ABSTRACT
The interdependence of the slave trade and the sugar industry was universally accepted by the English prior to about 1780. A petition of West India merchants and planters to the House of Commons, in 1739, stated that the slave trade to the coast of Africa “entirely depends” on the sugar trade. The necessary conditions prevailed in the sugar islands to make Negro slavery a successful solution of the labor problem. Many Indian slaves in the eighteenth century were shipped from Charleston to the Sugar Islands. In the early stages of the industry, the planters made use of such white labor as was available, but to the second generation it was apparent that only African slaves could fill the necessary conditions. The Royal African Company’s monopoly of the slave trade greatly aggravated the West India planters toward the end of the seventeenth century.
