The First Black Slave Society: Britain's "Barbarity Time" in Barbados, 1636-1876

By Hilary McD. Beckles

In this remarkable exploration of the brutal course of Barbados’s history, Hilary McD. Beckles details the systematic barbarism of the British colonial project. Trade in enslaved Africans was not new in the Americas in the seventeenth century – the Portuguese and Spanish had commercialized chattel slavery in Brazil and Cuba in the 1500s – but in Barbados, the practice of slavery reached its apotheosis.

Barbados was the birthplace of British slave society and the most ruthlessly colonized. The geography of Barbados was ideally suited to sugar plantations and there were enormous fortunes to be made for British royalty and ruling elites from sugar produced by an enslaved, “disposable” workforce, fortunes that secured Britain’s place as an imperial superpower. The inhumane legacy of plantation society has shaped modern Barbados and this history must be fully understood by the inheritors on both sides of the power dynamic before real change and reparatory justice can take place.

A prequel to Beckles’s equally compelling Britain’s Black Debt, The First Black Slave Society: Britain’s “Barbarity Time” in Barbados, 1636–1876 is essential reading for anyone interested in Atlantic history, slavery and the plantation system, and modern race relations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of the West Indies Press
• Release date: Sep 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9789766405878

Hilary McD. Beckles

Hilary McD. Beckles is Professor of Economic and Social History and Vice-Chancellor, the University of the West Indies. His many publications include The First Black Slave Society: Britain’s “Barbarity Time” in Barbados, 1636–1876; Britain’s Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide; A History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to Caribbean Single Market and Economy; Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados, 1636–1834; and Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Societies.

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THE FIRST BLACK SLAVE SOCIETY

The University of the West Indies Press

7A Gibraltar Hall Road, Mona

Kingston 7, Jamaica

www.uwipress.com

© Hilary McD. Beckles, 2016

All rights reserved. Published 2016

A catalogue record of this book is available from the

National Library of Jamaica.

ISBN: 978-976-640-585-4 (print)

978-976-640-586-1 (Kindle)

978-976-640-587-8 (ePub)

Cover illustration: Omowale Stewart, Least We Forget (1978).

Reproduced by courtesy of the artist.

Cover and book design by Robert Harris

Set in Adobe Garamond Pro 11/14.5 x 27

Printed in the United States of America

For Hilary Beckles, my granddaughter,

and her generation of Caribbean picknies,

hoping they find this text/tool useful

Barbados, before Emancipation, … is still spoken of by the negroes as ‘Barbarity Times’.

—Reverend Greville John Chester, Transatlantic Sketches in the West Indies, South America, Canada, and the United States (1869)

