CHAPTER 1

England’s First Slave Society, Barbados

THE ENGLISH ADOPTED the practice of using enslaved Africans as agricultural laborers in the late 1620s without much thought because their imperial competitors in the Atlantic—the Portuguese and the Spanish—had been doing so profitably for more than a century. As the English founded their first slave society in Barbados during the mid-seventeenth century, two hundred thousand enslaved Africans survived the Atlantic crossing in Dutch or Portuguese slave ships and were sold in Brazil or the Spanish mainland. A small percentage were sold in the rough young colonies of the English, but in the early decades of England’s empire, indentured servants from Europe provided most of the labor. The first Barbadian planters found success in growing cotton and tobacco, and servants were cheaper and more widely available, so they predominated. The planters built a plantation economy based on the labor of indentured servants and, soon, of enslaved Africans who were compelled to do the same work in similar conditions of inhumane brutality.1
The English began to develop their own slave trade with West African merchants in the 1630s, and in the 1640s the Barbadian planters learned the art of making sugar, which the Iberians had known for a hundred years. Sugar brought in more profits than either cotton or tobacco, and its production required more capital, as well as more labor. Sugar brought success to fewer and richer colonists, and the intensity of its production worsened the exploitation inherent in the plantation economy. Servants and slaves resisted the erosion of human dignity at the heart of this exploitation, generating a political struggle that would last for two hundred years.2
Despite the importance of liberty in European intellectual discourse, few people of power had ever challenged the morality of slaveholding. In 1518 Bartolomé de Las Casas, outraged by the brutal enslavement and slaughter of the Indians of the Greater Antilles, proposed to the Crown that the practice of enslaving Indians be replaced with the purchase of enslaved Africans. While Las Casas later regretted his proposal, the suggestion accurately represented the growth of African slavery within the expansive merchant capitalism that linked northern Europe to the Mediterranean and West Africa by the end of the fifteenth century. The expansion of Mediterranean sugar production, as well as the European sugar market, had fostered these connections, for when the Ottomans captured Constantinople in 1453, barring Christian merchants from the slave markets of the Black Sea, Mediterranean sugar planters turned increasingly to the slave markets of North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula.3
There had always been a few black Africans in these slave markets, those who had survived the trans-Saharan journey, but as the Portuguese began to explore the West African coast, they opened a trade with African merchants in gold and slaves. In 1444 some 235 Africans arrived in Lagos, a port in southern Portugal, and in the following decades Genoese and Castilian merchants were also dealing in African slaves. By the 1490s slaves from sub-Saharan Africa were known to Europeans as sclavi negri, literally “black slaves,” and in Sicily they were predominant on some of the sugar plantations. Over the next half century, the Portuguese extended their domain and brought the sugar plantation to the Canaries, Madeira, and especially São Tomé. They purchased African slaves to do most of the labor in all of these islands. In Brazil, discovered by Europeans in 1500, the Portuguese enslaved Indians at first to plant a sugar industry there, but during the 1580s they began to import Africans, and by 1620 most slaves in Brazil were African.4
In the 1480s English merchants demonstrated interest in what was then known simply as the “Guinea trade” when King Edward IV sought the blessing of Pope Sixtus IV for an African trading venture planned by John Tintam and William Fabian. It was a fitful start to a sixty-year period of haphazard attempts to establish a regular trade with West Africa. William Hawkins the elder—father of the infamous slaving pirate—made three successful ventures to Guinea and Brazil in the 1530s. He traded for ivory in Africa and “behaved himself so wisely” on the Brazilian coast that an unnamed Indian king willingly traveled back to England and appeared before the court of Henry VIII. The English established a regular trade with West Africa by the 1550s, though without any permanent presence, and when William’s son John left for West Africa in 1562, he behaved quite badly. John Hawkins had already traded in the Canaries and the Spanish West Indies, where he learned that “Negros were very good marchandise in Hispaniola, and that store of Negros might easily bee had upon the coast of Guinea.” Hawkins led three more slaving ventures to West Africa over the next few years, and in depositions taken after the Spanish disrupted Hawkins’s fourth voyage, the English merchants William Clark, John Tommes, and William Fowler demonstrated extensive knowledge of the slave markets of Hispaniola and Vera Cruz.5
