Sugar and the Caribbean

The Royal African Company

The British monarchy was directly involved in running and profiting from the slave trade.

• Established in 1660 and rechartered in 1672 by King Charles II, the Royal African Company (RAC) was a Joint-Stock Company led by the Duke of York. Enslaved people were physically branded with "DY" or "RAC" to mark royal ownership.
• The RAC held a Royal Charter, granting it a legal monopoly on all English trade along 5,000 miles of the West African coast. It transported approximately 187,000 to 212,000 Africans between 1672 and 1731.
• However, independent traders called Interlopers frequently defied this monopoly.
• The shift in power followed a clear causal chain: $\text{RAC Monopoly} \rightarrow \text{High demand for labour} \rightarrow \text{Merchants lobby Parliament} \rightarrow \text{Monopoly ends} \rightarrow \text{Trade expands}$.
• In 1698, the Trade with Africa Act ended the monopoly, allowing independent merchants from ports like Bristol and Liverpool to rapidly expand the trade.

West Indies Settlements and the Sugar Revolution

Every time you add sugar to your tea, you are consuming a crop that completely transformed the Caribbean economy.

• Early British settlements in St Kitts (1623) and Barbados (1625) initially relied on white indentured servants to farm tobacco. In the 1640s, the introduction of sugar sparked the "Sugar Revolution", requiring massive land and a huge labour force.
• This created a Sugar Monoculture, an economy entirely dependent on one crop. This drove out small farmers because sugar required economies of scale, meaning huge investments of £3,000 to £10,000 for mills and boiling houses.
• Colonies rapidly shifted demographics; by 1710, Barbados was 80% enslaved. Enslaved people were forced to work dawn to dusk in the brutal Gang System.
• The legal framework was cemented by the Barbados Slave Code (1661). This established Chattel Slavery, a system where humans were defined as legal property, and critically, this status was inherited by their children.

Economic Impact: Port Cities and the Industrial Revolution

How did a coastal city like Liverpool grow its population by over 100,000 people in just thirty years?

• The answer lies in the slave trade. By the 1790s, Liverpool controlled 80% of the British slave trade, taking the premier spot from Bristol. Port cities accumulated massive wealth, which transformed their Hinterland regions.
• This wealth directly fuelled the Industrial Revolution. In Birmingham, the arms industry produced one musket per minute to trade in Africa. In Lancashire, textile mills relied entirely on slave-produced cotton for their 465,000 workers.
• Historians often reference the Williams Thesis, which argues that slave trade profits provided the essential capital for Britain's industrialisation. Slave wealth directly funded canals, early railways, and even James Watt’s steam engine.

Economic Impact: Financial Institutions

The banks and insurance companies found on modern high streets have deep, historical ties to the transatlantic slave trade.

• The Bank of England, founded in 1694, provided commercial credit to the slave economy. At one point, it even owned two plantations in Grenada after a loan default.
• Financial tools like the Credit System and Plantation Mortgages (loans secured against enslaved people, not land) allowed merchants to spread the extreme financial risks of the trade. Lloyd's of London dominated this, with slave economy insurance making up 41% of its total business in the 1790s.
• When ownership of enslaved people was abolished, the 1833 Compensation Act paid £20 million to 46,000 slave owners. This massive national debt was only fully repaid by the UK government in 2015.

Social Impact: The Plantocracy and British Society

While working-class Britons suffered in dangerous factories, a select group of plantation owners lived in unbelievable luxury.

• These owners, many of whom were an Absentee Planter living in Britain, formed the Plantocracy. Families like the Beckfords used slave profits (worth around 5% of British GDP) to build grand estates like Harewood House.
• They bought up Rotten Boroughs—parliamentary seats with few voters—to secure political power. This formed the West India Interest, a powerful London-based lobby group that heavily influenced Parliament to protect slavery.
• The trade also caused a dietary revolution in Britain. Sugar shifted from a luxury to a staple, providing 1/6th of per-capita caloric intake and cheap energy for industrial workers.
• Socially, the plantocracy promoted "scientific" racism and ideas of white supremacy to justify the transatlantic slave trade, embedding these prejudices deeply into British culture.