Slavery in the British and French Caribbean

• 1. Introduction

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  Slavery in the British and French Caribbean built the modern sugar economy on the bodies of millions of people trafficked from Africa. A single line from Voltaire's Candide captures the whole machinery in one sentence: "C'est à ce prix que vous mangez du sucre en Europe" , "this is what it costs for you to eat your sugar in Europe." Those words were not an abstraction. They described a system in which the death rate among enslaved people outpaced the birth rate by an average of three to four percent every year, and where the average lifespan of a newly arrived slave in Jamaica was expected to be less than two decades.

  How did a handful of island colonies become the engine of an entire Atlantic economy? What made slavery not just profitable but considered patriotic in France? Who resisted, and who finally forced the system to crack? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Sugar, Tobacco, and the First Colonies

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  England colonised St. Kitts in 1623 and Barbados in 1627, then seized Jamaica from Spain in 1655 as part of Oliver Cromwell's Western Design. In each case, white colonists arrived first, worked alongside indentured servants, and only gradually shifted to enslaved African labor as the cash-crop economy expanded.

  The switch to sugar was decisive. By 1640 the English had begun sugar production with assistance from the Dutch, and the crop's explosive popularity in Europe transformed the logic of every plantation. Islands such as Barbados, St. Kitts, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Antigua, and Dominica all made the transition from tobacco to sugar by the end of the seventeenth century, and slavery came with it. Mercantilism, the dominant economic model in Europe at the time, valued cheap exported goods over expensive imports, which meant that keeping labor costs as close to zero as possible was not just convenient , it was structurally required.

  By the middle of the eighteenth century, British Jamaica and French Saint-Domingue , the colony that would eventually become Haiti , had grown into the two largest slave societies in the entire region, rival even to Brazil as destinations for enslaved people. Jamaica at its peak production, between 1740 and 1807, absorbed thirty-three percent of all slaves trafficked to sustain its output.

• 3. The Triangular Machine

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  French merchants in Nantes, La Rochelle, Bordeaux, and Le Havre ran the commerce triangulaire, the French name for the Atlantic circuit of people, goods, and profit that defined the era from 1763 to 1792. Ships left France carrying cheaply made European goods known as "pacotille." They traded those goods with African leaders in exchange for enslaved captives. They then carried the captives to the Caribbean colonies, where the labor of those enslaved people produced sugar, rum, tobacco, coffee, and indigo. Those goods returned to France, completing the loop.

  The French government reinforced the circuit with a policy called "the Exclusif," which required French colonies to sell their exports only to France and buy all their imports from France. This kept profit and capital circulating back to Europe , what economists of the period called "centripetal trade." By 1778 the French slave trade was transporting roughly thirteen thousand Africans per year to the French West Indies and Saint-Domingue alone.

  The price of a slave was not fixed. At the time the Dictionnaire universel was written, an enslaved person in a French colony cost £19. In Africa itself, the price was roughly half that, which is why merchants could buy captives cheaply from African leaders and then mark up the price substantially for buyers in the colonies. Prices in Africa were sometimes quoted in entirely different currencies: 172 cowries, one twenty-fifth of a horse, or 9,000 pounds of sugar. Those African leaders who sold captives received pacotille in exchange, so their profits looped back into European manufacturing rather than staying in Africa.

• 4. Life and Death on the Plantations

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  The Middle Passage , the sea crossing from Africa to the Americas , killed roughly ten percent of every group of trafficked people who endured it. Some researchers estimate that one in every three enslaved people died before even reaching their port of departure in Africa. Those who survived the crossing arrived malnourished, diseased, and disoriented. The majority came from Western Central Africa. They had not been exposed to the particular diseases of the Caribbean, and that vulnerability was lethal.

  On Jamaica from 1829 to 1832, the average mortality rate on sugar plantations was 35.1 deaths per 1,000 enslaved people per year. Some researchers put average infant mortality on plantations at fifty percent or higher. Because deaths so consistently outpaced births, the slave population was not self-sustaining, which is why plantation owners demanded a constant flow of newly trafficked people to replace those who died.

