The Organization of the Slave Trade in the English West Indies, 1660-1685

Abstract

B ) Y i66o the man who planted tobacco on a farm was being displaced, rapidly in Barbados and more gradually in the Leeward Islands, by the man who cultivated sugar on a large estate. Contemporary calculations that io,ooo white people quitted Barbados between i645 and i665, and that another 4,000 left between i667 and i67I,1 are probably exaggerated, but the very exaggeration illustrates how plain the process of worming must have been. The fate of the dispossessed cannot be ascertained accurately, since displaced persons, having no official status, have also no official history. Some certainly transferred themselves to Jamaica, where the proclamation of Governor Lord Windsor in I662 had promised freehold of 30-acre farms. Plainly they hoped by so doing to avoid involvement in a sugar-economy, in which it was clear they could never have a place: for did it not take upwards of 400 acres to lay out a plantation, as well as /6,ooo to finance and maintain it?2 But the majority, it would seem, took themselves off to Virginia, Carolina, and the Leeward Islands, where indigo, cotton, and tobacco, all originally small men's crops, might still be raised.3 It was clear, then, that the local supply of white labor was failing. It could still be imported from English and Scottish jails, but that was an expensive process. Experience had taught the sugar-planters that there was a better substitute to hand in the labor of the African Negro, who could comparatively easily be exported to the plantations from the Guinea Coast