Born Then1640–1799
Life during the Sugar slavery in the Caribbean
Be born in a place it hit, a few years before it began, and see what it did to five ordinary lives.
What it meant for ordinary people
From the 1640s Barbados, then Jamaica, Saint-Domingue and other islands turned to sugar grown by enslaved Africans. Work in the cane fields and mills was so deadly that the enslaved population could only be kept up by constant new imports. By the 1700s most people on the sugar islands were enslaved.
Deaths: the Caribbean received about 4.5 million enslaved Africans before 1800; deaths exceeded births on most sugar islands.
How hard it hits each person in the game (risk of death, of being conscripted, of leaving) comes from scholarly estimates.
Around the same time
- Indian Ocean slave trade 700–1799
- Atlantic slave trade (West Africa) 1501–1799
- Atlantic slave trade (Kongo and Angola) 1514–1799
- Plantation slavery in Brazil 1550–1799
- Russian conquest of Siberia 1580–1700
- Tokugawa peace 1603–1780
- Thirty Years' War 1618–1648
- Dutch conquest of the Banda Islands 1621
- Late Ming famines and rebellions 1627–1644
- Italian plague of 1629–1631 1629–1631
- Deccan famine of 1630–1632 1630–1632
- Sugar slavery in the Caribbean 1640–1799
- Ming–Qing transition 1644–1683
- Slavery in the British North American colonies 1660–1799
- Great Plague of London 1665–1666
- Little Ice Age famines of the 1690s 1693–1698
- 1707 Hōei earthquake and Fuji eruption 1707–1708
- 1755 Lisbon earthquake 1755
- Burmese–Siamese War and fall of Ayutthaya 1765–1767
- Bengal famine of 1770 1769–1771
- Spanish missions in California 1769–1799
- Great Tenmei famine 1782–1788
- Laki haze and the cold winter of 1783–1784 1783–1784
- Laki eruption and the Haze Famine 1783–1785
- Smallpox epidemic around Sydney 1789–1790
- Atlantic slave trade, final decades 1800–1866
- Slavery in the United States 1800–1865
- Slavery in Brazil 1800–1888
- Serfdom in the Russian Empire 1800–1861
- Napoleonic Wars 1803–1815