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Timeline - 17th Century

15thC | 16thC | 17thC | 18thC | 19thC | 20thC | 21stC

• 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
• 1672: The London-based Royal African Company is established, with a monopoly of British trade to Africa
• 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
  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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