Slavery in the Caribbean

Slavery in the Caribbean was central to the Atlantic slave system, especially through plantation agriculture, maritime trade, and imperial competition. Caribbean colonies absorbed a very large share of enslaved Africans carried across the Atlantic, with sugar islands such as Jamaica, Barbados, Saint-Domingue, and later Cuba becoming major centers of coerced labor. Modern databases such as SlaveVoyages and the destination-adjustment work of Alex Borucki, David Eltis, and David Wheat show that Caribbean totals must be read carefully because many captives were first landed in one port and later redistributed within the Americas.

The region was not a single slave society. British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, and independent Caribbean polities had different laws, labor systems, and abolition sequences. Jamaica was the largest single British island destination, with roughly 1.02 million enslaved Africans disembarking there, while Saint-Domingue had roughly 465,000 to 500,000 enslaved people on the eve of the Haitian Revolution. Cuba became especially important in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, receiving about 779,000 to 789,000 enslaved Africans and developing a large sugar economy after the destruction of Saint-Domingue's plantation center.

Sugar shaped much of Caribbean slavery because cane cultivation and processing required tightly timed field, mill, boiling-house, and transport labor. Enslaved people were also sold and resold through ports and internal markets. Evidence from Jamaica, Cuba, and compensation records shows that the system converted vulnerability into alienable labor: merchants, planters, creditors, insurers, and imperial states all depended on records that treated people as transferable property.

Abolition in the Caribbean was uneven. Haiti's revolutionary abolition sequence ran from local emancipation in 1793 through French abolition in 1794 to independence in 1804. British Caribbean slavery formally ended under the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, with apprenticeship ending in 1838 where it applied. French colonial slavery was finally abolished in 1848 after Napoleon's earlier restoration of slavery in 1802. Spanish Caribbean slavery lasted longer: Puerto Rico abolished slavery in 1873, while Cuba's patronato transition ended in 1886. These legal endpoints did not erase plantation inequality, coerced labor transitions, or the social consequences of racialized slavery.

References

• SlaveVoyages: Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.
• Alex Borucki, David Eltis, and David Wheat, "Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America", American Historical Review 120, no. 2 (2015).
• University College London, Legacies of British Slavery and Slavery Abolition Act project materials.
• Antislavery in Domestic Legislation, global abolition law database.
• Thomas Maciejewski, The History of Slavery, manuscript, abolition atlas, claim matrix, and source research notes, 2026.