While mousing around the web for information on a future post, I came across a paper on the History section of the Beeb, entitled ‘Slavery and Economy in Barbados,’ by Dr. Karl Watson.
I never knew that:
1. Barbados was England’s first experimental tropical agricultural export colony.
2. Barbados was, back then, thought to be the ‘richest spote of ground in the worlde.’
3. Initially, whites from Britain were brought in as indentured servants or prisoners. (I have some recollection of this from History class back in the day.)
4. After the Somerset uprising, many West Country men were exiled or ‘barbadosed’ by one Judge Jeffreys.
5. That nearly 700 Irish were transported to the island during the Cromwellian period.
6. That Barbados became the springboard for English colonisation in the Americas.
7. And played a leading role in the settlement of Jamaica (didn’t know that) and the Carolinas (had read about that somewhere.)
8. That due to the cost of white labour going up, planters, acting on the advice of the Dutch and Sephardic (Sep-who?) merchants turned to West Africa for their source of manpower.
9. That between 1627 and 1807, 387,000 Africans were shipped to Barbados against their will.
10. That after emancipation in 1834, an organised effort was made to socialise slaves to European patterns, an effort lead by the Anglican Church.
11. That from the beginning of the 18th century, Barbados, unlike other Caribbean countries, had an excess of women over men in both racial groups.
12. That Barbados was the only colony to support the abolition of the slave trade.
3 Comments
April 25, 2007 at 2:03 am
Refuting point #8: “The Sephardics were the ones who organised the slave trade”. This is a hoary allegation that has been going the rounds for decades. It is comprehensively refuted in two books by leading scholars of the slave trade:
Saul Friedman: Jews and the American Slave Trade (2001), and
Eli Faber: Jews, Slaves and the Slave Trade: setting the record straight (2000).
Another essential corrective is: Seymour Drescher, ‘Jews and New Christians in the Atlantic Slave Trade’ in
P Bernadini and N Fiering eds, The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West (2001).
Sephardi Jews in Spanish and Portuguese territories in the New World, as well as Marranos and New Christians, were active in the slave trade. Jews owned slaves throughout the Caribbean and on the eastern seaboard of America. But their numbers were a tiny proportion of slave owners/ traders. Their role is insignificant compared to that of Muslim slave traders in Africa.
The English introduced slavery to the Americas.
June 5, 2007 at 6:14 pm
I wouldn’t have thought the English did that, so there’s another education point for myself, thankyou Anon.
The bit that really interested me was point 12 in the original post:
[12. That Barbados was the only colony to support the abolition of the slave trade.]
… what a wonderful thing for the country to be proud of. In Wales not so long ago people were chuffed about cymric connections to the writers of theamerican constitution – but a lot of them were slave owners, whilst Bim (admittedly, significantly later than the US constitution was written) were more enlightened.
Surprised people don’t make a bigger thing of this point of Bajan history.
September 8, 2007 at 9:54 am
it is nice to see people have an intrest is this subject as i have just finished my first book on this matter and would love to get more information about this , my reading of “To Hell or Barbados” the ethnic cleaning of ireland by Sean O’ Callaghan tell me that between 1652 and 1659 over 50,000 Irish men ,women and children were transported to Barbados and Virginia. Yet until now there has been no account of what became of them.If there is any more information out there on this i would like to here from you. Tommy