually in the English and especially the French Caribbean, primarily because sugarcane cultivation and processing required a large capital investment in equipment and labor, one well beyond the reach of most European planters, many of whom also lacked expertise in processing cane. In 1654 came a crucial turning point in the Caribbean, sparked by events outside the region: the Dutch, after nine years of struggle with the Portuguese, finally abandoned Brazil, where they had learned the complicated and costly techniques of sugar cultivation and, more important, of transforming sugar into rum and molasses. As Dutch merchants, planters, and investors dispersed into the Caribbean, they brought those techniques with them. While some English settlers had already begun to experiment with sugar on Barbados, the infusion of Dutch capital contributed to the “sugar revolution,” in which sugar monoculture replaced other crops and enslaved Africans replaced European indentured laborers.

Sugar wrought major environmental transformations wherever it took hold, and those changes assisted the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which had crossed the Atlantic from Africa in slaving vessels. As Europeans cleared land for sugarcane, they felled trees, removing bird habitats and facilitating the survival of insects the birds had once consumed. Sugar processing also required clay pots, which stood empty much of the year, collecting rainwater that enabled mosquitoes to flourish. A. aegypti is the vector for yellow fever, and it is no accident that the Caribbean’s first yellow fever epidemic started in Barbados in 1647, in the wake of sugar’s introduction to the island. In that first epidemic, as much as one-third of the island’s population may have died.

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by | 15 August 2024 · 2:20 pm

Spanish Caribbean Havana vs. San Juan

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 185-188:

As large stretches of the Greater Antilles were falling into general decline and had begun to look inward, giving rise to the peculiar creole cultures one associates today with the Hispanophone Caribbean, one city—Havana—was experiencing unparalleled growth and prosperity. In effect, one of the few Spanish Caribbean success stories of the long 17th century was Havana’s conversion into a major maritime outpost, a dynamic, multicultural center where goods and people from distant lands built an emerging mercantile capitalism. With this change, the economic and demographic epicenter of the Spanish Caribbean moved decisively from the old colonial capital of Santo Domingo to western Cuba. Havana’s growth, laggard at best until about 1590, would be unstoppable after that year. Historians have often remarked how, in economic prowess and cultural achievement, western Cuba became more like a continent than an island. By the end of the 18th century, Havana, this capital of “continental Cuba,” was the third most populous city in the Americas and a crucial link connecting the main elements of Spain’s dispersed overseas empire. The demographic and economic growth that fueled its ascent began around the middle of the 16th century and continued in spurts throughout the long 17th century.

Historian Alejandro de la Fuente and his collaborators (2009) have narrated in great detail the story of Havana’s emergence as the most important of Spain’s Caribbean maritime cities, initially rivaled in importance only by Cartagena [Colombia]. Beginning in the second half of the 16th century, Havana emerged as the crossroads of three key trading circuits in the Spanish Atlantic: the transatlantic trade, the intercolonial trade between various ports in the Spanish circum-Caribbean region, and the intracolonial trade connecting various Cuban ports with the island’s principal commercial hub. The first of these trading circuits funneled large amounts of silver from the continental colonies and some American staples such as sugar, tobacco, indigo, and hides toward Europe in exchange for manufactures, foodstuffs, wine, and enslaved Africans. The second circuit, the intercolonial, grew in importance as Spain’s fleet system of transatlantic navigation (the so-called Carrera de Indias) became more developed. It connected the more marginal ports in the Caribbean, usually bypassed by Spanish ships, with the Atlantic routes. The third circuit, to and from the Cuban interior, linked Havana to the outside world as both supplier and market. Because the forces that made up Cuba’s great maritime city were so far-flung and diverse, and because the people who built the city also hailed from diverse corners of the Atlantic world, referring to Havana as one of the few “Atlantic communities” seems justified.

The three mercantile systems that converged in Havana interconnected with each other in the city’s harbor, a large, deep, well-protected port capable of accommodating dozens of vessels at a time. It was one of the two or three best harbors in the Caribbean and, considering its proximity to the Gulf Stream, easily the best located. During the second half of the 16th century, Havana’s window to the sea would be made virtually impregnable by the construction of three forts (one at each side of the bay’s entrance, and one closer to the main docks) as well as an underwater chain at the harbor’s entrance to interrupt traffic whenever necessary. This defensive complex was highly successful and—as the English corsair Francis Drake found in 1586—could be so formidable that it discouraged even the most daring aggressors from attacking the city.

