Slavery, Sugar and Micro Enterprise Development in West Indies

Abstract

: In 1492 Columbus discovered the New World. On march5, 1496, Henry VII issued a patent to another sailor, John Cabot, to undertake a voyage of discovery. The date has been called the birthday of British Empire. According to Adam Smith the discovery of America and the cape route to India are two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind. In 1718 William Wood said that the slave trade was the spring and parent whence the other flows. In this triangular trade England-France and Colonial America- supplied the exports and the ships; Africa the human merchandise; it is estimated that around 11 million Negroes were displaced during the slave trade thus created a big void in terms of human resource to Africa in the years to come; the plantations the colonial raw materials. The slave ship sailed from home country with a cargo of manufacturing goods. These were exchanged at a profit on a the coast of Africa for Negroes, who were traded on the plantations, at another profit in exchange for a cargo of colonial produce to be taken back to the home country. The economic triumph of Sugar meant the demographic domination of the Negro. The eighteenth century was born in the glory that was sugar. The profit of a sugar plantation in any of our West India Colonies, wrote Adam Smith, in 1776, are generally much greater than those of any other cultivation that is known either in Europe or America. Sugar occupied the place in the eighteen century economy that steel occupied in the nineteenth and oil in the twentieth. With this sugar and slaves the colonial masters industrialize Europe. West Indies was left behind in spite of its natural and human resources. This paper analyses the political history of slavery, sugar and how to bring about a change in motivating this hardworking people by introducing couple of innovative entrepreneurship development programmes and inculcate a culture in entrepreneurship in this part of the New World where it is the need of the hour.