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The First Black Slave Society: Britain’s “Barbarity Time” in Barbados, 1636–1876

2017; The MIT Press; Volume: 48; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/jinh_r_01190

1530-9169

Demetrius L. Eudell,

Race, History, and American Society

Beckles presents a political and economic history of Barbados from its founding as the paradigmatic “pure plantation” slave society to the post-slavery era marked by the labor rebellions of the formerly enslaved. Using an extensive array of original sources from archival holdings in Barbados, London, and New York, Beckles chronicles the systematic subordination of Blacks for two and half centuries, enforced by “military machinery” and the execution of the law, beginning with the Slave Code of 1661 (24). Beckles also demonstrates that from the earliest moments, the enslaved challenged the conditions in which “the administering of physical and mental violence was the norm” (28).The bonded labor of whites, not unlike “slave-like relations” (32), formed a part of the early history of Barbados—particularly the governance of the Irish, who were subjected to laws modeled on the Slave Code of 1661. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the demand for bonded labor had substantially declined, overtaken by a surge in slave labor from Africa. This endeavor transformed one of “the smallest colonized spaces in the West Indies…into England’s largest economy in America” (51). The elite planters delighted in the prestige of their plantation economy, viewing Barbados as “Little England” and as a model for other societies. Indeed, the “chattel model” was exported to other locations in the West Indies as well as to colonial British North America (61–74).Beckles aptly describes the complex facets of this global enterprise, which included a significant role played by the island’s white women—who owned “more female enslaved persons than did male slave-owners”—in the production and reproduction of the slave society (81). Small isolated communities of whites without property, a few of whom served in the military, also became “permanent social features” of the colony (95). Described by visitors in the nineteenth century as having a “slave-like appearance,” impoverished Whites were still ridiculed as “black men in white skins” in the late twentieth century (96).The miniscule number of free colored and free blacks on Barbados who owned slaves (.61 percent of the slave population) included a few who overcame considerable obstacles to become wealthy. They, however, were not the usual masters. Since some of their slaves were family members, they were more inclined to protect them, and they were twice as likely to manumit their enslaved Blacks (102). Moreover, most free blacks worked alongside slaves, either in towns or on the plantations. The full civil rights that Whites granted free blacks, after much social agitation, shortly before the onset of emancipation strained their already contentious relations with the larger enslaved population (121).Although the economy was dominated by sugar, many enslaved persons worked in urban Bridgetown “on ships and in households, public works, crafts, commerce and entertainments services” (123). Beckles might have offered more discussion about some of the non-labor endeavors of the enslaved, beyond his treatment of their small-scale productive activity, known as huckstering. However, he provides an insightful description of slave resistance, culminating in the 1816 Bussa rebellion that shook planters’ previous perception of social stability. An extremely poignant example is the conflict regarding the ceremonial burying of the dead, in which attendance increased substantially for victims of murder or execution by Whites. To suppress this form of resistance, the authorities began to conduct “aquatic burials,” whereby bodies were cast out to sea (158).The study concludes with a cogent analysis of emancipation. Beckles perceptively argues that after being sold into slavery, the enslaved were “sold into freedom by the British state” in a “commercial transaction” that forced them to labor to repay their “value” generated under the plantation system (207, 206). The works ends with a statement about the legacy of this “chattel principle” in the twenty-first century (231), but a few notable examples of it would have been welcome.