1674 to 1806 · Caribbeanspan
Nevis fills with captives around 1680 and then slowly empties
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Arrivals of enslaved people in Nevis jumped around 1680, driven by the island's sugar revolution, and then settled into a long and uneven decline. London vessels carried most of that labour until 1730, drawing on the Bight of Benin, the Bight of Biafra and the Gold Coast. Nevis is 36 square miles, a single volcanic cone with a rim of coast, and for a few decades it was worth more to England than large stretches of North America. That is what sugar did to the value of land. The estates could not sustain their own numbers, so production depended on a continuing supply of new arrivals rather than on families raising children. The same pattern ran on every sugar island and reached its extreme in Saint-Domingue, where the scale was many times greater. Nevis shows the mechanism early and in miniature: a small island, one crop, and a population held up only by importing more people.
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