Barbados's history: an assembly the planters kept for three centuries

Who lived on Barbados before the English came

The oldest trace of people on the island is thin. Fragments of adzes cut from conch lip have been found with shells radiocarbon-dated to about 1630 BC, and Britannica puts a first settlement by people from northern South America at around 1600 BCE, a population that later drops out of the archaeological record. Settlement that is fully documented begins between about 350 and 650 AD, with a second wave around 800 AD and a third in the mid-13th century, according to the Wikipedia history of the island. Britannica names the later inhabitants as Arawak and Carib peoples, living there from about 500 to 1500 CE, and gives their name for the island as Ichirouganaim. The Wikipedia account adds that the Kalinago visited by canoe but left no evidence of a permanent settlement.

Europeans arrived in the early 16th century and emptied the island. Spanish slave raids either carried the inhabitants off or drove them to more defensible islands, and by 1541 a Spanish writer described Barbados as uninhabited. Portuguese sailors gave it the name that stuck, Os Barbados, the bearded ones, which Britannica reads as a reference either to bearded fig trees or to bearded men. By the middle of the century both Iberian powers had lost interest in a small, remote and empty island.

How the English colony took root at Holetown

An English ship touched the island on 14 May 1625 and claimed it for James I. The settlers came on 17 February 1627, when the William and John landed near what is now Holetown, then called Jamestown. Britannica counts 80 Englishmen and about 10 Africans aboard. The Wikipedia history, drawing on other accounts, gives more than 60 settlers and six enslaved Africans, and adds about 40 Taino brought from Guyana to plant crops. The accounts do not agree on the numbers, and this article does not choose between them.

The colony began as a private venture. Sir William Courten, a London merchant, funded it and held the title, so the first colonists were in effect his tenants. The title then passed to James Hay, Earl of Carlisle, in a transfer remembered as the Great Barbados Robbery, and Carlisle founded a second settlement on Carlisle Bay that became Bridgetown. His governor, Henry Hawley, set up the House of Assembly in 1639. Britannica describes it as an assembly of owners of at least 10 acres of freehold, elected every year, sitting beside a council and a governor.

For its first fifteen years the colony searched for an export crop. Tobacco, cotton, indigo, aloes and fustic all had their turn on small family farms, and tobacco prices fell in the 1630s as Chesapeake output grew. The English civil wars reached the island after the execution of Charles I. On 7 May 1650 the Assembly received the royalist Lord Willoughby as governor, Parliament banned trade with Barbados that October, and a fleet under Sir George Ayscue blockaded the island from October 1651. The royalists surrendered on terms written into the Charter of Barbados, signed at Oistins on 17 January 1652.

How sugar remade the island within a generation

Sugar cane was introduced in 1637 and by 1642 it was the focus of the island's agriculture, with Dutch traders supplying the equipment, the credit, the enslaved labour and the shipping. The change is called the Sugar Revolution, and the UNESCO tentative list entry for the island's sugar heritage quotes the historian B. W. Higman's six elements of it: from mixed farming to monoculture, from small farms to plantations, from free to enslaved labour, from sparse to dense settlement, from a white to a Black population, and from low to high output per head.

Sephardic Jews expelled from Iberia by way of Dutch Brazil helped the early industry, and after 1750 more and more estates belonged to absentee owners in Britain who ran them through hired managers. Rum began here too. The UNESCO entry records that the spirit first called killdevil or rumbuillion was made on Barbadian plantations for local drinking and export, and became a staple of British naval rations in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The small farms were bought up. In 1680, according to the Wikipedia history, 175 large planters held over half the arable land, each working at least 60 enslaved people. Displaced settlers left for Jamaica, the Leeward Islands and North America, and settlers from Barbados founded the colony that became Charleston, South Carolina. The population figures show the rest.

The law followed the labour. Britannica dates the island's slave laws from 1636, and the Wikipedia history lists slave codes in 1661, 1676, 1682 and 1688. The UNESCO entry quotes Hilary Beckles on how far the 1661 code travelled: it served as the blueprint for Jamaica and the Leeward Islands, and the 1688 code was copied in the Windward Islands. Britannica describes a society of three legal categories, free, indentured and enslaved, in which race decided status and no white person was enslaved. By 1660, by the Wikipedia count, Barbados generated more trade than all the other English colonies together, a position it held until Jamaica overtook it in 1713.

Why the rising under Bussa failed

The British slave trade ended in 1807, slavery did not, and in November 1815 the Barbados Assembly rejected the Imperial Registry Bill, which would have registered the enslaved population. BlackPast, drawing on Hilary Beckles, records that secret planning began in February 1816, organised estate by estate. At Simmons Plantation the leaders were John Grigg, Nanny Grigg and a man known only as Jackey; at Bailey's Plantation in St Philip they included Bussa, King Wiltshire, Dick Bailey and Johnny. Three free literate Black men, Cain Davis, Roach and Richard Sarjeant, carried the plan between parishes.

