Slavery in the British Caribbean

Slavery in the British Caribbean was a colonial system that treated enslaved Africans and their descendants as property and compelled their labor, especially on sugar plantations.

Sugar plantation: A plantation organized to grow sugar cane and process it into sugar, often using coerced labor. Plantations concentrated enslaved labor in the crop that drove much British Caribbean wealth.
English colonization of the Caribbean: The establishment of English settlements and colonies across Caribbean islands from the seventeenth century onward. Colonial expansion created the jurisdictions and land claims in which slavery developed.
Olaudah Equiano: A formerly enslaved African writer and abolitionist whose autobiography appeared in 1789. His account helped expose the violence and human costs of enslavement.
British abolitionism: The movement in Britain to end the slave trade and slavery in its colonies. Its campaigns and legislation brought the imperial system to a legal end.
Caribbean slave codes: Colonial laws that restricted enslaved people's movement, rights, and legal standing. These statutes gave legal form to racialized control and punishment.
Barbados: A Caribbean island that became an English colony and a major sugar-producing slave society. Barbados pioneered a profitable plantation model later adopted elsewhere.
Nanny of the Maroons: An eighteenth-century Jamaican Maroon leader associated with resistance to British colonial rule. Her leadership represents organized resistance beyond plantation boundaries.
Slave Trade Act 1807: A British law that abolished the British slave trade, while leaving colonial slavery intact. It ended legal British trafficking but did not free people already enslaved.
Atlantic slave trade: The forced transportation of millions of Africans across the Atlantic for enslavement in the Americas. It supplied the people whom British Caribbean colonies enslaved and exploited.
Royal African Company: An English trading company granted a monopoly over England's trade in enslaved Africans in the late seventeenth century. Its trafficking helped expand the labor supply for English Caribbean plantations.

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