The compendiums of Richard Hakluyt kept alive the knowledge of Hawkins’s voyages, and trade with West Africa continued to attract the interest of English merchants, albeit a relative few. The English merchants who engaged in overseas trade in this era established companies that sought royal charters that granted a monopoly for a particular trade—in exchange, of course, for a stream of revenue to the Crown. So the Muscovy Company focused on northern Europe, while the Spanish Company, the Turkey Company, and the Levant Company invested in different portions of England’s trade with the Mediterranean. The English merchant companies established a diaspora of trading factories in northern Europe, Spain, and the Levant, and by the 1590s there were English merchants based in Madeira. In the early seventeenth century a more sustained trade with West Africa developed as an offshoot of the Mediterranean trades; ivory, dyewoods, and pepper were the principal commodities.6
By 1618, England’s Guinea trade had become significant enough to motivate the merchants involved to seek a royal monopoly. “The Company of Adventurers of London Trading to Gynney and Bynney” included merchants such as Humphrey Slaney, Nicholas Crispe, and William Cloberry. Slaney, the most experienced merchant in the group with interests in the Levant, Spain, and the Barbary Coast, developed a significant trade in redwood during the 1620s with Crispe, Cloberry, and John Wood. They traded in more than dye, however, for in 1629, a French privateer seized the Benediction, a company ship that was loaded with slaves. When the company faced bankruptcy, Crispe engineered its reorganization, and it gained a new charter in 1631. Crispe hoped to branch out from the redwood trade of Sierra Leone into the gold trade to the east, the stretch of coast between Cape Three Points and the river Volta known as the Gold Coast, where the Portuguese and then the Dutch had opened a trade in gold and slaves with Akan merchants. But if this proved too difficult, Crispe was confident that the sugar trade with São Tome would be lucrative.7
At some point in the 1620s, the English Guinea merchants realized that a moderately successful trading voyage in redwood and ivory could become profitable by taking on sugar in São Tomé, and by doing so, they would have learned about what the historian Philip Curtin called the “plantation complex.” This engine of merchant capitalism that would shape the Atlantic World brought together European merchants with access to capital and markets, tropical land with a climate suitable to sugar production, and a regular source of enslaved laborers, who in São Tomé came from West Central Africa. This political economy began to develop in the Mediterranean in the fourteenth century and reached its mature form in São Tomé by 1500. By the time the English began to plant colonies beyond the European pale, the sugar plantation founded on African slavery had been critical to economic development and imperial expansion for several hundred years. The English merchants who went to São Tomé to buy sugar understood this.8
Under the leadership of Crispe, the reorganized African Company made key innovations in the trade with Akan merchants with the assistance of Arent de Groot, a Dutchman who had traded for the Dutch West India Company. De Groot introduced the English to the Dutch trading system of keeping resident merchants, or factors, at permanent trading stations whose security depended on agreement with the local African ruler. In 1632 De Groot negotiated a treaty on behalf of the English with Ambro, the Fante ruler, for the exclusive right to trade from Kormantine, Egya, and Anomabu, ports that lay within his authority. De Groot planted the flag of His Royal Majesty of Great Britain at Kormantine and established the first trading factory held by the English on the Gold Coast.9
For the next twelve years, Crispe and his associates worked assiduously to grow the trade with the Akan merchants of the Gold Coast. English factors learned the ways of the African trade and made connections with local merchants while English ship captains learned the tricks of the route to Guinea. Success came slowly, but late in 1636 a ship returned with gold that brought investors profits of about £30,000. The English began to build a fort at Kormantine in 1638 and by 1640 posed a serious challenge to the Dutch. Crispe became increasingly wealthy, and in 1640 he was knighted and became a chief customs farmer for Charles I. But as the turmoil of the English Civil War intensified, Crispe suffered for his connections to the King. In 1641 the Committee of Grievances accused Crispe of being a monopolist (which he