Slave Colonies of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Slave Colonies of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

In Barbados and Jamaica (the sugar islands) sugar was a major crop. The owners of these sugar plantations were badly in need of laborers to work for them year round, and because the natives died off so speedily, they needed to bring in someone to do the grueling tasks for them. They tried to use indentured servants, but this was extremely difficult because sugar is a year round, demanding sort of crop and nobody sought after work on those plantations. Any person who had any other kind of alternative would choose to go anywhere else.

Eventually they started importing slaves because they were not only cheaper, but easier to replace when they died, as most people who came to these islands did. By 1650, there were approximately 20,000 black slaves in Barbados; and by 1700, nearly as many as 45,000 black slaves in Jamaica (the prevalent sugar producer at this point in time). It was in these West Indian Islands that slavery not only got started for the English, but grew the fastest.

South Carolina began as a colony of Barbados. They came there to cultivate crops such as rice and indigo. These settlers brought their slavery practices with them. This idea of growing rice worked well due to the fact that the slaves had experience prior to this experience working with it, and they were just in a good area for growing such a crop. By 1770, black people were nearly eighty percent of the population in South Carolina and the colony of Georgia.

Tobacco production in the Chesapeake was growing due to an enormous demand for the product in England. The demand for tobacco in England had grown during the eighteenth century over ten times what it had been originally. With so mu...

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...many slave merchants and shipping services. These port cities became exceedingly important in expanding the trade network between the southern plantations and the Atlantic markets. This is how slavery in the south contributed indirectly to the growth and economic status of the northern colonies. Slaves were first shipped to Pennsylvania where nearly everyone who was able to do so bought one. In 1760, in Newport, Rhode Island, 20 percent of the population consisted of black people as a direct result of the slave trade from that port. By 1770 black people were about 10 percent of the population in New York and New Jersey.

By the end of the eighteenth century nearly half a million slaves had been sold into slavery. Without them the colonies would not have been as successful as they were. America had become a successful asset, unlike anything England had seen before.