Sugar plantations in the Caribbean

Sugar was the main crop produced on plantations throughout the Caribbean through the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. Most islands were covered with sugar cane and mills for refining it. The main source of labor, until the abolition of the system, was African slaves. These plantations produced 80 to 90 percent of the sugar consumed in Western Europe.

Sugar was the most important crop throughout the Caribbean, although other crops such as coffee, indigo, and rice were also grown. Sugar cane was best grown on relatively flat land that was near the coast, where the soil was naturally yellow and fertile; mountainous parts of the islands were less likely to be used for cane cultivation.

In the mid-17th century, sugar cane was brought into what later became the British West Indies by the Dutch, from Brazil. Upon landing in Barbados and other islands, they quickly urged local growers to change their main crops from cotton and tobacco to sugar cane. With depressed prices of cotton and tobacco, due mainly to stiff competition from the North American colonies, the farmers switched, leading to a boom in the Caribbean economies. Sugar was quickly snapped up by the British, who used it in cakes and to sweeten teas.

During the colonial period, the arrival of sugar culture deeply impacted the society and economy in the Caribbean. It not only dramatically increased the ratio of slaves to free men, but it increased the average size of slave plantations. Early sugar plantations made extensive use of slaves because sugar was considered a cash crop that exhibited economies of scale in cultivation; it was most efficiently grown on large plantations with many workers. As a result, black men and women were forcibly taken from Africa and made into slaves to work on the plantations. For example, before 1650 more than three-quarters of the islands' population was white. In 1680, the median size of a plantation in Barbados had increased to about 60 slaves. Over the decades, the sugar plantations became larger and larger. In 1832, the median-size plantation in Jamaica had about 150 slaves, and nearly one of every four bondsmen lived on units that had at least 250 slaves.

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