Caribbean Sugar And Sugar Chapter Summary

Thesis: “This book asks three principal questions: how did the early English planters in the West Indies respond to the novelty of life in the tropics/ to the novelty of large-scale sugar production? And to the novelty of slave labor?”

Summary: Dunn’s book chronicles the settling and early growth of the first 3 generations of British colonists in the Caribbean islands. From a modest attempt to grow North American staples tobacco and cotton, largely with white indentures and their own labor, the islands quickly turned, with Dutch assistance, into great sugar plantations with large numbers of African slave labor and dwindling populations of whites, whether freeman or indentures. The dominance of sugar would determine the very structure of the
This was due to disease, malnutrition, violence, excessive lifestyles, and constant raiding and warfare. Ultimately, a society of slaves would rapidly develop into an extreme slave society almost overnight within the 17th century. Dunn argues that this was economically predictable, as sugar provided enormous profit and slave labor was easily accepted, as exploitation of the poor was a matter of fact in English society and thus the move to slavery was more of an economic facet than a racial one (though English society was largely ethnocentric and easily moved toward race being a natural explanation/acceptable reason for Africans and Indians being enslaved). There were no efforts made prior to the mid 18th century to maintain health of slaves, as they were merely worked to the extreme to extract as much labor before their or their owners’ demise to maximize profits. Therefore, the number of slaves exported to the islands was