CARIBBEAN HISTORY

SBA

Name of teacher: Miss Duncan Brown

Name: Ryhanna Linton

Class: 11B

Date: September 20, 2021

School: Cambridge High School

Centre:

School: Cambridge High Schoo

Candidate:

Territory: Jamaica

Year Of Examination: 2021

Research Question: To what extent is it true to say that the enslaved in the British
Caribbean in the 18th century performed various methods of resistance against
the slave system.

Between 1662 and 1807 Britain shipped 3.1 million Africans across the Atlantic Ocean in
the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Africans were forcibly brought to British owned colonies in
the Caribbean and sold as slaves to work on plantations. Those engaged in the trade were
driven by the huge financial gain to be made, both in the Caribbean and at home in Britain.

Enslaved people constantly rebelled against slavery right up until emancipation in 1834.

Most spectacular were the slave revolts during the 18th and 19th centuries, including:
Tack's rebellion in 1760s Jamaica, the Haitian Revolution (1789), Felon's 1790s revolution in
Grenada, the 1816 Barbados slave revolt led by Bussan, and the major 1831 slave revolt in
Jamaica led by Sam Sharpe. Also voices of dissent began emerging in Britain, highlighting
the poor conditions of enslaved people. Whilst the Abolition movement was growing, so
was the opposition by those with financial interests in the Caribbean.

The British slave trade officially ended in 1807, making the buying and selling of slaves from
Africa illegal; however, slavery itself had not ended. It was not until 1 August 1834 that
slavery ended in the British Caribbean following legislation passed the previous year. This
was followed by a period of apprenticeship with freedom coming in 1838.

Even after the end of slavery and apprenticeship the Caribbean was not totally free. Former
enslaved people received no compensation and had limited representation in
the legislatures. Indentured labor from India and China was introduced after slavery.
This system resulted in much abuse and was not abolished until the early part of the 20th
century. After indenture, Indians and Africans struggled to own land and create their own
communities.

The history of the British Caribbean is explored in this exhibition through government
documents, photographs and maps dating from the 17th century to the 1920s and
discovered during a cataloguing project at The National Archives of the United Kingdom.
 Section A

Indigenous People and the Europeans

North America in the 1500s. Before that time, the continent was an unknown place
to them. These adventurers saw it as an entirely new land, with animals and plants
to discover. They also met new people in this exciting New World—people with
fascinating lifeways that the Europeans had never seen and languages they had
never heard. This New World for Europeans was actually a very old world for the
various people they met in North America. Today we call those people American
Indians.

Archaeologists tell us that American Indians may have been on the North American
continent for fifty thousand years. They were the first Americans, and they were
great explorers, too. They didn't come to this continent all at once. It is thought that
these ancient adventurers arrived at different times, over several thousands of
years. They journeyed from Asia on foot or by boat. Their explorations took them
through icy landscapes and along the coastlines. Eventually these earliest American
explorers spread out over the entire continent.
 Caribbean Economy and Slavery

The sugar revolutions were both cause and consequence of the demographic
revolution. Sugar production required a greater labor supply than was available
through the importation of European servants and irregularly supplied African slaves.
At first the Dutch supplied the slaves, as well as the credit, capital, technological
expertise, and marketing arrangements. After the restoration of the English monarch
following the Commonwealth (1642-60), the King and other members of the royal
family invested in the Company of Royal Adventurers, chartered in 1663, to pursue
of the lucrative African slave trade. That company was succeeded by the Royal Africa
Company in 1672, but the supply still failed to meet the demand, and all types of
private traders entered the transatlantic commerce.

Between 1518 and 1870, the transatlantic slave trade supplied the greatest proportion
of the Caribbean population. As sugarcane cultivation increased and spread from
island to island--and to the neighboring mainland as well--more Africans were
brought to replace those who died rapidly and easily under the rigorous demands of
labor on the plantations, in the sugar factories, and in the mines. Acquiring and
transporting Africans to the New World became a big and extremely lucrative
business. From a modest trickle in the early sixteenth century, the trade increased to
an annual import rate of about 2,000 in 1600, 13,000 in 1700, and 55,000 in 1810.
Between 1811 and 1870, about 32,000 slaves per year were imported. As with all
trade, the operation fluctuated widely, affected by regular market factors of supply
and demand as well as the irregular and often unexpected interruptions of
international war.

