Sugar, Slavery and the Caribbeans
All of the Caribbean islands became integrated into the tropical plantation systems during the 18th century. Sugar became almost the only crop grown on the British islands and although the French islands had a more diverse economy, sugar was their main crop as well. The only islands that were not directly impacted were ones like the Bahamas as the islands were unsuited for sugar cropping, others like the Caracas islands were used as outposts for trade, still others like the Dutch Leewards served as free ports for selling and buying slaves to the British and French islands.
British traders began to bring in more slaves and Jamaica quickly became a colony of large sugar estates, 18,000 whites supervised 180,000 black slaves. Slaves were expensive to transport, however even more expensive when half died of disease while being transported across the Atlantic. As many as 8 million Africans many have died to bring only 4 million to the Caribbean islands. The plantation economies were wholly devoted to sugar produced by black slaves, as a result the sugar exports produced larger and larger plantations.
Saint-Domingue cane estates made them the most valuable colony in the world in 1789. Cane estates all along the coastal plains produced 40 percent of the world’s sugar. The value and great wealth in the sugar islands that caused wars, some of which destroyed merchant vessels, which disrupted the trade industry. With the collapse of the British and French sugar islands, Cuba became the dominant sugar producer from the 1830s through the 1960s. Cuba as a case history of sugar production offers the best example of the evolution of plantation society in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as it passed through a series of essentially revolutionary economic changes. For example, Cubans resented an economic policy that enriched Spain at the expense of Cuba.
War, emancipation, modernization, industrial revolution, import and export restrictions, agricultural exploitation, an over-supply of sugar and the European need for sweets over several centuries all brought an end to the Caribbean sugar plantation system or more commonly known to some as the sugar islands.
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