The various manifestations of coerced labour between the opening up of the Atlantic world and the formal creation of Haiti.

The first account of Caribbean slavery to draw from the plantation records of several different sugar colonies, this book examines the attempts made by British West Indian planters to improve the treatment of their slaves, partly in response to the anti-slavery movement. Ward argues that although the measures taken did raise the standard of living and productive efficiency of plantation slaves, "amelioration" contained serious weaknesses that made it ultimately ineffective as a means of defending the institution of slavery. Though focused on the British West Indies, the book's main theme--the potential for reform and economic development in slave-based societies--will hold wider significance for a variety of economic and social historians.

In his influential and widely debated Capitalism and Slavery, Eric Williams examined the relation of capitalism and slavery in the British West Indies. Binding an economic view of history with strong moral argument, his study of the role of slavery in financing the Industrial Revolution refuted traditional ideas of economic and moral progress and firmly established the centrality of the African slave trade in European economic development. He also showed that mature industrial capitalism in turn helped destroy the slave system. Establishing the exploitation of commercial capitalism and its link to racial attitudes, Williams employed a historicist vision that has set the tone for an entire field. Williams’s profound critique became the foundation for studies of imperialism and economic development and has been widely debated since the book’s initial publication in 1944. The Economic Aspect of the Abolition of the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery now makes available in book form for the first time his dissertation, on which Capitalism and Slavery was based. The significant differences between his two works allow us to rethink questions that were considered resolved and to develop fresh problems and hypotheses. It offers the possibility of a much deeper reconsideration of issues that have lost none of their urgency—indeed, whose importance has increased.

Prince — a slave in the British colonies — vividly recalls her life in the West Indies, her rebellion against physical and psychological degradation, and her eventual escape in 1828 in England.

A groundbreaking study of slavery and power in the British Caribbean that foregrounds the struggle for survival Atlantic slave societies were notorious deathtraps. In Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean, Randy M. Browne looks past the familiar numbers of life and death and into a human drama in which enslaved Africans and their descendants struggled to survive against their enslavers, their environment, and sometimes one another. Grounded in the nineteenth-century British colony of Berbice, one of the Atlantic world's best-documented slave societies and the last frontier of slavery in the British Caribbean, Browne argues that the central problem for most enslaved people was not how to resist or escape slavery but simply how to stay alive. Guided by the voices of hundreds of enslaved people preserved in an extraordinary set of legal records, Browne reveals a world of Caribbean slavery that is both brutal and breathtakingly intimate. Field laborers invoked abolitionist-inspired legal reforms to protest brutal floggings, spiritual healers conducted secretive nighttime rituals, anxious drivers weighed the competing pressures of managers and the condition of their fellow slaves in the fields, and women fought back against abusive masters and husbands. Browne shows that at the core of enslaved people's complicated relationships with their enslavers and one another was the struggle to live in a world of death. Provocative and unflinching, Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean reorients the study of Atlantic slavery by revealing how differently enslaved people's social relationships, cultural practices, and political strategies appear when seen in the light of their unrelenting struggle to survive.

"Impressive. . . . Some of the book's most salient contributions are the conclusions about the origins of the slaves, the relative importance of the Caribbean trade vis-a-vis the African trade, comparisons between Cuba and Puerto Rico, and the inner workings of the slave trade. In all these areas the author offers fresh perspectives based on new materials."--Luis Martinez-Fernandez, Rutgers University Drawing on archival sources from six countries, Joseph Dorsey examines the role of Puerto Rico in slave acquisitions after the traffic in slaves was outlawed. He delineates the differences between Puerto Rican and non-Puerto Rican traffic, from procurement in West Africa to influx into the Caribbean, and he scrutinizes the tactics--including inter-Caribbean traffic and conflation of African and Creole identities--by which Puerto Rican interest groups avoided abolitionist scrutiny. He also identifies the extent to which Spain supported these operations. Dorsey reconstructs the slave trade in Puerto Rico, devoting special attention to the maritime logistics of slave acquisitions--in particular the West African corridors and the nuances of inter-Caribbean assistance. He examines the evidence for the true origins of these slave populations and considers forces beyond European and American politics that influenced the flow of slaves. He explains the complex conditions of the Upper Guinea coast and illustrates the impact of social, political, and economic forces endemic to West African affairs on the Puerto Rican slave market. Dorsey's meticulous pursuit of evidence unearths the routes and institutions that brought thousands of slaves from West Africa into the eastern Caribbean, turning them into "creoles" in official records. In a radical departure from present Puerto Rican historiography, he demonstrates that Puerto Rico was an active participant in the illegal slave traffic and exerted a great deal of control over numerous components of the acquisition process, without exclusive dependence on the larger slave-trading polities such as Cuba and Brazil. Joseph C. Dorsey is associate professor of history and African-American studies at Purdue University.

Book describes the brutal Black slave society and plantation system of Barbados and explains how this slave chattel model was perfected by the British and exported to Jamaica and South Carolina for profit. There is special emphasis on the role of the concept of white supremacy in shaping social structure and economic relations that allowed slavery to continue. The book concludes with information on how slavery was finally outlawed in Barbados, in spite of white resistance.

The proceedings of a conference on Caribbean slavery and British capitalism are recorded in this volume. Convened in 1984, the conference considered the scholarship of Eric Williams & his legacy in this field of historical research.

In the late 1630s, lured by the promise of the New World, Andrea Stuart’s earliest known maternal ancestor, George Ashby, set sail from England to settle in Barbados. He fell into the life of a sugar plantation owner by mere chance, but by the time he harvested his first crop, a revolution was fully under way: the farming of sugar cane, and the swiftly increasing demands for sugar worldwide, would not only lift George Ashby from abject poverty and shape the lives of his descendants, but it would also bind together ambitious white entrepreneurs and enslaved black workers in a strangling embrace. Stuart uses her own family story—from the seventeenth century through the present—as the pivot for this epic tale of migration, settlement, survival, slavery and the making of the Americas. As it grew, the sugar trade enriched Europe as never before, financing the Industrial Revolution and fuelling the Enlightenment. And, as well, it became the basis of many economies in South America, played an important part in the evolution of the United States as a world power and transformed the Caribbean into an archipelago of riches. But this sweet and hugely profitable trade—“white gold,” as it was known—had profoundly less palatable consequences in its precipitation of the enslavement of Africans to work the fields on the islands and, ultimately, throughout the American continents. Interspersing the tectonic shifts of colonial history with her family’s experience, Stuart explores the interconnected themes of settlement, sugar and slavery with extraordinary subtlety and sensitivity. In examining how these forces shaped her own family—its genealogy, intimate relationships, circumstances of birth, varying hues of skin—she illuminates how her family, among millions of others like it, in turn transformed the society in which they lived, and how that interchange continues to this day. Shifting between personal and global history, Stuart gives us a deepened understanding of the connections between continents, between black and white, between men and women, between the free and the enslaved. It is a story brought to life with riveting and unparalleled immediacy, a story of fundamental importance to the making of our world.