Unsurprisingly, mortality rates during the ‘middle passage’ stood at 9–18%.28 Yet Britain was not the pioneer in this field – the Portuguese had been using African slaves, mainly shipped over from Congo and Angola, on their Brazilian plantations since the mid-1500s – but the British, French and Spanish industrialization of sugar production transformed the terms of trade. Indentured white servants, Carib Indians or the Irish prisoners of war who Cromwell exported to the West Indies in the 1650s just did not have the physical strength required for the work, heat and humidity of plantation life. The Irish labourers also had a history of rebellion, which put off the planters. As Vincent Harlow put it in his History of Barbados (1926): ‘The planters discovered that labour of Negro slaves, accustomed as they were to intense heat and sudden cold, was more efficient … consequently the British labourer … gave place to the Negro. It was the triumph of geographical conditions.’29
For it was a hellish existence of often inhuman demands: the trench-digging, planting and slashing of the sugar cane under the broiling, semi-tropical sun in humid marshland; the transporting of huge cane bundles to the windmills for the crushing between the rollers; the refining in the boiler house amidst scalding heat (often at night to get through the harvest); then the barrelling and delivery. ‘The Devil was in the Englishman,’ was one slave saying, ‘that he makes every thing work; he makes the Negro work, the Horse work, the Ass work, the Wood work, the Water work, and the Windework.’ So, the business model worked much better with imported slaves, handled by the Crown-appointed slavers of the Royal African Company with its Caribbean headquarters in Bridgetown, and paid for with good credit lines from London and Amsterdam. In the mid-1640s, at the outset of sugar production in Barbados, the island housed a little more than 5,600 slaves. By 1680 that had become 38,000 and, with 1,300 arrivals a year, it reached 54,000 by 1700. For some, Bridgetown was a final destination, but for tens of thousands more African slaves it was a transit point for the wider West Indies, as the first port of call after the middle passage. Between 1708 and 1725 Bridgetown customs records reveal 321 ships anchoring in Carlisle Bay carrying 52,005 slaves. Equiano remembered landfall well.
We came in sight of the island of Barbados, at which the whites on board gave a great shout, and made many signs of joy to us. We did not know what to think of this; but as the vessel drew nearer we plainly saw the harbour, and other ships of different kinds and sizes; and we soon anchored amongst them off Bridge Town. Many merchants and planters now came on board, though it was in the evening. They put us in separate parcels, and examined us attentively. They also made us jump, and pointed to land, signifying we were to go there.30
So began the Bridgetown slave auction:
On a signal given, (as the beat of a drum), the buyers rush at once into the yard where the slaves are confined, and make choice of that parcel they like best. The noise and clamour with which this is attended, and the eagerness visible in the countenance of the buyers, serve not a little to increase the apprehension of the terrified Africans.31
John Oldmixon was present at one such sale. ‘The Slaves are purchas’d by Lots, out of the Guinea Ships. They are all view’d stark naked, and the strongest and handsomest bear the best Prizes. They are allow’d to have two or three Wives, that they may encrease the Planter’s Stock by Multiplication.’32 The process naturally had its apologists. ‘The sales, which formerly took place on board the ship, are now (most properly) conducted on shore, and care is taken that no cruel separation of relations should take place,’ was how one pro-slavery polemicist described the auction. ‘To behold a number of human beings, naked, captive, exiled and exposed for sale, must, at first sight, affect the mind with melancholy reflections; but the victims themselves seem to be hardly conscious of their situation … In the market they display few indications of being deeply affected with their fate.’33 Equiano recorded it differently. ‘In this manner, without scruple, are relations and friends separated, most of them never to see each other again. I remember in the vessel in which I was brought over, in the men’s apartment, there were several brothers, who, in the sale, were sold in different lots; and it was very moving on this occasion to see and hear their cries at parting.’34
The slaves, now the private property of their masters, were taken from Bridgetown out to the sugar plantations. It was here, amid the cane fields and boiling rooms, that the most appalling crimes and torture were committed.
