Throughout the eighteenth century the empire’s epicenter lay not in North America, Africa, or India but in a handful of small sugar-producing Caribbean islands. The two most important--tiny Barbados and its larger, distant neighbor Jamaica--were among the most profitable places on earth. On the eve of the American Revolution, the nominal wealth of an average white person was £42 in England and £60 in North America. In Jamaica, it was £2,200. Immense fortunes were made there and poured unceasingly back to Britain. This gigantic influx of capital funded the building of countless Palladian country houses […]. Sugar became Britain’s single largest import, and the craze for it revolutionized national diets, spending habits, and social life [...]. Between 1700 and 1800, English consumption of sugar skyrocketed from about four pounds per person per year to almost twenty, roughly ten times as much as that of the French. [...]
In the decades following the Coromantee War, Jamaican slavery expanded and flourished as never before. In 1760 there had been about 150,000 slaves on the island; by 1808 there were over 350,000. To safeguard its white inhabitants, the colony became ever more heavily militarized. In the aftermath of rebellion, new laws severely curtailed the rights and movements not only of slaves but also of all other nonwhites: white solidarity was increasingly seen as crucial to security.
The British finally outlawed the transatlantic trade in 1807 (the same year the United States did). But the fantasy of an acquiescent […] class, governed by benevolent masters, never materialized, nor did the gradual withering away of slavery that abolitionists had hoped for. On the contrary, as Tom Zoellner argues [...], it was another Jamaican rebellion that finally precipitated the end of British slavery in the West Indies. Shortly after Christmas 1831, between 30,000 and 60,000 men and women rose up and ran away, refusing to work any longer as slaves. Hundreds of plantations were set on fire […].
The Slavery Abolition Act didn’t apply to India or Ceylon, and though it technically liberated over 800,000 British slaves in the Caribbean and Africa, all of them (excepting only small children) were forced to continue to labor as unpaid “apprentices” for a further six years, [...] subject to punishment for “indolence,” “insolence,” or “insubordination.” So many black West Indians were jailed for resisting these outrageous terms that full emancipation was eventually brought forward to August 1, 1838. [...]
In the meantime, for almost two hundred years, British taxpayers funded the largest slavery-related reparations ever paid out. Under the provisions of the 1833 act, the government borrowed and then disbursed the staggering sum of £20 million (equal to 40 percent of its annual budget—the equivalent of £300 billion in today’s value). Not until 2015 was that debt finally paid off. This unprecedented compensation for injustice went not to those whose lives had been spent in slavery, nor even to those descended from the millions who had died in captivity. It was all given to British slaveowners, as restitution for the loss of their human property.
Text above by: Fara Dabhoiwala. “Speech and Slavery in the West Indies.” The New York Review. 20 August 2020. URL: https:// www.nybooks. com/articles/2020/08/20/ speech-slavery-west-indies/
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