page_title: History of the Caribbean
section_title: Enslavement
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Caribbean / Early colonial history / Enslavement
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Litho. Ingekleurde litho door Petit naar een tekening van Théodore Bray (no. 12/25). Voorstelling van het oogsten van suikerriet op een slavenplantage. Rechts een 'blankofficier', de Europese opzichter. Links op de voorgrond een zogenoemde pondo, een vaartuig met platte bodem waarmee het riet naar de plantage werd vervoerd.. Ingekleurde litho voorstellende de oogst op een suikerrietplantage
context_page_description: The history of the Caribbean reveals the significant role the region played in the colonial struggles of the European powers since the 15th century. In 1492, Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean and claimed the region for Spain. The following year, the first Spanish settlements were established in the Caribbean. Although the Spanish conquests of the Aztec empire and the Inca empire in the early sixteenth century made Mexico and Peru more desirable places for Spanish exploration and settlement, the Caribbean remained strategically important.
  From the 1620s and 1630s onwards, non-Hispanic privateers, traders, and settlers established permanent colonies and trading posts on the Caribbean islands neglected by Spain. Such colonies spread throughout the Caribbean, from the Bahamas in the North West to Tobago in the South East. Furthermore, during this period, French and English buccaneers settled on the island of Tortuga, the northern and western coasts of Hispaniola, and later in Jamaica.
context_section_description: The development of agriculture in the Caribbean required a large workforce of manual labourers, which the Europeans found by taking advantage of the slave trade in Africa. The Atlantic slave trade brought African slaves to British, Dutch, French, Portuguese and Spanish colonies in the Americas, including the Caribbean. Slaves were brought to the Caribbean from the early 16th century until the end of the 19th century. The majority of slaves were brought to the Caribbean colonies between 1701 and 1810. Also in 1816 there was a slave revolution in the colony of Barbados.
  The following table lists the number of slaves brought into some of the Caribbean colonies:
  Abolitionists in the Americas and in Europe became vocal opponents of the slave trade throughout the 19th century. The importation of slaves to the colonies was often outlawed years before the end of the institution of slavery itself. It was well into the 19th century before many slaves in the Caribbean were legally free. The trade in slaves was abolished in the British Empire through the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807. Men, women and children who were already enslaved in the British Empire remained slaves, however, until Britain passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. When the Slavery Abolition Act came into force in 1834, roughly 700,000 slaves in the British West Indies immediately became free; other enslaved workers were freed several years later after a period of forced apprenticeship. Slavery was abolished in the Dutch Empire in 1814. Spain abolished slavery in its empire in 1811, with the exceptions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo; Spain ended the slave trade to these colonies in 1817, after being paid £400,000 by Britain. Slavery itself was not abolished in Cuba until 1886. France abolished slavery in its colonies in 1848.
caption: A 19th-century lithograph by Theodore Bray showing a sugarcane plantation. On right is "white officer", the European overseer, watching plantation workers. To the left is a flat-bottomed vessel for cane transportation.
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