The islands of the West Indies began to be colonised by English planters in the 1600s, growing sugar and tobacco for export to Europe. This trade required large quantities of manual labourers to toil in the fields, once the native Carrib peoples had been suppressed.

There began a policy of bringing Irish and English people to the

Islands, by various means to work as indentured servants.

Some were willing participants, selling their labour for periods of 5 to 10 years in return for a small plot of land at the end of the period of indenture. Others were forcibly deported to servitude in the 1600s, particularly from Ireland.

An indenture is a legal contract drawn up in a particular style. The contract is written in duplicate on the same sheet of paper. A jagged cut is then made in the contract, hence the term indenture, with one half given to the indentured labourer. The two parts can then be brought together and the jagged edges matched to proved authenticity.

Such contracts were widely issued for people brought to the plantations in the West Indies. Labourers were split into those who willingly sold their labour for a period usually of seven years ("freewillers") or those duped into signing a contract and then sold on arrival in the West Indies ("Redemptionists") and a separate group of those people who were "spirited" to the Carribean by gangs working in Ireland who would load them on board slave ships in Bristol or Liverpool.

Indentured servitude is a somewhat benign description for the conditions endured by the Irish in the Carribean. They worked in very poor conditions with sweltering sun and heat and were regularly maltreated, beaten and starved by plantation owners so that up to 50% of them died during their term of servitude.

Many of the first indentured Irish were brought to Antigua or Montserrat in 1632. Their number quickly grew and by the end of that decade they made up almost 70% of the population. In total, up to 1660, an estimated, 50,000 - 100,000 Irish people were mostly forcibly sold into servitude in the Carribean.

Barbados became an important centre for the British sugar trade in the 1600s and it too had a large share of Irish slaves, deported by Cromwell following his great land clearances in the 1640s.

This group of people on Barbados and elsewhere earned the pejorative term, 'Red legs', a term resulting from the effects of the tropical sun on their paler Irish skin. This term came to refer to the poor Irish and mixed race underclass that developed on Barbados and Montserrat, some of whose descendants still survive today.

In the 19th Century, there was a campaign to move some of the RedLegs to better conditions on other Carribean islands such as Grenada or St Vincent.