CONTENTS

List of Tables

Preface and Acknowledgements

Introduction: Defining the Black Slave Society

PART 1 CREATING THE BLACK SLAVE SOCIETY

1Made in England: A Racialized Chattel Society

2Our Negroes Are Our Property Forever

3The First Labour Force: Bonded Whites

4We Desire No Workers of the Irish Colour

5One of the Riches Spotes of Ground in the Wordell

6The Chattel Model Exported: Jamaica and South Carolina

PART 2 A WELL CONSTITUTED SOCIETY

7White Women as Equal Enslavers

8Some Whites Will Be Poor and Oppressed

9Some Blacks Will Be Rich and Free

10 White and Brown against Black

11 Town Negroes Have Too Much Tongue

PART 3 THE END OF DELUSION

12 Cheaper to Breed Than to Buy Negroes

13 Punish the Bad and Reward the Good

14 The War of General Bussa

PART 4 ENDING THE BARBARITY TIME

15 Little England versus Great Britain

16 Tear Down the Church and Lynch the President

17 To Set Them Free Is to Endanger the Colony

18 Making the Enslaved Pay for Emancipation

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

TABLES

5.1 Estimated Sugar Imports (Tons) to England, 1651–1680

5.2 Leading White Families in Eighteenth-Century Barbados

7.1 Ten Leading Female Slave-Owners in Barbados, 1834

7.2 Top Ten White Women Creditors in Barbados, 1823–1843

7.3 The Interracial Family Ties of White Women in St Philip Parish, Barbados, 1715

9.1 Free Blacks in the Barbados Population, 1773–1829

9.2 Distribution of Free Black Slaveholders, 1817

10.1 Free Coloured Population, 1802

10.2 Barbados Free Coloured Population, 1809–1816

11.1 Occupations of Enslaved Persons in Bridgetown (Barbados) and Kingstown (St Vincent), 1817

11.2 Skilled Enslaved Workers in Bridgetown, 1817

11.3 Home Locations of Enslaved Persons in Bridgetown, 1834

12.1 Life and Death on Lowthers Plantation, 1825–1832

13.1 Population of Barbados, 1712–1817

14.1 Principal Organizers of the 1816 War

17.1 Compensation Payments to the Earl of Harewood, 1835–1836

18.1 Top Five Recipients of Slave Compensation

18.2 Land Values in the West Indies, late 1840s

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

IT NOW REQUIRES A SEISMIC SHIFT IN HISTORICAL imagination to recall that Barbados, the beautiful Caribbean island known today for its social amiability and political civility, was Britain’s colonial site of the first black slave society – the most systemically violent, brutal and racially inhumane society of modernity. The abundant empirical evidence that illustrates this status and reputation echoes through the archives of the island and resonates through those in Britain, the United States and the wider Atlantic world.

Images of this past are found in mounds of manuscripts, but the living memory is seen most clearly in the faces and facades that populate and punctuate the island’s landscape. Discerning researchers need not end there. There is living testimony, equally riveting and revealing, to be mined by delving into the mindscape of descendants.

The society has a distinct social character and cultural identity that are rooted in its slavery past. Public perceptions of the nation remain linked to the legacies of slavery. Once described by an economist as the Caribbean model of the pure plantation, first to be reformatted as a black slave society, Barbados remains the last to loosen the political stranglehold of plantocracy.

The genealogy goes back to the decision taken by English investors on the island in the late 1630s to rebuild their economic enterprises upon the foundation of racial debasement and mass enslavement of imported Africans. This had immediate and far-reaching consequences. It economically transformed the colony and redefined its social environment and that of other Caribbean colonies. Critically, it accelerated the pace of mass enslavement of Africans as the basis of Europe’s colonial projects in the Atlantic world.

The new economic system needed precise operational rules for the application of market principles to labour in order to facilitate wealth accumulation and ethnic dominance. The transition from a society that included a minority of enslaved Africans to one conceptualized and built entirely around the legally assured principle of property rights in African bodies was innovative and transformative. In 1636 a political directive provided that all Africans brought to the island were to be received as lifelong chattels. In 1661 the legislature passed a comprehensive slave law that consolidated this culture and surrounded it with additional reinforcements. Not only were Africans deemed chattels, but subsequent laws also defined them as real estate. The slave laws were not intended to protect lives but to secure the investment value in those lives. Africans were given but one reason to live: to ensure that they served the investors’ wealth creation.

By the 1650s England was grandly celebrating Barbados as its premier global investment. The island had provided impetus for the breakthrough into profitable colonialism the nation had long desired but found irritatingly elusive. Henceforth, the national discourse on trade and economic growth, wealth creation and mercantilism, sovereignty and security, and ethnic identity were tightly tied to the colony’s performance as a black slave society.

Barbados capitalism and slavery were of greater importance to imperial investors than the politics of Crown versus Cromwell. The violent brutality that attended the Civil War, however, evoked considerable outcry as Englishness descended into a moral quagmire that would tarnish the legitimacy of both kingdom and republic. However, there was no corresponding discourse on the inhumanity, immorality and brutality of the national reliance on slavery, and the enslaved became the principal source of England’s new wealth. A new England came into being with Barbados, and a new Barbados was created by England.

