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(Barbados, 1625)
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- The first colonies of the British Empire were founded in North America (Virginia, 1607) and the West Indies (Barbados, 1625).
www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zk4ktcwWhat impact did Britain have on the Caribbean? - BBC Bitesize
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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. There have been several attempts at political unions in the history of the British West Indies .
The British West Indies (BWI) were the territories in the West Indies under British rule, including Anguilla, the Cayman Islands, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Montserrat, the British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the ...
- Overview
- Colonialism of the West Indies
- Plantation slavery
- Emancipation
England was the most successful of the northwestern European predators on the Spanish possessions. In 1623 the English occupied part of Saint Christopher (Saint Kitts), and in 1625 they occupied Barbados. By 1655, when Jamaica was captured from a small Spanish garrison, English colonies had been established in Nevis, Antigua, and Montserrat. France occupied the rest of Saint Kitts, took control of Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1635, and in 1697 formally annexed Saint-Domingue (Haiti), the western third of Hispaniola, which for about half a century had been occupied by buccaneers and French settlers. Curaçao, Aruba, and Bonaire, off the coast of present-day Venezuela, and Sint Eustatius, Saba, and half of Saint Martin (Sint Maarten), in the northern group of the Lesser Antilles, became Dutch possessions in the 1630s, but more as part of the military strategy of the Dutch war of independence against Spain than in expectation of agricultural riches.
These major gains against the Spanish were concentrated in the Lesser Antilles, which were poorly defended and essentially under Carib control. Only Jamaica and part of Hispaniola were wrested from the Spanish empire in the Greater Antilles, and Havana and San Juan continued to play a crucial part in trade between Latin America and Spain until the latter lost its mainland empire as a result of independence struggles of the 1820s. The French and the British continued to dispute the Lesser Antilles throughout the 18th century, and by the early 19th century Dominica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, Tobago, and Grenada were in British hands, while Trinidad was formally ceded to Britain by Spain in 1802, following its capture in 1797.
England was the most successful of the northwestern European predators on the Spanish possessions. In 1623 the English occupied part of Saint Christopher (Saint Kitts), and in 1625 they occupied Barbados. By 1655, when Jamaica was captured from a small Spanish garrison, English colonies had been established in Nevis, Antigua, and Montserrat. France occupied the rest of Saint Kitts, took control of Guadeloupe and Martinique in 1635, and in 1697 formally annexed Saint-Domingue (Haiti), the western third of Hispaniola, which for about half a century had been occupied by buccaneers and French settlers. Curaçao, Aruba, and Bonaire, off the coast of present-day Venezuela, and Sint Eustatius, Saba, and half of Saint Martin (Sint Maarten), in the northern group of the Lesser Antilles, became Dutch possessions in the 1630s, but more as part of the military strategy of the Dutch war of independence against Spain than in expectation of agricultural riches.
These major gains against the Spanish were concentrated in the Lesser Antilles, which were poorly defended and essentially under Carib control. Only Jamaica and part of Hispaniola were wrested from the Spanish empire in the Greater Antilles, and Havana and San Juan continued to play a crucial part in trade between Latin America and Spain until the latter lost its mainland empire as a result of independence struggles of the 1820s. The French and the British continued to dispute the Lesser Antilles throughout the 18th century, and by the early 19th century Dominica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, Tobago, and Grenada were in British hands, while Trinidad was formally ceded to Britain by Spain in 1802, following its capture in 1797.
During the second half of the 17th century, colonialism was linked to mercantilism (based on establishing gold and silver reserves and a favourable trade balance) and, in the British and French possessions in particular, to sugar and coffee plantations using slave labour imported from West Africa. The object of each of these imperial systems was to extract profits from the systems of trade in sugar, enslaved people, and manufactured goods. Mercantilism was most fully expressed in what is referred to as the triangular and quadrilateral trades; in their most complicated form these linked Europe, West Africa, the West Indies, and the eastern seaboard of what is now the United States in reciprocal commerce largely for the benefit of the British, French, and Dutch. Mercantilism peaked in the 18th century, before being replaced by the industrial capitalism that it had nurtured.
A major feature of European settlement in the West Indies was its transitory nature. The object of adventurers, especially the British, was not to stay permanently in the West Indian colonies but to return to Europe with their fortunes made. Absenteeism became well established during the early 18th century, when many successful planters retired to Britain, leaving representatives in charge of their estates. These absentees were a crucial element in the West India Interest, a powerful lobby that brought together merchants from the major ports, planters, and parliamentarians. It was the West India Interest that engineered the Molasses and Sugar acts in the first half of the 18th century. These acts protected British West Indian sugar in the British market and increased the prosperity of the planters.
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West Indian Creole societies were shaken by the successful slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue in the 1790s, which led to a growing independence movement whose leaders included Toussaint Louverture, Henry Christophe, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. The movement resulted in Haiti’s independence in 1804, thus creating the first republic founded by people of primarily African descent in the Americas. In 1807 Britain abolished the slave trade, and slavery itself was abolished in the British West Indies in two stages between 1834 and 1838. The French enacted emancipation in 1848 and the Dutch in 1863. But while these changes were taking place in the British, French, and Dutch West Indies, Spanish Cuba was developing as a slave-plantation producer of sugar. The importation of enslaved Africans into Cuba, despite a British naval blockade, turned the island into a predominantly Black and mixed-race society by the second half of the 19th century. Full emancipation was not enacted in Cuba until 1886, 13 years after it was accomplished in Puerto Rico, where tobacco was more important than sugar and where enslaved people made up less than 5 percent of the population. Subsequent free white immigration, especially for plantation work in the early 20th century, once again transformed Cuba into a mainly white society with a Hispanic culture.
Nineteenth-century emancipation created fewer changes than the slaveholders feared, largely because most of the best land was already part of plantations and because property-restricted franchises—especially in the British West Indies—favoured the established order. Nonetheless, the emancipated were free to sell their labour, migrate, squat, or purchase land. A “reconstituted” peasantry emerged in Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, and the Windward Islands. In the larger Leewards and Barbados the ex-slaves were unable to acquire land; mountainous (nonplantation) land on other islands was all that was available to formerly enslaved people, but the Leewards and Barbados lacked mountainous interiors. Thus, the nominally freed people there remained as plantation workers or emigrated and moved to Central America or the United States. Cuba’s emancipated Blacks were soon caught up in the war of independence with Spain; their descendants were later drawn into the burgeoning sugar industry developed by U.S. capital, much as mixed-race peasants had been in the Dominican Republic and as whites would be in Puerto Rico.
An important general feature of history-writing in the West Indies since 1950 has been an effort to think of the British colonies as part of a larger region and a larger world to subvert the fragmentation rooted in the geophysical history of the archipelago and exploited by European imperialism.
Oct 21, 1999 · The British West Indies in 1815 consisted of a large number of islands and territories acquired over two centuries. The original colonies established in the seventeenth century, Barbados, Jamaica, and the Leeward Islands, were still the most important British possessions in the region.
BRITISH COLONIALISM IN THE WEST INDIES: THE POLITICAL LEGACY * Gordon K. Lewis ** The political government of the West Indian territories was exercised, classically, through the instrumentality of the Crown Colony system. That system, with individual variations, characterised West Indian political life cer
Following the onset of the Cold War, most of the remaining British colonies in the Americas gained independence between 1962 and 1983. Many of the former British colonies are part of the Commonwealth of Nations, a political association chiefly consisting of former colonies of the British Empire.
