The West India Sugar Crisis and British Slave Emancipation, 1830–1833

The West India sugar crisis of 1830–1832 dealt a shattering blow to an economy that was already in the grip of secular decline. Contributing to die decline were certain changes of a structural nature. In its heyday in the mid-eighteenth century, the British Caribbean economy was an important part of an international economy organized on the basis of imperial complementarity; it consisted of a base—the sugar colonies themselves—which was supported by three legs—the North American trade, the African trade and the British Isles trade. The base expanded geographically, largely as a consequence of military conquest, until fourteen Caribbean sugar colonies or groups of colonies were possessed by Great Britain in 1815. Moreover, the slave-plantation regime spread from colony to colony under a system of near-monoculture in the production of cane sugar.