West India Committee

The West India Committee, later also known as The Committee to the West Indies was an English charity formed out of the London Society of West India Planters and Merchants, established in 1780 as a lobby group for British-based merchants and absentee plantation owners with business interests in the Caribbean and which later became a group promoting Caribbean businesses to the world's major markets.

History

The principal commodities were cane sugar, rum, mahogany, other softwood, spices and tropical produce, early on largely confined to types which would last a long transatlantic voyage such as coffee, nuts and desiccated coconut but later expanded to include tropical fruits in general.

In 1904, the committee received a (royal) charter of incorporation at the initiative of the British government. It later acquired charitable status and established two subsidiary bodies:

• The Caribbean Council for Europe (CCE)
• The Caribbean Trade Advisory Group (Caritag).^[1][2][3]

^[4][5]

Among its records are for example eight collections of Caribbean and English newspapers 1761-1846, reports of the Acting Committee to the Half-Yearly Meeting of the Standing Committee of West India Planters and Merchants, 1878-1883 and albums of photographs and press cuttings on the 1907 earthquake in Jamaica, a country that was a major subject of its promotion work.^[6]

From at least 1915 - 1929^[6] its Secretary was Sir Algernon Edward Aspinall who in the name of his committee published geographical guides to Guyana and the British Caribbean, such as a 1907 Stanford's Guide: Pocket Guide to the West Indies and The handbook of the British West Indies, British Guiana and British Honduras (1929).

References

External links

• Official website