Istwa Nou

Montserrat built a sugar sector that depended entirely on continuing slave arrivals, heaviest between 1689 and 1730 and handled mainly by merchants from London and Bristol. Many of the principal slaveholders on the island in that period were descendants of Irish indentured servants shipped out in the seventeenth century, some of them transported against their will after the wars in Ireland. A generation or two later their families were buying human beings. Smaller territories nearby, St Lucia, Tortola and the Bahamas, took arrivals in an irregular pattern, often clustered around wartime, and relied heavily on Liverpool ships bringing people from the Bight of Biafra and West Central Africa. The Irish detail is the one to keep. Being the victim of an empire has never stopped anyone from running one. Slavery in the Caribbean was sustained by whoever arrived and found the arrangement profitable, and in Montserrat that meant the children of men who had crossed in chains themselves.