The West Indies (1684 – 1827 CE): Empire, Slavery, and the Atlantic Crossroads

Geographic and Environmental Context

The West Indies of the long eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—stretching from Cuba and Jamaica in the west through Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and the Lesser Antilles to Trinidad, and northward through the Bahamas, Bermuda, and Turks and Caicos—formed one of the most strategic and contested maritime regions in the world.
This region’s division into three natural and historical subrealms—the Northern, Eastern, and Western West Indies—was defined by wind, current, and empire as much as by geography.

• The Northern West Indies (Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, Bermuda, northern Hispaniola) was a world of shallow banks, salt pans, and smuggling harbors, a crossroads of piracy and empire.

• The Eastern West Indies (Trinidad, Barbados, Saint Lucia, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, eastern Hispaniola) became the plantation heart of the Caribbean, where sugar, slavery, and revolt shaped the modern Atlantic.

• The Western West Indies (Cuba, Jamaica, the Caymans, and the Inner Bahamas) was the imperial cockpit—a corridor of treasure fleets, naval wars, and plantation kingdoms whose influence reached far beyond the Caribbean basin.

Together these subregions bound Europe, Africa, and the Americas into a single, brutal, and creative system: the Atlantic World.

---

Climate and Environmental Shifts

The late Little Ice Age persisted into the 1700s, bringing alternating pulses of storm and drought.

• Hurricanes periodically erased entire settlements—from the Great Hurricane of 1780 that devastated Barbados and Saint Lucia to the cyclones that swept the Bahamas and Jamaica.

• Droughts afflicted Hispaniola and eastern Cuba, while floods reshaped Puerto Rico’s valleys and washed away fragile terraces.

• Volcanic and coral soils in the eastern arc buffered rainfall variability, but thin limestone and wind-exposed cays in the north demanded constant rebuilding.

Despite climatic instability, warm seas, and the steady northeast trades made the Caribbean a perennial hub of shipping and migration.

---

Subsistence, Settlement, and Economy

Across the archipelago, local adaptations reflected the twin forces of ecology and empire.

• In the Northern West Indies, shallow banks and reefs nurtured piracy and contraband. Nassau and Tortuga became pirate havens before being “reformed” into colonial ports. Bermuda evolved into a shipbuilding and trading powerhouse, while salt-raking and small-scale ranching sustained the Turks and Caicos and northern Hispaniola’s frontier.

• In the Eastern West Indies, plantation economies reached their zenith. Barbados, Saint-Domingue, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, and the Danish and British Virgins built vast estates of sugar and coffee, their profits extracted through the labor of enslaved Africans. The Treaty of Ryswick (1697) split Hispaniola into French and Spanish halves—Saint-Domingue, the world’s richest colony, and Santo Domingo, a ranching and provisioning frontier.

• In the Western West Indies, Spain’s Cuba and Britain’s Jamaica anchored rival empires. Havana became a fortified naval hub and the final stop for Spanish treasure fleets; Jamaica grew into the centerpiece of the British sugar system, defended by Maroon treaties and fed by Atlantic slavery. The Bahamas and Caymans remained smaller satellite economies, dependent on fishing, turtling, and trade.

Everywhere, African labor and knowledge made the system function: sugar cultivation, salt evaporation, animal husbandry, shipwrighting, and tropical medicine all drew on African expertise.

---

Technology and Material Culture

• Plantation industry reached new levels of mechanization: wind- and later steam-powered mills, boiling houses, and curing houses dotted the islands.

• Shipbuilding thrived in Bermuda and Jamaica, producing sleek sloops that outsailed European vessels.

• Fortification architecture defined Havana, San Juan, and Port Royal; the ruins of stone mills, cisterns, and aqueducts endure as the era’s material signature.

• Enslaved Africans and their descendants contributed ironworking, weaving, pottery, basketry, and culinary traditions that transformed Caribbean daily life.

---

Movement and Interaction Corridors

The West Indies was the beating heart of Atlantic circulation:

• Trade routes carried sugar, rum, and molasses to Europe and North America, returning with goods, guns, and enslaved captives from Africa.

• Naval convoys guarded silver fleets through the Windward and Mona Passages.

• Pirates and privateers exploited the same currents, operating from the Bahamas and Hispaniola.

• Slave ships traversed the Middle Passage to Saint-Domingue, Jamaica, Cuba, and Trinidad.

• Maroon and contraband networks stitched together mountain refuges and frontier coasts from Jamaica to Santo Domingo.

• Migrant flows after the American Revolution—Loyalists, free Blacks, and enslaved Africans—reshaped Bahamian and Cayman society.

These corridors made the region at once interconnected and violently unequal.

---

Cultural and Symbolic Expressions

The West Indies forged some of the most profound cultural syntheses in the Atlantic world.

• Religions: Catholicism and Protestantism provided colonial frameworks, but African cosmologies—Vodou, Santería, Obeah, Myal, and others—redefined the sacred landscape.

• Languages and Music: Creole languages, drumming, and call-and-response singing blended African, European, and Indigenous rhythms.

