Caribbean plantations
Island colonial farms
Caribbean plantations were large agricultural estates in the Caribbean islands, established primarily from the 16th through 19th centuries, that used enslaved African labor to produce sugar, tobacco, coffee, and other cash crops for export to Europe.
The term evokes the brutal system of chattel slavery that defined the region's colonial economy: The Caribbean plantations consumed enslaved workers at staggering rates.
Sugar plantations in particular were notoriously lethal, with mortality often exceeding births.
The plantation system shaped Caribbean demographics, culture, and economics in ways still felt today.
- mercantilismTrade policy favoring exports
- sugarcaneSucrose-yielding tropical grass
- cane fieldsAgricultural land growing sugarcane
- tobaccoDried smoking leaf
- resistance movementsOrganized opposition to authority
freedom songs · colonialism · Creole culture · export economy · transatlantic slave trade · oral histories · European empires · cotton · abolition · folk traditions · emancipation · indentured servitude · racial hierarchies · colonial masters · great house · commodity markets · triangular trade · coffee
- plantationsMelrose, Monmouth, Longwood, slave quarters, great house
- indentured laborindenture, indentured servants, bound labor, servitude, bondsman
- sugar plantationsugar cane, sugarcane, sugar mill, cane field, cane fields
Caribbean plantationssubsistence farms
Self-sufficient agricultural plots
kitchen gardens · homesteads · family plots · communal farms · communal gardens
Caribbean, plantations, plantation, plant, plants, planted, planting, planter, planters