New Estimates of Exports from Barbados and Jamaica, 1665-1701

Abstract

T SHE rough outline of the early development of the English Caribbean is well known. By any measure-exports, population density, capacity to resist foreign aggression-Barbados was the foremost English possession throughout the seventeenth century. It became so on the basis first of tobacco production and, after i640, sugar. At some point during or immediately following the switch to sugar, its plantation labor supply shifted from indentured servants arriving mainly from England to slaves arriving exclusively from Africa. Barbados was not the first English slave colony-slaves composed over half the population of Providence Island in the later i630sbut it was certainly the most productive in the seventeenth century.1 Jamaica, by contrast, was settled later and gradually became a major sugar producer after i670, So gradually, in fact, that by 1700 it was the Leeward Islands, not Jamaica, that first threatened Barbados's status as the leading sugar producer of the English Americas.2 These and related findings have depended heavily on estimates of the volume of sugar exports that several historians have developed.3 Major gaps exist prior to i697, but even where complete, such estimates support only broad brushwork on the canvas of early colonial development, despite imaginative attempts to combine such evidence with slaveholding patterns as revealed in census data and the abundant comments of contemporary observers.4