ABSTRACT
The most striking feature, perhaps, of the British sugar trade in the eighteenth century was the inadequacy of supply to meet the effective demand of the empire. One of the contributing causes of the phenomenon was the deficiency of the labor supply. The principal sugar islands sought by legislative experiments to remedy the deficiency of white population. Masters or mistresses of families not actually residing on the island were to be allowed only twenty-four Negroes, young and old, to a deficiency. In the Leeward Islands, legislation to encourage the importation of white servants was passed in 1716. Nicholas Lawes thought it a great evil that owners of slaves permitted them to ramble throughout the island provided they paid their master weekly or monthly sums agreed on; the liberty not only afforded them opportunity of plotting insurrections, but encouraged thieving to enable them to pay their owners.
