David Brown
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Ireland and Barbados, 1620–1660
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The Irish presence in England’s early Caribbean colonies has startlingly modern echoes. A healthy trade in provisions and servants had developed between Munster and Virginia during the 1620s. As the quantity and value of Virginia tobacco increased dramatically, the Government of Charles I, in 1630, sought to increase its tax revenue and decreed that all Virginia tobacco must be imported through London. To circumvent this tax, a group of colonial projectors and planters, resident in County Cork and centred around Richard Boyle, the first Earl of Cork, joined forces with a group of London-based tobacco merchants and established small plantations on the Leeward Islands, which they peopled with Irish servants. The partners’ intention was to cultivate tobacco on the islands and to import it through Cork, thus avoiding the Virginia tax. Although the tax loophole was removed a few years later, it had the effect of developing a number of successful colonies managed by English merchants but using Irish finance and labour. The habit of merchants moving their production to the lowest-tax jurisdiction has, it seems, a long history.

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Ireland, slavery and the Caribbean

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