1 - Slave Empire

Summary

This chapter traces the developing English empire across the global tropics. Like their European rivals, English colonists, traders, and governors turned to forced labor and migration to maintain the tropical empire. As they forged this empire, English investors experimented with a wide variety of different colonial models. The early empire was not so neatly divided into territorial expansion in the West and commercial settlement in the East. English colonial architects tried to extend plantation agriculture beyond the Americas to West Africa and the Indian Ocean, and they tried to bring the spices and peppers of the East Indies to the West Indies to grow. They became both imitators and innovators, modeling the successful endeavors of European rivals but also carving their own path. Many of their overseas ventures were utter failures. Yet, slave-produced goods and factories constructed and maintained by forced labor ensured profit margins that would be high enough to continue to attract investors. By the end of the seventeenth century, slavery had become the defining feature of the English tropical empire, and there were slave majorities at most English sites in the tropics.

In the first decade of the seventeenth century, the East India Company (EIC) received a string of reports from its captains and agents to the East about the cornucopia of trade goods that could be acquired throughout the Indian Ocean. The island of Buton, just southwest of Sulawesi in the Indonesian archipelago (see Figure A.4), was full of “good merchandize,” especially “Some good slaves,” “China Dishes,” and “India Cloth[es].”¹ Trafficked people were casually listed alongside other potentially profitable chattel goods. There were slave markets in southwestern Sulawesi long before European traders arrived. Portuguese visitors in 1515 observed that sea pirates kept that area well supplied with captives.² English traders were discerning in their valuations of human property in the Indonesian archipelago. The local Buton slaves, the English traders insisted, were “noe good,” but the people “brought from Java” to the slave markets in Buton were worth buying.³

Across the seventeenth-century world, slavery was a legitimate institution; few societies questioned its moral foundations.⁴ Human trafficking, enslaved labor, and other forms of bondage and dependency were well established as important components of commercial and territorial empire building in both the western and eastern hemisphere. European overseas expansion encouraged the globalization of forced labor markets, driving the demand for enslaved laborers even higher. Although slavery no longer existed in the British Isles, English imperial architects, merchants, sailors, and colonists were not at all hesitant to purchase slaves and other forced laborers. They were opportunists; they profited where they could from buying and selling people. The English were comfortable with the institution of slavery, but the supply of enslaved people was not always high enough to meet colonial demand, and the permanence that usually accompanied the condition of slavery was not always more profitable or viable than other more temporary forms of labor in the early tropics.⁵ Life expectancies, the possibility of resistance, the degree of coercion that could be used to force labor, and the price and supply of captives were important factors in any calculation of the profits to be had from a form of bondage.

Vast amounts of backbreaking manual labor were required to carve out European colonial enterprises. In the first half of the seventeenth century, a mix of unfree laborers from Africa, Europe, and the Americas performed heavy agricultural field labor; built and maintained roads, forts, and sugar works; loaded and unloaded goods from ships; and acted as porters and domestics at English colonies and plantations in the Americas, particularly in the Caribbean.⁶ At the same time, the English tapped into existing African and Indian Ocean systems of slavery, bondage, and dependency to maintain their factories in West Africa, India, and Indonesia. Unfree laborers serving for the English in Africa and in the Indian Ocean were driven to perform most of the same chores as slaves in the Americas, although they spent much less time overall in field labor. Until the 1660s, the English continued to use a wide variety of unfree labor systems across most of the empire, but enslaved non-Europeans soon outnumbered the English at almost all sites in the tropics. Slave majorities became the norm in the tropics. English colonists and investors started to assume that racial slavery was essential to the growth of the empire in the tropics.

This chapter will offer a comprehensive overview of the creation of a slave empire in the English tropics. This was an empire in which slaves became the predominant labor force and in which English settlers comprised a small minority of the population in their colonies, factories, and other settlements. This chapter will argue that the English had no qualms with purchasing the people offered to them for sale at any point in the first half of the seventeenth century.⁷ They relied, pragmatically, on a mix of different kinds of unfree laborers to meet the enormous labor demands of building and maintaining a territorial and commercial empire, but they preferred slaves because they could be most fully controlled and exploited. In the 1640s, English traders began to establish better access to tropical slave markets. English planters, merchants, colonists, and investors based in the British Isles – spurred on by profits made in the Barbadian plantation complex in the sugar islands and by Dutch slaveholding in the spice islands – turned more readily to racial slavery wherever they could. They also tried, unsuccessfully, to expand their reliance on slavery in the tropics by bringing the Caribbean plantation complex to the East, where enslaved captives were cheaper, and by bringing Indonesian spices to the Western plantations to avoid Dutch power and establish more control over the spice trade. Over the last half of the seventeenth century, the English tried to create a common tropical empire built almost entirely on the backs of non-European slaves.

Origins of the Slave Empire

Slaves had been central to Iberian overseas expansion for more than a century and a half when the English first began establishing colonies and factories in the tropics. These Iberian powers created a colonial model for the English to imitate. Portuguese explorers and traders were at the forefront of European transoceanic navigational and shipbuilding technology in the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. They began sailing south along the west coast of Africa and established their first trading factory on the island of Arguin in 1445 off the coast of North Africa. They found a route past the dangerous winds and currents along the coast of Cape Bojador, and they reached the Gulf of Guinea in the 1460s, building their first trading factories soon afterward along the coast to trade for gold, ivory, pepper, palm oil, and, increasingly, slaves. As they expanded southward, the Portuguese took the earliest iterations of the slave-based plantation complex from the Mediterranean to the island of Madeira in 1455, almost four decades before Columbus arrived in the Americas.⁸ Sugar exhausts the soils and brings massive deforestation to feed the sugar mills.⁹ It also kills enslaved laborers in droves. Portuguese sugar planters enslaved and exported indigenous Guanches from the Canary Islands to Madeira to grow sugar, killing vast numbers of them before turning more fully to African slaves.¹⁰ The plantation complex spread south along the African Coast with Portuguese expansion to Sāo Tomé in the Gulf of Guinea. It seemed poised to make the leap east to the African coast, where the rainfall needed for sugar harvests was more abundant than in the Atlantic islands. Yet, by the late sixteenth century, the Portuguese had moved the plantation complex to the South American mainland in Brazil, likely because of the political and military power and potential interference of coastal Africans.¹¹ In the century before the English first settled in the Americas, the Portuguese were responsible for the forced migration of 195,000 Africans to the Americas; these captives fed the demand for labor on plantations in Brazil.¹² In the seventeenth century, the volume of Portuguese slaving between Africa and the Americas continued to dwarf all other European powers. The Portuguese shipped 996,000 bound Africans across the seventeenth-century Atlantic Ocean, nearly two and a half times as many captives as the English traders.¹³

The Spanish, who laid claim to the rest of the Americas under the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), also began tropical plantation agriculture on a much smaller scale than the Portuguese in the sixteenth century. There were sugar mills in Hispaniola and Jamaica, for example, that relied on both African and Indigenous slave labor.¹⁴ The Spanish, however, would remain focused more on mining and other domestic economies in Latin America than on large-scale plantation agriculture until the rise of the nineteenth-century Cuban sugar economy. They forced the Indigenous people they encountered into slavery and other closely related systems of labor subjugation, but violence and disease quickly killed the vast majority of the pre-Columbian population of the Americas.¹⁵ When they turned to enslaved Africans, the Spanish usually outsourced their demand for these captives to other European nations, relying heavily on the Portuguese between 1580 and 1640, when the two kingdoms were united under one crown, then on the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, and then on the French until Britain gained the Asiento contract – allowing them the exclusive right to transport 4,800 enslaved captives each year to the Spanish Americas – in 1713.¹⁶

