The concept of “white slavery” in the English Caribbean during the early seventeenth century

The early success of the English colonial enterprise in the West Indies between 1625 and 1650 depended heavily on the importation of large numbers of servile laborers. Before the mid-1640’s most workers were recruited as indentured servants from the British Isles; slaves from West Africa, already widely in use in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies, remained a small minority. The social composition of Barbados, the leading English colony in this period, reflects the servant majority in the labor force (see Table 27.1). It is also important to note that the plantation system of cultivation was already in place before 1645 when the advent of the sugar industry revolutionized the economy, resulting in a massive importation of African slaves. By the mid-1650s, blacks outnumbered whites in the colony, and slavery became the principal labor institution. Table 27.1 Labour structure of fifteen pre-sugar plantations in Barbados, 1639–43

Year	Owner	Acres	Servants	Slaves
1639	Thomas Hethersall	100	7	–
1640	Samuel Andrews	200	10	–
1640	Henry Hawley	300	28	–
1640	Lancelot Pace	360	17	–
1640	William Woodhouse	150	26	–
1640	Captain Skeete	–	26	–
1641	Colonel Drax	225	4	22
1641	Lancelot Pace	426	20	–
1642	Gerald Hawtaine	124	4	2
1642	Thomas Rous	60	8	–
1643	Alexander Lindsay	60	2	4
1643	Christopher Moulropp	250	6	12
1643	James Holdip	200	29	–
1643	Captain Perkins	200	5	6
1643	John Friesenborch	26	2	5
Totals		2,681	194	51

Source Deeds and inventories of Barbados, Barbados Archives, RB 3/1, ff. 15, 55–77, 237, 290, 316, 418, 729, 946. Also R. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1715 (New York: 1972), p. 68.