Barbados is an island country in the southeastern Caribbean Sea, situated about 100 miles (160 km) east of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Roughly triangular in shape, the island measures some 21 miles (34 km) from northwest to southeast and about 14 miles (23 km) from east to west at its widest point. The capital and largest town is Bridgetown, which is also the main seaport.
The Atlantic slave trade or transatlantic slave trade involved the transportation by slave traders of enslaved African people, mainly to the Americas. The outfitted European slave ships of the slave trade regularly used the triangular trade route and its Middle Passage, and existed from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The vast majority of those who were transported in the transatlantic slave trade were from Central and West Africa who had been sold by West African slave traders mainly to Portuguese, British, Spanish, Dutch, and French slave traders, while others had been captured directly by the slave traders in coastal raids; European slave traders gathered and imprisoned the enslaved at forts on the African coast and then brought them to the Americas. Except for the Portuguese, European slave traders generally did not participate in the raids because life expectancy for Europeans in sub-Saharan Africa was less than one year during the period of the slave trade.
The history of the Caribbean reveals the significant role the region played in the colonial struggles of the European powers since the 15th century. In the modern era, it remains strategically and economically important. In 1492, Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean and claimed the region for Spain. The following year, the first Spanish settlements were established in the Caribbean. Although the Spanish conquests of the Aztec empire and the Inca empire in the early sixteenth century made Mexico and Peru more desirable places for Spanish exploration and settlement, the Caribbean remained strategically important.
The British West Indies (BWI) were colonised British territories in the West Indies: Anguilla, the Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos Islands, Montserrat, the British Virgin Islands, Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, British Guiana and Trinidad and Tobago. Other territories included Bermuda, and the former British Honduras.
Indentured servitude is a form of labor in which a person is contracted to work without salary for a specific number of years. The contract, called an "indenture", may be entered voluntarily for purported eventual compensation or debt repayment, or imposed involuntarily as a judicial punishment. Many came with forged or no contract they ever saw.
Triangular trade or triangle trade is trade between three ports or regions. Triangular trade usually evolves when a region has export commodities that are not required in the region from which its major imports come. It has been used to offset trade imbalances between different regions.
The slave codes were laws relating to slavery and enslaved people, specifically regarding the Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the Americas.
Sugar plantations in the Caribbean were a major part of the economy of the islands in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Most Caribbean islands were covered with sugar cane fields and mills for refining the crop. The main source of labor, until the abolition of chattel slavery, was enslaved Africans. After the abolition of slavery, indentured laborers from India, China, Portugal and other places were brought to the Caribbean to work in the sugar industry. These plantations produced 80 to 90 percent of the sugar consumed in Western Europe, later supplanted by European-grown sugar beet.
Afro-Caribbean people or African Caribbean are Caribbean people who trace their full or partial ancestry to Africa. The majority of the modern Afro-Caribbean people descend from the Africans taken as slaves to colonial Caribbean via the trans-Atlantic slave trade between the 15th and 19th centuries to work primarily on various sugar plantations and in domestic households. Other names for the ethnic group include Black Caribbean, Afro or Black West Indian or Afro or Black Antillean. The term Afro-Caribbean was not coined by Caribbean people themselves but was first used by European Americans in the late 1960s.
The Slavery Abolition Act 1833 was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom which provided for the gradual abolition of slavery in most parts of the British Empire. It was passed by Earl Grey's reforming administration and expanded the jurisdiction of the Slave Trade Act 1807 and made the purchase or ownership of slaves illegal within the British Empire, with the exception of "the Territories in the Possession of the East India Company", Ceylon, and Saint Helena. The Act came into force on 1 August 1834, and was repealed in 1998 as a part of wider rationalisation of English statute law; however, later anti-slavery legislation remains in force.
Slavery in the British and French Caribbean refers to slavery in the parts of the Caribbean dominated by France or the British Empire.
The term British West Indies refers to the former English and British colonies and the present-day overseas territories of the United Kingdom in the Caribbean.
British America comprised the colonial territories of the English Empire, and the successor British Empire, in the Americas from 1607 to 1783. These colonies were formally known as British America and the British West Indies immediately prior to thirteen of the colonies seceding in the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) and forming the United States of America.
The Indian indenture system was a system of indentured servitude, by which more than 1.6 million workers from British India were transported to labour in European colonies, as a substitute for slave labor, following the abolition of the trade in the early 19th century. The system expanded after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, in the French colonies in 1848, and in the Dutch Empire in 1863. British Indian indentureship lasted till the 1920s. This resulted in the development of a large South Asian diaspora in the Caribbean, Natal, East Africa, Réunion, Mauritius, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Fiji, as well as the growth of Indo-Caribbean, Indo-African, Indo-Mauritian, Indo-Fijian, Indo-Malaysian, and Indo-Singaporean populations.
This article describes the history of West Indies cricket to 1918.
Bristol, a port city in south-west England, was involved in the transatlantic slave trade. Bristol's part in the trade was prominent in the 17th and 18th centuries as the city's merchants used their position to gain involvement. It is estimated that over 500,000 enslaved African people were traded by Bristol merchants.
Slavery in Britain existed before the Roman occupation and until the 11th century, when the Norman conquest of England resulted in the gradual merger of the pre-conquest institution of slavery into serfdom, and all slaves were no longer recognised separately in English law or custom. By the middle of the 12th century, the institution of slavery as it had existed prior to the Norman conquest had fully disappeared, but other forms of unfree servitude continued for some centuries.
Seasoning, or the Seasoning, was the period of adjustment that slave traders and slaveholders subjected African slaves to following their arrival in the Americas. While modern scholarship has occasionally applied this term to the brief period of acclimatization undergone by European immigrants to the Americas, it most frequently and formally referred to the process undergone by enslaved people. Slave traders used the term "seasoning" to refer to the process of adjusting the enslaved Africans to the new climate, diet, geography, and ecology of the Americas. The term applied to both the physical acclimatization of the enslaved person to the environment, as well as that person's adjustment to a new social environment, labor regimen, and language. Slave traders and owners believed that if slaves survived this critical period of environmental seasoning, they were less likely to die and the psychological element would make them more easily controlled. This process took place immediately after the arrival of enslaved people during which their mortality rates were particularly high. These "new" or "saltwater" slaves were described as "outlandish" on arrival. Those who survived this process became "seasoned", and typically commanded a higher price in the market. For example, in eighteenth century Brazil, the price differential between "new" and "seasoned" slaves was about fifteen percent.
Irish indentured servants were Irish people who became indentured servants in territories under the control of the British Empire, such as the British West Indies, British North America and later Australia.
The history of Dutch slavery involves slavery in the Netherlands itself, as well as the establishment of slavery outside the Netherlands in which it played a role. The Netherlands banned the slave trade in 1814 after being compelled by Britain.
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