To establish trade with the East, the Portuguese rounded the southern tip of Africa at the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, proving that the Indian Ocean was not land locked. They built their first factory in Southeast Asia in Malacca in 1511, beginning a sea trade with Asia for silks, fabrics, and spices, forging the new ocean road that the English would use nearly a century later. The Spanish crossed the Pacific to the Philippines in 1521 and established a regular galleon trade between Manilla and Acapulco in 1565. These Iberian powers became both slave traders and slaveholders in Southeast Asia. The Spanish developed a trans-Pacific supply of slaves as part of the Manilla galleon trade, bringing Asian slaves to labor in the Americas from the 1560s until the beginning of the 1700s.¹⁷ As the English sailed into the East, they entered a world in which Iberian traders had been involved in human trafficking and had been compelling labor from enslaved captives for more than a century. Beginning in the sixteenth century, the Portuguese began exporting approximately 200 slaves a year from Mozambique to their factories in Southeast Asia, and the trade appears to have risen in volume by the end of the sixteenth century before falling in the seventeenth century.¹⁸ As the English began enslaving in the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese continued. Overall, the Portuguese commitment to the slave trade and slaveholding in the Indian Ocean remained much larger than anything the English ever attempted.¹⁹ Seventeenth-century Portuguese settlers in Southeast Africa known as prazeiros had established themselves in the Zambesi Valley to trade for slaves and ivory, and they bought vast numbers of slaves to labor for them. They also armed them to protect their settlements.²⁰ The EIC employee Nicholas Buckeridge sailed twice past Mozambique and Madagascar, areas still dominated by Portuguese influence, on his ventures into the Indian Ocean in the 1650s and 1660s (see Figure A.1). While sailing to India in 1651 for the EIC, Buckeridge marveled that “some Portugalls” living in Mozambique “kepe upwards of A thousand slaves” and most had at least “hundreds which they imploy in transportation of their goods.”²¹

As the English expanded overseas in the seventeenth century through the same routes as the Spanish in the Americas and the Portuguese in Asia, they did so alongside their Northwest European neighbors, the Dutch and the French. With the gradual decline of Iberian power in the early to mid-seventeenth century, the French began to compete with the English in the Eastern Caribbean but, from a global perspective, it was the Dutch who would become England’s primary rival until at least the 1670s. In 1635, the English had signed a peace agreement with the Portuguese “against the common enemyes in Asia,” particularly the Dutch.²² In the West, Portuguese economic interests were in the South Atlantic, far from English settlements. The English and Dutch, in contrast, would engage in Atlantic trade wars three times between 1652 and 1688 when the Glorious Revolution led to an Anglo-Dutch alliance. Dutch expansion overseas was part of their struggle for independence from Spain, which they would not officially achieve until 1648. The Dutch also waged colonial war against the Portuguese when the Spanish and Portuguese crowns were united from 1580 to 1640.

The Dutch became England’s key rivals in both the seventeenth-century Atlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades. The Dutch East India Company or VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) took over the Portuguese role as the primary European slavers in the seventeenth-century Indian Ocean, and European participation in human trafficking in the region grew to new heights. Between 12,500 and 25,000 slaves had been trafficked by Europeans in the sixteenth-century Indian Ocean, but that number rose to as high as 92,000 in the seventeenth century with the Dutch responsible for over half and perhaps as many as two-thirds of that seventeenth-century total.²³ In the Atlantic, the Dutch drove the Portuguese from their slave-trading forts in West Africa and Angola in 1641 and occupied northeastern Brazil with its sugar plantations from 1630 until 1645 (and in some places until 1654); they may have helped transfer the plantation complex from Brazil to Barbados in the 1640s.²⁴ The Dutch began a regular annual transatlantic trade in African captives in 1637 and accelerated that trade in the 1640s, but, in contrast to Dutch slaving in the Indian Ocean, the Dutch were responsible for just 17 percent of all African captives brought in the middle passage from Africa to the Americas from 1637 through 1699. The Portuguese remained the dominant European slave traders in the seventeenth-century Atlantic, taking African captives to supply their sugar plantations in Brazil. The volume of the European slave trade in the Atlantic was more than ten times larger than the Indian Ocean trade in the seventeenth century. The Dutch share of the Atlantic slave trade may have been small but, because the seventeenth-century Atlantic trade was so much larger than the Indian Ocean trade, the Dutch trafficked three times more human captives across the Atlantic than in the Indian Ocean.²⁵

The VOC turned to slavery to garner immense profits and ensure a near monopoly over the spice trade in the seventeenth-century Indian Ocean. They quickly and aggressively penetrated the spice market in the early seventeenth century, particularly in the Banda Islands, which held the world’s richest supply of nutmeg. The VOC profited not just from human trafficking but from using slave labor to reduce costs, build and maintain forts, and secure their monopoly interests from the attacks of the local indigenous powers and other European rivals.²⁶ Under the leadership of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the Company’s governor-general, the VOC brutally subjugated the people of the Banda islands in 1621 to secure their monopoly against EIC efforts to trade there.²⁷ Dutch brutalities reduced the inhabitants to less than a tenth of their original number. The VOC enslaved and transported more than half the people of the islands to Batavia.²⁸ In 1623, Coen outlined his plan to completely replace the indigenous population of the Banda Islands with imported slaves in order to control the means of production and secure a monopoly.²⁹ He wrote a letter to his successor, Pieter de Carpentier. Coen was concerned that the VOC’s returns in Asia had fallen over the last eighteen years. His main solution to the problem was simple: more slavery. The VOC “should pursue it every where so far as possible,” because there was no more “service and profit [than] can be done than in the buying and gathering of a very great multitude of He, and She Slaves, especially Young People.” Coen suggested that “this buying of slaves” should “proceed to many Thousands, yea to an infinite number.” He imagined that these slaves could tend cattle, grow provisions, fish, perform all the labor of the settlements, and build forts, lowering labor costs and making the VOC self-sustaining in Asia.³⁰ The VOC remained committed to Coen’s vision of a slave empire in the East. In the 1670s, for example, the VOC relied on 4,000 enslaved Africans to build a fort in Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka), and by 1687–1688 there were 66,350 enslaved captives laboring at VOC outposts in the Indian Ocean.³¹ By the 1680s, the EIC was actively trying to emulate the Dutch reliance on slavery in Southeast Asia, but they were never able to fully replicate it. Seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century English slaveholdings in the Indonesian archipelago were insignificant in comparison to the Dutch. In contrast, by the turn of the eighteenth century, the number of enslaved people held by the Dutch in the Americas was much smaller than in the English American colonies.

Not only were English colonial agents conscious that slavery was central to the expansion of empires around the world, but they were also aware that they could become slaves themselves. Vulnerable people from a variety of religious and ethnic backgrounds across the world could fall into various kinds of indefinite and dehumanizing bondage. Christians from the British Isles, for example, were held in slavery alongside sub-Saharan West Africans in seventeenth-century Islamic Morocco.³² The English state, far from a formidable power, was unable to prevent the enslavement of the English through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.³³ As England expanded its overseas empire, the enslavement of people from the British Isles became more common, especially in the Mediterranean and along the coast of North Africa.³⁴ In the sixteenth century, there were Englishmen held captive and forced to labor on Spanish galleys for indefinite terms.³⁵ Thousands of people from the British Isles were taken by the Turks in the seventeenth century, sold at market, and forced to labor, often as galley slaves in the Mediterranean. Some were ransomed, but very few managed to escape that condition and return home.³⁶ Many were taken at sea by North African Corsairs during the great wave of Puritan migration to the Americas.³⁷ As historian Michael Guasco argues, English enslavement, “especially in the Mediterranean,” had a critical impact on how the English “thought about slavery” as the empire expanded.³⁸

