Where It All Began

Cydney Cottman                                                                                          10/3/16      

Where it All Began

Most people can agree that slavery was a horrific time period in the development of the United States. Still fewer are aware of the fact that the institution of slavery in the Caribbean and, more specifically, Barbados set the precedent for what would become one of the most egregious violations of human rights in Western History.

In the beginning, European colonialists had established a colony in Barbados and had promised ten acres of land to all who set foot on the island (Soderlund, 2000, p.64). The problem was that very few people were willing to do the backbreaking work that came with the land, so kidnapping hundreds of thousands of Africans and making them work for free seemed to be the best idea. It helped that most Europeans viewed Africans as heathens, and inherently sinful, such that subjecting them to the physical and mental horrors that was chattel slavery was seen as natural (Soderlund, 2000, p.65). This set the foundations for what it meant to be enslaved in America.

Edward Rugemer (2013) discussed the ways that this early form of enslavement shaped the way race is viewed in Barbados today. He talked about how the slave laws created a boundary between what was seen as Christian and righteous versus what came to be understood as Africans deserving the violence that was so often brought against them (Rugemer, 2013, p.431). He further spoke on the differences between indentured servitude and African enslavement citing how those white servants had certain protections under the law that enslaved Africans would never have (Rugemer, 2013, p. 439). Furthermore, Rugemer cites a law passed in 1633 that declared that African slaves and Native peoples were bound to be slaves for life (Rugemer, 2013, p.433).

            Kenneth Andres, an alumnae of the University of Alberta, spoke on a specific slave act that contributed to the disenfranchisement of enslaved Africans in his blog post titled “SourceAnalysis of the Barbados Slave Code of 1661”. He discussed how its fundamental purposed served to have a steady supply of workers during a time when sugar was fast becoming a lucrative crop. Andres cited the aforementioned code of 1633 to further argue that the slave codes which came after were a crucial tool used to implement the social control of enslaved Africans, first in Barbados and then later, everywhere else.

            It was through these initial slave codes that the establishment of Africans as being less than, other, and inherently deserving of violence was cemented. Today, the ramifications of this racial socialization in Barbados can easily be seen. In an article written by Joan Phillips and Robert Potter (2006), it is argued that even in recent times the racial status of Black people in Barbados has not changed much since colonial times. They explained that the domination of whiteness in this predominantly Black society runs so deep that it has become internalized both socially and economically (Phillips & Potter, 2006, p. 315). This article from the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative clearly illustrates how specifically British enslavement and colonialism of Africans in Barbados set the standard for enslaved people would be treated in the New World for years to come.

'A Topographical Description and Measurement of the Island of Barbados', in Richard Ligon's (1657) 'A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados' [Shelfmark: 455.a.18]

References

Phillips, J., & Potter, R. B. (2006). ‘Black skins–white masks’: Postcolonial reflections on ‘race’, gender and second generation return migration to the Caribbean. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 27(3), 309-325. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9493.2006.00264.x

Rugemer, E. B. (2013). The development of mastery and race in the comprehensive slave codes of the greater Caribbean during the seventeenth century. William & Mary Quarterly, 70(3), 429-458. doi:10.5309/willmaryquar.70.3.0429

Soderlund, J. R. (2000). Creating a biracial society, 1619-1720. In W. R. Scott & W. G. Shade (Eds.), Upon these shores (pp. 63-82). New York, NY: Routledge.