…

As an Atlantic city, Havana gradually became a Spanish Caribbean anomaly in several ways. First, it became a thriving port that drew strength from Spain’s increasing presence as a precious-metal producer in the European system at a time when other port cities in the region were becoming more inward-looking and less cosmopolitan. It also bred a social order more hierarchical than those of smaller cities: Havana’s elite was ethnically more diverse, economically more dynamic, and in its business orientation more akin to other Atlantic hubs like Seville, Cartagena, and Veracruz. As its prosperity grew, Havana’s elite drew more resources from the agriculturally rich hinterland, from which it obtained goods, including sugar, that later were sold via Atlantic networks. Local fortunes grew enough in the 17th century so that some habanero families purchased titles of nobility and imitated in the Caribbean the lavish lifestyles of the Spanish aristocracy. The habanero elite stood at the pinnacle of a society profoundly stratified by class, status, and race—a socioracial hierarchy that in its well defined and protected social spaces was not quite replicated in any other Spanish Caribbean city.

If, in its vitality amid the relative poverty of the 17th-century Spanish Caribbean, Havana occupied one extreme, San Juan stood at the opposite end of the spectrum. A heavily fortified bastion governed by military men, it was the only port in Puerto Rico authorized to engage in direct trade with the metropole. When contacts with the mother country were frequent, as in the final quarter of the 16th century, this arrangement had worked relatively well. After 1625 or so, however, the monopoly trading system collapsed and Puerto Rico was thrust essentially to the margins of Spain’s Atlantic trading circuits. Between 1651 and 1675, reportedly only nine ships left Seville, the Spanish peninsula’s single designated port for colonial trade, for San Juan. As commercial relations with Spain came to a virtual halt, the colonists in Puerto Rico were forced to rely on contraband. These contacts, illegal but commonplace, drew them into a web of trade relations that was centered in the Danish and British islands to the east and south. Thus, contrary to Havana, the Atlantic port city par excellence, San Juan had become a regional port city where life centered on the contraband relations that thrived at the imperial margins and in proximity to foreign colonies.

Still, this poor, underpopulated city on the eastern edges of the Spanish empire, surrounded by impressive walls and guarded by a massive fort (San Felipe del Morro) at the entrance to the bay, was racially stratified and hierarchical in ways reminiscent of Havana, although it was less residentially and socially segregated. Whites (whether rich or poor), free people of African descent, and enslaved persons cohabited in many of the barrios into which the city’s small footprint was divided. San Juan’s landholding and commercial elites were clearly poorer than those of Havana or even Santo Domingo, although many foreign observers remarked on their aristocratic aspirations and claims to racial purity.

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by | 14 August 2024 · 6:15 am

Dutch & Portuguese Role in Barbados

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 142-145:

Discovered by the Portuguese in 1500, Brazil became the site where the Portuguese first managed to reinstall the sugar plantation complex they and the Spanish had pioneered on the Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa, and to achieve its continuity and growth. By 1526 Brazil was exporting sugar, and in the early 17th century its output superseded not only that of earlier Atlantic outposts but also that of the rapidly declining Spanish-Caribbean sugar industry. Part of the reason for this success was that the Portuguese straddled both shores of the Atlantic. Most of the slaves, on whose labor the early Brazilian sugar industry depended, came from the Portuguese colony in Angola, the civil war-ridden neighboring kingdom of Kongo, or the Portuguese factories in the Bight of Benin and Cape Verde (which drew on Senegambian sources). As a result, Portuguese planters in Brazil did not face a problem their Spanish colleagues in the Caribbean would unsuccessfully struggle with for another two centuries: the highly restrictive and inefficiently organized asiento system by which Spain provisioned its New World colonies with African slave labor. While Spanish plantations floundered after the turn of the 17th century, the same period marked the beginning of a boom in Brazil. If the British and French in the Caribbean were looking for a model for hyperprofitable overseas agricultural enterprises, by that time it would not have been Hispaniola or Cuba but the northeastern Brazilian province of Pernambuco.

