The Caribbean and West Indies

This chapter examines the development of the Church of England in the West Indian colonies, notably Barbados, Jamaica, and the Leeward Islands of Antigua, Montserrat, Nevis, and St Kitts, in the era of ‘sugar and slavery’ (the mid-seventeenth through to late eighteenth centuries). In many instances, the Church’s mission was undermined by a critical lack of clergy, churches, and funds, and by an apparent lack of interest on the part of the planter elite in either attending or financially supporting religious activities. But it would be inaccurate to consider the Church to have played an insignificant role in these colonial societies; in reality, Anglicanism was a crucial element in the political and social, if not always the spiritual, identity of the islands’ white inhabitants, as it was an integral part of their individual and communal self-image as ‘Englishmen transplanted’.