Caribbean Slavery

Caribbean Slavery

Starting in the seventeenth century, the European colonization of the Caribbean changed drastically as exploration gave way to exploitation. As the great wealth that the Caribbean held became more evident to the European colonizers, a rush of profit hunters stormed the area and flooded it with slavery. The massive introduction of slavery as the major form of labor organization in the Caribbean changed social organization radically. The plantation system thrived and expanded through the following years (centuries), and the Caribbean became the focus of American slave centers, "The planters of the Caribbean bought about sixty percent of all the slaves sold to the Americas between 1701 and 1810 (Knight, p112)." Franklin W. Knight approximates that five million African slaves were brought to the Caribbean throughout the slave trading years. The resulting success of the Caribbean sugar economy harvested (no pun intended) even more slavery, and the Caribbean became an almost exclusively two-group society divided by blacks and whites. Those who did not fall into the well-defined groups –free blacks, maroons, buccaneers, and others- were forced to live isolated from normal society.

Arnold Sio addresses the interesting "in-between group" of free blacks in these societies in his article entitled "Marginality and Free Coloured Identity in Caribbean Slave Society". Sio delves into the identity search that the free blacks felt in such situations, and he defines their position simply, "The people of colour were marginal to Caribbean society: neither black nor white, neither African nor European, and neither slave nor free." The assertion that the author makes that these "freedmen" were not free is fundamental in understa...

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...at the blacks enjoyed as a result of this participation, a type of psychological empowerment was attained by blacks that was not experienced by blacks on the other islands of the Caribbean. A certain kind of "re-humanizing" takes place with the endowment of responsibility in which the implications go far beyond employment.

Through the terrible years of Caribbean slavery, horrific crimes against personal rights were violated over and again. In a genocide of sorts, Africans were taken from their homes, and sold into a system which worked them to their deaths. Blacks in the Caribbean who avoided this horrible situation, few though they were, struggled to establish themselves as successful alternative societies due to their few resources. The varying backgrounds of these people made communication difficult, and made the forming of a unified society almost impossible.