Establishment of the Colonial Empire: Sugar-Slave Plantations, White Exploitation, and Slave Suppression

This chapter explains the establishment of the English/British colonies in the Caribbean with the three-fold social structure of slave masters, free people of colour, and African slaves. It also examines the originality expressed in the colonization of distant and unknown tropical islands; and in the decision, after other experiments, to select the sugar plantation and slavery as the mode of production for the cultivation and export of sugar and sugar products for the British market. Not only were the British Caribbean colonies subordinate to Britain, but the bulk of their inhabitants—African slaves and free people of colour—were subordinate to the local white planters socially, economically, and politically.