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Timeline - 17th Century

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1600s
Dutch enter the trade.The ivory trade is so rampant that elephant numbers begin to decline in West Africa
1607
English settlement of Jamestown, Virginia, founded
1610-1660
110,000-135,000 white English went to the Caribbean mainly as indentured labourers, some as transported prisoners
1615
First European poem against slavery, by Gerbrand Brederoo, The Little Moor
1618
British Crown allows the 'Guinea Company' to trade with West Africa: the main interest was gold
1619
First recorded cargo of enslaved Africans is landed in Virginia
1623
Thomas Warner founds the first successful English settlement on St Kitts
1625
First English settlement on Barbados
1626
First boatload of African slaves to St. Kitts
1630
British King Charles I grants patent to Sir Nicholas Crisp to trade to West Africa
First slave rebellion in an English colony - Santa Catalina in E. Caribbean. One Puritan colonist there advises slaves to abscond as slavery was wrong
Bristol merchants give credit to early colonists in Caribbean in return for a share in their tobacco crops
1631
King Charles I grants a monopoly on the Guinea trade to a group of London merchants
1639
Slave revolt in the French part of St. Kitts
1640s
Sugar cultivated in Barbados by mixed teams of white and black labourers
1646
Sir Thomas Browne writes against the slave trade in Vulgar Errors
1649
Slave revolt in Barbados
1652
First coffee house established in Britain
1655
British take Jamaica from the Spanish - Bristol Admiral Sir William Penn in command
Slaves in Jamaica escape into the mountains and establish 'Maroon' settlements
1656
Slave revolt in Guadeloupe led by Angolans
1657
Juan de Bolas, a Jamaican leader of escaped slaves ('Maroons') surrenders to the British but on terms of pardon and freedom. Other Maroons continue to fight British rule
1660's
Demand for African labour for the Barbados sugar plantations intensifies
1663
Charles II charters 'The Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading to Africa'
1664
A law passed in Maryland refers to inter-racial unions as 'shamefull Matches' and to 'diverse free-born English women disgrac[ing] our nation'
1667
Act to Regulate Negroes on the Plantations passes in Virginia: masters who kill slaves whilst punishing them shall not be accounted guilty of murder
1668
'Lobby's rebellion' in Jamaica 200 Africans escape to the mountains
1675
35 enslaved people executed for conspiracy to rebel in Jamaica
1677
First mention of a Bristol coffee house (in the tenure of John Kimber of High Street)
1678
A 'slave mutiny' reported and martial law enforced in Jamaica
1679
Slave revolt in Haiti
1683
Slave conspiracy in Jamaica uncovered
1685
Judge Jefferies accuses Bristol aldermen and justices of kidnapping English people to serve on their plantations in the Caribbean and Virginia
1685-1686
Slave rebellion in Jamaica suppressed
1688
The Bristol ship Society laden with enslaved Africans and 'elephants teeth' from Guinea is seized and condemned in Virginia as was the Betty, also of Bristol, for breaking the monopoly of the Royal African Company
Quakers in Pennsylvania publish the anti-slavery Germantown Protest
1690
Major slave revolt in Jamaica - begins in Clarendon
1692
Slave conspiracy to massacre whites discovered in Barbados
1696
Board of Trade and Plantations set up by the British
1698
British monopoly of the Royal African Company ended
1698 First legal slaving venture out of Bristol: the Beginning carried enslaved Africans from Africa to Jamaica
1699
80% of Caribbean residents are African slaves

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