Unsurprisingly, the history of slavery in the Caribbean is marked by desperate rebellions. One of the best known is the Jamaican Maroon rebellion from 1690, later led by a slave called Cudjoe, who escaped with his brothers to the mountains and fought the British until 1739, when he signed a peace treaty. Another famous rebellion took place in Guyana in 1763, when a slave named Cuffee took over and ruled the entire region of Berbice for some months before his defeat.

The planters lived in a state of terror about the possibility of a revolt and were ruthless in their suppression of the slaves. This went further than the use of branding, whipping and chains: slaves were effectively imprisoned on their masters' estates, they were forbidden to speak their own language, forbidden to practise their native religion, and forbidden to assemble without permission. Families were routinely and arbitrarily split up. At one point an entire island in the Eastern Caribbean was used as a farm for breeding slaves, and sold its product all over the Caribbean and the USA. Slaves were named by their masters, either after their own family estates, or after figures in the classics - Ovid, Virgil, Caesar. Female slaves were at the disposal of their masters, and by the time slavery was abolished in 1838, a substantial proportion of the Caribbean population was racially mixed.

After the successful slave rebellion in Haiti from 1719 onwards, it became apparent to the government in Britain that the expense of guarding against and crushing repeated revolts meant that the costs of slavery were increasingly overtaking the profits. At the same time the price of sugar dropped dramatically and the plantation system declined in importance relative to a rapidly industrialising Europe.

The efforts of the abolitionists in Britain undoubtedly hastened the end but financially slavery was doomed as an institution. When it was finally abolished in August 1838 the event was greeted with joy in the Caribbean, but by then it had helped to shape the life and future of the region, and its effects can still be felt today.

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