• Resistance and Community: Festivals, ring-shouts, and secret gatherings sustained solidarity among the enslaved; pirates, maroons, and sailors developed their own egalitarian codes.

• Architecture and Landscape: Plantation great houses stood above quarters, mills, and cane fields, while vernacular huts and maroon villages adapted to hills, mangroves, and storms.

Through suffering and creativity, Caribbean people produced enduring art, faith, and identity.

---

Environmental Adaptation and Resilience

Despite relentless exploitation, the region’s inhabitants learned resilience:

• Islanders rebuilt after each hurricane with stronger stone, better cisterns, and low, wind-resistant roofs.

• Provision grounds allowed enslaved and free people to maintain food security with cassava, yams, and plantains.

• African agronomy and water management sustained fertility in thin tropical soils.

• Cattle and small stock on drier islands (Turks, Caicos, Santo Domingo) supplemented the plantation diet and economy.

Human adaptation paralleled ecological resilience: mangroves, reefs, and coral cays regenerated repeatedly after devastation.

---

Transition and Legacy (by 1827 CE)

By the early nineteenth century, the West Indies was transforming under revolutionary and abolitionist pressure:

• The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) destroyed the world’s richest colony and created the first Black republic, inspiring fear and hope across the region.

• British Jamaica and Barbados tightened control but faced growing unrest; debates over emancipation gained force.

• Cuba and Puerto Rico, under Spain, expanded sugar and slavery even as neighboring colonies moved toward freedom.

• Trinidad absorbed French planters and enslaved labor under British rule after 1797.

• Bermuda and the Bahamas became minor metropoles of Atlantic shipping and, eventually, abolitionist transit.

By 1827, the West Indies had become both the engine and the conscience of the Atlantic world—its wealth built on enslavement, its resistance birthing freedom’s first revolutions.
In the framework of The Twelve Worlds, the region embodied the paradox of modernity itself:
a crossroads where empire, ecology, and human endurance converged to shape the moral and material map of the modern age.

Northern West Indies (1684–1827 CE): Piracy, Empire, and Maritime Crossroads

Geographic & Environmental Context

The subregion of Northern West Indies includes Bermuda, the Turks and Caicos, northern Hispaniola, and the Outer Bahamas (Grand Bahama, Abaco, Eleuthera, Cat Island, San Salvador, Long Island, Crooked Island, Mayaguana, Little Inagua, and eastern Great Inagua). The Inner Bahamas belong to the Western West Indies. Anchors included the Bahama Banks, the Caicos Passage, Bermuda’s cedar outcrop, and the Cibao Valley of northern Hispaniola. The region’s shallow cays, reefs, and natural harbors became pivotal in the age of piracy and naval rivalry.

Climate & Environmental Shifts

The Little Ice Age lingered into the 18th century. Hurricanes swept across the Bahamas and Caicos, often devastating fragile settlements. Bermuda endured repeated storms in 1712 and 1719. Hispaniola’s north coast experienced cycles of drought and flood, shaping ranching and farming.

Subsistence & Settlement

• Northern Hispaniola: Spanish authority waned along the north coast. French buccaneers and settlers encroached from Tortuga and Saint-Domingue. Ranching and contraband trade flourished.

• Bahamas: English settlement at Nassau (1670) became notorious for piracy. Captains like Blackbeard (Edward Teach) operated from Bahamian waters until Governor Woodes Rogers reestablished order in 1718. Loyalist refugees after the American Revolution resettled the islands.

• Turks and Caicos: Salt-raking emerged as the economic base, developed by Bermudian and Bahamian settlers using enslaved Africans.

• Bermuda: Matured as a maritime colony. Cedar-built sloops carried goods across the Atlantic. Tobacco declined, replaced by food crops, salt fish, and shipping. Enslaved Africans formed the majority of the labor force.

Technology & Material Culture

• Bermudian sloops exemplified fast, maneuverable shipbuilding.

• Salt pans and stone windmills dotted Turks and Caicos.

• Ranching in Hispaniola used Spanish herding technologies.

• African influences shaped basketry, drumming, and foodways across the islands.

Movement & Interaction Corridors

• Pirate routes crisscrossed the Bahamas, threatening Spanish fleets.

• British shipping tied Bermuda to North America, the Caribbean, and London.

• Salt from Turks and Caicos supplied Atlantic markets.

• Contraband from Hispaniola’s north coast linked ranchers with French Saint-Domingue and Dutch Curaçao.

• The transatlantic slave trade bound all islands into wider circuits.

Cultural & Symbolic Expressions

• Catholicism persisted in Hispaniola; African traditions fused with saints’ festivals.

• Anglican churches anchored Bermuda and Nassau, while enslaved Africans nurtured creole religious practices.

• Piracy generated its own symbolic culture: flags, legends, and songs of outlaw captains.

• Salt rakers in Turks and Caicos marked seasons with communal rituals of harvest.

