The Salt 'Plantations' of the Caribbean

Lest We Forget

Content Warning: this episode contains mentions of violence, slavery and wider harm.

Most scholarship on Caribbean chattel slavery of enslaved Africans largely covers the the sugar and tobacco plantation systems throughout the region. However, there was another massive industry that was built upon the enslavement of Africans - that was the cultivation of salt. Saltpans, the name given to the areas of salt production, were spread across the region: Turks & Caicos, Haiti, Jamaica, Barbuda, Sint Maarten, Bonaire and other areas. Throughout the 18th and 19th century, the region was one the main supplier of salt to Europe and the United States; and as events unfold, the documentation of the life of one enslaved black woman who worked on a Caribbean saltpan played a major role in the fight for emancipation in the British West Indies. Still, it is the history of salt production in the region that shaped the West Indian diet we know today.

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