1501 to 1830 · Caribbeanspan
The Caribbean imported nine times more Africans and ended level
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By 1750 the Caribbean had received nine times as many African captives as the North American mainland. By 1830 the Black populations of the two regions were roughly the same size. The gap between those two facts is a death rate. On the mainland the enslaved population grew by natural increase, because food was more plentiful, the disease environment less lethal, and the work regime, brutal as it was, did not consume people at the same speed. In the islands the population fell every year and was topped up by fresh shipments from Africa. Sugar accounts for the difference. Cutting and milling cane in a tropical climate under the whip killed adults faster than children were born, and planters treated replacement by purchase as an ordinary cost of production. Saint-Domingue was the extreme case. Its half a million enslaved people in 1789 needed constant importation to hold that number, which is why so many of those who made the revolution had been born in Africa.
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