Memory of this history still percolates within the consciousness of the community; memory survives despite the persistence of political and cultural forces that try to suppress it. Tourism brochures, for example, present glittering images of the island as a paradise on earth and reduce the past to romanticized remnants of the slave-based civilization. In these politically engineered ecologies of environmental enchantment, golden sand beaches and sugar barons’ bungalows mask a persistent black poverty polarized in communities of crumbling chattel houses. They serve in an indirect way to suppress the fading but resilient truth: that this proud, politically successful postcolonial nation-state was the home of England’s egregious experiment with African enslavement. The image of gentle waves rolling upon bleached beaches against a backdrop of serene sunsets has become a part of the new Barbados brand. It has not washed away, however, facets of the island’s history as a monument to immeasurable human misery. The vestiges are to be found in dozens of sugar plantation villages.

White inheritors of the wealth of criminal enrichment remain politically unrepentant and financially dominant. Despite their political ascendency in contemporary society, black descendants remain marginalized within the wealth-management and ownership structures and cultures of the national economy. Political power has been no balm for the physical and psychic pain associated with three centuries of plantation tyranny. Passions from the past continue to shape social understandings of the present. The discontent brews beneath the social surface. It boils and spews periodically in the form of popular protest but quickly evaporates; the society settles again and the sins of slavery sink once more to the bottom. But they are not forgotten.

Some wish to forgive, but none to forget. To litigate, it is said, is to promote hate. Yet the reparatory justice discourse, like sugar cane, is growing everywhere. On both sides of the Atlantic the official narrative of slavery is still read and received as old story time, a past devoid of political agency and best set aside. A rising popular discourse, however, is calling for radical agency and social justice, based on research into the judicial origins and ending of the enterprise.

The first black slave society was an English innovation rather than its invention. For centuries chattel slavery had been a characteristic of the Mediterranean and east Atlantic slave routes. From the fifteenth-century Portuguese island colonies at São Tomé and Cape Verde in the east Atlantic, where chattel slavery was incubated and commercialized, it was transferred to Brazil and the Caribbean in the West Atlantic in the early sixteenth century. The enslavement of Africans on the sugar plantations of São Tomé by the 1530s undoubtedly represented the first great stride towards the creation of the Barbados black slave society. The Spanish took the chattel enslavement of Africans to Cuba, in the northern Caribbean, in the 1540s. Inexorably it spread to the eastern Caribbean and found its most fertile environment in the plantation complex of Barbados exactly a century later.

Upon this small rock, England gained its first economic success by building the first complete large-scale black slave society. By 1650 it was universally recognized for its economic prosperity, physical brutality and social inhumanity towards Africans. English managers of the model were not to be deterred, however; they pressed on and redefined for the long term the primary character of Europe’s and the Americas’ relationship with Africans. It was the beginning of a new era in global economic development and race relations. With the black slave society, England’s entrepreneurship forged and refashioned the world economic order. Investors and imperial administrators seized the moment and abandoned traditional labour values and relations.

The sugar plantations, stocked with thousands of easily replaceable enslaved Africans, spun super-profits. The entire island was quickly stripped of an internal frontier and transformed into endless fields of sugar plantation. Record levels of white-owned wealth and black deaths defined the slave plantation as a best practice in the new business culture. Barbados represented for the English a symbol of global enrichment. Investors representing the English royal family and its ruling elites, including the military and clergy, rushed to the island to secure their share of the wealth.

A comprehensive understanding of this English creation continues to stimulate the research capacity of historians. In my quests I have benefited from the seminal studies on slavery in ancient and modern societies by Moses Finley and Eric Williams, and more recently the mentoring masterpieces of David Brion Davies and Orlando Patterson. The conceptual power and empirical rigour of these scholars still serve as sources of sensitization. I continue to find in their mega-narratives considerable scope for creative comparative study.

Work on Barbados, Caribbean and Atlantic slavery by Robin Blackburn, David Brown, Trevor Burnard, Kathleen Mary Butler, Henderson Carter, Michael Craton, Nicholas Draper, Richard Dunn, David Eltis, Stanley Engerman, Barry Gaspar, Elsa Goveia, Larry Gragg, Jack P. Greene, Jerome Handler, Richard Hart, B.W. Higman, Joseph Inikori, Alana Johnson, Franklin Knight, David Lambert, Claude Levy, Paul Lovejoy, Woodville Marshall, Russell Menard, Philip Morgan, Melanie Newton, Walter Rodney, Stuart Schwartz, Verene Shepherd, Richard Sheridan, Simon Smith, James Walvin and Pedro Welch have informed and shaped my thinking and writing. Many of these scholars, in conversations over meals and drinks, have guided my journey along the slave route from São Tomé and Cape Verde to Brazil and Barbados. In such contexts we discussed the origins, growth and maturity of slavery in all the hosting societies and accounted for the complexity of forces that ushered in their beginning and assured their ending.

