While the English were planting the first frail colonial shoots in the Chesapeake, they also were busily colonizing the islands of the West Indies. Spain, weakened by military overextension and distracted by its rebellious Dutch provinces, relaxed its grip on much of the Caribbean in the early 1600s.
By the mid-seventeenth century, England had secured its claim to several West Indian islands, including the large prize of Jamaica in 1655.
Sugar formed the foundation of the West Indian economy. What tobacco was to the Chesapeake, sugar cane was to the Caribbean-with one crucial difference. Tobacco was a poor man's crop.
It could be planted easily, it produced commercially marketable leaves within a year, and it required only simple processing. Sugar cane, in contrast, was a rich man's crop.
It had to be planted extensively to yield commercially viable quantities of sugar. Extensive planting, in turn, required extensive and arduous land clearing. And the cane stalks yielded their sugar only after an elaborate process of refining in a sugar mill.
The need for land and for the labor to clear it and to run the mills made sugar cultivation a capital intensive business. Only wealthy growers with abundant capital to invest could succeed in sugar.
The sugar lords extended their dominion over the West Indies in the seventeenth century. To work their sprawling plantations, they imported enormous numbers of enslaved Africans-more than a quarter of a million in the five decades after 1640.
By about 1700, enslaved blacks outnumbered white settlers in the English West Indies by nearly four to one, and the region's population has remained predominantly black ever since. West Indians thus take their place among the numerous children of the African diaspora-the vast scattering of African peoples throughout the New World in the three and a half centuries following Columbus's discovery.
To control this large and potentially restive slave population, English authorities devised formal "codes" that defined the slaves' legal status and their masters' prerogatives.
The notorious Barbados slave code of 1661 denied even the most fundamental rights to slaves and gave masters virtually complete control over their laborers. ↓
- Including the right to inflict vicious punishments for even slight infractions.
The profitable sugar-plantation system soon Oliver crowded out almost all other forms of Caribbean agriculture.
The West Indies increasingly depended on the Finally North American mainland for foodstuffs and other basic supplies.
And smaller English farmers, squeezed out by the greedy sugar barons, began to migrate to the newly founded southern mainland colonies. A group of displaced English settlers from Barbados arrived in Carolina in 1670.
They brought with them a few enslaved Africans, as well as the model of the Bar bados slave code, which eventually inspired statutes governing slavery throughout the mainland colonies.
Carolina officially adopted a version of the Barbados slave code in 1696. Just as the West Indies had been a testing ground for the encomienda system that the Spanish had brought to Mexico and South America, so the Caribbean islands now served as a staging area ties for the slave system that would take root elsewhere in English North America.