The West Indies

Abstract

The mainland colonies are generally perceived as being the principal destinations of the settlers who went from Britain across the Atlantic in the seventeenth century. Thus, historians talk of ‘the great migration’ to Massachusetts in the 1630s, when 13,000 went there. But that pales into insignificance compared with the numbers who migrated to the Caribbean. It has been estimated that some 60 per cent of all whites who crossed the ocean went there, so that by 1660 the English islands contained 47,000 inhabitants, or 40 per cent of those in England’s American plantations.