American Colonies: The Settling of North America

Located north of South America in the Caribbean, the West Indies became the most profitable of all the English colonies due to one key crop: sugar. This profit, however, came at a huge cost to human life, particularly to African slaves. As Taylor writes, “In a violent and exploitative age of colonial expansion, the West Indies were an especially bloody and ruthless zone” (205).

With Spanish, French, and Dutch attention elsewhere, English immigration to the West Indies exploded in the mid-1660s. The island of Barbados was a prime location: easy to cultivate, well situated, and perfectly suited climatically. As in the Chesapeake, early arrivals were small planters with farms worked by indentured servants, who hoped to live long enough to earn land of their own (207). Already West Indies planters showed an unusual propensity to cruelty, whipping their “white slaves” (207). “Truly,” one colonist observed, “I have seen such cruelty there done to Servants, as I did not think one Christian could have done to another” (208).

In the 1640s sugar was in high demand, and its byproduct, molasses, could be distilled into rum, the primary liquor sold in the British empire (208). But sugar production required physically demanding, round-the-clock work in tropical conditions, and wealthy planters quickly ran into labor issues.