Atlantic British Slavery
Caribbean plantations and compensated abolition
Britain became the largest Atlantic slave trafficker of the eighteenth century, shipping more than three million Africans. Slave-produced sugar and cotton capitalized British ports and industry, and abolition compensated the owners.
Damage
British Atlantic slavery and plantation terror produced Caribbean wealth on African deaths.
Lives lost
Millions embarked; high Middle Passage and plantation mortality (order-of-magnitude)
Value lost
Sugar and related plantation profits compounding British capital
Record Points
- British ships carried over 3.1 million enslaved Africans, and hundreds of thousands died during the Middle Passage.
- Jamaica and Barbados sugar estates operated as death regimes reliant on constant new imports.
- Profits flowed into Liverpool, Bristol, Glasgow, and the banks and insurers that financed the trade.
- The 1833 abolition act paid slaveholders 20 million pounds, a debt British taxpayers finished repaying in 2015.
- The formerly enslaved received nothing and were bound to unpaid apprenticeship for years afterward.
Perpetrator(s)
Victims
West AfricaCaribbean