Caribbean slave colonies were so profitable they became hub of the British Empire. 70% of the Empire’s total income from 1750-1780 came from taxes on goods from its slave colonies

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“Slave Trade was the richest part of Britain’s trade in the 18th century….The sugar colonies were Britain’s most valuable colonies….Between 1750 and 1780, about 70% of the [UK] government’s total income came from taxes on goods from its colonies.…The Caribbean islands became the hub of the British Empire.…Britain dispatched about 10,000 voyages to Africa for slaves” over a period 245 years beginning in 1562 during the reign of Elizabeth 1.”…

“British Involvement in the Transatlantic Slave Trade," The Abolition Project

[Image: Slate map shows heavy flow of slaves from Africa to Caribbean in 1700s, “The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes,” Slate, posted on You Tube, 8/12/2019]

“For well over 300 years, European countries forced Africans onto slave ships and transported them across the Atlantic Ocean….

Captain John Hawkins made the first known English slaving voyage to Africa, in 1562, in the reign of Elizabeth 1. Hawkins made three such journeys over a period of six years. He captured over 1200 Africans and sold them as goods in the Spanish colonies in the [North and South] Americas….

Historian, Professor David Richardson, has calculated that British ships carried 3.4 million or more enslaved Africans to the [North and South] Americas….

Estimates, based on records of voyages in the archives of port customs and maritime insurance records, put the total number of African slaves  transported by European traders, to at least 12 million people….

Barbados became the first British settlement in the Caribbean in 1625 and the British took control of Jamaica in 1655.

The establishment of the Royal African Company in 1672 formalised the Slave Trade under a royal charter and gave a monopoly to the port of London. The ports of Bristol and Liverpool, in particular, lobbied to have the charter changed and, in 1698, the monopoly was taken away.

British involvement expanded rapidly in response to the demand for labour to cultivate sugar in Barbados and other British West Indian islands. In the 1660s, the number of slaves taken from Africa in British ships averaged 6,700 per year. By the 1760s, Britain was the foremost European country engaged in the Slave Trade.”…

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Added: On a British slave ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to the Caribbean Island of Grenada in 1791, an African slave girl was hung by one ankle and whipped to death as depicted in copyrighted image.

British slave ship Recovery was owned by Bristol merchants. In 1791 an enslaved African girl was whipped to death for refusing to dance naked on the deck of the ship. At right, a sailor is seen suspending the African girl by her ankle from a rope over a pulley. The ship’s captain, John Kimber, left, holds a whip. Back in England, Captain Timber was tried for murder but acquitted. He was merely denounced before the House of Commons over the alleged incident….Image attributed to Isaac Cruikshank.…”Cruikshank’s depiction of the alleged murder of a slave girl by John Kimber, published April 10, 1792.“…”This image is available from the United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3g06204.”…Image is “Copyright The British Museum.”

“Description: The Abolition of the Slave Trade, showing Captain John Kimber of Bristol flogging a slave girl because she was unwell and could not eat, by Isaac Cruikshank, 1792.

Copyright The British Museum

Creator: Isaac Cruikshank

Date: 1792, Copyright: Copyright British Museum”

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Added: “On the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to the island of Grenada in the Caribbean, Kimber had punished a female slave.” In 1792 Kimber was tried as tried and found not guilty of murdering the slave girl.

 

 

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