Barbados in the Atlantic World

Abstract

Barbados, settled by Europeans in 1627, was among the first permanent English colonies in the Americas, and it was where the English variant of race-based plantation slavery first took root; not surprisingly, it plays a central role in the scholarship of the Atlantic world. Although Barbados was uninhabited when the English arrived, they were certainly not the first people on the island. Arawak-speaking peoples first migrated to Barbados from South America long before 1492. The Kalinago were the last people to live on Barbados before the English arrived. The Portuguese and Spanish visited the island after 1492 but never established colonies there. The Spanish claimed that the island was uninhabited in the mid-sixteenth century. Yet, by the mid-seventeenth century, Barbados was the most densely populated and lucrative colony in the English Americas. Barbadian planters began growing sugar in the 1640s. They were innovators and they developed a proto-industrial and integrated sugar plantation system that was more productive than the sugar industry had been in Brazil. At first, planters relied on a mixture of Africans and white servants, but the Barbadian plantation model became increasingly dependent on a brutal and ruthlessly efficient system of racial slavery. The island was quickly deforested, the environment was destroyed, and the soils were degraded by sugar. Barbadians became the vanguard of expansion through the English plantation in the Americas, and they helped extend their new model of race-based plantation slavery and the legislative measures designed to entrench it to Surinam, Jamaica, Antigua, the Carolinas, and the Chesapeake. Although the island was threatened by hurricanes, the Barbadian elite benefited from fewer threats to production than the planters in other British Caribbean islands; no other European power invaded Barbados before emancipation, and there was only one major slave insurrection. After the transition to sugar, Barbados continued to have a majority black population throughout its history, but the ratio of blacks to whites was smaller than in other major British Caribbean colonies. Barbados had the only naturally reproducing slave population among all the Caribbean sugar colonies before emancipation. A Barbadian creole culture developed among the peoples of African and European descent. The white population, however, was divided into a planter elite and a marginalized poor white population. A small number of free blacks also carved out lives on the island. After emancipation in 1833, the Barbadian sugar economy recovered but the ex-slaves continued to struggle against economic and racial oppression.