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  Brazil opened up new coffee-growing regions and huge numbers of slaves were relocated from the north-east of Brazil, where they had been settled on the sugar plantations. Just like the cotton planters of the US South at much the same time, Brazilian coffee growers (after the end of Brazil’s slave trade, but not of slavery, in 1850) could no longer buy Africans, which created instead an internal slave trade. Huge numbers of Brazilian slaves were transported great distances from one part of that huge country to the new coffee frontiers, sometimes by ship along the Atlantic coast. It was a trade accompanied by acute human suffering. Most painful of all was the devastation caused by the break-up of slave families. It was a heartless reprise of the dislocation and seaborne horrors endured by their African forebears crossing the Atlantic.

  Though sugar remained Brazil’s most valuable export until the mid-nineteenth century, by the time slavery ended in Brazil in 1888, the coffee-producing regions were home to about 65 per cent of the nation’s slaves.[4] There is a real paradox at the heart of this story, because at the very time Western opinion was turning against slavery in the nineteenth century, slavery continued to be sustained and strengthened by the massive Western demand for slave-grown produce, notably cotton grown in the US South and Brazilian coffee. Although Brazilian slavery expanded alongside the country’s wider agricultural growth (in cattle, tea and grain cultivation, much of it for consumption by Brazil’s growing population), above all it was the coffee industry that confirmed the continuing value of slavery in Brazil.

  In the nineteenth century, Brazilian slavery was at its most visible in urban life. Slaves constituted a sizeable proportion of the local population in Brazil’s major cities. In common with other Western societies, Brazilian cities grew apace. By mid-century, Rio was home to more than 200,000 people, of whom 80,000 were slaves. In São Paulo, almost a quarter of its 31,000 people were slaves. In Porto Alegre, upwards of one-third of the 17,226 inhabitants were enslaved. In some urban areas, almost half the population were slaves.

  Though the focal point of Brazilian slavery remained the plantation, this diversity of slave labour meant that slave ownership was widely diffused throughout Brazilian society. Planters and the wealthy may catch the eye, but there were substantial numbers of slave owners in all walks of life. Slavery was not restricted to the major industries, nor limited to wealthy elites, but permeated Brazilian society to a degree that was unusual in other parts of the Americas. Large numbers of people – even poorer sorts – owned two or three slaves, often relying on the income from their rented labour. In effect, slavery was part of the warp and weft of society at large. This meant, however, that ending slavery would have massive consequences, not merely for planters or major vested interests, but throughout Brazilian life.

  Although African slaves and sugar had been introduced into the Caribbean islands by early Spanish settlers, both remained marginal until the 1620s. Spain’s prime interest was Central and South America, and the apparently boundless riches disgorged by the collapse of the ancient Aztec and Mayan empires. Treasure fleets heading home to Spain, packed with the riches of the Indies (with all the temptations they dangled before privateers) seemed a better investment than the arduous involvement in agricultural commodities. The Portuguese and Dutch in Brazil, however, had proved otherwise. The rising power of Dutch mercantile interest (in all corners of the globe) had seen their growing involvement in Brazil. Though Dutch control of Brazil proved short-lived, they acquired the skills of sugar cultivation and production, and they had the money necessary to invest in sugar industries. It seemed natural that the Dutch should facilitate the transfer of sugar and Africans into the Caribbean itself.

  Bit by bit, the French and English took command of the islands from local Indians or from the fading power of Spain. By turns, the English conquered Barbados (1627) and Nevis (1628), followed by Montserrat and Antigua. Finally, they took Jamaica from Spain in 1655 (a consolation prize, having failed to conquer Santo Domingo). Almost in parallel, the French seized Guadeloupe and Martinique, shared St Kitts with the English and finally took St-Domingue (the western part of the island of Santo Domingo). This was to become France’s most valuable Caribbean colony, home to the largest number of African slaves and a major source of wealth to France. Ultimately, however, it was to be the cause of the collapse of France’s slave empire and send terror throughout the enslaved Americas.

  Like others before them, English settlers in the Caribbean and North America experimented with a number of crops – cotton, tobacco and sugar – and used various forms of labour: indentured whites, free labour, and both free and unfree local Indian labour. Everything changed with the rise of sugar, and the use of African slaves. It was not an inevitable progression; but, with the right mix of location, climate and crop, slavery emerged as the most viable and commercial labour system. Initially, it seemed that indentured labour might be the answer, but sugar was an extremely harsh taskmaster, and people simply refused to commit themselves to working in the sugar fields – even for a limited period. Slavery fitted the bill.[5]

  It had been proved to work, profitably, in São Tomé and Brazil, and it soon took hold in the Caribbean. There was, moreover, no real moral issue at stake. With a few notable exceptions, African slavery had effectively gone unchallenged since its arrival in the Americas. Local Indian peoples had been enslaved, and small numbers of African slaves had been settled in the region from the early days. But it was the experience of Brazilian planters that clinched the argument: slaves worked until they died. Those born in the Americas worked from their early years until old age or decrepitude rendered them useless. The phrase ‘old and useless’ entered plantation ledgers as a heartless descant to the slaves’ basic economic value. So it was, as British and French settlers in the Caribbean turned to sugar cultivation, they also turned to African slaves (the early success of tobacco there was undermined by the astonishing rise of tobacco cultivation – by slaves – in the Chesapeake). From the 1640s onwards, sugar crept through the islands; from Barbados onto Guadeloupe, Martinique, St-Domingue, St Kitts, Nevis, Antigua and Montserrat. It was never the sole export crop, even on the major sugar-producing islands (coffee was very important in some places). But it came to dominate the islands’ exports, and enhanced their economic and strategic value to all of Europe’s colonial powers.