There was no ingenuity that fear or a depraved imagination could devise which was not employed to break their [the slaves’] spirit and satisfy the lusts and resentment of their owners and guardians – irons on the hands and feet, blocks of wood that the slaves had to drag behind them wherever they went, the tin-plate mask designed to prevent the slaves eating the sugar-cane, the iron collar. Whipping was interrupted in order to pass a piece of hot wood on the buttocks of the victim; salt, pepper, citron, cinders, aloes, and hot ashes were poured on the bleeding wounds. Mutilations were common, limbs, ears, and sometimes the private parts, to deprive them of the pleasures which they could indulge in without expense. Their masters poured burning wax on their arms and hands and shoulders, emptied the boiling cane sugar over their heads, burned them alive, roasted them on slow fires, filled them with gunpowder and blew them up with a match.35
These were the plantation conditions in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, as described by C. L. R. James in his classic history of resistance The Black Jacobins. As abolitionist William Dickson’s harrowing accounts of slaves run through on spits and human mutilations attested, the British were no better. On the plantations, the lash, iron collar and straitjacket were regular remedies for poor behaviour. ‘The English do not look after their slaves well,’ noted Père Labat in Barbados.
The overseers get every ounce of work out of them, beat them without mercy for the least fault, and appear to care far less for the life of a negro than for a horse … The clergymen do not instruct the slaves or baptize them, and the negroes are regarded more like the beasts to whom all license is permitted so long as they do their work properly.
If they ever tried to resist their enslavement, the planters’ savagery knew no bounds. ‘The slaves who are captured are sent to prison and condemned to be passed through a cane mill, or be burnt alive, or be put into iron cages that prevent any movement and in which they are hung up to branches of trees and left to die of hunger and despair.’36
And when the slaves were no longer fit enough to work the plantations, they were discarded like dogs. ‘In Barbadoes, sir, I am sorry to say, there are some owners, who, when their slaves become incapable of labour, from age, ill usage, or disease, especially leprosy; inhumanely expose them to every extreme of wretchedness, by turning them out to shift for themselves,’ Dickson wrote. ‘The poor creatures generally crawl to Bridge-town … and they are often to be seen in the streets, in the very last stage of human misery, naked, famished, diseased and forlorn.’37
‘Not a Span hardly uncultivated with Sugar-Canes’. Map from A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, by Richard Ligon (1657).
Such savagery kept up the need for imports. Records from one Barbadian plantation in the mid-eighteenth century show only one slave birth for every six slave deaths; and one birth a year for each hundred slaves.38 Typically, the plantation owners had to replace their workforce at a rate of 2–5 per cent per annum to keep up with mortality levels. John Oldmixon explained this was because:
The Negroes are generally false and treacherous … They are apt to swell with a good Opinion of themselves, on the least occasion for it, to be very stubborn, are sullen and cruel, and their Masters are almost under a fatal Necessity to treat them inhumanely, or they would be ungovernable … when we consider how lazy they are apt to be, and how careless, and that the Fortune of their Masters depends almost entirely on their Care and Labour, one can’t blame the Overseers, for punishing the Idle and Remiss severely.39
Not least when such extraordinary wealth was at
stake.