But what about the Dutch? Like other northern European nations, the Dutch initially began to prey upon the Spanish fleet in the second half of the 16th century. Like the British and French, they also perceived the advantages of piratical raids on the Spanish mainland colonies. By the early 17th century, however, the new Dutch West India Company, founded in 1621, embarked on a different course of action. Its novel approach was not merely to skim off profits by raiding Iberian colonies or preying upon the homeward-bound fleet, but to take over the very source: fully developed colonial enterprises.

Aware of the advantages the Portuguese enjoyed by maintaining a connection between Angola and northeastern Brazil, the Dutch seized control of both places at once. Between about 1630 and 1650 they achieved three distinct but interrelated goals: they subjected both regions to a rigorous scheme of capitalistic development, pumping in the requisite cash and credit for building up the plantation infrastructure of Brazil; they continued their role as major maritime architects of legal and illegal commercial links between the Caribbean colonies of various nations; and they turned Amsterdam—which already was the center of finance and banking in northern Europe—into one of the major international European markets for sugar. In contrast to the Portuguese, the Dutch apparently had no strong interest in monopolizing sugar production. In their view, profit lay in offering credit and taking over commercial shipping and distribution.

…

While the importance of the Dutch introduction of sugarcane to Barbados in 1637 is open to question, the crucial role of Dutch merchants in providing financial backing with which British settlers built the first sugar mills on that island is beyond dispute. Dutch planters and sugar masters also taught the British Barbadians what they came to call the “method of Pernambuco”—which included not only the know-how of planting, milling, and processing cane, but also the rudiments of a legal code regulating slavery. Dutch ships, finally, linked Barbados’s emerging plantation economy both to the supply of African labor provided by the Atlantic slave trade and to the effective and profitable distribution networks in the Netherlands. Although the extent of Dutch involvement has lately become the subject of debate among historians, it may be safe to say that within little more than the decade between 1640 and 1650, the Dutch helped to transform Barbados from a slaveholding society with a large yeoman population engaged in fairly diversified economic pursuits into a slave society solidly based on sugar monoculture.

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These developments were due in no small measure to a fortuitous Atlantic conjuncture. For the “sugar revolution” in Barbados occurred at a time when English metropolitan control over the island faltered. What allowed the Barbadians to engage in such principally illegal dealings with the Dutch was the colonial result of the turmoil in the metropole incited by the English Civil War. As the eminent historian of that war, Christopher Hill (1986), put it, between 1641 and 1650, Barbados virtually became an independent state, or at least approached a state of home rule. As a consequence, the emerging planter elite began to control legislative and executive matters in a manner unprecedented in any New World colony. Only when the British Parliament sent the fleet in the fall of 1651 did the Barbadians finally resubmit to imperial control. They arguably did so, however, because they had become too afraid of their own slaves and rebellious servants to risk giving out arms to them—a situation foreshadowing the agonizing decisions the Jamaican planter elite made when the protest of the 13 North American colonies against British commercial legislation began to escalate into a full-scale colonial war more than a century later.

Still, the intervening period had allowed the Barbadian planter elite enough autonomy to achieve three major objectives: first, to engineer the crucial economic takeoff with the help of Dutch capital and distribution networks; second, to forge a brutal slave code—first properly codified in 1661, but developed in the 1640s—that allowed masters almost unlimited power to exploit their human chattel; and third, to begin a process of concentration of landholding that effectively pushed small freeholders off the island.

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by | 13 August 2024 · 6:06 am

The Sugar Revolution in Barbados

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 139-142:

Initially, the character of British settlement in Barbados resembled the first successful British colonial experiments on the North American mainland. As in Virginia, the first group of Barbadian colonists had been sent out by a charter company that intended to “plant” them there in the sense discussed above. Little is known about the first years in Barbados, but it seems as if the colony almost failed. As in Virginia, the British policy was to give out land grants to settlers and to employ the labor of indentured servants (Barbados had no indigenous population). The first commercial crops in Barbados were tobacco and, to a lesser extent, cotton—largely because the Barbadians tried to emulate the tobacco-driven success story Virginia had experienced in the 1620s. But tobacco cultivation in Barbados turned out to be a failure. Although the European tobacco market remained good until the late 1630s, the Barbadian product was considered vastly inferior to that of Virginia.

