Page 384 - Western Civilization A Brief History, Volume I To 1715 9th - Jackson J. Spielvogel

a drop in the output of the silver mines and the pov- erty of the Spanish monarchy. As the seventeenth cen- tury began, both Portugal and Spain found themselves facing new challenges to their American empires from the Dutch, English, and French, who increasingly sought to create their own colonial empires in the New World.
THE WEST INDIES Both the French and English colonial empires in the New World included large parts of the West Indies. The English held Barbados, Jamaica, and Bermuda, and the French possessed Saint-Domingue, Martinique, and Guadeloupe.
On these tropical islands, both the English and the French had developed plantation economies, worked by African slaves, which produced tobacco, cotton, coffee, and sugar, all products increasingly in demand in Europe.
The “sugar factories,” as the sugar plantations in the Caribbean were called, played an especially prominent role. By the last two decades of the eighteenth century, the British colony of Jamaica, one of Britain’s most im- portant, was producing 50,000 tons of sugar annually with the labor of 200,000 African slaves. By the early eighteenth century, sugar was the main export from
FLORIDA
Atlantic
CUBA
Britain’s American colonies. The French colony of Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) had 500,000 slaves working on three thousand plantations at the same time. This colony produced 100,000 tons of sugar a year, but at the expense of a high death rate from the brutal treatment of the slaves.
BRITISH NORTH AMERICA The Dutch were among the first to establish settlements on the North American continent after Henry Hudson, an English explorer hired by the Dutch, in 1609 discovered the river that bears his name. Within a few years, the Dutch had established the mainland colony of New Netherland, which
A Sugar Mill in the West Indies. Cane sugar was one of the most valuable products produced in the West Indies. By 1700, sugar was replacing honey as a sweetener for increasing numbers of Europeans. This seventeenth-century French illustration shows the operation of a sugar mill in the French West Indies.
Spanish settlements French settlements English settlements
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250
500 Kilometers 250 Miles
SAINT- DOMINGUE
Santo PUERTO Domingo RICO
HISP ANIOLA
Virgin Is.
Barbados Guadeloupe
Martinique
Kingston JAMAICA
The West Indies
346 Chapter 14
Europe and the World: New Encounters, 1500–1800
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Navy Historical Service, Vincennes//Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY