You had to write an essay on the Caribbean, and you didn't choose to write it on Pirates of the Caribbean?

Horrible paper...jesus man...

What class is it for, and what education level?

Corsair Community College

Sounds like a plan. Are you asking for actual information or useful resources that you can use to draw on for research?

The rich got richer and the poor were slaves.

Useful resources, actual info, or just some pointers.

It's some online introductory class, dw.

Hell, you've already done enough work for an intro course...

A Google/Bing/alternative search on "economic effects of colonialism in the Caribbean" should turn up some stuff, maybe play around with search terms a bit to be more or less specific. Also, if the college has a library (this is online, so maybe this isn't an option), you should be able to ask the librarian to point you in the right direction in the stacks. Just some thoughts. I really don't know that much about the topic myself. Don't be discouraged if you get mostly information about how colonialism fundamentally CHANGED the economy than about whether it made the economy "better" or "worse" (and better or worse than what? what it was before colonialism or than it would have been if there hadn't been colonialism?)

That's all I can offer that I can think of.

Google scholar is probably going to be more helpful than just straight-up google.

Good call, abge. Scholarly literature can sometimes be too detailed to be much use for a survey paper like this one, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to check it out, too.

Wait, since when were pirates not a part of the economy?

I did a class opening to explain the spice trade with my six grade geography class.

I asked a student in the back to hand a ruler forward to me. As the ruler went forward everyone had to "buy" it from the student behind him/her. One student got up, yanked it out of the hands of another, walked over to another student across the room and sold it for $1000.00. Hey that's piracy, he got bonus points.

Dude PIRATES JUST RIGHT ABOUT PIRATES

JACK SPARROW

Check out JSTOR or Scholars Portal. If you're in university, your library should give you access to a bunch of things.

Your community college should give you online access to a number of databases that include things not available on Google Scholar. I'd start searching there.

THE BEST RESOURCE IN THIS SITUATION IS UNDOUBTEDLY THEPIRATEBAY.

I disagree, the best resource is Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

"The loss of Eldorado" by V. S. Naipaul contains some interesting tidbits about life on Trinidad, including the economic consideration of the governors from the various European powers.

Hoooo boy. Arguably the economic effects of colonization on the Caribbean were catastrophic if you look long-term. They were slave societies, which is basically creating countries with the worst standards of living imaginable for 95% of the population, and you see the result in the modern Caribbean. Also, slavery noticeably discouraged more effecient labor practices during the 19th century industrial revolution, though this is after emancipation , such was the catastrophic effect of the planter monopoly on the politics and economics of the islands. Maybe for the metropoles it was a good deal, but for the islands themselves it was catastrophic. In Jamaica the nature of sugar production meant land was consolidated in a few hands, and most of these planters were absentee, living in England. The island completely lacked a meaningful civil society in the period mentioned for that reason.

That being said , sugar was big business. I don't know how sustainable it proved to be. Look at Haiti. The system was always feared on the verge of collapse, that's what happens when 95% of the population is in chains.

In colonialism there are generally two broad types of colony, settler colonies and trading colonies. The former, the USA, South Africa eg. The latter, French Canada, Macau, that kind of thing. But I think this ignores a third type: the labor camp colony. The formula: completely exterminate the natives and import Slave labor to work the land. All exports and profits to the mother country. Imagine an alien race that comes to earth to strip it clean of resources and move on. That's what this was.

Anyway, obviously I have had a long time to read about Jamaican history so, if you have any questions on that front, fire away. Great topic

It really is an interesting question to ask what "the economy" actually even is. You start with the 15th century, so let's start there. The Caribbean economy in the 15th century was the Arawak (Taino) economy seems to have been stable for centuries, punctuated only by hurricanes and raids from Carib war canoes (buccaneers first leaned their island hopping raising ways from the Carib tribesmen but I digress). They fished, grew cocoa, pineapple, guava, cassava, tobacco, and maize, and organized themselves democratically and communally. So depending on how you view economics, they weren't doing too bad.

Then of course they were attacked, sickened, and enslaved by the Spanish. Those strong enough resisted enslavement to the death or fled to the mountainous interiors but needless to say the Spanish arrival wrecked the existing economy. Some Arawaks kept on scratching out a living hunting and smoking wild boar (on the "boucan" - strips of wood, also something they taught buccaneers whose trade was boat hunting as they escaped indentured servitude before it was piracy, but I digress again).

Anyway the new economy was basically if the place had gold, like Hispaniola, concentrate on it and make slaves, Taino or imports from the Spanish Main or Africa dig for it, and if it didn't have gold, fruitlessly dig for it anyway and finally give up and leave behind a few poor neglected ranchers along with runaway African slaves (Maroons) and surviving Tainos. Limited agriculture outside of that, much of which was poorly suited for the land. Not a great economic start for the Caribbean at the end of the 15th century.

It wasn't till the 17th century that sugar production really started to take off, though it was implemented in a limited way, first on the Canaries, then São Tomé and the Azores, and finally in the Caribbean, but the Spanish didn't focus on it. The English did after their takeover of Jamaica (ill-defended and ignored because of there being no gold), and so did the French on Saint-Domingue, in the 1600s. During this time in the region you also have near constant warfare between the powers (Google "no peace beyond the line) which often threatened to embroil Europe in war, along with constant raiding buccaneers and Carib war parties. They mined plenty of gold though, I guess, but it was really not very important compared to the gold from the mainland.

In the 1700s the slavocracy got into full swing as I mentioned, which also produced wars between the maroons and the plantation owners, hindering development of the interior, and also tying up British troops to put down revolts, maintain an uneasy order, and unsuccessfully traipse into the mountains to hunt maroons. You could say it was a good business though, if all you are analyzing is the plantocracy. I don't know how good it was for the slave peasants on the islands or the peasants back in the mother countries, though. And by the end Of the century you see revolution and the collapse of the plantocracy on the horizon. The American Revolution then the French gave the slaves the language of the Rights of Man, and so you had the Haitian Revolution with it's devastating effects and a Second Maroon War on Jamaica.

So yeah honestly I think it would be tough to argue that the economy was good in the Caribbean at any point after 1492. Maybe in the independence era with tourism things are a bit better, but up till then it was exploitation by the sugar estates and the United Fruit Company and foreign domination from the USA, Spain, UK, etc.

But the 19th and 20th centuries aren't under study, so

the economy was completely and irrevocably altered. I don't quite understand how you can compare a subsistence/barter economy with a slave driven mercantile staple producing economy that came later. In addition, the Caribbean is a much too large and diverse area to cover (it wasn't all sugar and there were by my count 6 different European colonizing powers controlling separate portions of the Caribbean over that time.

Do we have anyone who currently lives in the Caribbean and could provide some insight?

Nah didn't think so

Do you have access to the New Cambridge Histories or Cambridge Histories?
They have really good summary articles focusing on specific regions, and each volume covers a different time period. They also have an entire volume on the economic history of Latin America; an entire volume on the economic history of slavery, with substantial sections on the Caribbean.

The pre-Columbian population of the Caribbean is estimated to have been 3 million and was largely wiped out within a generation of European contact. The Caribbean population suffered the worst demographic collapse of any region of the Americas. So it's really an odd question to ask whether colonization hurt or helped the economy because there was really no continuity whatsoever from pre-Columbian to post-Columbian society. By 1542 is estimated that fewer than 2,000 natives remained in Hispaniola, for example, and similar demographic collapses occurred in Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and Cuba. Only about 10% of Spanish emigration went to the Caribbean (relative to the rest of the Americas). Most Europeans settled in areas where population densities already existed - Mexico and Peru.

The pre-Columbian economy was dependent upon the production of Cassava and was largely subsistence-based. Food production plummeted as the Europeans began mining gold in the Caribbean with native labor. Indian Slavery was actually formally banned by the Spanish Crown in 1500, although certain exceptions were made to 'Carib' groups believed to be cannibals.

By the time the development of Mexico began rolling in the mid-1500s, the Caribbean was a Spanish afterthought and didn't regain importance again until the 19th century really, when the Puerto Rican and Cuban sugar & tobacco trades began booming.

The British and French got into the region in the 1600s, first to wage piracy against the Spanish, and began a lucrative sugar trade. Virtually the entirety of the region was committed to sugar production. The British, although initially reluctant to import African slaves, ended up providing the lion's share of African slave imports, more than twice as many as the French. Jamaica (and Barbados) was the center, obviously, of their sugar empire. For the French, the Caribbean was also the most important and lucrative sector of their colonial empire. By the mid-1700s Saint-Domingue was the richest colony in the Caribbean (which was the richest sector of colonies in the world). Sugar far and away exceeded any importance gold ever had for the region, which largely became unimportant after the Spanish left. Cotton, indigo, and tobacco began to pick up in the late 1700s, but sugar was still king in the 1800s. Sugar planters were among the richest people in the world in the 1700 and 1800s. The British governors of the West Indies were the highest paid, and there is much reason to believe that the British were much more concerned about losing the Caribbean than they were the North American colonies during the American war of independence. Indeed what is interesting is that in the negotiations after the Seven Years War, the French and British were much more preoccupied with who got Guadalupe than who got all of Canada! British sugar plantations were remarkably efficient, more production per capita than any almost any other industry. This is largely due to the unique regimented system of sugar plantation labor. As the slave trade was eradicated, demands on existing slave labor increased, as did productive efficiency.

I don't know anything about other Caribbean powers, but I don't have any reason to believe the situation was much different except on a much smaller scale.

A good comparative book is The Making of New World Slavery, by Robin Blackburn. Another good one is Eric Williams's from Columbus to Castro.

The minor European powers like the Netherlands and Denmark were a bit different in that they mostly made money from selling slaves to other Caribbean powers, didn't really establish a big sugar plantation economy, and had to rely on British North America for importing food to their colonies. The Dutch had tried to establish a presence in Brazil but the effort failed. They then moved into the Caribbean largely to create transit posts for the provision of Spanish colonies such as Venezuela, or to serve as distribution centers for French sugar to Europe. The Danish largely supplied slaves to Cuba.

"So yeah honestly I think it would be tough to argue that the economy was good in the Caribbean at any point after 1492. "

Er...I think it would be rather easy. The Caribbean was booming in the 1700s and was rich well into the 1800s even after the collapse of Saint-Domingue.

A good book may also be: 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann

It focuses on the Colombian exchange world wide but has substantial areas devoted to the Caribbean. I would suggest it as a personal read maybe not directly for this if you are on a time crunch.

My point Putin is what does "booming" mean? Booming for whom? Certainly a lot of *something* was going on, but what it good, prosperous, beneficial? That's highly arguable.

In short, I question the proposal that rich is the same thing as good.

I also question what it is that constitutes benefit, what constitutes wealth. What objective view of Caribbean economics (being defined as how resources are allocated under conditions of scarcity) could call it prosperous with a straight face? A gigantic labor camp, sending all the products away to people abroad. And what products? Addictive tobacco. Addictive sugar. Frivolous things. So if you honestly answer the question of how resources are being distributed under conditions of scarcity, the answer for Caribbean society from 1500 on can only be "atrociously."