Slaves were cheap and readily available through much of the tropics when the English entered the fray of European overseas expansion and colonization. Longstanding oceanic trade networks and the ability to easily sail through much of the tropics facilitated the transport of human captives through the tropics over long distances. In the 1630s, when Puritan investors tried to settle islands in the Western Caribbean, nearly 150 years after the Spanish first arrived, they found that “Negroes” could be “procured at cheap rates,” and, unlike Europeans, they could be made “perpetually servants.”³⁹ In the 1650s, the English planter and soon to be colonial governor Thomas Modyford grew excited about “an infinite number of naked Indians” in the Guianas who could be used as laborers in English settlements there.⁴⁰ One of the early promotors of English settlement along the northeast coast of South America observed that the Indigenous people sold “Women and Children” as slaves “for Trifles to the English.”⁴¹ Buckeridge, who sailed with the EIC past Mozambique and Madagascar in the 1650s and 1660s, reported enthusiastically to London in 1663 that “Slaves are cheap & plentifullie to be had at all places on these Coasts.”⁴²

Without a strong trading presence in Africa, the English acquired most of their slaves through Iberian channels until the 1640s, either directly or via the Dutch. English merchants had started trading on the Gold Coast of West Africa in 1618, and they had erected a factory at Kormentine in modern-day Ghana by 1624 at the latest, but they struggled to maintain a consistent presence there until the second half of the century.⁴³ Instead, they captured Portuguese and Spanish ships with slaves aboard or they purchased enslaved captives from the Dutch, who had in turn raided Iberian ships. The first “20. and odd Negroes” forced to migrate to the North American colony of Jamestown in 1619 were Angolans sold to the colonists by Dutch privateers who had raided a Portuguese slave ship bound for Vera Cruz in Mexico.⁴⁴ At the same time, the EIC was capturing enslaved people from Portuguese ships in the Indian Ocean. In the early 1620s, the Company’s captains reported taking “many slaves” during raids on Portuguese ships, often sailing out of Mozambique. Company agents generally transported these enslaved people to pepper-trading factories in Indonesia.⁴⁵ In 1625, the EIC factory in Batavia reported to London that an EIC captain was carrying “divers Slaves and Chinamen” to “our plantation at Lagundy,” a brief-lived English outpost on an island between Java and Sumatra (see Figure A.4).⁴⁶ Shortly afterward, in 1627, the first English settlers in Barbados arrived with enslaved Africans that they had seized from either Portuguese or Spanish vessels while sailing to the island.⁴⁷ English settlers in the Caribbean continued to get slaves through Iberian channels in the 1630s. The EIC likely continued to rely heavily on the Iberians as well in these early decades of expansion. In the 1640s, for example, EIC factors – the Company’s local agents – on the Coromandel Coast noted that they bought an African slave from a local trader (see Figure A.1). The slave had run away from the Portuguese before being taken captive once again.⁴⁸

Before the 1640s, the English forced slaves to work at every colonial site in the English empire from Amboyna to New England, but these slaves were almost always in the minority.⁴⁹ The English began to venture more fully into a direct slave trade with West and East Africa in the 1640s to supply a surging demand for colonial labor. One historian has gone so far as to call the rapid escalation in the English slave trade after 1640 a “slave rush.”⁵⁰ The 1640s became a hinge point in the development of slave trading throughout the empire. In 1640, the EIC sent its first slave ship directly from Surat to Mozambique and Madagascar to acquire captives.⁵¹ The next year, an English slave ship arrived in Barbados from the Gold Coast, the beginning of a steady transatlantic trade to the English Caribbean.⁵² The slave empire began to form.

Heart of the Empire: Slavery in the Caribbean

The failed Puritan colonies established in Providence Island and Association Island (modern-day Tortuga) in 1630 were not densely settled, but they were the first colonies in the English empire to have populations in which the enslaved were in the majority.⁵³ The settlers hoped to raise tobacco and cotton, but the soil proved unsuitable.⁵⁴ Providence Island and Association Island were deep in the Western Caribbean, amid Spanish territorial concerns. The settlers started to acquire many enslaved people by trade or by force and directly or indirectly through Spanish or Dutch channels. Some of the first slaves in Providence Island appear to have run away from the Spanish before being captured by the Indigenous Miskito people of Central America (see Figure A.3). They resold them to the English. New Englanders also captured and sent a few Pequots to these new English colonies after massacring the Indigenous Pequot in New England in 1636–1637.⁵⁵ In the 1630s, in the Western Caribbean, enslaved Africans could be bought from Dutch traders for half the price of what an imported English servant would have cost: 150 pounds of tobacco for a slave compared to 300–500 pounds of tobacco for a servant.⁵⁶ A few members of the Providence Island Company tried to discourage slavery in favor of more Puritan principles, and the Company decided to ban the enslavement of the Indigenous altogether, following Iberian precedent. Governor Philip Bell set a different example, bringing his own slaves from Bermuda when he moved to the new Providence Island colony.⁵⁷ It is not clear how large the slave population at Association Island was at its height, but it grew to a “great number of Negroes.”⁵⁸ When the Spanish destroyed Association Island in 1635, they seized thirty enslaved people.⁵⁹ Six years later, when Spanish forces captured the English settlement at Providence Island, they seized 381 slaves and they found only 350 English colonists there at that point.⁶⁰ The presence of an enslaved majority at Providence Island – and quite likely at Association Island – helps to underscore that when slaves were readily available and cheap, the English committed without reservation to racial slavery to supply their settlements with labor. When the English settled in the Caribbean, they did not need to work out or develop ideas about racial slavery or overcome any significant moral or religious aversions to the institution. They adopted the most profitable economic customs of the region, one of which was enslaving.

The English Puritan colonies in the Western Caribbean were the first to have enslaved majorities, but it was the English colonists in Barbados, settled in 1627, who adopted and refined the Iberian plantation model and then committed to racial slavery on a large scale. The Barbadian plantations would become the economic heart of the seventeenth-century English overseas empire, and the Barbadian variant of enslavement and plantation agriculture would be exported throughout the empire. Although the first Barbadian settlers brought African and Indigenous slaves, Barbadian planters relied to a large extent on indentured servants, convicts, and prisoners of war from the British Isles as laborers for the first three decades of settlement because servants and prisoners from the war-torn British Isles were more readily available than slaves.⁶¹ Bell, the former governor of Providence Island, became the governor of Barbados from 1641 to 1650 during the initial transition to sugar. His experience with slavery in Bermuda and then with slave majorities on Providence Island made him a conduit of knowledge for acquiring and managing enslaved people during the early transition to slavery in Barbados.⁶²

For nearly the first two decades, Barbadian planters tried to grow tobacco and cotton, like their English counterparts in the Western Caribbean, but in 1645 the English brought the sugar plantation complex from Brazil to Barbados, forever changing the archetype of the most profitable tropical venture. Most likely, it was introduced to Barbados via Brazil during the Dutch occupation of Pernambuco.⁶³ Enslaved sugar boilers from Penambuco were probably the conduits of agricultural knowledge, teaching the English and their slaves and servants how to grow sugar.⁶⁴ Over the last half of the seventeenth century, sugar transformed Barbados into a monocropping plantation society and created vast wealth for the English. The new crop accelerated deforestation and soil erosion and brought labor exploitation and concentrated capital into the hands of a new elite class of slaveholding sugar planters, the new Barbadian gentry.⁶⁵ Wealth production per capita in seventeenth-century Barbados after the transition to sugar – judging by exports – was higher than in any English colony in the seventeenth-century Americas. David Eltis has gone so far as to call it “the global economic giant” of the period, producing more per capita than “any other polity of its time.”⁶⁶ By 1666, Francis Willoughby had told Charles II that Barbados had become the “faire Jewell of your Majesty’s Crown.”⁶⁷ The Barbadian system of sugar planting began to produce more for export than the much larger Recôncavo of Bahia – the most significant region for sugar cultivation in Brazil – suggesting that Barbadians were refining the Brazilian plantation model, making it more productive per acre.⁶⁸

Innovations in labor organization and plantation management and land consolidation led to the remarkable sugar profits in Barbados in the 1640s and 1650s. English settlers in Barbados, supported by the growing financial power of Amsterdam and London, developed a new kind of sugar plantation model that allowed for better coordination in production and consequently higher yields and profits.⁶⁹ Whereas sugar fields in Brazil were owned by cane farmers who processed their canes at a central mill that was owned by someone else, Barbadians combined cultivation and processing into one plantation, using such vertical integration to create more profitable and efficient economies of scale, and they began introducing a more rigorous and brutal system of field labor organization – gang labor – to drive productivity to new levels. The new Barbadian plantation model relied on extreme violence and discipline, and it became increasingly dependent on a form of slavery that was racialized, inflexible, permanent, and inheritable.⁷⁰ These innovations yielded higher profits, allowing planters to buy more African slaves.

