Up to the early 19th century, the slave trade was massive in the Caribbean, with 3.1 million slaves shipped to the Caribbean between 1662 and 1807 ("Slavery and negotiating freedom)". The hot and wet climate of the area was perfect for growing sugar and tobacco, both of which were very profitable crops in Europe. The large scale plantations that were created required a large amount of labor, so the colonists sought slave labor to do the necessary work to run a plantation. These slaves were treated abysmally, as the plantation owners thought of them as being lazy ("The Caribbean and the Trade"). The sugar produced was sent to Europe, where it would be traded for rum, which would be taken to Africa, where the rum was traded for slaves. This sequence of trades was known as the “Triangle Trade” as there were three stops along its route. Around the time the "CMS Juvenile Instructor Vol. I" was written, in the first half of the 19th century, successful revolutions occurred in the Caribbean where the slaves overthrew their masters ("Slavery and Negotiating Freedom"). Some countries, such as Haiti, destroyed everything that was built or put in place by the colonists, including plantations and sugar mills. This effectively destroyed a vast wealth, leading to great poverty in the region, a poverty that still exists today ("Colonialism in the Caribbean" 7:27-8:17).

After these revolutions, the enslaved people would have been left on the islands without any direction, as they had been ripped from their previous homes and forced into a location unknown to them. This means that the missionary trips would have been beneficial to the natives and former slaves in that it would have allowed them to learn how to live a life. The only way of life the slaves and natives would have known before is one of wildness, and the missionaries would have been able to show them how to live, so that they could go on to found a society, instead of living in the wild.