I wish this work to serve as a reminder of that tragic time when England and later Great Britain rose triumphantly to claim creation of the first black slave society as a national cultural achievement. There is now a call from Barbados and other Caribbean societies for Britain and Europe to recognize their crimes of chattel slavery and native genocide and to repair the damage. The historical and legal evidence show that there is a case to answer.

INTRODUCTION

DEFINING THE BLACK SLAVE SOCIETY

ELSA GOVEIA’S SEMINAL 1965 MONOGRAPH, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands, provides the most persuasive workable definition of a slave society. It is a socioeconomic formation, she states, that is entirely dependent on slavery for all its operations, dominant ideology and defining functions, including its means of sustainability.¹ While for Goveia other forms of social living and economic accumulation coexisted independently in societies with slaves, in the slave society that developed at Barbados, slave relations shaped the functions of all social and economic institutions and determined the nature of all social consciousness. The Slave Code of 1661 was a defining element within the meaning of the slave society. It was the foundation upon which the social order was articulated and clearly understood. It was the philosophical core of all social and economic relations and defined the totality of political and cultural life. The slave society would have existed without the Slave Code, of course, but its precise nature, structures, relations and functions would have been less well defined and discernible.

The Barbados slave society reproduced itself through no other means than slavery. Goveia’s conception, then, makes allowance for a distinction between a society where slavery existed, such as Brazil and the Spanish Caribbean, and a society like Barbados that was existentially dependent on slavery. This study takes as its point of departure Goveia’s definition of a slave society. It is conceptually situated within the mainstream of Caribbean historiography. Her perspective has shaped three generations of slavery studies in the region. Furthermore, the emphasis on totality, dependency and sustainability explicit in her thinking provides an analysis of the slave society that goes beyond demographics.

It is important but insufficient, therefore, to conclude that slave society is defined by the presence of enslaved Africans as the social majority. Goveia states: The term ‘slave society’ … refers to the whole community based on slavery, including masters and freedmen as well as slaves. My object has been to study the political, economic, and social organization of this society and the interrelationships of its component groups and to investigate how it was affected by its dependence on the institution of slavery.² Slavery shapes and sustains both the principal and secondary means of productive and social living in Goveia’s definition. Barbados by 1660 was such a society.

Following Goveia, Ira Berlin defines the slave society in ways that focus on its obvious and essential features. He separates Barbados from all other colonies and makes the following delineation:

what distinguished societies with slaves was the fact that slaves were marginal to the central productive processes. In societies with slaves, slavery was just one form of labor among many. Slave owners treated their slaves with extreme callousness and cruelty at times, because this was the way they treated all subordinates, be they indentured servants, debtors, prisoners of war, pawns, peasants, or perhaps simply poor folks. In societies with slaves, no one presumed the master-slave relationship to be the exemplar. In slave societies, by contrast, slavery stood at the center of economic production, and the master-slave relationship provided the model for all social relations.³

Berlin confirms the importance of the definition provided by Goveia. He identifies Barbados as the quintessential black slave society of the seventeenth century – the first of its kind anywhere in the Americas, or, indeed, during any previous era. Like Goveia, Berlin does not rely on the criterion of African majority to make his case. Political governance, social relations, geographical coverage and production, he notes, are also important in determining the degree of slavery’s infiltration of public and private institutions.