Whereas there was an active trade in slaves through Iberian channels in the Western Caribbean and along the Spanish Mainland in the 1630s, Barbadian planters, in the Eastern Caribbean, did not have access to sufficient slaves at first to be able to meet their labor demands (see Figure A.3). Providence Island planters were able to buy slaves from Dutch traders for less than half the price of a servant, but in the 1630s Barbadian planters, at roughly the same point in time, were paying almost six times more for a slave than a servant: £40 compared to £7.⁷¹ To meet their labor demands, the Barbadians relied on convicts, indentured servants and prisoners of war driven out of the British Isles by the political and social turmoil there. It is striking, given the significant difference in labor cost for servants and slaves, that the enslaved population in Barbados still rose to as high as 6,000 in the mid-1640s, 25 percent of the island’s overall population.⁷² Clearly English settlers in Barbados preferred slaves over servants even with a substantial difference in price. In the mid-1650s, the price of servants rose to twice what it had been in the 1630s.⁷³ The population began to fall in England at mid-century, stemming the tide of both forced and free European migration to the colonies.⁷⁴ At the same time, the price of slaves was steadily falling as slave traders began to supply the Eastern Caribbean generally and Barbados specifically.⁷⁵ By 1645, the sudden growth of an English slave trade ensured that slaves were being sold for £20, half of what they had sold for in the 1630s.⁷⁶ The island transitioned to a majority African labor force as the supply of African slaves to Barbados grew, their costs fell, and the purchasing power of the new Barbadian elite grew.⁷⁷ A Barbadian yellow fever epidemic, as Chapter 4 will show, helped to accelerate this process.

The transition to an enslaved African majority in Barbados came between the late 1650s and early 1660s, within fifteen to twenty years after the transition to sugar planting. This shift created a new set of concerns about social control.⁷⁸ Barbados developed the first comprehensive slave code in the English empire in 1661 to control the rapidly growing slave population. It is important, however, to note that the Barbadians were not necessarily inventing slavery by creating a comprehensive slave code. They passed a comprehensive servant code at the same time because servants were still a significant labor force in Barbados. The two sets of laws were triggered more by the return of Charles II to the throne than by a desire to invent an English form of slavery. A permanent, inflexible, and inheritable form of racial slavery had been forged in the English Caribbean before it was codified.⁷⁹

The sugar plantation complex spread out of Barbados and through the Leeward Islands of Nevis, St. Kitts, Montserrat, and Antigua, but the conditions in these islands were less than ideal for the rapid growth of sugar. The terrain in the interior of some of these islands was more rugged and mountainous than in Barbados, making it difficult to cultivate sugar. Warfare with the Indigenous Kalinago and with other European powers was also more endemic in these closely grouped islands than in Barbados.⁸⁰ The slow growth of sugar in the Leeward Islands led to slower growth in the slave population compared to Barbados. Planters in the Leeward Islands had to rely on European indentured servants much longer than their Barbadian counterparts because slave traders were more willing to deliver their African captives to the wealthier Barbadian planters.⁸¹ In the 1660s, there were a few sugar plantations in the Leeward Islands, and in the 1670s the number of slaves began to increase more rapidly, particularly in Nevis.⁸² By 1690, enslaved Africans outnumbered whites in the Leeward Islands as a whole, indicating that the slave-based plantation complex had begun to take hold.⁸³ Yet, by 1700 the total value of exports from the plantations throughout the Leeward Islands, collectively, was still only slightly more than half of the exports from Barbados.⁸⁴

The spread of the plantation complex out of Barbados shaped the development of North American temperate and subtropical mainland colonies but to a lesser degree than it did in the Caribbean. Elite planters in the Chesapeake, modeling their Barbadian counterparts, began the slow transition around Chesapeake Bay to a predominantly enslaved African labor force in the 1650s. That process was not complete until the 1720s.⁸⁵ As land and forests became scarce, Barbadians became interested in the Carolinas as a resource satellite in the 1660s. They helped establish the first permanent colony there in 1670.⁸⁶ They sent settlers, slaves, and investment capital to the region and exported the Barbadian plantation and slaveholding model. The new colony was committed to plantation slavery, and as many as a third of the first inhabitants were enslaved Africans. Yet, the planters struggled to find the right staple crops for their new plantation complex before slowly turning to rice in the 1690s.⁸⁷

The sugar industry in the Western Caribbean developed very slowly compared to Barbados. Smuggling, privateering, and piracy played more significant roles in Jamaica’s early economy sugar because it lay so close to the Spanish mainland colonies.⁸⁸ Tensions between European planters and maroon communities of ex-slaves also slowed the pace of development in the sugar industries in the Western Caribbean.⁸⁹ In the 1660s, after the Restoration, the English state began trying to redirect the plantation complex toward the new royal colony in Jamaica, conquered from Spain in 1655. Charles II was hopeful that his appointment of Thomas Modyford, a sugar planter and former Barbadian governor, as the new governor of Jamaica in 1664 would encourage planters to journey west to the Jamaican frontier, but the island remained a backwater military garrison and a haven for pirates, privateers, and smugglers. In the Treaty of Breda (1667), at the end of the Second Anglo–Dutch war, the English Crown sped up the transition to a sugar economy in Jamaica by ceding a flourishing new sugar colony in Surinam (see Figure A.3) and English claims to the Indonesian island of Run to the Dutch in exchange for the island of Manhattan.⁹⁰ After a few years of living under Dutch rule and without an adequate supply of enslaved labor, English planters from Surinam began to migrate to Jamaica in 1671 and again in 1675 with their slaves, with capital to invest and with the knowledge and expertise necessary to grow sugar and manage large populations of slaves.⁹¹ Settlers from the Leeward Islands began to migrate to Jamaica in the 1670s as well, bringing with them more experience with England’s sugar and slaves complex.⁹² By 1673, there were more slaves in Jamaica than in the Leeward Islands.⁹³ Shipping costs to and from the Caribbean began to fall after 1675, making sugar production more profitable in Jamaica in the last quarter of the seventeenth century.⁹⁴ In 1675, the Jamaican governor, John Vaughan, told the English Crown that everyone in the island was now “bent on planting.”⁹⁵ When he made that claim, there were seventy sugar plantations in Jamaica, but a decade later there were 246.⁹⁶ As the Jamaican planter Cary Helyar had explained in 1671 when he envisioned plantations spreading through Jamaica, “as negroes will begett negroes, so one plantation will begett another.”⁹⁷

