“Barbados has a fascinating past,” says a brightly-colored brochure from Hilton Grand Vacations featuring the island’s blue-green waters and beautiful sand beaches. “Wherever you go, you’ll be pacing through history.” The brochure advises visitors to take the “rum tour” and visit the St. Nicholas Abbey Plantation, built during the height of Barbodos’ wealth in the seventeenth century.
The brochure does mention the “painful history” of slave labor, which, it explains, can be reviewed at the Museum & Historical Society. Then it lists where to eat and the best beaches.
How lightly the past sometimes weighs on the present!
I have just written a paper about Barbados for a history class. Barbados’s history was grim. Barbados was the first English colony to take advantage of the rising English demand for sugar. By 1680 Barbardos was the richest of England’s colonies. It was the best of times and the worst of times, depending on who you were.
Sugar production is grueling, back-breaking work—in a previous post I described the plantations as “not just plantations but factories.” The cane had to be grown, cut, and boiled multiple times in large, hot vats, then cured in clay pots. Speed was essential because the cane could ferment soon after harvest.
At first, the work was done mostly by indentured servants—until they stopped coming. Historian Richard S. Dunn says that the English had long depended on the “laboring poor” as servants, but in Barbados they treated servants “more brutally than at home.”[1] For example, planters had the right to whip these workers. A seventeenth-century observer writes: “I have seen an Overseer beat a Servant with a cane about the head, till the blood has followed, for a fault that is not worth speaking of; and yet he must have patience, or worse will follow.” [2]
Would-be servants learned that this was miserable work and went elsewhere. By the mid-1600s, almost all work on sugar plantations was done by African slaves, who did not have the option of saying no. And with England’s greater efficiency in shipping and slave trading, their prices went down, their numbers up.
For slaves, conditions were even worse than for indentured servants. “Once the switch was made to slaves there was, in effect, no longer any labour constraint on the expansion of plantation production,” says Robin Blackburn. [3] “The sugar planters utilized agricultural techniques radically different from those they knew at home and learned how to manipulate men, beasts, and machines on a far grander scale than their cousins in Virginia or Massachusetts,” write Richard Dunn and Gary Nash.[4]
The Barbados Slave Act of 1661 gave tremendous freedom to planters to punish slaves by disfigurement and even execution. The permission for disfigurement (slitting of the nose) provides “empirical evidence for David Brion Davis’s argument that the ‘bestialization’ of the enslaved lay at the heart of slavery,” says Edward Rugemer. [5] .
Initially, my purpose in studying Barbados sugar plantations was to learn how a factory-like setting was managed when the workers were slaves, compared with the management of labor in British factories 100 years later. (Nineteenth-century writers liked to say that the treatment of factory workers was akin to the treatment of West Indian slaves.) I haven’t yet carried out the second part of the project.
As we know, Britain ended the slave trade in 1808 and abolished slavery in its colonies in 1834, long before the United States did (although a few years of black servitude in the form of “apprenticeships” followed in the islands). So perhaps there is something to feel good about while touring this poignant island.
[1] Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), 72.
[2] Richard Ligon, A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes [1657, 1673]. (London: Frank Cass, 1970).
[3] Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997), 325.
[4] Richard S. Dunn and Gary B. Nash, The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 189. Accessed April 21, 2019. ProQuest Ebook Central.
[5] Edward B. Rugemer, “The Development of Mastery and Race in the Comprehensive Slave Codes of the Greater Caribbean during the Seventeenth Century.” William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 3 (2013): 429-58, 441-442.