This chapter begins to explore the impact of slave majorities and limited white migration and settlement to the tropics. This chapter starts with Barbados in the middle of the seventeenth century, showing that the island had held a substantial white majority population and that it was the most densely settled place in England’s overseas empire before a mix of disease and emigration combined with dwindling immigration led to a sharp decline in the white population. The chapter details the increasing black to white ratios at tropical sites across the colonies after the dispersal of white settlers from Barbados. The English tried to mitigate their fears of these emerging racial imbalances by turning to new modes of political arithmetic to socially engineer populations and recruit more European migrants. English colonial architects started to calculate exactly how many white settlers would be necessary to ensure the survival of the English in the tropics and counter the new crisis in political economy. These constructed metrics helped to entrench ideas about racial distinctions.

This chapter explores the many forms of bondage in the early English tropics, showing how difficult it can be to even define slavery from a global perspective, especially over the course of the seventeenth century. There was a blurry line between slavery and other conditions of bondage or subjugation, but the English gradually developed a more consistent approach to non-European enslavement across the tropics. By the 1680s, one particularly inflexible and brutal genus of racial slavery – forged in the Caribbean – had outcompeted most other forms of slavery and became the default in the English empire. This chapter highlights the difficulty in defining slavery and shows overlapping elements in bondage systems in the English tropics. It argues that one of the reasons that English slavery became more draconian and permanent than most other forms of slavery was that the English took steps in the comprehensive slave codes passed in the Caribbean to deny the subjecthood of the enslaved.

This chapter explores how the evolving disease environments of the tropics shaped free and forced migration patterns at English sites. The globalization of forced labor markets and trade were catalysts in the spread of yellow fever and falciparum malaria, diseases that originated in Africa and that disproportionately weakened or killed English migrants to the tropics. These were the two deadliest mosquito-borne fevers that the English encountered in the tropics. The ways in which the English understood and responded to evolving tropical disease environments and their differential effects on European and non-European populations contributed to the rise of enslaved majorities in the tropics and informed ideas about human difference that would coalesce into nineteenth-century racism. The chapter will also show how epidemiology made English footholds in the tropics much more precarious and dependent on non-Europeans than the English footholds in other more temperate zones of the empire. The chapter relies on case studies of disease outbreaks in the Caribbean, on the West African Gold Coast, and in Sumatra at key points in the seventeenth century.

This chapter examines the twin threats of invasion and insurrection that most English tropical colonies faced because of dwindling white migration and the English reliance on bondage and forced migration to populate and build the tropical empire. It focuses on the period between 1675 and 1720, when a series of large-scale slave insurrection plots began to rock English settlements in the Atlantic. It shows how the very real threats of invasion and insurrection shaped these colonies and how the English navigated these twin threats. Ultimately, English settlers and governors in the Caribbean turned to brutal and draconian policies of slave management to maintain their colonies, while English agents in Asia and Africa were forced to rely on others to help them control the enslaved and defend their factories and settlements. Yet, by the end of the seventeenth century, the English in both the East and West Indies had begun to tentatively explore arming the enslaved, turning to their non-European bondsmen to build, populate, and even help defend the empire. Armed slaves became agents of empire.

This chapter focuses on six groups that were forced to migrate and become bound laborers at English sites of overseas expansion. It examines the poor, criminals, and prisoners of war from the British Isles forced into servitude, the indigenous people of the circum-Caribbean who wound up enslaved, enslaved West Africans from the Gold Coast, people sold into slavery in India during times of famine (especially on the Coromandel Coast), the Malagasy people of Madagascar sold for firearms, and the indigenous peoples of the Indonesian archipelago forced to labor for the East India Company. This chapter will stress the political and socioeconomic conditions that made these groups vulnerable to enslavement or other closely adjacent forms of bondage. The chapter highlights the ways in which the Little Ice Age created famine and political and social upheaval that shaped forced and free migration. It also emphasizes the added political destabilization that came with the expansion of global trade, the introduction of firearms as a trade good, and competition for access to coastal trades. This destabilization and change made people in the tropics more vulnerable to enslavement.

The epilogue takes a broad and expansive view of the nature of the British empire in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tropics. It argues that the British largely abandoned the settlement of the tropics by Europeans by the eighteenth century, becoming more convinced that it was a dangerously unhealthy place. They maintained their hold on the tropics by relying on non-Europeans. The ratios of non-Europeans to Europeans in the tropical empire continued to grow. Ideas about racial differences hardened and became more fully and ardently articulated. They were interwoven with notions of environmental determinism. The British turned more fully to soldiers of African descent in the Caribbean and Sepoy armies in India to help defend the empire. The epilogue explores the large-scale rebellions that erupted against the empire in nineteenth-century India and in the Caribbean, arguing that internal resistance helped to end slavery and, ultimately, the empire. It also underscores the ways in which English colonization and trade across the tropical zone was linked and how the wealth accrued through tropical exploitation and slavery helped facilitate the rise of the British empire.

This chapter traces the developing English empire across the global tropics. Like their European rivals, English colonists, traders, and governors turned to forced labor and migration to maintain the tropical empire. As they forged this empire, English investors experimented with a wide variety of different colonial models. The early empire was not so neatly divided into territorial expansion in the West and commercial settlement in the East. English colonial architects tried to extend plantation agriculture beyond the Americas to West Africa and the Indian Ocean, and they tried to bring the spices and peppers of the East Indies to the West Indies to grow. They became both imitators and innovators, modeling the successful endeavors of European rivals but also carving their own path. Many of their overseas ventures were utter failures. Yet, slave-produced goods and factories constructed and maintained by forced labor ensured profit margins that would be high enough to continue to attract investors. By the end of the seventeenth century, slavery had become the defining feature of the English tropical empire, and there were slave majorities at most English sites in the tropics.