In the 1670s, Jamaican planters began a slow transition to sugar, and they began to reinvest their profits in slaves. With far more available land than Barbados, Jamaica would eventually prove a lucrative frontier. By itself, Jamaica has 1.7 times as many square miles as all of the islands of the Lesser Antilles combined.⁹⁸ By 1686, sugar comprised 74 percent of the total value of exports from Jamaica to London.⁹⁹ The shift from piracy to plantations was sealed with the deaths in 1687 and 1688 of the Jamaican governor Christopher Monck – who supported the privateers – and Henry Morgan, a former governor and renowned buccaneer. The destruction of Port Royal – a haven for pirates – by a catastrophic earthquake in 1692 also helped spur the plantation industry in Jamaica. The capital gained from piracy and privateering was reinvested in the plantation industry.¹⁰⁰ In the 1690s, the growth of the Jamaican sugar economy accelerated. The number of enslaved in Jamaica almost doubled between 1689 and 1713 and the island’s white servant population almost vanished.¹⁰¹ By 1713, there were more slaves in Jamaica than in Barbados, and Jamaica overtook Barbados as the leading sugar producer in the British empire in the early eighteenth century.¹⁰²

Merchant Company Slaves: West Africa and the Indian Ocean

As slaveholding expanded in the Caribbean plantations, slave traders struggled to meet the enormous demand for enslaved labor. The European trade along the African Coast expanded – particularly on the Gold Coast – and it became increasingly focused on human trafficking.¹⁰³ The Royal African Company (RAC), a commercial arm of the English Crown set up by Charles II’s brother James II, was chiefly responsible for escalating the English slave trade from the West African coast at the end of the seventeenth century, even though their initial 1660 charter had not even mentioned a trade in slaves. After going bankrupt, the Company was granted a monopoly over English trade with West Africa in 1672. They maintained their monopoly over the African trade until 1689, when the rapidly expanding English slave trade was opened to other traders. After losing their monopoly, the Company’s market share began to steadily decline. By 1730, they were no longer significant players in the British Atlantic slave trade.¹⁰⁴ The slave trade from Africa expanded significantly after 1680. From 1645 to 1720, the English forced 711,330 African captives aboard their slave ships. Twice as many captives were taken in the last half of that three quarters of a century than in the first half.¹⁰⁵

Under the terms of the charter, the RAC was tasked with managing a string of factories on the Gold Coast, in Sierra Leone and in Gambia, ensuring an English foothold in the region. These were the only permanent English forts and factories in West Africa in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. They were far from being anything like the significant colonial settlements that the English were establishing in the Caribbean. Instead, the RAC forts and factories were intended almost exclusively for trade and for countering the geopolitical ambitions of other European powers in the region. The main fort at Cape Coast had between fifty and 100 Europeans working for the Company, but some of the smaller subsidiary sites, far removed from Cape Coast, had consistently fewer than six white RAC staff (see Figure A.2).¹⁰⁶ Staffing this string of RAC factories with tradesmen, laborers, and soldiers to maintain and defend the factories was a costly endeavor, fraught with recruiting difficulties.¹⁰⁷ More than half (480) of the 894 Europeans employed by the RAC between 1694 and 1713 were soldiers and nearly one-fifth (170) were tradesmen.¹⁰⁸ As the RAC’s trading presence in West Africa grew, their factories, large and small, became dependent on not just a supply of slaves for trade but also on slaves and other African laborers to do the heavy work required to maintain the RAC sites. They worked as porters, and they built and rebuilt the RAC’s structures, repairing crumbling walls, roofs, and dungeons. They also performed other domestic labor for the Company’s employees. The enslaved people working at European factories along the coast were known as “castle slaves,” and they normally outnumbered the RAC’s European staff and soldiers (see Chapter 5). These castle slaves were sometimes transported to the Gold Coast from distant RAC factories in Gambia or Sierra Leone.¹⁰⁹

The strength of indigenous polities – particularly the Mughal Empire of northern and central India – kept the English and other European powers from establishing slave-based plantation economies or other kinds of colonies on the Indian subcontinent in the last half of the seventeenth or the early eighteenth century. Through most of the seventeenth century, it was particularly difficult to gain footholds in the Bay of Bengal, the heart of Mughal power. The EIC established their principal factories in India in Surat in northwestern India in 1613 and in Madras in southeastern India in 1639 (see Figure A.1). Fort St. George in Madras would become the “most substantial” EIC settlement in Asia in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.¹¹⁰ The EIC also established smaller factories in the Bay of Bengal at Balasore (1633), Hugli (1651), Dhaka (1668), and Calcutta (1690). In 1661, the English Crown acquired the island of Bombay from Portugal. It was just south of Surat but still in the orbit of the Mughal empire. There were many other smaller factories subordinate to these main sites in India. Most were short-lived. EIC factories in Asia had little centralized control, and there were times at which the EIC seemed destined to fail. The Company’s economic fortunes reached their nadir in the mid-1650s while Barbados flourished. A new charter in 1657 kept the Company afloat and started to turn their fortunes around.¹¹¹ The acquisition of Bombay gave the English an opportunity to attempt a more extensive colonial settlement in India. The EIC gained governing power over the island in 1667. The Company envisioned a full-fledged colony in Bombay, but the island was notoriously unhealthy, and the EIC struggled to maintain sufficient settlers there.¹¹²

There were so few European settlers at EIC settlements in India that the English became completely dependent on Indian political connections and support, on Asian settlers, and on local or slave labor to maintain their factories on the Indian subcontinent and develop the promising trade in textiles.¹¹³ The English used slaves in India to do the heavy work of constructing and rebuilding factories and fortifications in India, and the EIC’s employees kept their own slaves and servants as domestics. Occasionally, the English used slaves as soldiers.¹¹⁴ Slaves also carried goods to and from ships and acted as sailors and laborers on the EIC’s voyages.¹¹⁵ The English remained opportunists in India, taking advantage of vulnerable people and forcing them to labor or settle, using whatever means of coercion they could. The laborers that the English used existed under a wide variety of conditions of bondage and dependency. To simply label those various forms of bondage as slavery before the late seventeenth century is to overlook the vast differences between the status of Indian bondsmen and the status of enslaved Africans in Barbados. Indian bondsmen often existed in forms of enslavement or unfree labor that were temporary or which had very porous boundaries between unfreedom and freedom.¹¹⁶ Until the 1680s, EIC agents may have been modeling Iberian or Muslim forms of enslavement in India, both of which allowed more opportunities for manumission.¹¹⁷ Many of the forced laborers serving the EIC were in debt bondage; some were war captives; others voluntarily sold themselves or their families into slavery to avoid starvation.¹¹⁸ In Bombay, one scholar has suggested that the EIC tried to assert more control over local Indian textile workers by giving them cash advances to keep them tied through contractual obligations to the EIC’s factory.¹¹⁹ Slaves and other unfree laborers were also sometimes used to forcefully populate an EIC settlement. For example, the EIC planned to transform unfree bondsmen in India into more permanent settlers in 1677 by choosing to emancipate the “black servts.” they had purchased after only three years if those servants had converted to Christianity. They could become “free men” at the English settlement.¹²⁰

The EIC also became actively involved in human trafficking along the coast of India, ultimately contributing, alongside other European powers, to a transformation in the nature and scale of slavery in the Indian Ocean.¹²¹ As early as 1622, the EIC sent twenty-two enslaved people from India to their spice-trading factories in the Indonesian archipelago, but the EIC’s involvement in slavery and slave trading in India and Indonesia continued to be miniscule compared to the Dutch.¹²² The English investment in human trafficking numbers in India had grown substantially by the 1680s. In 1686, the English shipped at least 200 slaves from Madras.¹²³ Overall, they may have transported as many as 665 enslaved people to sell in Aceh in Sumatra that year.¹²⁴ The Company operated in a variety of ways to obtain slaves in India. English traders bought the people offered for sale in India, and they also resorted at times to outright kidnapping. Sometimes Indian laborers working temporarily for the Company found themselves enslaved.¹²⁵