Cane fields were fired in St Philip on the night of Easter Sunday, 14 April 1816, and the rising spread to more than seventy estates. Martial law was declared the next day. Only two whites were reported killed. The Wikipedia history explains the defeat by the ground itself: a flat island with no mountains or forest gave the mounted militia the advantage, and the free men of colour the rebels had counted on joined the other side. Bussa was killed in the fighting. The governor, Sir James Leith, reported 144 executions by September; BlackPast adds 70 later death sentences and 170 people deported, and the Wikipedia count puts a further 120 killed in combat or executed on the spot.

Parliament named Bussa one of the island's National Heroes in 1998. Karl Broodhagen's Emancipation Statue, unveiled at Haggatt Hall in St Michael in 1985, is taken by many Barbadians to represent him and is known as Bussa's statue.

What emancipation left in the planters' hands

The Consolidated Slave Law of 1826 offered concessions to the enslaved and reassurance to their owners. Slavery ended across the British Empire in 1834, and in Barbados, as in the rest of the British West Indian colonies, emancipation came with an apprenticeship that lasted four years.

Freedom changed less than it promised. Sugar held its place through the 19th-century crises of emancipation, free trade and beet sugar, and Britannica gives the reason: a dense population supplied cheap labour, and a planter and merchant elite made sure public money rescued the industry whenever it faltered. Wages stayed low and social services minimal, emigration was the outlet, and the elite often obstructed even that. The vote stayed with property. The Wikipedia history estimates that only the upper 30% of the population had any say.

The island's governor sat over the Windward Islands from 1800 to 1885. When Governor John Pope Hennessy pressed the island toward closer union with them in 1876, the proposal ended in deadly riots and his transfer, and in 1884 the Barbados Agricultural Society asked whether Canada would take the colony into its confederation. Neither union happened.

How the Bridgetown riots opened the Assembly

Clement Payne was born in Trinidad in 1904 to Barbadian parents and grew up on the island. In 1937 he held public meetings in Bridgetown against the planter order, was convicted of lying about his birthplace on re-entry, won his appeal, and was deported anyway on 26 July. Four days of rioting followed. Stores were burned and cars pushed into the sea, and police fire killed 14 people and wounded 47, by the count Caribbean & Co. and the Wikipedia biography both give. Colonial officials called the crowds disorderly; the Dean Commission of Enquiry found deeper economic grievances under them.

Britannica sets the unrest against population growth, the closing of emigration outlets, the Depression and the spread of Garveyism. The West Indies Royal Commission under Lord Moyne, sent in 1938, endorsed the legalisation of trade unions and a wider franchise. Grantley Adams, the lawyer who had advised Payne to accept deportation, founded the Barbados Progressive League in 1938, later the Barbados Labour Party.

The reforms came in stages. In 1942 the income qualification was lowered and women were given the vote, and Britannica dates the ascendancy of Black political leaders to 1944. Universal adult suffrage followed in 1950 by Britannica's date and in 1951 by the Wikipedia history's. Full internal self-government came in 1961, the year Errol Barrow's Democratic Labour Party took office. Payne became a National Hero in 1998 alongside Bussa.

What independence changed and what it kept

Barbados joined the West Indies Federation in 1958, and when it dissolved in 1962 the island went back to being a self-governing colony. It negotiated its own independence at a conference in London in June 1966 and became independent on 30 November 1966, with Barrow as prime minister and the Queen as head of state. Membership of the United Nations and the Organization of American States followed the next year. Barrow helped form the Caribbean Free Trade Association in 1968, which became the Caribbean Community in 1973.

The constitution adopted in 1966 went largely untouched for half a century; ConstitutionNet names the amendments of 1974 as the most notable, and they left the parliamentary arrangements as they were. A Constitutional Review Commission appointed in 1977 reported in 1979 that the monarchy had worked well. A second commission reported in 1998 in favour of a parliamentary republic with a president chosen by the legislature. A republic constitution was drafted in 2004 and the Referendum Act 2005 provided for a vote on it, but the vote was never held.

How the republic arrived without a referendum

The government announced on 15 September 2020 that Barbados would become a republic by the 55th anniversary of independence. The Constitution (Amendment) (No. 2) Bill was introduced on 20 September 2021 and passed on 6 October; the governor-general, Sandra Mason, was elected the first president on 20 October and took office on 30 November 2021. Barbados left the list of Commonwealth realms and stayed in the Commonwealth.

The change drew objections to the method, not the goal. Cynthia Barrow-Giles, writing for ConstitutionNet in 2021, recorded support across the parties for ending the monarchy alongside complaints that there had been no referendum and no public consultation, and noted that the constitution contains no referendum provision. A survey by the University of the West Indies between 23 October and 10 November 2021 found 34% of respondents in favour, 30% indifferent and 12% opposed. A Constitutional Review Commission was sworn in on 20 June 2022, and its final report was released toward the end of 2024.