was) and forced him to give up his patents to the trade in redwood and gold. Crispe fled London and joined the King at the onset of war, and in 1644 Parliament sequestered Crispe’s shares in the company, which reverted to John Wood. By 1649 one of Wood’s partners in the company was Maurice Thompson, a former interloper in the Guinea trade who had been invested in every English colonial enterprise in the Americas since the 1620s. So it was that at the very moment English planters in Barbados began to plant sugarcane, the English trade to the Gold Coast had developed into a profitable and growing enterprise. By the late 1640s the branches of commerce that connected African slave merchants to England’s tropical colonies through European merchants with access to capital and markets had passed into the hands of men deeply invested in all of these things.10
The English began to plant colonies in the Americas in the early seventeenth century, 1607 in the Chesapeake and then New England and the Lesser Antilles in the 1620s. In 1627 Barbados became the second island settled, after Saint Christopher, when the London merchant William Courteen and his associates gained permission from the proprietor of the colony, James Hay, the Lord of Carlisle, and put up capital to fund the first settlers. During that very first year, Captain Henry Powell, the island’s first governor, brought an unknown number of enslaved Africans to the island, whom he had captured from a Spanish or a Portuguese vessel. While Spain and England were at peace, Spain considered the entire Caribbean as part of its domain according to the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, which drew a line down the center of the Atlantic. The area to the west was Spanish, including the Caribbean islands (some of which the Spanish had already claimed through conquest), as well as the continental Americas. Portugal claimed everything to the east, including Brazil, Africa, and all of Asia. England under Elizabeth, the Stuarts, Oliver Cromwell, and the Stuarts again after 1660 consistently challenged the Iberian claims, as did the Dutch and the French. Just as in the era of Hawkins, the English encountered African slaves whenever they encountered the Spanish.11
Maurice Thompson had been involved in English colonial expansion almost from the very beginning. Born around the turn of the seventeenth century, Thompson, young and ambitious and from a large family without fortune, made his way to Virginia by 1617, the very year that Virginians made their first shipment of tobacco to London and just two years before a Dutch merchant brought the first Africans to the colony.12 He established himself as a ship captain in the provisioning and servant trades, but in 1626 he returned to London as a merchant with interests in all of the American colonies, importing tobacco, furs, and fish while exporting provisions, equipment, and indentured servants. One of Thompson’s first ventures as a London merchant was a partnership with the cash-poor tobacco planter Thomas Combes of Saint Kitts. In 1628 Thompson sent sixty African slaves to work on Combes’s plantation.13
Virginian success with tobacco fostered the “first American boom,” and the earliest Barbadians followed suit, hoping to tap into the new market for this stimulating weed. Henry Winthrop wrote from Barbados in 1627 that he and his servants had planted tobacco, which in three years he hoped would be “very profitable.” He sought assistance in bringing over more servants, two or three “everye yere,” who would be bound to serve him for three to five years and could expect no more than ten pounds a year. He described Barbados as “the pleasantest iland in all the West Indyes,” with a small settlement of only sixty “christyanes,” all of them English, and between forty and fifty slaves, “negeres and Indyenes.” Winthrop’s father, John, replied some months later that he could only procure boys who were willing to indenture themselves in Barbados and that the tobacco Henry sent was “foul, and full of stalks.” No one would buy it, not even his relatives.14
Not all Barbadians were so careless with their tobacco, however, for in 1638 Thompson imported twenty-five thousand pounds of the stuff, and tobacco remained an important form of currency on the island until 1648.15 But in 1640 the aspiring planter James Dering considered tobacco to be a “dead commodity” that could not compete with the Virginian product in a market now glutted with the crops from Nevis, Saint Kitts, and Montserrat as well.16 Barbadians expanded into cotton and indigo and, based on the production of these commodities, developed the plantation model of agricultural production—sizable estates dependent on unfree labor—that they would soon adapt to sugar.17 Indentured servants did most of the labor during this period, but as the testimony of Henry Winthrop shows, African slaves were part of the workforce from the very be...