Nevertheless, in the 1630s the population of Barbados grew rapidly. As in Virginia, a majority of its inhabitants arrived as servants hoping to acquire land after the expiration of their term. Quite a large number of them, however, came involuntarily: they had been rounded up in British cities as vagrants, criminals, or seditious agitators and sentenced to “transportation.” This practice of deporting surplus populations from the metropole became so common that the phrase “to Barbados someone” (meaning to spirit away innocent people to servitude in the Caribbean) entered the lexicon of everyday English speech at the time. Many of the Irish defeated by Cromwell, followers of dissident sects, and royalists sentenced by Parliament during the English Civil War likewise found themselves aboard ships bound for the West Indies.

Temporary servitude was not uncommon in England at the time. As in the North American mainland colonies, most settlers to Barbados were attracted by the promise of eventually acquiring freehold status, but the margin of opportunity gradually shrunk as wealthier planters increased their holdings through purchase. Land available to ex-servants or free newcomers to Barbados virtually ran out at the end of the 1630s, and, unlike in Virginia, there was nowhere else to go. Also unlike the situation in England, where servants and apprentices enjoyed a certain amount of legal protection, was that Barbadian masters exercised almost unrestrained control over their servants and often abused them in ways entirely unprecedented in the mother land. As early as 1634, white servants rebelled on Barbados: and, as in the case of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia (1675), there are good indications that these servants, particularly the Irish, repeatedly tried to join forces with similarly maltreated Africans.

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Nevertheless, by the end of the 1630s, Barbados still had not developed into a genuine plantation society. Although demographic data for this period are notoriously unreliable, toward the end of the 1630s the island had a population of almost 6,000; of these, some 760 held land—a proportion comparable to that in the European countryside, which is especially noteworthy because Barbadian landholdings still greatly varied in size. Some of the larger planters held tracts of several thousand acres, but the majority of freeholders farmed small parcels between 10 and 50 acres each. This situation changed drastically in the 1640s. Within less than a decade, most members of the white yeomanry on Barbados were squeezed off their land: servants were replaced by African slaves, and the social organization of the island irreversibly switched from that of a society with slaves to that of a society organized around the legal institution of slavery.

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The reason for this dramatic transformation was sugar. Understanding the Barbadian “sugar revolution” requires stepping back to look at the development of sugar planting in the Americas after the decline of the early Spanish experiments. Both figuratively and literally, sugar arrived in Barbados from Brazil and aboard Dutch ships. It took hold there not because of British metropolitan intentions, but in spite of them.

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by | 12 August 2024 · 6:22 am

Redefining “Plantation” in 1600s

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 131-133:

At least in the British case, the very word “plantation” offers a clue to the continuities between Old and New World histories of violent expansion, for it entered the English language during the Tudor period, in the context of the English conquest of Ireland. When the English broke up the previous social and political structures of the Celtic Irish, installed themselves as lords of the land, and pressed their new subjects into agricultural service, they called the result “planting.” To the 16th-century English, planting meant improving the land—in the sense not just of planting crops, but of implanting a social order they thought superior to what had been there before. The phrase speaks to migration and agriculture, but also to political domination. This is the sense in which Francis Bacon used it in his “Essay on Plantations” in 1625. Some 30 years later, Thomas Hobbes was even more precise in referring to a plantation as “numbers of men sent out from the commonwealth, under a conductor, or governor, to inhabit a foreign country, either formerly void of inhabitants, or made void then by war.”

The plantation was thus not simply a type of agricultural enterprise, but a political institution deployed in organizing colonial social space. It also welded a model of political domination to one of economic enterprise. As sociologist Edgar Thompson (1935) argued, at least since Tudor times, planting had come to signify “a form of migration and settlement which was organized, controlled, and given direction by capital; and it looked to a profitable return from capital.” Planting meant colonizing, but in a rather specific sense: it involved capital investment and the anticipation of profit. A plantation colony is one established not for military purposes, or as a place where individuals from overpopulated areas migrate to gain access to land (although it may come to serve such purposes as well). It is a planned enterprise geared toward generating return on capital by transplanting people who are expected to produce commercially valuable crops in a colonized territory.

