Admin Table of Contents
What do the West Indies trade for slaves?
In addition to sugar, France additionally capitalized on “pacotille,” or cheap goods such as rum, tobacco, coffee and indigo. These cheap products were brought from Europe and traded to African elites in exchange for enslaved people.
What was traded from the West Indies?
By the 1770s, West Indian planters were exporting nearly 100,000 tons of sugar and 2 million gallons of rum to Britain and the North American colonies, the combined value of which reached almost £4 million. The rest were traded to the mainland colonies in exchange for lumber, grain, flour, and salt fish.
Which Caribbean colony was the most profitable?
For about 100 years, Barbados remained the richest of all the European colonies in the Caribbean region. The colony’s prosperity remained regionally unmatched until sugar cane production expanded in larger colonies, such as Saint-Domingue and Jamaica.
Which Caribbean island has the highest population?
Cuba
1. Cuba. As the largest island in the Caribbean by size, it makes sense that Cuba would also be the most populated Caribbean island. With just over 11 million inhabitants, you’ll find Cuba bursting with vibrant locals who love to dive into their incredibly rich history with visitors eager to listen.
What was shipped from West Africa to the West Indies?
The three-way trans-Atlantic trade known historically as the triangular trade was the Atlantic slave trade, for example the trade during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of slaves, sugar (often in its liquid form, molasses), and rum between West Africa, the West Indies and the northern colonies of British North …
What products came from the West Indies?
They collected “country produce” from outlying farmers at their stores in exchange for imported goods: English cloth, iron, glass, and crockery; East Indian silk, tea, and spices; and West Indian sugar, molasses, rum, salt, fruit, and coffee.
What made Haiti rich?
One of the primary reasons that Haiti was such a productively rich land was because of slave labor. Not only did the slaves work long days under tremendously unsafe conditions, with little or no technology beyond hand labor, but Haiti’s slave system was the most brutal in the Caribbean.
What is the economy of West Indies?
Agriculture is the traditional basis of the economies of the West Indies, but production and employment in agriculture have been declining. Most countries are not self-sufficient in food production, and cereals, primarily wheat, are the chief food imports.
What did the British trade with the West Indian colonies?
Consequently, about 85 percent of British West Indian exports were consigned to Britain. The rest were traded to the mainland colonies in exchange for lumber, grain, flour, and salt fish.
Why was sugar important to the British West Indies?
The British West Indies were tightly interwoven with the economies and societies of their northern neighbors, especially New England and the middle provinces, as a major market for their exports and supplier of goods that American colonials consumed, processed, and re-exported. Sugar, like tobacco, depended on slave labor.
Why were the British colonies in the West Indies so important?
The West Indies and the Sugar Trade In the mid-eighteenth century the island colonies of Bermuda, Barbados, Jamaica, and the four Leeward Islands were the British Empire’s most valuable possessions because of the demand for sugar and its by-products, molasses and rum.