Abstract
This chapter contextualizes legal and illegal acts of commerce that took place within the British Caribbean during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Central to this enterprise is an account of the rise and fall of the region’s primary economic driver during this time period, the sugarcane industry. Using the case study of the development of sugarcane mono-culture in Jamaica, this chapter details the processes through which an island, which first served as a Spanish and then English buccaneering and privateering launch point, gradually transformed into a sugar based plantocracy by the close of the 1600s. Having seen the planters’ rise to political prominence in Jamaica we then consider the political influence gained and wielded by an emergent West Indian planter class throughout the 1700s and reveal how pro-sugar politics resulted in social consequences and economic opportunities for those who lived on and those who sought to trade in the British Caribbean. Finally, through an assessment of the impact of the American Revolution on the sugar industry in the British Caribbean, I demonstrate how the war uncovered a regional over-reliance upon free trade with the American colonies as well as an empire wide over-reliance upon revenues from sugar related industries. Through these efforts, this chapter sheds light on the myriad of legal and illegal trade opportunities in the British West Indies during the volatile seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a period when the region endured imperial wars, hurricanes, shortages of food, construction materials, and livestock, and the all too frequent closure of needed ports and markets.
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Siegel, B.D. (2022). Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Opportunities for (Il)legal Trade in the British West Indies. In: Harris, L.B., Johnson, V.A. (eds) Excavating the Histories of Slave-Trade and Pirate Ships. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96233-3_2
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