ABSTRACT
English colonization in the Caribbean originally emerged from early seventeen th-centtiry strategics for establishing footholds on the continental margins of Spanish America and conducting illegal trade with the Spanish colonies. On withdrawing from the Amazon lowlands during the 1620s, Englishmen had opportunistically annexed the Leeward Islands of St Kitts, Nevis and Barbados, small but fertile isles which displayed immediate potential. They were relatively close to Europe and had easy access from the Atlantic, but, because of the prevailing winds, could not easily be attacked from the Spanish colonies that lay to the west. By mid-century, the islands were important colonies despite their small size, attracting substantial white settlement and becoming producers of tropical export crops, especially tobacco. But their importance as an element in the emerging English colonial system became fully clear only after about 1650, when the islands’ economies and societies were radically altered by the introduction of sugar and slavery, and when Jamaica, in the Greater Antilles, was annexed to provide England with a considerable addition to its Caribbean territories. From colonies of settlement, the English West Indies were turned into plantation societies that were dominated by the production of sugar for export, peopled by huge and growing forces of black slaves, and involved in complex interactions and conflicts with the larger culture of plantations and slavery which gradually spread among the colonies of the European powers present in the Caribbean.