Throughout much of the seventeenth century, the EIC considered Indonesian spices to be as important as Indian textiles in the Indian Ocean trade. The English had started trading in Bantam as early as 1602, and they established a factory in the city in 1613.¹²⁶ They were pushed out of many of their spice island factories by the VOC in the 1620s, but they struggled to try to maintain a share of the trade.¹²⁷ It was a difficult task. Although the English kept footholds in the Indonesian archipelago, the bulk of the seventeenth-century European trade in the spice islands remained in the hands of the VOC.¹²⁸ In 1682, after the EIC lost their foothold in Bantam in the island of Java, the English were forced to focus on India and the textile trade, a consolation prize that proved more profitable in the long run than Indonesian spices.¹²⁹ The EIC turned more fully and intentionally to slavery in the 1680s and 1690s as they tried to reestablish an Indonesian trading presence in Sumatra and turn their Atlantic island way station in St. Helena into a Caribbean-style plantation economy.¹³⁰

The Fusion of Colonial Models: One Slave Empire

The Barbadian slave-based plantation model transformed the western tropics, but it also spread across the Atlantic and into the Indian Ocean.¹³¹ In 1650, the unprecedented success of the Barbadian sugar plantations inspired a bold effort to colonize an island in the Indian Ocean on a Barbadian model. Unlike earlier English efforts to settle a colony on Madagascar itself, the colony they hoped to build in 1650 was to be settled on a small island off the coast of Madagascar called Nosy Be or, to the English, Assada (see Figure A.1).¹³² The Assada venture demonstrates the extent to which some English investors dreamed of a global slave empire filled with plantations producing tropical crops. Just as Bell, a governor of the failed Providence Island colony, had become governor of Barbados, Robert Hunt, another former governor of Providence Island, would be named governor of Assada, bringing his expertise in the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean.¹³³ Hunt outlined his vision in his promotional pamphlet, The Island of Assada. The island would be fruitful, he thought, because it was about the same “bignesse and goodnesse” as Barbados, and the islands shared the same latitude in the tropics.¹³⁴ Assada, in Hunt’s mind, would combine East and West, commercial and territorial expansion. He maintained that the island could be filled with plantations that would grow a mix of “Sugar, Indico, ginger, cotton woll, Tobacco, Rice, and Pepper,” combining all the crops that seemed to grow best in the torrid zone.¹³⁵ Assada could conceivably merge Caribbean sugar islands with spice island pepper plantations and give the English more control over the means of production in spices. Hunt focused on Barbados as the chief model of success, but he also noted that the island was so well situated in the Indian Ocean for commercial trade that it might become a valuable trade entrepot “as Batavia is to the Dutch, and Goa to the Portigalls.”¹³⁶ The English – as latecomers to the game of imperial expansion – focused on recreating both Dutch and Iberian successes in the tropics.

According to Hunt, the key to Assada’s potential was that slaves in East Africa would be substantially cheaper and more easily found than in Barbados. Earlier efforts to establish an English colony in Madagascar during the surge in English slave trading in the 1640s were also focused on the idea that slaves were so readily available in that region that a Madagascar colony could become a hub for exporting slaves through the Indian and Atlantic oceans.¹³⁷ Plantations in Assada, Hunt proclaimed, could be supplied with “Negroes” for just 20 shillings each, whereas the same “Negroes servants” would cost £25 to £30 each in Barbados. In other words, twenty-five to thirty slaves could be had in Assada for the price of just one in Barbados.¹³⁸ As further incentive, Hunt suggested that English servants could be enticed to permanently settle by promising them “as much Land to Plant” as they could manage and an additional “three Negro” servants of their own at the end of a four-year indentured servant contract.¹³⁹ Essentially, the supporters of the Assada venture wanted to move the Barbadian plantation system closer to a cheap source of slave labor. Yet, while Hunt was certain that there would be ample slaves in Assada, he was not always clear about who exactly these slaves would be. Presumably, by “negroes” he meant blacks from Madagascar and Mozambique or perhaps Mauritius, but he seems to have used the term loosely as an umbrella category for non-Europeans. He left open the possibility that a variety of ethnic groups from across the Indian Ocean would serve in this role. He suggested that in the densely populated Indian Ocean the new plantation colony of Assada could draw “men from Arabia, Africa and India to Plant,” and “some” would “be free men, others servants.”¹⁴⁰ Assada – this blend of East and West in the tropics – proved to be nothing more than a pipe dream. Hunt was killed with other settlers in the early settlement by indigenous inhabitants who may have become hostile to English encroachments or who may have been encouraged by the Portuguese to attack.¹⁴¹ By 1650, the failure of successive colonization attempts on or near Madagascar and the weak financial state of the EIC meant that Englishmen would – temporarily – table the dream of establishing plantation colonies in the eastern half of the Indian Ocean world.¹⁴²

The Barbadian plantation complex was something the Assada merchants had hoped to spread beyond Madagascar, deep into the spice islands. After Assada was established, the Assada merchants planned to build a large settler colony with “plantations and fortifications” on the tiny and isolated island of Run in the Banda Islands (see Figure A.4), where the English could get “nutmeg and mace of their own growings.”¹⁴³ These plantations would allow the English to exercise control over the means of production in spices and counter Dutch control of the trade. Although the Assada merchants made no mention of a labor source for these plantations in the Banda Islands, they would presumably have relied on slaves, following the Dutch model. The only hitch was that the Assada merchants recognized they would need to “settle any differences” with the Netherlands in order to build plantations and forts in Run.¹⁴⁴ It was, of course, a big roadblock. The Dutch had ousted the English from Run in 1620 and, in 1623, to maintain monopoly control over nutmeg, the VOC had killed English, Japanese, and Portuguese factors at an English trading outpost in Amboyna, 200 kilometers north of Run.¹⁴⁵ The VOC and EIC continued to vie for control of Run. The English gained the island again in 1654, and the Company imagined that they would “plant, fortify and people it,” but the plans were never realized.¹⁴⁶ The dream of creating plantation-based settlements in Run was abandoned altogether in 1667 at the end of the Second Anglo–Dutch War when the English surrendered the tiny island to the Dutch.

Imperial agents fantasized about moving people and plants around the growing global empire to find the most profitable combination and locale for plantations, and the tropics remained an interconnected region in their minds. Just as men such as Hunt had hoped to transplant Caribbean sugar and tobacco plantations into Madagascar, others wanted to bring the exotic plants of the East Indies to the Atlantic Ocean, where the English had more control and could escape their VOC rivals.¹⁴⁷ After the Restoration, Charles II and his advisors were particularly keen to take advantage of Cromwell’s conquest of Jamaica, now a royal island rather than an island under proprietary control. Sugar cultivation was one possibility, but tropical spices from the East Indies were another. In 1661, one advisor, in a “Proposal for removing spices and other plants from the East to the West Indies,” suggested that the King send gardeners to the East Indies to gather plants to grow in Jamaica. Some evidence suggests that the paper may have been drafted by Richard Ford, a member of the EIC. The plan was to gather “pepper plantes” from the Indonesian archipelago and any “plants as may be proper” from St. Helena and then sail “directly for Jamaica” to “arrive in a proper tyme for theire plantings there.”¹⁴⁸ A few years later, in 1669, the Barbadian sugar planter and London merchant Nicholas Blake wrote to Charles II to suggest that he was certain “that the spices of the East India (such as pepper cloves nutmegs & Synamon) would grow here, if wee had them here to plant.” Blake had “heard’ that a “Certayne publique spirited Commander of a Ship (some years past before I knew this place) did Undertake that designe,” but “death … prevented him.” Blake urged Charles II to make another trial of these plants in the Caribbean.¹⁴⁹ Just a year letter, the Jamaican sugar planter Cary Helyar wrote to his brother in England in 1670 to tell him that there was a “design of bringing the plants of all sorts of spices from the East Indies” to Jamaica.¹⁵⁰ Colonial architects planned to bring both plants and people from East to West. More than 8,200 slaves were also from brought from the Indian Ocean to be sold in Jamaica from 1669 through 1671 as the RAC struggled to meet Caribbean demand.¹⁵¹ On the other side of the Atlantic, the EIC tried to bring some of the profitable spices from Java to grow in St. Helena, where they would have more exclusive control over the laborers and less interference from the Dutch. In 1678, the agent and Council at Bantam reported to the EIC directors that they “Continue[d] to send Plants to St. Helena.”¹⁵²