SO MANY PORTS, HARBOURS, CITTYES, HAVENS
Karl Marx called it ‘primitive accumulation’ – the initial influx of capital from the colonies which allowed the nations of Western Europe to kick-start the industrial revolution. ‘The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production,’ as he put it in Das Kapital. And this accumulation of funds was essential for the development of industrial capitalism in the eighteenth century. ‘The colonial system ripened, like a hot-house, trade and navigation,’ he wrote. ‘The colonies secured a market for the budding manufactures and, through the monopoly of the market, an increased accumulation. The treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder, floated back to the mother country and were turned into capital.’40 Daniel Defoe, with characteristic succinctness, spelt out the relationship:
I must confess I do not know any thing in Trade that could befal us, I mean that was ever probable to befal us, that could be so great a Blow to Trade in general, as the Ruin of the African Trade in particular; and those who know how far our Plantation Trade is Blended and Interwoven with the Trade to Africa, and that they can no more be parted than the Child and the Nurse, need have no time spent to convince them of this; The Case is as plain as Cause and Consequence: Mark the Climax. No African Trade, no Negroes; no Negroes, no Sugars, Gingers, Indicos [indigo] etc.; no Sugars, etc. no Islands; no Islands, no Continent; no Continent, no trade.41
This was the interpretation which Eric Williams developed more fully in Capitalism and Slavery (1944), where he traced how profits from the slave trade ‘fertilized the entire productive system’ of Great Britain. The Welsh slate industry, Manchester textile production, Glaswegian, Bristol and Liverpool banking, ship-building and heavy engineering were all endowed by foreign funds drawn from the plantation system. ‘It was the capital accumulation from the West Indies trade that financed James Watt and the steam engine,’ writes Williams of the most celebrated of industrial innovations.42 In 1741, the value of Barbadian exports alone to England (of which the vast majority was constituted by sugar) was £298,000. By 1763, the total value of Caribbean exports to England had risen to near £2 million. What was more, sugar had a multiplier effect, increasing domestic land values – as it was consumed with domestic fruits – and growing import duties on cocoa, tea and coffee.43
Since the publication of Capitalism and Slavery, many historians have sought to downplay such Marxist interpretations, suggesting that funds from the West Indies were falling by the late eighteenth century and that the industrial revolution was far more dependent upon new energy sources, systems of innovation, or nonconformist finance. Yet more recent scholarship has reasserted just how closely profits from advanced sugar production, as well as captive markets in the colonies, assisted the industrialization process. The slave trade provided important routes for British industry – notably textiles – to develop their competitive strengths in expanding markets. In 1772, 72 per cent of Yorkshire woollens and 90 per cent of broadcloth, and about 40 per cent of all English copper and brass was going abroad chiefly to Africa and the New World.44 The Atlantic trade was the dynamo for British industrial development. Robin Blackburn has calculated that profits derived from the triangular trade could have furnished anything from 20.9 per cent to 55 per cent of Britain’s gross fixed capital formation in 1770, crucially underpinning the prosperity of the UK economy as a whole and easing the financial or credit problems of technically advanced sectors in particular. It was not only investment in new technologies, but also the vital infrastructure of ports, new docks (most notably in London and Liverpool), canals, harbours and agricultural improvements which were made possible by the colonial tribute pouring in from the West Indies.45
As well as promoting industrial development, the Caribbean plantations funded the enforcement and expansion of Empire. It was a symbiotic process with increased revenue from the West Indies financing the Royal Navy’s expeditions across the Atlantic and Pacific, which in turn secured further imperial possessions. During the rolling conflicts of the mid-eighteenth century, naval officers and colonial merchants worked closely together over victualling, enemy bounties and convoy security. The assistance even extended to the manning of empire, with West Indian merchant sailors being called upon in time of war. The planters’ propagandist Bryan Edwards estimated that in 1787 the British West Indian trade employed 689 ships, totalling 148,176 tons and manned by nearly 14,000 seamen – all potential crewmen for the Royal Navy. When Captain Richard Wyvil, of the 79th Regiment of the British infantry, anchored in Carlisle Bay en route to Martinique, the harbour ‘was so full of shipping [that] it was difficult to steer clear of them. Here lay the East Indiaman belonging to Admiral Sir Hugh Christian’s fleet, with the troops still on board.’
