On this page, you’ll find out more about the lives of the enslaved Africans who were forced to work on the plantations of the Dickinsons in Jamaica, the Tudways in Antigua, and the Society of the Propagation of the Gospel in Barbados. It’s worth stressing from the outset that the historical experience of enslaved people varied considerably across the landscape of the British slave colonies. The British West Indies was made up of a diverse set of islands and regions, each of which were inserted into the wider system of plantation labour and commerce in different ways. The sheer historical span of British slavery – an evolving system in place for nearly two centuries before Abolition in the 1830s – makes it difficult to generalise the experience of one enslaved person to the other. The type of plantation labour enslaved Africans were forced into also differed: many plantations grew sugar cane, a very important crop in the history of the Caribbean as a region, but others grew other crops like coffee, cotton, and pimento. Each plantation was, as Sidney Mintz argued, a unique historical ‘synthesis of field and factory’, combining forms of agricultural and proto-industrial labour. Enslaved people would have been intimately familiar with the cane fields, the plantation works, the managers’ houses and the enslaved villages that formed the “world” of each individual plantation.

Violence, in all its ugly mutations, was at the very core of plantation life. For many enslaved Africans, before even entering the world of the plantation in the Caribbean, the Middle Passage across the Atlantic would have been the first of a series of shockingly traumatic experiences. Upon arrival in the British Caribbean, families and kinship groups would be systematically broken up to be sold off to different plantations and masters. From there followed the brutal process of “seasoning”, whereby plantation managers forced enslaved people to adjust to the torturous living and working conditions of the Caribbean. Many would not survive the deadly first few months and years. Further on, a whole series of horrific experiences awaited each enslaved person: a lifetime of coerced labour under appalling conditions, pervasive sexual and physical violence, brutal punishments and executions, and, for the vast majority, death in bondage.

It is difficult to capture in words the sheer inhumanity of the British plantation world. But enslaved people continually found ways to survive and resist this inhuman system of exploitation. From everyday acts of resistance, such as disobeying instructions, refusing to work and singing spirituals, to more extreme forms, such as self-induced abortions, poisonings and armed revolts, enslaved Africans consistently struggled against their enslavers. Above the Dickinson’s Appleton Estate, for example, free Black people who had escaped from slavery – known as the Maroons – established the village of Accompong Maroon in Jamaica’s mountain interior, where they fought against British colonial authorities throughout much of the eighteenth century. Similar resistance took place in Antigua. In 1736, for instance, an enslaved man known as Prince Klaas was convicted alongside others by the colonial authorities for planning a mass uprising against their captors. Cuffee and Watty, two enslaved men described as a “mason” and an “old driver” who belonged to the Tudway’s Parham estates, were also executed for their involvement. Today, Prince Klaas is celebrated as a national hero in Antigua.

In the further sections on this page, you’ll find more about the different experiences of enslaved people across the Caribbean plantations linked to Wells. Undeniably, there are considerable challenges to reconstructing the lives of those who lived under British slavery. Injustices of the past are inherited and preserved in the historical archive: against the well-documented evidence that remains for slave-owning Britons and their families, often there are only fragments, scraps, and brief accounts that can give us some insight into the lives of the enslaved. But the history of British slavery demands to be told, and we have done our best here to try to give some insights into the conditions enslaved people faced in the British West Indies. Grappling with this past in its full complexity not only yields a much-needed understanding of the violent workings of the slave system, but it also testifies to the sheer strength of the enslaved to survive and resist this brutal world.