This is what the British charter companies so important in the colonization of North America were about: their goal was to transplant people for profit. It just so happened that the settlers in Virginia found the right kind of crop (tobacco), whereas those in New England did not—which is part of the reason why the term “Plymouth plantation” sounds quaint to us. The Puritans certainly “planted,” and quite violently so; but the result was something rather different from a plantation colony as generally understood today. The intriguing historical semantics of the English term “plantation” notwithstanding, the forms of violent, agriculturally based settler colonialism it implied did not set the precedent for the institution that would leave its indelible imprint on the history of the Caribbean: the agro-industrial complex of the slave labor–based sugar plantation and its tri-continental economic articulation that linked New World colonial production sites with markets for commodified human labor from Africa and networks of capital, credit, distribution, and consumption in Europe. The origins of the institution arguably lie in the very first phase of Spanish colonialism in the Caribbean.

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by | 11 August 2024 · 3:41 pm

Sugarcane on the Atlantic Islands

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 77-80:

From the mid-15th century, the Portuguese took slaves to work on Madeira: Moroccans and Berbers, black Africans, and Canary Islanders. The number of slaves who could be profitably employed was limited because the Madeiran sugar establishments were still relatively small in comparison to the later Caribbean and Brazilian plantations. Because of population growth in Portugal itself in the 16th century, many free Portuguese laborers migrated to Madeira, further lessening the demand for slaves. There were even proposals to export some of the slaves already there. In the 15th century, Madeira was a precursor of the future American colonial areas, but by the early 16th century its development had transformed it into a replica of metropolitan Portugal.

The Portuguese established sugar production on other Atlantic islands, but none rivaled the early profits of Madeira. In the Azores sugar production met with little success because of the unfavorable climate; there grain and dyestuffs were always more important, and slaves were few in number. Portuguese agriculture in the arid Cape Verde Islands concentrated on cereals and fruits and was complemented by cattle raising. São Tomê, which became a crucial entrepôt for the transatlantic slave trade, experienced a sugar boom in the 16th century and can also be seen as a prototype of the sugar islands of the Caribbean.

With sugar production and trade prospering, shiploads of sugar were delivered to the large European markets: Lisbon, Seville, Antwerp, and cities of the Mediterranean. Although most of the plantations and mills were in the hands of Portuguese, the bulk of the export trade was controlled by foreigners, many of them Italians resident in Portugal. Columbus traded in Madeiran sugar early in his career and lived on the neighboring island of Porto Santo for a time in the 1470s. The European demand for sugar was strong, and the lower costs of Madeiran sugar caused heavy competition for the longer-established Mediterranean producers.

The Portuguese were not the only Europeans who were developing the Atlantic islands during this time. In the early 15th century, Castile began sponsoring conquests in the Canaries, and by the end of the century it had secured control of all the islands. Unlike the other Atlantic islands, the Canaries had a native population who were likely akin to the Berbers. Foreshadowing events in the Americas, the Spaniards subdued the islanders and enslaved those who resisted. Of these, a number were exported to Europe or Madeira, while others were employed on Canarian sugar plantations.

The island population was relatively small to begin with, and its numbers fell due to epidemic disease after the European incursion. Members of indigenous groups whose leaders had signed treaties could not be enslaved legally, unlike members of the non-treaty groups, and those who were enslaved frequently attained manumission. In the early years of the 16th century, the Canarian slave trade to Europe ceased as the islanders increasingly assimilated European culture and intermarried with the colonists. Since native workers never filled the labor needs of the Canaries, the islands witnessed an influx of other workers, including a number of free Castilian and Portuguese settlers. Wealthier settlers brought their own slaves with them from the peninsula. Portuguese slave traders brought in blacks from West Africa, and Castilian mariners raided the coast for North Africans, Berbers, and other slaves. Following the first Spanish contact with the Americas, a few American Indians were sold in the Canaries, but the Spanish crown soon outlawed the slave trade in Indians.