Retaining control of the colonies and their merchant marine was an essential part of any European power’s geo-political strategy. The wars of the eighteenth century saw extensive skirmishes between France, Britain, Holland and Spain centred on the West Indies, with the succeeding peace treaties of Utrecht (1713), Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) and Paris (1763) usually involving the return of whichever wealthy colony had been captured. ‘Whenever the nations of Europe are engaged, from whatever cause, in war with each other, these unhappy countries are constantly made the theatre of its operations,’ noted Bryan Edwards of the West Indies. ‘Thither the combatants repair, as to the arena, to decide their differences.’46 And such were the riches at stake that, at the Treaty of Paris for example, the French were willing to cede most of Canada in order to keep control of sugar-rich Guadeloupe and Martinique.
This military backdrop determined much of the physical infrastructure of Bridgetown – from parade grounds to barracks to hospitals and forts. In 1681 the commission granted to the governor of Barbados gave him the authority ‘to erect, raise and build in the Island … so many fortes, platforms, castles, cittyes, burroughs, townes and fortifications’ as he thought fit to defend the island. Time and again, in the ensuing century of global conflict, the vital guarantor of Barbadian autonomy was the defensive system around the coast of Bridgetown. ‘The Wharfs and Keys are very neat and convenient; and the Forts to the Sea so strong, that there would be no taking it by Force, if they were as well mann’d and furnished with Ammunition as they ought to be,’ was John Oldmixon’s verdict in 1708.
The first of these Forts Westward, is James Fort, near Stewart’s Wharf. ’Tis mounted with 18 Guns … Next to this is Willoughby’s Fort, built on a small Neck of Land, that runs out into the Sea. ’Tis mounted with 12 Guns … Above this Fort, and more within Land, the late Governor, Sir Bevill Granvill, began the Royal Cittadel … This will be the strongest in the whole Island, and stand the Country in above 30000 l. Sterling.47
These were the forts – the remnants of which now encircle the grassy, Garrison Savannah racecourse – which provided a protective cove for the Royal Navy, a home for the 2,700 troops stationed in Barbados and a base from which to launch invasions and counter-attacks into neighbouring Caribbean islands.
Bridgetown’s Charles Fort and James Fort secured that same ‘empire of goods’ that connected the fortunes of Bridgetown and Boston with the colonial metropolis across the Atlantic. For the governor had also been authorized to ‘order and appoint within our said Island … respectively such and so many ports, harbours, cittyes, havens and other places for convenience and security of shipping and for the better loading and unloading of goods and merchandizes’.48 If the rural sugar plantation was the ingenio of the colonial process, then Bridgetown provided the entrepôt – exporting the hinterland’s sugar to Europe, and importing an ever-expanding range of British ‘goods and merchandizes’.
It was in Bridgetown that the structures of an export eco
nomy were developed, where a market for British manufactured goods emerged – the townhouses of the plantation owners bedecking themselves in the same collection of Wedgwood ceramics, Chippendale furniture, linens and soft furnishings as were on display in Boston’s Beacon Hill – and where idealized notions of English society were reflected back into urban life.49 ‘The great value of Barbados to Great Britain is best known from its vast consumption of British and Irish manufactures and commodities,’ was the well-connected Bajan Henry Frere’s judgement in the 1760s. ‘The goods sent from Great Britain are chiefly woolen, linen, Manchester velvets, silk, iron, brass, copper, leather, laces for linen, hats, wigs, shoes, stockings, china, glass, earthen wares, pictures, clocks, watches, jewels, plate, gold and silver lace…’50 It was what one visitor called ‘promoting Trade by a Magnificent way of living’.51 Père Labat was certainly impressed by the levels of Caribbean consumption. ‘The shops and stores are full of everything one could wish to buy, and their goods come from all parts of the world. There are a number of goldsmiths, jewellers, clockmakers and other artisans who drive a thriving trade and appear to be very comfortably off, and the largest business in “America” is carried on in this town.’ For the plantocracy had no hesitation about showing off their wealth. ‘One observes the wealth and good taste of the inhabitants in their furniture, which is very fine, and their silver, of which they have so large a quantity that were this island to be sacked the silver alone would be worth more than the value of several galleons.’52
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