The EIC directors eventually decided that they wanted to pepper St. Helena – a small EIC way station off the coast of Africa – with Caribbean-style plantations.¹⁵³ The EIC had expanded to St. Helena in 1659, creating another permanent English settler colony in the tropics but closer to the West African coast. James Drax, a prominent Barbadian sugar planter and a governing member of the EIC, seems to have urged the Company to colonize St. Helena.¹⁵⁴ Unlike so many seventeenth-century colonial settlement schemes, the EIC’s settlement at St. Helena survived, and it served as a crucial resupply station for EIC ships sailing to and from their commercial interests in Asia. The EIC, however, wanted even more profits from the colony.¹⁵⁵ In 1683, the EIC lifted a ban on buying slaves in St. Helena that had been placed to protect this essential EIC way station from slave rebellion. To imitate the Caribbean model, they needed not only more slaves but “Commodities of a richer Nature than Cattle or Potatoes, Yams, Planta[i]ns & c.”¹⁵⁶ They hoped that the St. Helena planters would “live and grow rich” with slave and export-based plantation agriculture; the specific crop was less important to them.¹⁵⁷ Like South Carolinian planters in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, St. Helena was committing to a Caribbean-style slave labor force before they had a staple crop, but unlike the South Carolinian planters and their turn to rice cultivation, the planters in St. Helena never found a suitable staple crop.¹⁵⁸ The Company recommended the planters try a variety of crops, including sugar, indigo, tobacco, cotton, and even wheat.¹⁵⁹ In 1684, a planter in St. Helena warned the Company’s directors that “no West India Commodityes will grow well at St. Helena,” but they believed he and the other planters just needed more perseverance.¹⁶⁰ Ultimately, regardless of how many slaves they had, the EIC directors were frustrated by their efforts to grow the most lucrative tropical crops in St. Helena.¹⁶¹ The South Atlantic colony remained, as one observer called it in 1683, nothing “but an Inn, for the Ships” and a place for the production of “Butchers Meat.”¹⁶²

The EIC tried to replicate not only the Barbadian plantation complex but also the Barbadian approach to governing and managing slaves. By the 1680s, the Company may have even hoped to implement something akin to the new Barbadian gang labor system in St. Helena. In 1684, London said that they would try to send St. Helena “a System of ye Lawes and Customes of Barbadoes with Relation to ye Government, working, diet, times of Labor, and ease of their Negroes.”¹⁶³ The directors wanted them to follow the Barbadian regimen “as near as possible” and also recommended “Overseers” for the enslaved, who would “compell each of them to do a full days work.”¹⁶⁴ The Company relied heavily on the expertise and knowledge of Nathaniel Cox to help them implement sugar and a Barbadian plantation model in St. Helena. Cox had worked as the “overseer of Col. Codringtons Plantaton in Barbados” and was “well Skill’d” at “raising a Sugar Plantaton.”¹⁶⁵ The EIC directors also tried to replicate aspects of Barbadian slave management in the Indian Ocean. The EIC agents at Fort St. David in Cuddalore were told, for example, to start a Caribbean-style slave provisioning system and grant the “Companyes Slaves … little Platts of Ground” to plant and grow their own food “as is done in Barbados.”¹⁶⁶

After they lost their foothold in Java, the scattered outposts that the EIC rebuilt in the late 1680s in Sumatra and Borneo became a new canvas onto which the EIC could paint their dreams of both profiting from the spice trade and extending the lucrative plantation model across the tropics (see Figure A.4). The proliferation of stateless societies and the decentralization of power in western Indonesia in the late seventeenth century seemed at first to offer the English more opportunity for trade and for building plantation colonies.¹⁶⁷ Rather than just establishing another factory, the English imagined that their new settlement in Bencoolen would grow into a “great & famous colony.”¹⁶⁸ In 1687, the EIC wrote to the chief and council at York Fort in Bencoolen to let them know that they had discharged Cox, the former Barbadian overseer, from their service in St. Helena, and they had offered him passage to Bencoolen along with a good salary of £70 and a ranking of third in the governance of the factory.¹⁶⁹ They were excited because he was so “skillfull in Sugger plantations for wch by experience we finde St. Hellena improper.”¹⁷⁰ In Sumatra, Cox could “employ his tallent and his Stock in making sugar for himself” because, as the EIC directors noted, Bencoolen was “a proper Country for Sugar canes.”¹⁷¹ The initial efforts at bringing sugar plantations to Sumatra in the 1680s failed, but the dream lingered into the early eighteenth century. By 1710, the EIC council at York Fort, where there was always a very high turnover in European staff, seems to have had no idea that there had already been some effort to start sugar planting in Sumatra. “It Seems a wonder to us,” the council reported to London, “that Sugar plantations have not been encouraged at this place.”¹⁷²

At the turn of the eighteenth century, while the EIC was still trying to introduce sugar plantations to Sumatra, the RAC considered developing Caribbean-style plantations in the areas around their West African factories to collapse the distance between the labor supply and the plantation system. They hoped to use castle slaves imported from other regions of Africa to work the plantations.¹⁷³ In 1692, the Company informed a factor in Sherbro River in Sierra Leone that they wanted to try cultivating indigo on a place they called York Island. They could “traine up some people in that art” on the island and presumably control their labor more easily. The island setting would also, they hoped, protect the plantations “from violence” from locals.¹⁷⁴ Alarmed Jamaican planters protested the RAC efforts at establishing plantations. They were concerned that the RAC’s efforts in the West African tropics could create unfair competition, proving “Much to the Discouragement” of the Jamaican “Planting Trade.” The Jamaican assembly went so far as to instruct their agents to try to “Oppose the Contrivance of the Royall Companys Planting of Indigo at Gambia.”¹⁷⁵ The RAC continued to explore opportunities for cultivating plantation agriculture in West Africa, extending the English foothold there. In 1706, an RAC employee from Scarcies noted that that “the land about Seraleon … as also elsewhere is very good & seemingly will bear any thing especially in ye sugars or Rice plantations.”¹⁷⁶

Dalby Thomas, one of the RAC factors involved in trying to extend the plantation complex to the West African littoral in the early eighteenth century had detailed knowledge of the Caribbean plantation systems. Thomas was a merchant who had traded slaves to the Caribbean and had petitioned on behalf of Caribbean planters to Parliament to better support the plantations.¹⁷⁷ In 1690, Thomas had published An Historical Account of the Rise and Growth of the West-India Colonies in which he described the process of growing sugar, cotton, indigo, ginger, and cocoa and argued that the plantations, particularly sugar plantations, had made enormous contributions toward “Increasing the Wealth, Power and Glory of the Nation.”¹⁷⁸ He stressed though that the cost of enslaved Africans – “the main prop of a Plantation” – continued to be much too high, chiefly because Caribbean planters had to buy “Ten Blacks” per year for every fifty they owned to replace the dead.¹⁷⁹ Like most planters, he took these catastrophic mortality rates of plantation agriculture for granted. The goal was to reduce the cost of resupply rather than the mortality of the laborers.

