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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

volunteer slaves, indentured servants, French Caribbean, African slavery

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

History

Abstract

The last forty years have seen an unprecedented expansion in the study of African slavery and the impact this “peculiar institution” had on the creation of colonies throughout the Americas, Africa, and Asia. In the last twenty years, historians of North America have increasingly examined the development of colonies in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries as an “Atlantic” phenomenon—that is, as a result of influences from Africa, Europe, and Latin America rather than as a simple outgrowth of the “mother country.” This, in turn, has placed a new emphasis on the role of the Caribbean, where sugar, coffee, and indigo plantations served as the economic engine that drove this trans-Atlantic system. The history of the Caribbean, in many ways, is the history of labor, as owners of plantations did their best to maximize production and profits. Though dominant for the better part of two centuries, African slavery was not the only, or even the first, labor system used on European plantations. My research focused on the pivotal decades of the mid-1600s, when French masters switched from using primarily French-born indentured servants to relying on African slaves.

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