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Saturday, February 13, 2010

SLAVE ECONOMY/Black History Month

Wood Plank House, St. Vincent, West Indies ca. 1898
Image Reference NW0022 Source Robert T. Hill, Cuba and Porto Rico New York,1898
Virginia Foundation of Humanities University of Virginia Library
This type of thatched house was probably found during the late slave period 19th century.


The reorganization of the French empire began under Colbert and was finallybrought under direct control of the Crown in 1774.


Silver production on the Spanish-American mainland declined significantly;
with a drop in domestic Spanish industries and their subsequent demise;
Spanish merchant shipping greatly declined in Caribbean ports.

By 1686 more than 90 percent of the capital and goods handled on
the legal Seville-to-the -Indies trade was controlled by French, Dutch,
Genoese, English and German businessmen (mostly through Spanish
intermediaries).

In the Caribbean the whole of the region by this time had been experiencing
a revolutionary reorganization of it society structure. This was to include
it's agriculture and commerce.

With the delay in Spanish possessions, and the subsequent exploitation, domination
of settlers and removal. The age of sugar and slavery had arrived.

The introduction of African slaves was instituted on a massive scale. It soon was
was to be use as a main source an form of employment and reflected a major
change in the status and role of the colonies in the Caribbean.

In the 1640s a semi-feudal European settler frontier slowly gave way to a
organized and commercially structured society of masters and slaves.

Greater profits were to be made in the new economic structure to private and public
proponents than had been in the old and former European farming communities.

The adoption of slavery came about because of the severe economic crisis of the
seventeenth century Caribbean and it's particular need to establish a more
competitive, marketable commodity than tobacco as the basis of colonial economy.

(CORNER TALK REPORT)

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