Plantation system 1640 – 1876

In the1640’s, West Indian tobacco was out competed by Virginian farms which caused the bankruptcy.
At this time the Dutch were expelled from Brazil and sailed up to the Caribbean to introduce sugar
and revolutionize the Caribbean into the Sugar Revolution. This saw the birth of the plantation:

 Large 5000 acre farms for sugar for exports.

 Outlying fields needed for food production as ground provisions, vegetables to save money.
This was also to occupy slave in free time and reduce the food import bill.
 Land was also used for cattle pasture and sheds, firewood, and construction.
 A Great House reinforced for the planter and family on a slope
 Huts for the white Attorney and the Agent
 The sugar crusher, the boiler, refinery, mills
 Huts for the enslaved which were built on the periphery
 Hospital, and jail
 Sugar as a MONOCROP

This European system of production saw the bringing in of different ethnic groups to live and labour
for the Europeans, with everything in favour of the Europeans. They looked to Africa for free labour
in the fields of sugar cane and slavery became a trade in black gold with millions of Africans forcibly
transported across the Atlantic. For hundreds of years, Africans would be brought in to be
dehumanized, treated as chattel dependent on the few whites for meager food, clothing and shelter.

It was a self- sufficient unit maximizing its profits. To save the estate money they grew ground
provisions and vegetables allowing slaves to grow food to reduce the food import bill. This may be
seen as resistance too, with the slave supplementing his diet (by growing his own food), to escape the
from the sub-standard meals of the estates, like breakfast, sometimes given only after the enslaved
had worked a 4 hour shift from 4.a.m. to 8 a.m. so it may be seen as a slave eating what he wanted
possibly even before the 8.a.m. time.

Middle class Whites disappeared from the landscape as there were no jobs for them. There therefore
remained a small White elite and a mass of Black enslaved on cotton, sugar, cocoa, coffee plantations
and in Belize, logwood and mahogany. It was said that these were the most miserable of all slaves,
left desolate and isolated for months in the rainforests in search of the trees.

The Rs of the plantation were:

 Racism
 Re-socialization
 Resistance and revolt
 Resilience