Russell Menard, while accepting much of Berlin’s assessment, does not formulate his notion of the slave society in the same way. He concludes, however, that from every analytic perspective the hegemony of African enslavement in Barbados is revealed and found to be central. He notes that while most would agree that Barbados was a slave society by at least 1680, when enslaved Africans accounted for nearly 70 per cent of its population, there were clearly major changes in the institution following that date, as the slaves’ share of the population continued to rise, reaching 76 percent by 1700 and 84.2 percent by 1770.⁴ Beyond demographics, Menard engages neither Berlin nor Goveia but recognizes that sustainability of the slave society depended on the reproduction of enslaved labour. In this regard, he finds less useful the dichotomy between slave society and society with slaves. For him it obscures the analysis and does students of the Barbadian slave regime a disservice.⁵

Nowhere else but Barbados were enslaved Africans a majority in a significant colonial society, nor were Africans considered elsewhere the primary sustainable source of labour in the creation of imperial wealth. Importing, exploiting, managing and suppressing the majority African population became the core consideration upon which the entire social formation was based. As a ruling class, the sugar planters and large slave-owners constructed a complex legal system for public governance and an elaborate machinery for political administration. All of it was shaped by and infused with the needs of the slave economy. The cultural and ideological forces that held the slave society together as a distinct civilization reflected a hegemonic white-supremacy value system. All non-white persons were subject to legal and social discrimination. Freedom was for whites only and slavery was attached to the African identity.

These ideological forces constituted the scaffold of the slave society and determined every relationship within it. No alternative social order competed meaningfully with the cultural forces endemic to the society. But, like all societies, the slave society existed with its own peculiar contradictions and anomalies. Enslavers, already living in fear of the oppressed white indentured workers, added fear of Africans as their numbers increased. Both groups rebelled and pursued freedom however best they could, and eternal vigilance and violent reprisals were applied to both groups. Laws were formulated, armies established and prisons built in order to brutalize Africans into social submission. Extreme violence against Africans was justified by enslavers as a self-defence mechanism. Atrocities were considered inevitable and were endemic. As wealth generation spiralled to new heights, the degradation of Africans reached an unprecedented social low.

The English nation celebrated the slave society as an entrepreneurial edifice and urged other Europeans to marvel at their commercial genius. Sugar enslavers were the new fortune makers, becoming the richest persons in English America. Slavery, Barbados style, became a celebrated global brand as an English invention. The colony was the centre of a new economic order that typified the reduction of all Africans to non-human property status. Two supportive principles were enshrined: (1) The only legal status attributable to enslaved Africans was their identity as property. They could be bought, sold, mortgaged, rented, leased, murdered, raped, beaten, imprisoned and dismembered – all within the legal property rights of the owner-investor. (2) The expected lifespan of the enslaved was determined by a commercial calculation about his or her investment value, income-generation potential and replacement cost.

African life, then, was a closely protected marketable asset with no recognized human significance. David Eltis locates these aspects of the slave society within the wider context of Europe’s historical relationship to African enslavement. He recognizes that when Barbados moved ahead with the chattel model, it did so against a broad background in which there was cultural rejection of the idea of enslaving one’s own kind.⁶ Slavery, Eltis states, had been abolished in England for centuries. It was retrieved for full service in Barbados, with an aggression and brutality that involved exploitation more intense than had ever existed in the world.⁷

Moses Finley has categorized the socioeconomic realities that fit the term slave society and concludes that, in terms of Greek, Roman, Brazilian, Caribbean, and the Southern United States slavery, Barbados was unmatched before 1800 in terms of output per slave.⁸ For sure, he said, the southern United States followed a distant second; the English enslavers in Barbados were the creators and innovators of modernity’s most socially violent and economically valuable socioeconomic order.⁹

Within the context of colonial America, Jack Greene grasped the full significance of the positions adopted by Eltis when he stated that the colony became both a base and a prototype for all colonies that came to depend upon large-scale enslavement of Africans. It was at Barbados, he stated, that the English imported one hundred thousand Africans, to achieve a population density greater than that of any comparable area in the English-speaking world except London. He calls the slave society a socio-economic and cultural model which was first successfully articulated, then adopted and adapted throughout the Caribbean within fifty years.¹⁰

