Caribbean Slavery Essay -- Caribbean History Slave Essays

Caribbean SlaveryStarting in the seventeenth century, the European colonization of the Caribbean changed drastically as exploration gave way to exploitation. As the great wealth that the Caribbean held became to a greater extent evident to the European colonizers, a rush of profit hunters stormed the area and swamp it with break ones backry. The massive introduction of slavery as the major form of childbed organization in the Caribbean changed social organization radically. The plantation system thrived and grow through the following years (centuries), and the Caribbean became the focus of American slave centers, The planters of the Caribbean bought around sixty percent of all the slaves interchange to the Americas between 1701 and 1810 (Knight, p112). Franklin W. Knight approximates that tail fin million African slaves were brought to the Caribbean throughout the slave trading years. The resulting success of the Caribbean dough economy harvested (no pun intended) even more sl avery, and the Caribbean became an near exclusively two-group community divided by blacks and whites. Those who did not fall into the well-defined groups gratuitous blacks, maroons, buccaneers, and others- were oblige to live isolated from normal society.Arnold Sio addresses the interesting in-between group of free blacks in these societies in his article entitled Marginality and Free Coloured individual(prenominal) identity in Caribbean Slave Society. Sio delves into the identity search that the free blacks mat in such situations, and he defines their position simply, The peck of colour were fringy to Caribbean society neither black nor white, neither African nor European, and neither slave nor free. The assertion that the author makes that these freedmen were not free is fundamental in understa... ...at the blacks enjoyed as a result of this participation, a type of psychological empowerment was accomplish by blacks that was not experienced by blacks on the other island s of the Caribbean. A certain kind of re-humanizing takes place with the endowment of responsibility in which the implications go far beyond employment.Through the terrible years of Caribbean slavery, horrific crimes against personal rights were violated over and again. In a genocide of sorts, Africans were taken from their homes, and sold into a system which worked them to their deaths. Blacks in the Caribbean who avoided this horrible situation, few though they were, struggled to gear up themselves as successful alternative societies due to their few resources. The varying backgrounds of these people made communication difficult, and made the forming of a unified society almost impossible.