Environmental Adaptation & Resilience

Settlers rebuilt after hurricanes with sturdier limestone houses and water catchments (notably in Bermuda). Bahamian settlers exploited shallow soils with provision grounds and shifting gardens. African agrarian knowledge preserved crops like okra, cassava, and yams. Hispaniola’s ranchers adapted to drought with mobile herds.

Transition

By 1827 CE, the Northern West Indies was bound tightly into Atlantic empires. Bermuda stood as a fortified British naval station. The Bahamas transitioned from piracy to plantation and Loyalist resettlement. Turks and Caicos anchored salt exports on enslaved labor. Northern Hispaniola lay contested, overshadowed by the rise of French Saint-Domingue and, later, revolutionary Haiti. The subregion was a maritime frontier of slavery, contraband, and empire.

European plantations require laws to regulate the plantation system and the many slaves imported to work on the plantations.

This legal control is the most oppressive for slaves inhabiting colonies where they outnumber their European masters and where rebellion is persistent, such as Jamaica.

During the early colonial period, rebellious slaves are harshly punished, with sentences including death by torture; less serious crimes such as assault, theft, or persistent escape attempts are commonly punished with mutilations, such as the cutting off of a hand or a foot.

Slaves can only be freed with the consent of their master under British rule,  and therefore freedom for slaves is rare.

British colonies are able to establish laws through their own legislatures, and the assent of the local island governor and the Crown.

British law considers slaves to be property, and thus does not recognize marriage for slaves, family rights, education for slaves, or the right to religious practices such as holidays.

British law denies all rights to freed slaves, with the exception of the right to a jury trial.

Otherwise, freed slaves have no right to own property, vote or hold office, or even enter some trades.

The development of agriculture in the Caribbean requires a large workforce of manual laborers, which the Europeans have found by taking advantage of the slave trade in Africa.

The Atlantic slave trade brings African slaves to British, Dutch, French, Portuguese and Spanish colonies in the Americas, including the Caribbean.

Slaves are brought to the Caribbean from the early sixteenth century until the end of the nineteenth century.

The majority of slaves are brought to the Caribbean colonies between 1701 and 1810.

Toussaint Louverture is the leader of the slave rebellion in Saint-Domingue.

Born between 1743 and 1746 on the Breda plantation in northern Saint-Domingue, one of a small number of slaves who had been well treated and allowed to become literate, Toussaint had served on the Breda plantation as a steward; when the rebellion began, he had arranged safe conduct for his master's family out of the colony and joined the army.

He had soon emergesd as the preeminent military strategist, reportedly in part because of his reading of works by Julius Caesar and others, and in part because of his innate leadership ability.

Cap-Francais falls in April 1793, to the French republican forces, who are reinforced by thousands of blacks who have joined them against the French royalists on the promise of freedom.

Commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax abolishes slavery in the colony in August.

The buccaneers eventually began to cross to the western side of Hispaniola to hunt for cattle and wild boar, and some have settled here, assuming they would be safe because of the area's relative remoteness from the Spanish capital city of Santo Domingo.

By 1670 the buccaneers had established a permanent settlement at Cap-Francois, now Cap-Haitien.

By  this time, the western third of the island was commonly referred to as Saint-Domingue, the name it bears officially after Spain relinquishes sovereignty over the area to France following the War of the Grand Alliance, or Nine years' War, which officially ends with the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697.

More French citizens arrive in Saint-Domingue in the 1720s.

They hope to get rich by farming indigo, coffee, or sugar and then to return to France.

Many succeed in their goal.

By the mid-eighteenth century, this territory, largely neglected under Spanish rule, has become the richest and most coveted colony in the Western Hemisphere.

Between 1783 and 1789, agricultural production on the island almost doubles, creating more wealth than the rest of the West Indies combined, and more than the United States.

Sugar is the principal source of its wealth.

Saint-Domingue produces forty percent of the sugar imported by France.

The colony plays a pivotal role in the French economy, accounting for almost two-thirds of French commercial interests abroad and forty percent of foreign trade.

Saint-Domingue's flourishing economy is based on slavery.

The first African slaves had been brought from Portugal and Spain, but by 1513, shipping lines had been established exclusively for slaving, and its victims were imported directly from Africa.

Although most of the slaves come from West Africa, their origins are diverse, representing at least thirty-eight regions in Africa and one hundred tribes.

With time, Saint-Domingue becomes the principal slave-importing island in the West Indies.

According to historian Moreau de St. Mery, who writes in 1797, based on census figures there are four hundred and fifty-two thousand slaves in Saint-Domingue in 1789 out of a total population of five hundred and twenty thousand— the remainder consists of forty thousand whites and twenty-eight thousand affranchis (free men and women of color) or descendants of affranchis.

Between 1764 and 1771, ten thousand to fifteen thousand new slaves arrive in Saint-Domingue annually, while countless others die at sea en route.

Most who survive  the crossing subsequently perish in Saint-Domingue, some because of the island's tropical heat, humidity, and diseases, and others as the result of brutal treatment by plantation owners.

Statistics show that there is a complete turnover of slaves every twenty years.

Two-thirds of all the slaves in the colony in 1789 had been born in Africa.