These sugar establishments on Madeira and in the Canary Islands turned out to have some important features of the Caribbean plantations that would emerge in the 16th century, including elements both agricultural (growing the cane) and industrial (refining the sugar), the use of slave labor, and the export of a product to be sold in the growing markets of Europe. The significant difference between the sugar establishments on the Atlantic islands and the later plantations of the Caribbean was size; the former had smaller plots of land and fewer laborers. Those Atlantic islands provided a link between Mediterranean sugar production and the plantation system that was to dominate New World slavery and society into the 19th century.

Madeira and the Canaries formed the staging area from which sugar cultivation and refining would reach Hispaniola, the island where sugarcane was first planted in the Caribbean. Columbus, knowledgeable in the Portuguese sugar trade, had ships of his second transatlantic voyage stop in Madeira for additional supplies. These included refined sugar as a medicinal store and cuttings of sugarcane, which were later planted at Columbus’s ill-fated settlement of La Isabela on the north shore of Hispaniola. The first canes grew but failed to establish permanent sugar production. Only in the first decade and-a-half of the 16th century did successful sugar plantings and newly introduced sugar mills on Hispaniola establish the foundations for the fateful beginning of the colonial plantation complex in the Americas.

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by | 10 August 2024 · 6:03 am

Role of Sugarcane in the Islamic World

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 69-71:

Sugar and slavery, key components that helped shape the colonial Caribbean, were present in the medieval Mediterranean world in both Muslim and Christian areas. Elements that contributed to the development of the plantation complex in the early modern Caribbean and elsewhere in the Americas had long Mediterranean histories: the use of slaves, slave trade, sugar cultivation and refining, merchant capitalism, and marketing networks.

The Muslims first introduced sugarcane growing and refining to the Mediterranean after they found the crop under cultivation and production in Khuzistan in Mesopotamia, just north of the Persian Gulf. When the Muslims conquered the region in the seventh and eighth centuries, they established a labor force imported from East Africa to work in the cane fields, thus foreshadowing the links between sugar production and black slavery. Still, in the Islamic world and the Christian Mediterranean, free labor predominated in sugar production.

From Khuzistan, sugar refining spread to Baghdad, which lasted as a refining center until the end of the Middle Ages. Egypt was the next step along sugar’s westward march; the first sugar plantations were established there in the early eighth century. From Egypt, the Muslims spread sugarcane to Yemen and to the lands around the Mediterranean: Syria, Sicily, southern Morocco, and southern Spain. In ancient and early medieval times, the Mediterranean had not known sugar; sweetening came from honey and fruit juices. Honey remained a luxury because its supply was limited and could never be expanded much. Sugarcane was entirely different, its growth limited only by the availability of suitable land and labor.

By the 10th century, sugar production was thriving in several places in the Islamic world, and cane sugar traded widely in the Muslim markets and afield to the Byzantine Empire and the Christian West. Because of the special requirements of successful sugarcane production, it was mainly large landholders who could afford the necessary investment. The intensive nature of the industry has been a feature of cane sugar production ever since.

Egyptian sugar processes became famous throughout the world. The Egyptians probably invented the manufacture of cube or misri (Egyptian) sugar. They had long used two minerals, natron (sodium carbonate) and alum (aluminum potassium sulfate), for the refining of honey, and around the 11th century they began to refine cane sugar with the same minerals.

The first written evidence of sugarcane in Spain appears in the 10th century, even though Muslims conquered most of the Iberian peninsula early in the eighth century and, from the time of the emir ’Abd al-Raḥmān I in the mid-eighth, were introducing and acclimating new crops in palace gardens in southern Spain. The Calendar of Córdoba first mentions sugarcane around the year 961, but this source may reflect conditions in Egypt more accurately than in Spain, or may be referring to all territory under Cordoban control rather than Córdoba itself. Certainly in Muslim times, sugar was grown in a wide stretch of southern Iberian territory, from the wetlands of the lower Guadalquivir south of Seville to warm coastal valleys along the Mediterranean coast from Málaga to Almería and occasionally as far north as Castellón.

