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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Abolitionists in the Americas and in Europe become vocal opponents of the slave trade throughout the nineteenth century.

The importation of slaves to the colonies is often outlawed years before the end of the institution of slavery itself.

It is well into the nineteenth century before many slaves in the Caribbean will be legally free.

The trade in slaves is abolished in the British Empire through the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807.

Men, women and children who are already enslaved in the British Empire will remain slaves, however, until Britain passes the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833.

When the Slavery Abolition Act comes into force in 1834, roughly seven hundred thousand slaves in the British West Indies will immediately become free; other enslaved workers will be freed several years later after a period of forced apprenticeship.

Slavery is abolished in the Dutch Empire in 1814.

Spain abolishes slavery in its empire in 1811, with the exceptions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo; Spain ends the slave trade to these colonies in 1817, after being paid ₤400,000 by Britain.

Slavery itself will not be abolished in Cuba until 1886.

France will abolish slavery in its colonies in 1848.

Eastern West Indies (1684–1827 CE): Sugar Frontiers, Revolt, and Revolutionary Shockwaves

Geographic & Environmental Context

The subregion of Eastern West Indies includes Trinidad, Saint Lucia, Barbados, most of Haiti, most of the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Anchors include the Orinoco–Trinidad seaway, the Cordillera Central (Hispaniola), the karst valleys of Puerto Rico, and the volcanic arc from Saint Lucia through the Virgin Islands. Deep channels and steady trades funneled fleets, while fertile valleys and limestone plains supported plantation cores.

Climate & Environmental Shifts

The late Little Ice Age persisted, with devastating hurricanes—especially the Great Hurricane of 1780—and multi-year droughts alternating with flood seasons on Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. Volcanic soils on windward islands buffered rainfall shocks; leeward cays suffered salinization and erosion after major storms.

Subsistence & Settlement

• Hispaniola: The Treaty of Ryswick (1697) formalized a split between French Saint-Domingue (west) and Spanish Santo Domingo (east). Saint-Domingue became the hemisphere’s premier sugar/coffee colony, powered by massive imports of enslaved Africans; the Spanish east emphasized cattle, small farms, and provisioning ports.

• Puerto Rico: Spain expanded towns, forts, and mixed agriculture (sugar, coffee, tobacco), relying on enslaved labor alongside free smallholders.

• Barbados: A mature British sugar colony dominated by estates; enslaved Africans formed the vast majority.

• Saint Lucia: A contested French/British battleground; sugar estates expanded under shifting flags.

• Trinidad: Spanish until 1797, then British; late but rapid plantation growth under the Cedula of Population (1783) attracted French planters and enslaved labor.

• Virgin Islands: Danish St. Thomas and St. John (and St. Croix after 1733) developed plantation complexes; neighboring British islands mixed small estates with maritime trades.

Technology & Material Culture

Wind- and later steam-powered mills, boiling houses, and curing ranges defined sugar landscapes. Fortified harbors (San Juan, Santo Domingo) mounted new artillery. African knowledge shaped cane field practices, provision plots, and foodways; maroon strongholds adapted mountain house forms. On Saint-Domingue, coffee terraces and aqueducts climbed steep slopes.

Movement & Interaction Corridors

• Atlantic slave trade funneled captives to Saint-Domingue, Barbados, Trinidad, and the Danish/British Virgin Islands.

• Convoy routes threaded the Windward Passage and Mona Passage, while inter-island smuggling tied Spanish east Hispaniola to French markets.

• Runaway corridors led into Hispaniola’s ranges and Puerto Rico’s cordilleras, feeding marronnage and maroon communities.

Cultural & Symbolic Expressions

Catholic and Protestant establishments framed public ritual, yet Afro-Caribbean lifeways dominated plantation quarters: vodou (Saint-Domingue), cabildos and cofradías (Hispaniola, Puerto Rico), drumming and ring-shout traditions across British and Danish islands. Maroon treaties in Jamaica (contextual neighbors) resonated with mountain communities in Saint-Domingue and eastern Hispaniola. Revolutionary slogans and catechisms later fused with African ritual speech.

Environmental Adaptation & Resilience

Provision grounds (cassava, plantains, yams) stabilized diets; inter-island provisioning cushioned hurricane losses. Coffee diversified steep lands; cattle in eastern Hispaniola buffered drought. Coastal towns rebuilt with thicker masonry, wind-smart roofs, and raised cisterns after great storms.

Transition

By 1827 CE, the subregion had been remade by revolution. The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) shattered Saint-Domingue and birthed Haiti, catalyzing regional slave resistance and planter flight (some to Trinidad and Puerto Rico). Santo Domingo oscillated between Spanish rule and local movements, heading toward the Haitian unification (1822–1844) just beyond this span. British islands tightened plantation order yet faced rising emancipation debates. The Eastern West Indies stood at a pivot between the age of sugar/slavery and an era of abolition and post-plantation change.

The exploitation of the Caribbean landscape dates to the Spanish conquistadors starting in the 1490s, who had forced indigenous peoples held by Spanish settlers in encomienda to mine for gold.

The more significant development came when Christopher Columbus wrote back to Spain that the islands were made for sugar development.

The history of Caribbean agricultural dependency is closely linked with European colonialism. which alters the financial potential of the region by introducing a plantation system.

Much like the Spanish exploited indigenous labor to mine gold, the seventeenth century had brought a new series of oppressors in the form of the Dutch, the English, and the French.

By the middle of the eighteenth century sugar is Britain's largest import, which makes the Caribbean colonies that much more important.

Sugar, a luxury in Europe prior to the eighteenth century, becomes widely popular in the eighteenth century, then graduates to becoming a necessity in the nineteenth century

This evolution of taste and demand for sugar as an essential food ingredient unleashes major economic and social changes.

Caribbean islands with plentiful sunshine, abundant rainfalls and no extended frosts are well suited for sugarcane agriculture and sugar factories.

The French Empire regulates slaves under the Code Noir (Black Code), which is in force throughout the empire from 1685, but which is based upon French practices in the Caribbean colonies.

French law recognized slave marriages, but only with the consent of the master.

French law, like Spanish law, gives legal recognition to marriages between European men and black or Creole women.

French and Spanish laws are also significantly more lenient than British law in recognizing manumission, or the ability of a slave to purchase their freedom and become a "freeman".

Under French law, free slaves gain full rights to citizenship.

The French also extend limited legal rights to slaves, for example the right to own property, and the right to enter contracts.

The West Indies are known as a particularly dangerous posting for soldiers in Colonial times and during the Napoleonic Wars, due to yellow fever being endemic in the area.