  Sugar began to pour eastwards across the Atlantic. By 1650, Barbados exported 7,000 tons of sugar. Fifty years later, when the British islands dispatched 25,000 tons to British refineries, they outstripped Brazilian production (of 22,000 tons). In 1700, the slave colonies were producing 60,000 tons of sugar, but even that huge amount was surpassed in the coming century. The total volume reached 150,000 tons in 1750, and 180,000 by 1770. By then, St-Domingue was producing an astonishing 60,000 tons, Jamaica, 36,000 tons. All this was produced by the gangs of African slaves. In the early 1600s some 7,000 Africans a year were being shipped to the Americas, rising to 18,000 by the 1660s. A century later, the numbers had risen to 80,000 a year, the great majority destined for Brazil or the Caribbean. Almost half a million landed on the small island of Barbados; twice that number in Jamaica.[6]

  This new sugar economy rested on the backs of armies of African slaves. Yet there is a historical puzzle here. Europeans turned to African slavery when slavery in Europe itself had faded away. Although Europeans had used slave labour at home for centuries, by the time they were settling new colonies in the Caribbean, slavery had effectively died out in Europe. The British developed colonial and metropolitan laws to regulate their new slave system, and a complex web of maritime law evolved to juggle the complexities of shipping millions of Africans across the Atlantic. But the justification for holding humans in perpetual bondage was not really addressed until the late eighteenth century. Whatever moral issues were involved in this system, they lay relatively dormant and unaddressed for a century and a half. This silence involved a strange contradiction, because at the very time Europeans were concerned about the concepts of
freedom at home, they were actively extending slavery to unprecedented numbers of people in the Americas. They could partly justify the process of enslavement because the people involved were not European – but African. Europeans came to think of Africans as people beyond the pale of civilised humanity: pagan, barbaric and devoid of the cultured characteristics that Europeans reserved for themselves.

  The basic justification for African slavery was much simpler and more basic. Unlike Europeans, Africans were available in abundance, were bought and transported cheaply (despite the distances), and were readily replaced. African slavery offered the perfect economic solution to the endless hunger of American plantations for a cheap, malleable and durable (or replaceable) labour force. In the words of Barry Higman, ‘Slave owners rarely doubted that slavery was the most profitable system of labour available to them.’ What more justification did slavery require? [7]

  Sugar thus shaped the justification for slavery. Indeed, one indication of the economic importance of slavery and sugar was the comparative wealth of the Caribbean and North American colonies. The sugar islands formed a much greater, and more valuable, part of British trade than the North American colonies. Similarly, the French islands, but especially the sugar and coffee industries of St-Domingue, were vital to France’s overseas trade. The two major powers in the eighteenth-century Atlantic, Britain and France, were also deadly rivals, enviously eyeing each other’s colonies and trade, battling each other for imperial and economic dominance, and pitching their military (mainly naval) power to protect their own possessions, or to seize those of their opponent. The Caribbean emerged as the engine of growth and prosperity in the Americas. It was the axis on which an enormous Atlantic economy turned, and a focal point of a huge maritime trade linking Africa, the Americas and Europe. The islands disgorged commodities and their related prosperity both to local owners and to metropolitan backers, and this generated North American colonial activity via the enormous volumes of foodstuffs and timber shipped from there to the Caribbean. It also transformed global dietary habits by flooding world markets with sugar, rum and coffee. Legions of working people, on both sides of the Atlantic, derived much of the energy they required for their labouring efforts from the sugar they consumed, notably in their hot drinks. And all this was made possible by the gangs of Africans in the sugar fields.

  In the ninety years to 1790, slave numbers in the Caribbean increased by 2 per cent annually. By that year, almost 1.5 million slaves lived in the region, with small numbers in Dutch, Danish and Swedish possessions, 9 per cent in Spanish islands, but the very great majority – 83 per cent – in French or British colonies. On the eve of the French Revolution, St-Domingue alone was home to a third of all slaves in the Caribbean. In the early nineteenth century, there was another expansion of slavery in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and by 1830 (on the eve of British emancipation) there were more than 3.25 million slaves throughout the Caribbean.[8] These are, by any standards, startling numbers when we remember that the enslaved population had stumbled from the Atlantic slave ships.