Thomas became an RAC factor on the African coast in 1703, and he started using castle slaves at Cape Coast Castle to cultivate a variety of crops. He made plans, although it is not clear how far they were carried out, to create sugar, indigo, cotton, and ginger plantations.¹⁸⁰ He noted that “Everything that thrives in ye West Indias will thrive here.”¹⁸¹ He already had someone skilled in growing Indigo at Cape Coast Castle, and he believed that he could “bring Indigo to as great perfection as in ye West Indias.”¹⁸² As with most of the other attempts to expand staple crop plantations into tropical zones outside the Americas, Thomas’ African plantation scheme withered on the vine. Undeterred by the many failures at erecting plantations beyond the Americas, Thomas Bowrey, in 1712, imagined the profits that could be made if the English developed plantations in East Africa on which slaves would grow medicinal crops for export.¹⁸³ On the African coasts, European efforts to establish plantations failed – if they were attempted at all – because the local populations stole the produce, and it was much more difficult than in the Caribbean islands to control a large and enslaved agricultural labor force.¹⁸⁴ Europeans lacked sufficient political or military power to impose the control needed for a slave-based agricultural export colony in Africa.

While the success of the Barbadian planation model served as inspiration in the spread of slavery through the English tropics, English factors in the Indian Ocean also continued to try to emulate the slaveholding and trading practices of the VOC, their chief European rivals in the East Indies. This was particularly true after the English were driven out of Bantam in 1682. The EIC worried about reestablishing a presence in Indonesia “to prevent ye avaritious design of the Dutch to engross the whole Pepper trade of India” through which they could become “Masters of the European as well as of the Indian Seas.”¹⁸⁵ Large numbers of slaves, following the Dutch example in Indonesia, seemed to be the key to the survival of this new wave of English ventures in the spice islands. In 1685, the EIC promised to send “Madagascar Blacks” to a new settlement called Priaman in Sumatra, and they wanted them to “be bred up Ship Carpenters, Smiths & other Handicraft trades as ye Dutch doe to their great advantage at Batavia.”¹⁸⁶ In 1686, agents on the ground in the new English settlement at Bencoolen in Sumatra explained to the EIC directors that they would need more slaves to compete with the Dutch. They noted that the Dutch “make use” of “Madagascar Blacks” in the Indonesian archipelago, and so those same slaves “would be of great use” in Sumatra.¹⁸⁷ The EIC, attentive to these Dutch examples, sent enslaved people from Madagascar to the new Sumatran settlement in Bencoolen, but they cautioned their factors on the ground to look as well to the Dutch example of how to “provide for your Blacks,” suggesting that they should follow the slaveholding practices of the “Dutch [as they] do at Battavia if you think to keep them serviceable and in health.”¹⁸⁸ The EIC outposts in Sumatra struggled to attract European settlers and soldiers, and they remained committed to slaves and other unfree Indian Ocean laborers to try to compete with the Dutch.

Conclusion

Racial slavery spread rapidly through the English empire in the second half of the seventeenth century. It was inspired in part by the success of two contemporary and lucrative models of tropical European slaveholding: the Barbadian sugar plantation complex in the Caribbean and VOC slaveholding and human trafficking in the interests of merchant capitalism in Indonesia. In the 1640s, a hinge point, the English began to develop a constant slave trade with Africa. They were more successful in West Africa than in East Africa. By the 1660s, racial slavery had become, unquestionably, the key to empire building in the tropics. The English continued to use a variety of unfree laborers, but in 1663 Renatus Enys, writing from Surinam, decided that all the colony needed to thrive was “Negroes[,] the strength and sinews of this Western world.”¹⁸⁹ The preamble to the Jamaican slave code of 1664 justified the act by the increasing “Numbers of Negroes,” arguing that “it is utterly impossible to make and continue Plantations without such Slaves.”¹⁹⁰ By the 1660s at the latest, English planters in the tiny land-scare islands of the Eastern Caribbean were arguing that slaves were even more important than land in the spread of the plantation complex. Blake, writing to Charles II in 1669 from Barbados, explained that “without stock, ether of Negros [and] cattle” the “bare Lands” of a sugar plantation were worth “nothing.”¹⁹¹ This attitude spread across the global tropics. The EIC, which had always relied on forced laborers when the opportunity arose, began to more intentionally embrace slavery at its factories in the 1680s and 1690s. English trading outposts and settlements in the Atlantic islands, in tropical West Africa and in much of tropical Asia – particularly in the Indonesian spice Islands – became as dependent on slave labor as English Caribbean planters.

By the turn of the eighteenth century, one can estimate that roughly 85 percent of all enslaved people in England’s overseas empire lived in the tropics.¹⁹² Approximately 115,000 slaves toiled in the Caribbean plantation colonies.¹⁹³ On the other side of the Atlantic, approximately 600 slaves lived as permanent workers at English forts and factories in West Africa along the Gold Coast and in Gambia and Sierra Leone, while there were another 1,300 enslaved laborers at EIC outposts in St. Helena, in India, and in the Indonesian archipelago.¹⁹⁴ To put this in perspective, the 1,300 enslaved people spread across the EIC’s “system of settlements” in 1700 were close in number to the population of slaves in the more densely settled English sites across New England and Atlantic Canada at that point in time.¹⁹⁵ There were 1,700 people of African descent across these northeastern North American English colonies in 1700. Not all of those who were enslaved were Black; there were also slaves of Indigenous North American descent in northeastern North America. One could estimate that the English had between 1,500 and 2,000 slaves in that region. The key difference between English sites in northeastern North America and English sites in the Indian Ocean was that whites vastly outnumbered slaves – by a ratio of more than fifty to one – in northeastern North America at the turn of the eighteenth century.¹⁹⁶ In sharp contrast, non-European slaves outnumbered Europeans at most English sites in the tropics.¹⁹⁷ Slave majorities became the foundation of a distinctly tropical model of empire.

It is important not to assume that any division of the early English empire into commercial expansion in the East and territorial expansion in the West was inevitable.¹⁹⁸ English settlements in the Caribbean and Indonesian islands and along the West African coast became the sites in the English tropics at which the English would turn to slave majorities in the late seventeenth century. The vast majority of slaves in the English tropics lived in the Caribbean, where the English successfully established a plantation complex with labor-intensive export crops. Yet, seventeenth-century English colonial architects imagined other possibilities, and those possibilities were not necessarily far-fetched. While the English failed in their efforts to establish the plantation complex in the Indian Ocean, other European colonizers were more successful. The Dutch controlled the slave-based clove and nutmeg plantations in the Moluccas in the Indonesian islands, while the French would successfully extend sugar and the plantation complex in the eighteenth century to the Mascarene Islands – just east of Madagascar – where they would rely on Indian Ocean slaves.¹⁹⁹ If the English had managed to extend the plantation complex into West Africa or the Indian Ocean in the seventeenth century, then the British empire may have had even more substantial slave populations beyond the Americas and an even higher proportion of its slaves in the tropics. The early English empire, however, lacked enough political power and settlers to be able to extend sufficient control to those regions to build and maintain the infrastructure for a plantation complex. The tropical disease environments in Africa and Indonesia remained a significant barrier to English expansion as well.

By the turn of the eighteenth century, the empire was loosely divided into a territorial empire in the West and a commercial empire in the East. The vast majority of English slaves spent their days in backbreaking labor in Caribbean sugar fields, but the English profited from human trafficking and relied on slave labor across the tropical zone. West Africa became the key supplier of captives for the Caribbean plantation complex, but slaves also helped maintain English forts and factories on that coast. At sites in the Atlantic islands and in the Indian Ocean, the English consistently relied on enslaved people for constructing and maintaining settlements, for growing provisions, and for loading and unloading ships at their forts and factories.²⁰⁰ They also profited from and relied on established human trafficking routes in the Indian Ocean.²⁰¹ By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, the English were tapping into slave markets in the Americas, in West and East Africa, in Madagascar, on the Malabar and Coromandel coasts of India, in the Bay of Bengal, and in the Indonesian islands – particularly Nias off the coast of Sumatra. The English had established a global slave empire.