The eighteenth century represented the apogee of the system, and before the century
had ended, the signs of its demise were clear. About 60 percent of all the Africans
who arrived as slaves in the New World came between 1700 and 1810, the time
period during which Jamaica, Barbados, and the Leeward Islands peaked as sugar
producers. Antislavery societies sprang up in Britain and France, using the secular,
rationalist arguments of the Enlightenment--the intellectual movement centered in
France in the eighteenth century- -to challenge the moral and legal basis for slavery. A
significant moral victory was achieved when the British Chief Justice, Lord
Mansfield, ruled in 1772 that slavery was illegal in Britain, thereby freeing about
15,000 slaves who had accompanied their masters there--and abruptly terminating the
practice of black slaves ostentatiously escorting their masters about the kingdom. In
the British Parliament, antislavery voices grew stronger until eventually a bill to
abolish the slave trade passed both houses in 1807. The British, being the major
carriers of slaves and having abolished the trade themselves, energetically set about
discouraging other states from continuing. The abolition of the slave trade was a blow
from which the slave system in the Caribbean could not recover.
 Resistance & Revolt

Slave resistance began in British North America almost as soon as the first slaves arrived in
the Chesapeake in the early seventeenth century. As one scholar has put it, “slaves
‘naturally’ resisted their enslavement because slavery was fundamentally unnatural.”1 Forms
varied, but the common denominator in all acts of resistance was an attempt to claim some
measure of freedom against an institution that defined people fundamentally as property.
Perhaps the most common forms of resistance were those that took place in the work
environment. After all, slavery was ultimately about coerced labor, and the enslaved
struggled daily to define the terms of their work. Over the years, customary rights emerged
in most fields of production. These customs dictated work routines, distribution of rations,
general rules of comportment, and so on. If slave masters increased workloads, provided
meager rations, or punished too severely, slaves registered their displeasure by slowing
work, feigning illness, breaking tools, or sabotaging production. These everyday forms of
resistance vexed slave masters, but there was little they could do to stop them without
risking more widespread breaks in production. In this way, the enslaved often negotiated
the basic terms of their daily routines. Of course, masters also stood to benefit from these
negotiations, as contented slaves worked harder, increasing output and efficiency.
 Section B

Metropolitan Movement Towards Emancipation

Slavery and the slave trade were always controversial practices. While
nearly all societies in the Atlantic world accepted slavery and unfreedom,
the institution always faced some opposition. Even as early as the sixteenth
century, some individuals (like Bartolomé de las Casas, for example) argued
against enslavement on moral grounds. As slavery grew in economic and
political significance, imperial and colonial powers faced powerful,
organized pressure to support and maintain slavery. As a consequence, the
different movements that advocated for the end of slavery and the end of
the slave trade had to mobilize a variety of moral, legal, social, and
political resources to be successful.
Emancipation movements generally evolved along two different lines:
one opposing the slave trade and another opposing slavery. Several reasons
existed for this separation. Some activists did not contest the legal basis of
slavery; rather, they argued that the transatlantic slave trade was brutal
and murderous and should be ended. Other abolitionists supported the end
of slavery (and the slave trade) entirely, promoting plans for either gradual
or immediate emancipation.

Adjustments to Emancipation
 INTRODUCTION This project is based on the topic Adjustments
to Emancipation from 1838 – 1876. It focuses on the Coming of the
Chinese, Europeans, Indians and Africans into the Caribbean.
Information is provided about their reasons for migration, working
conditions and their effects on the Caribbean. Slavery was the initial
labor system used by Europeans on their plantations in the Caribbean. It
was implemented in the 1600s, the Europeans forcefully took people
from the African continent to the Caribbean on various trips.