  The development of all slave colonies was closely linked, of course, to the policies of their mother country, though in time the emergence of colonial societies, with their own governing and economic elites, created inevitable friction and disputes with the metropolitan power. There emerged a divergence of interests and views between Europeans and their possessions across the Atlantic. That was at its most severe and obvious in the breakaway of Britain’s North American colonies, and later the break-up of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the Americas. The one factor that anchored the slave colonies most securely to the mother country was the slaves. Clean across the Caribbean, slaves greatly outnumbered the slave-owning classes, sometimes to a massive degree. On isolated sugar plantations, local management and white people might be outnumbered by fifty to one. Few Caribbean slave owners, from the humblest with only a handful of slaves to the wealthiest planters who owned hundreds, doubted that their ultimate security lay in the military strength of their mother country. They needed the military support provided by London and Paris.

  Naval forces were vital, not only in safeguarding the island’s and the shipping routes against European rivals, but especially as the ultimate safety net against the slaves. Colonists had their own militias, and there were military bases scattered across the islands. But it was the ability to move large military groups between the islands, and from one part of an island to another, that made navies so important. In periods of major European conflict, the French and British navies transported whole armies into the Caribbean. Of course, maintaining the security of slave colonies involved much more than military power. Indeed, the ability of slave owners to maintain control over huge numbers of disaffected slaves for long periods of time remains one of the great conundrums of slave history. But the threat and reality of physical and military action was the slave owners’ last line of defence in societies where large numbers of recalcitrant slaves lived cheek by jowl with apprehensive slave owners.

  Although the Spanish Crown had been the first to stake a claim to the Caribbean islands, in time their main colonial ambitions lay elsewhere. As power shifted in Europe, from the Mediterranean to northern Europe, the northern powers began to exercise growing control over the Caribbean. Spain based its regional power initially in Santo Domingo, then, from the early seventeenth century, in Havana, which became the waystation for Spain’s vital maritime links to and from Central America. Havana was the refuelling post and defence for Spanish fleets bringing astonishing treasures, especially silver, back to Spain. That apart, Cuba had little to offer Spain: its population and economic output declined but Havana (home to 14,000 people by 1620) and its hinterland were the exception. By then, half of Cuba’s population consisted of slaves, many of them Catholic, and there were large numbers of freed slaves. Cuba thus developed a distinctive social structure quite unlike the societies that evolved in the other slave islands in the region.

  Spain’s other main possession, Hispaniola, had a different experience, though it lacked Cuba’s strategic importance. Sugar took hold there thanks mainly to settlers from the sugar industry in the Canaries. As the local industry boomed, so did the import of African slaves. But, from 1570, the island’s sugar industry was undermined by the rapid growth of Brazilian sugar, and Hispaniola returned to a cattle economy.[9] Yet Hispaniola was nominally in control of Spain’s thinly stretched Caribbean empire and by the early seventeenth century that scattering of Spanish islands had become ungovernable, made worse by the decline of Spain itself. Spain’s islands proved a great temptation to the rising power of the Dutch, French and English, all now keen to develop their own colonies in the Americas, who began picking off Spain’s exposed and undefendable islands in the eastern Caribbean. Spain effectively retreated to its well-defended port cities (Havana, Santo Domingo and San Juan). From the 1620s onwards, islands began to change hands, and acquired new European rulers and took on new economic identities. Fresh waves of northern Europeans, aided by state power and private capital, were seeking a foothold along the vast edge of the Americas, from Jamestown, Virginia, to Barbados. Like the Spaniards before them, they soon discovered that their various agricultural developments required more labour than they could muster from their own ranks. They tried a range of crops, notably cotton and tobacco, before in many areas the viability of tobacco was swept aside by the astonishing rise of the crop in Virginia and Maryland. Once again, however, everything was changed (though slowly in some islands) by the advent of sugar and the arrival of Africans to work the sugar fields.

  This ‘sugar revolution’ failed to take root and thrive in Spain’s surviving Caribbean islands. For a start, Spain’s imperial interest remained focused on Central and South America, and its fading power was stretched merely to hang on to Cuba, Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico. In effect Spain backed itself into a defensive corner, happy to hold on to what it had, but allowing the rest of Europe to press on with its slave-based sugar economy.[10]


  Cuba did not turn to sugar and African slaves to any major degree until the upheavals of the French Revolution and the collapse of the French colonial economy. Though original Spanish restrictions on slave imports had been removed in 1762 (in the period of brief British control of Havana), slave imports increased steadily thereafter. In 1774, there were perhaps 44,000 slaves in Cuba, doubling by 1792. The pattern previously familiar in St-Domingue now developed in Cuba, with sugar, coffee and slavery growing side by side. Though the sugar industry grew steadily during the late eighteenth century, that growth was outstripped by the exceptional expansion after the Haitian collapse. In 1792 there were 529 sugar mills in Cuba, but by 1827 that had increased to 1,000, and to 1,531 by 1862. In the same period – a matter of only seventy years – the number of slaves in Cuba increased from 197,415 in 1792 to 323,759 in 1863. This increase was due entirely to the importation of Africans. Between 1801 and 1825, 229,000 had landed in Cuba, and a further 318,000 followed in the next twenty-five years. Although Cuban slavery was (like Brazilian slavery) diversified and was to be found throughout the economy, and had a major presence in Havana itself, by the 1860s one-half of Cuba’s slaves worked on sugar plantations – most of them in the west of the island.[11]