The Atlantic crossing from Africa – the feared M iddle Passage – foreshadowed the greater cruelties of the plantations in the British Caribbean, as Africans were herded on to slave ships and branded with irons. It was one of the most nearly perfect commercial systems in modern times, a loop of supply and demand. A typical "triangle voyage" carried trading goods from England to Africa, then slaves from Africa to the Caribbean, and finally sugar, coffee, cotton and rum on the home stretch to England. A popular melodrama of 1771, Richard Cumberland's The West Indian, satirised planters as drunken layabouts in ostentatiously buckled shoes and hats.īehind the great wealth of planters lay the "triangle merchants" who motivated the slave trade between Britain, Africa and the West Indies. Often they cast Barbados or Jamaica aside like a sucked orange in order to fritter their profits in England. In the heyday of the British slave trade, from 1700 to 1808, West Indians (as white sugar barons were then known) became conspicuous by their new wealth. The glittering prosperity of slave ports such as Bristol and Liverpool was derived in large part from commerce with Africa. Early colonial protests at these duties were ended when the tax was lowered two years later.M odern Britain was built on sugar there is hardly a manufacturing town on these shores that was not in some way connected with the "Africa trade". The act thus granted a virtual monopoly of the American market to British West Indies sugarcane planters. Although warnings were issued that the traffic could bear no more than that, the government of Prime Minister George Grenville refused to listen and placed a three-penny duty upon foreign molasses in the act (the preamble of which bluntly declared that its purpose was to raise money for military expenses). Protests had been received from America against the enforcement of the Molasses Act, together with a plea that the duty be set at one penny per gallon. Actually a reinvigoration of the largely ineffective Molasses Act of 1733, the Sugar Act provided for strong customs enforcement of the duties on refined sugar and molasses imported into the colonies from non-British Caribbean sources. colonial history, British legislation aimed at ending the smuggling trade in sugar and molasses from the French and Dutch West Indies and at providing increased revenues to fund enlarged British Empire responsibilities following the French and Indian War. Sugar Act, also called Plantation Act or Revenue Act, (1764), in U.S.
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