Slavery was the central institution in the British Caribbean. No West Indian colony, Barbara Solow emphasizes, “ever founded a successful society on the basis of free white labor.” The region owns the dubious distinction of being the first in the Americas to give rise to the sugar revolution, which in turn rested on slavery. Nowhere was the influence of the unholy trinity of slavery, sugarcane, and the plantation system more systematically and intensely felt. Until the slave trade was abolished, about five times as many Africans as Europeans arrived in the British Caribbean. A quarter of all Africans transported to the New World reached the West Indies. Slave-grown products dominated Atlantic trade, with sugar the single most important of the internationally traded commodities. Slavery became the source of reliable labor and of capital accumulation. It made the planters rich, and slaveholders dominated not just the economy but the region's politics and culture. “Nothing escaped” the influence of slavery, as Frank Tannenbaum put it, “nothing and no one.” Slavery is, as Richard Dunn pithily notes, “the essence” of British Caribbean history.

This chapter demonstrates the centrality of slavery in the British Caribbean in various ways. First, it traces the origins of slavery in the region. Second, it explores the peopling of the region and its domination by slaves. Third, it probes the work that slaves performed and the commodities they produced.