Indian Slaves from Guiana in Seventeenth-Century Barbados

Abstract

Abstract The economy of Barbados benefited both from the labor of Indian captives and from their isolated position away from indigenous zones of conflict and economic competition. The Anglo-Barbadians accessed labor in Guiana, the region between the Orinoco and Amazon Rivers. Barbados was a secure location, away from the indigenous war zones, trade routes, and markets for captives in Guiana. In this context, the Barbadian sugar industry flourished without threat from Indians’ reprisals. Seventeenth-century ethnographies and modern scholarship have emphasized the limited nature of this Indian slave trade, or the finite roles that Indian slaves played in colonial economies. However, the archival sources I use provide evidence that colonists routinely exploited Guiana for native slaves, and once on Barbados, the latter contributed a broad range of skills to the early economy of the island.