Simon Newman, in search of the new world order of labour in the seventeenth century, refers to the slave society as the Barbadian system which, he emphasizes, informed the development of racial slavery in Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, as well as in South Carolina, and then the deep South of mainland British North America. He describes Barbados as host to an entirely new system of bound labor.¹¹ The English there, he asserts, had not so much discovered a New World as they had invented one. In this regard, Newman concludes, Barbados is enormously significant in the labor history of the early modern British Atlantic. It played a foundational role, he says, in defining how plantation labor developed throughout British America.¹²

Dalby Thomas, in a seminal essay on plantation trades published in 1690, tells his proslavery audience that Barbados is the main prop of a plantation in all America. Between 1627 and 1700 the English imported into the colony 236,725 enslaved Africans, but by 1700 just 45,000 were accounted for on the island. By 1808, when the British slave trade officially ended, another 371,794 Africans had been imported. Altogether, 600,000 enslaved men, women, and children had been transported to the island.¹³

The English were able to legislate the first black slave society because of a coincidence of economic and political factors. England’s economic crisis of the 1630s and 1640s and the political civil war resulted in financial ruin for many families, who sent members out to the island with fervent determination to attain wealth by any means possible. Remaking old fortunes drove the ambitions of most of the men of means who arrived there in large numbers. This circumstance unlocked and liberated unaccountable entrepreneurial aggression; market thinking and actions transcended pedagogies of social restraint and respect for traditions of human relations. The entire legal, moral and social fabric of the colony was forged around quenching a thirst for quick profit without moral reflection. The imperial centre was momentarily weak, and the colonial periphery pushed outwards to the maximum the frontiers of economic fanaticism.

The religious identity of these original investors did not matter. The idea that they were materialists – to be contrasted with the Puritans who paraded Bibles across New England – does not stand up to historical scrutiny. Puritans too pioneered Barbados and pursued plantation profits by using enslaved Africans. Meanwhile, they were also establishing a black-majority slave colony at New Providence, off the coast of what is now Nicaragua, and were as engaged in corrupt politics, piracy and prostitution as the other settlers. They were in the vanguard of creation of a new England in Barbados, where the passion for profits was as feverish as that for religious freedom from the established church. The Rous family, for example, was as Puritan as any other, but after landing in Barbados in 1636, they dived into the deepest end of African chattel slavery. When they moved on to New England to consolidate the rule of Bible culture, the Barbados way of dealing with enslaved Africans was already incorporated into their social identity.

Barbados, then, became the first new England, a world that had erupted during a moment of civil lawlessness and political disintegration. In the colony was created an economic and social system that reflected the anxieties and rage of the age. Englishmen, without protective labour traditions as a restraining force, tried to enslave whomever they could in the search for profit. They pushed white indentured workers to the brink of enslavement and were themselves pushed back – not by the market but by the imperial state, when in 1659 it ruled against the conflation of black and white slavery.

Everything about Barbados was new. Old England was forging its new identity as an emerging capitalist nation on its slave plantations, where workers were seen as disposable and without civil rights. The execution of its king in 1649 was not the primary sign of the future. Rather, it was the declaration in 1636 that all Africans would be enslaved forever, and the subsequent creation of the slave society. Little England, as the colony was later called, was a projection of what Great England was destined to be. The plantation enslavers, not the Plymouth preachers, were the harbingers of the new England. After 1636 and up to 1834, when the chattel principle was abolished, the slave society evolved along a predictable trajectory.

In general, scholars have identified the role of white-supremacy thinking in shaping social structures and economic relations.¹⁴ The creation of the race/ colour culture, in which all inhabitants are subjected to the rule of whiteness, was foretold in the language of the 1661 Slave Code. They have drawn attention to the creative use of political and social events to test and measure the veracity of violent white racism, and to enable a deeper understanding of the ongoing intent of slave investors to see Africans as chattels and no more. They have also willed us to look beyond the plantations for evidence of the inflexibility of the enslaver’s mind within the race paradigm.

In the end, when the British Parliament and the general public seemed unwilling to prolong the shame of slavery in exchange for moderate profits from the plantations, the Barbados enslavers, not surprisingly, were the last to relinquish the legal trappings of the society imagined two hundred years earlier. Their inability to conceive black freedom created gridlock in colonial metropolitan politics. Racism crippled conversations about emancipation, and the colony was forced into freedom against a background of intense resistance from its political leaders.

