Plantation Slavery in the British Caribbean

Abstract

Slavery made the British Caribbean work and it did so largely within the institution of the plantation. British Caribbean plantation slavery was excessively brutal and exploitative but it was thoroughly modern and extremely productive and efficient. It brought great wealth to a few and to the British imperial government. But it made the lives of the majority of plantations workers very miserable as they were perhaps the most overworked and badly treated people in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.