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During Islamic times, sugar was a luxury product, used extensively in pharmacology and medicine and as a significant component of cuisine. Muslim physicians, following Galen’s approach, used it to balance the four humors. Honey and sugar, usually dissolved in water, were used to treat disorders of the respiratory, urinary, and digestive systems. A 15th-century Egyptian allegorical tale showed the personification of sugar leaving the ranks of the army of medicine and joining the army of the foods, reflecting the increasing availability of cane sugar. Sweets, including candy and sweet baked goods and other confections, were popular throughout the Muslim world. Equally important was the common use of sugar, along with fruits and other sweeteners, in meat dishes and vegetable recipes throughout medieval Christian as well as Islamic lands. In modern times the cuisine of Europe has tended to shed such recipes and to confine sweetened foods to the dessert course, whereas in North Africa main courses of meats and vegetables sweetened with sugar and fruits have remained popular.

Egyptian sugar production prospered in the 13th and 14th centuries, with sugar exported to the commercial centers of Italy, France, and Spain. Yet at the same time, the sugar industry in the Near East began to fall victim to the same forces that were causing an overall decline in the economy of the Islamic world, including deforestation and the Christian advance in maritime power and trade. Sugar factories began to close around the middle of the 14th century, and that process accelerated in the 15th. Cairo had 66 sugar mills in 1325; by the first years of the next century, nearly half had been abandoned.

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by | 9 August 2024 · 6:20 am

Europe’s Oldest Overseas Colonies

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 7-8:

Because of this long history of colonial domination, the Caribbean is rightly considered the oldest theater of overseas European expansion. The extended duration of the region’s colonial experiences and the depth of the colonial imprint on its society and culture dwarf those forged in African or Asian colonies during the age of high imperialism (ca. 1850–1914). Whereas in those latter regions, with very few exceptions, colonial arrangements lasted less than a century, in the Caribbean most societies were built from scratch at least 350 years ago (and some more than 500 years ago), all within strictures dictated by a mercantile, colonial capitalism. Put in even starker terms, except for Haiti, which violently overthrew French colonial rule after little more than a century, all of the Caribbean nations that gained independence in the course of the 19th or 20th centuries had endured at least three centuries of colonial domination.

Moreover, few other colonial settings were as dramatically affected by European agency—demographically, politically, and culturally—as the insular Caribbean. The drama of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca states notwithstanding, the success of Iberian colonialism on the American mainland rested heavily on the mobilization of large indigenous populations, often with the significant collaboration of subjugated native elites. Though mainland Spanish America received its share of European settlers and African slaves, Amerindians (and, increasingly, mestizos) predominated demographically throughout the colonial era. Likewise, Europeans rarely managed to gain more than coastal footholds in Asia until the late 18th century, and in Africa not until the second half of the 19th.

In the Caribbean, however, the demographic collapse of the indigenous population led to the near-complete repopulation of the islands by enslaved Africans transported to the region as a rightless and degraded workforce for emerging plantation enterprises, which increasingly provided the raison d’être for colonies in which sugar, coffee, tobacco, indigo, cocoa, or other tropical staples shaped the course of political and economic development. To be sure, communities of Native Caribbean descent persist today in Dominica, St. Vincent, and other islands, and in Puerto Rico and its diaspora a neo-Taino movement that aims to attain federal recognition has recently taken hold. Likewise, as Aisha Khan points out in chapter 27, the size of populations locally identified as “white” (or “Asian”) varies greatly from island to island. Yet there is no question that the Caribbean region as a whole is demographically the most highly “Africanized” part of the New World.