Belief in black inferiority filled the minds of the white society that used its control over the political and legal process in order to intensify police and military control over the liberated. The first developed black slave society was also the last to legislate freedom, and it never voluntarily accepted the emancipation agenda and its reality. Rather, enslavers remained bitter for decades about the insidious imperial dismantlement of the beautiful world they had created.

PART 1

CREATING THE BLACK SLAVE SOCIETY

1

MADE IN ENGLAND

A Racialized Chattel Society

BY THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, THE LABEL Made in England was a global phenomenon. Furthermore, Britain’s reputation for exporting the things it had made conferred considerable status on its citizens. When Napoleon Bonaparte referred disparagingly to them as a nation of shopkeepers, his description told but one aspect of the story. A more accurate description would have been a nation of slave-owners. Barbados was Britain’s first manufactured slave society, and wherever there was money to be made in the empire, the model was exported.

The slave society was maintained to sustain intergenerational wealth creation and assured elite status and social privileges for its successful owners. Monarchs and merchants, politicians and public servants, men of the cloth in the pulpit and women with families who purchased colonial produce in the market all benefited from the Barbados bonanza. At the end of the eighteenth century the intellectual classes of the country joined with the enslavers and hailed the halcyon days of wealth creation, speaking nostalgically of its golden age of super-profits.

In its infancy, the black slave society represented a radical break from tradition. B.W. Higman describes it as a new phenomenon in the Atlantic world. Emphasizing its social and economic dimensions, he notes that the effects of the innovations of slavery were immediate and hemispheric. Mass deployment of enslaved Africans on sugar plantations from the 1650s created an archetype for the development of a larger British West Indian economy bound to England and to the North American colonies. The tiny island, add John McCusker and Russell Menard, became, for a while, the world’s leading sugar producer.¹

As the first black slave society, notes Stuart Schwartz, Barbados forged ahead of other colonies as the forerunner of a new epoch. The wealth it generated, writes Eric Williams, established its operations as the hub of the English empire. For Menard it drove the colony from the periphery to the core of England’s colonial capitalism. But to Richard Dunn the slave society was something even more tangible. It was, he says, the richest colony in English America. Greene agrees, and describes it as the most prosperous seventeenth century insular colony on the globe. It remains inconceivable, echoes Eltis, that any society in history – at least before 1800 – could have matched [its] output per slave. Notes Larry Gragg, pioneer enslavers quickly became the wealthiest men in English America.²

The English settlers, who first began to arrive in 1627, experienced no resistance from the native peoples, who had earlier fled from Spanish and Portuguese slave-raiding and established themselves on the nearby mountainous islands. As the newcomers surveyed their new domain, they were encouraged by its emptiness. Initially the settlers did not set out to create a slave society; the black slave society they built emerged from the specific circumstances encountered in their fortune-making frenzy.³

Profitable colonial enterprises required – in addition to large capital investments – a secure, sustainable supply of servile labour. A 1636 declaration, by which all Africans imported into the colony were officially classified as chattels, was the first preparatory step in building the foundation. It followed a decade of moderate capital returns from investments in the production of tobacco, indigo and cotton that utilized the labour of indentured white servants imported from back home.

Investors in Barbados had tentatively proceeded with enslaved Africans before 1636. They entered an aggressive phase after 1640 and within a decade had narrowed their focus entirely onto Africans. During the 1660s, the creation and sustainability of every investment project was predicated principally upon slavery. Other labour systems and arrangements were gradually set aside or consigned to the fringes. The idea and image of unfree labour in the colony were ultimately reduced to a singular dominant meaning: African enslavement. As the colony was converted into the region’s experimental incubator for high-investment sugar production and military management of enslaved Africans, the Barbados brand became the most violently oppressive form of human bondage the modern world had seen. There was no physical place in the colony beyond its reach, no social space outside its laws. It was the final level on the long escalator of labour bondage along the Atlantic slave route.⁴

The Atlantic Slave Route

The journey across the Atlantic to Barbados