  The diary of Thomas Thistlewood, a Jamaican slaveholder, documents the violence of daily life on these plantations in detail that historians still study today. Overseers used the whip routinely. Workers were given barely adequate food, and during periods of intensive labor they were often deliberately starved. The most dangerous work was cane planting: clearing land, digging holes for the plants, and processing the harvest in conditions that claimed lives at every stage.

  Slaveowners did try to protect what they considered their investment. Newly arrived people were typically housed in walled areas holding between 100 and 200 individuals, kept separate from longer-established enslaved workers to slow the spread of disease. After a period of adjustment, new arrivals were placed under the guidance of more experienced enslaved people to improve survival rates. Simple tasks like planting and building construction were assigned first. Living conditions on non-sugar plantations were considered somewhat better , but only marginally.

• 5. Race, Power, and the Slaving Interest

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  François Bernier published what scholars consider the first modern concept of race in 1684, in a work titled "A New Division of the Earth according to the Different Species or Races of Men Who Inhabit It." His publication came more than a hundred years after enslaved Africans had already been brought to the Americas, which means the intellectual scaffolding of race was constructed to justify a practice already well underway.

  In France, the merchants who ran the slave trade defended their business vigorously when the abolition movement gained momentum in 1789. They described enslaved people as "dirty" and "savage" while many of those same men kept Black mistresses , a phrase that obscures the reality that these were enslaved women compelled into sexual service. The French government actively encouraged the trade by paying a bounty on every captive sold to the colonies, which made participation both profitable and, in the eyes of participants, a form of civic contribution.

  Slaveholding plantation owners in the French colonies were particularly hostile to any suggestion that the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen should apply to Black people. The colony of Saint-Domingue was soon out-producing all of the British islands combined in sugar, which gave the slaveholding class enormous political weight. That weight was not surrendered without a fight.

• 6. The Road to Abolition

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  In 1787, Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and others founded the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in Britain. The society distributed firsthand accounts from people such as Olaudah Equiano, organized consumer boycotts against goods produced by enslaved labor, and sent petitions to Parliament. The moral argument was powerful, but rising costs of production in the British sugar industry had already made the economic case for abolition easier to hear.

  France moved first, if inconsistently. The French Republic abolished slavery in 1794, but Napoleon reversed that decision in 1802 and reinstated the institution. On the 29th of March 1815, Napoleon abolished the slave trade , a decree that did not take legal effect until 1826. France permanently abolished slavery in its colonies of Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, and Réunion in 1848.

  Haiti arrived first. After the Haitian Revolution, the colony of Saint-Domingue declared independence from France on the 1st of January 1804, becoming the world's first free Black-led republic and the first country to abolish slavery outright.

  William Wilberforce's Slave Trade Act 1807 ended the trafficking of enslaved people within the British Empire. The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 abolished the institution itself, but on a gradual basis. The British government set aside £20 million to compensate slaveholders for the loss of their unpaid labor. Formerly enslaved people received no reparations.

  In 1811 on the island of Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, Arthur William Hodge , a wealthy slaveholder, plantation owner, and Council member , became the first person in the British Empire to be hanged for the murder of an enslaved person.

  The apprenticeship system imposed after 1833 required formerly enslaved people to continue working for their former owners. On the 1st of August 1834 in Trinidad, a mainly elderly, unarmed group of Black people addressed by the Governor about the new laws began chanting "Pas de six ans. Point de six ans" , "Not six years. No six years." Peaceful resistance continued until the full six-year apprenticeship term was rejected. Trinidad became the first British colony with a slave population to completely abolish slavery. The freed people marked the occasion with annual Canboulay celebrations in the streets. Full emancipation across the other British colonies followed two years ahead of the original schedule, on the 1st of August 1838.