Contemporary historians of the transatlantic slave trade tend to agree that the Antilles absorbed about 45% of the upwards of 10 million enslaved Africans who survived the violence of capture in Africa and the ordeal of the Middle Passage (Eltis 2001). But the sheer extent of the moral catastrophe entailed in the transplantation of Africans to the Caribbean becomes clearer in comparative terms. The French Windward Islands (Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Lucia, and Grenada), whose combined landmass of 1,483 square miles is about equal to that of the state of Rhode Island, imported more than 300,000 slaves between the early 17th century and the ending of the trade in the mid-19th century, while the entire British mainland of North America imported some 389,000 over a comparable period. Even more dramatically, French Saint-Domingue, slightly larger than Maryland, is estimated to have received upwards of 770,000 enslaved Africans between its formal cession to France in 1697 and the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791, a vast majority of them arriving in the decades immediately preceding this event—yet no more than 450,000 of them were still alive when the revolution put a decisive end to slave importation into the colony. Still, the French islands were far from exceptional in this regard. British Jamaica imported more than a million enslaved Africans between 1655 and 1807, yet released a mere 310,000 of them and their descendants into freedom once emancipation arrived in the 1830s.

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by | 8 August 2024 · 5:51 am

Caribbean Population & Demographics

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 34-35:

The size of the region’s indigenous population at the time of European contact is not known. Spanish chroniclers estimated the population at 1 million, but modern anthropologists argue that the numbers were much higher, between 6 and 12 million, with large populations on Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica. Tragically, these peoples and their societies were decimated within a few decades of contact, by Old World diseases, slave labor, emigration, and suicide. However, recent mitochondrial DNA studies of present populations have revealed a high Native American contribution, which suggests extensive sexual encounters between Spanish men and native women during the conquest period. Several thousand descendants of the Caribs still live on the island of Dominica, while “Black Caribs,” people of mixed Carib, African, and Taino descent, live in northern St. Vincent. The mountainous volcanic island of St. Vincent was so successfully defended by the Caribs that it was one of the last of the Lesser Antilles to be colonized. After their defeat by the British, several thousand Black Caribs were deported in 1797 to an island off the coast of Honduras. Their descendants eventually settled on the Caribbean coast of Central America between Belize and Nicaragua, where they created a distinctive Garifuna culture.

The insular nature of the Caribbean region is significant because islands provided opportunities for colonial powers to establish defensible colonies during periods of intense European rivalry and warfare. Neighboring islands belonging to different colonial powers had little contact with each other, so despite their common histories, islands acquired some of the distinctive cultural traits of their colonists’ mother countries, especially with respect to language and styles of governance—a legacy that has contributed to the cultural diversity of the region today.

Caribbean populations increased significantly under slavery, when more than four million people were brought from Africa, dramatically shaping the future ethnic composition of the population. A second important wave of immigration took place in the decades after emancipation, when large numbers of indentured laborers were brought from Asia to alleviate labor shortages on the plantations. Between 1835 and 1917, almost 700,000 workers arrived from British India and another 150,000 came from China, primarily into Trinidad and British Guiana, while approximately 50,000 from the Dutch East Indies (mainly Java) settled in Suriname. After completing their indentured service, many laborers stayed on, encouraged by land grants and prospects for economic advancement, further enriching the cultural diversity of Caribbean societies. Today, people of East Indian descent form the largest ethnic group in Trinidad and Guyana (formerly British Guiana). Tens of thousands of Western Europeans (mostly Spaniards) also arrived in the Hispanophone Caribbean during the 19th and 20th centuries.

By 1960 the Caribbean population had reached 17 million, and it has since more than doubled to 40 million. Cuba, the largest island, has 11 million people, and the Greater Antilles together account for more than 90% of the region’s total. In terms of language groupings, about 64% of the people live in the Spanish-speaking countries (Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico) and 22% live in French-speaking territories (mainly Haiti). Only about 6 million people live in English-speaking countries, two-thirds of whom live in either Jamaica (2.7 million) or Trinidad and Tobago (1.4 million). Islands such as Antigua, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and Grenada have populations between 100,000 and 200,000, while St. Kitts and Nevis has only 40,000.

Not surprisingly, population densities are high by international standards, with an average of 66 people per square mile. However, as with other demographic statistics, there is considerable variability from island to island. The highest population densities are in Barbados (1,663 per square mile), Aruba (1,479), and Puerto Rico (1,115), while the lowest are in the Bahamas (60) and the Turks and Caicos Islands (127). The population densities are even lower in continental French Guiana (3), Suriname (7), and Guyana (10) because their populations are geographically concentrated in the lowland coastal areas, while the interior rainforests and savannas are relatively unpopulated.

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