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Caribbean slavery


Slavery in the British and French Caribbean refers to slavery in the parts of the Caribbean dominated by France or the British Empire.

In the Caribbean, Barbados became an English colony in 1624 and Jamaica in 1655. These and other Caribbean colonies became the center of wealth and the focus of the slave trade for the growing English empire.

As of 1778, the French were importing approximately 13,000 Africans for enslavement to the French West Indies.

The Lesser Antilles islands of Barbados, St. Kitts, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Antigua, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Saint Lucia and Dominica were the first important slave societies of the Caribbean, switching to slavery by the end of the 17th century as their economies converted from tobacco to sugar production. By the middle of the 18th century, British Jamaica and French Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) had become the largest slave societies of the region, rivaling Brazil as a destination for enslaved Africans.


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