Istwa Nou

Across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the islands of the British Caribbean were alone among Caribbean colonies in fitting out slaving voyages of their own in any quantity. Barbados went furthest. Between 1696 and 1705 it was the second largest point of departure for slaving ventures anywhere in the British Empire, behind London alone. Captains sailing from the islands bought most of their captives on the Gold Coast, and the commodity they carried to pay with was rum, distilled on Caribbean estates from the molasses left over by the sugar works. The circuit closes on itself. The by-product of last year's crop purchases the labour that plants the next one, and the planter who organised his own supply kept the margin a London merchant would have taken. French colonists in Saint-Domingue never managed this. French law and French subsidy kept the traffic in the hands of ports in France, which is one reason the colony's planters spent the eighteenth century complaining about the price of everything they needed.