Description

Book Synopsis
In this remarkable exploration of the brutal course of Barbados’s history, Hilary McD. Beckles details the systematic barbarism of the British colonial project. Trade in enslaved Africans was not new in the Americas in the seventeenth century – the Portuguese and Spanish had commercialized chattel slavery in Brazil and Cuba in the 1500s – but in Barbados, the practice of slavery reached its apotheosis.

Barbados was the birthplace of British slave society and the most ruthlessly colonized. The geography of Barbados was ideally suited to sugar plantations and there were enormous fortunes to be made for British royalty and ruling elites from sugar produced by an enslaved, “disposable” workforce, fortunes that secured Britain’s place as an imperial superpower. The inhumane legacy of plantation society has shaped modern Barbados and this history must be fully understood by the inheritors on both sides of the power dynamic before real change and reparatory justice can take place.

A prequel to Beckles’s equally compelling Britain’s Black Debt, The First Black Slave Society: Britain’s Barbarity Time in Barbados, 1636–1876 is essential reading for anyone interested in Atlantic history, slavery and the plantation system, and modern race relations.

The First Black Slave Society: Britain's

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    A Paperback / softback by Hilary Beckles

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      Book details

      Publisher University of the West Indies Press
      Published 30 September 2016
      ISBN-13 9789766405854
      978-9766405854
      ISBN-10 9766405859
      Also in:
      Slavery, enslaved persons and abolition of slavery

      Description

      Book Synopsis
      In this remarkable exploration of the brutal course of Barbados’s history, Hilary McD. Beckles details the systematic barbarism of the British colonial project. Trade in enslaved Africans was not new in the Americas in the seventeenth century – the Portuguese and Spanish had commercialized chattel slavery in Brazil and Cuba in the 1500s – but in Barbados, the practice of slavery reached its apotheosis.

      Barbados was the birthplace of British slave society and the most ruthlessly colonized. The geography of Barbados was ideally suited to sugar plantations and there were enormous fortunes to be made for British royalty and ruling elites from sugar produced by an enslaved, “disposable” workforce, fortunes that secured Britain’s place as an imperial superpower. The inhumane legacy of plantation society has shaped modern Barbados and this history must be fully understood by the inheritors on both sides of the power dynamic before real change and reparatory justice can take place.

      A prequel to Beckles’s equally compelling Britain’s Black Debt, The First Black Slave Society: Britain’s Barbarity Time in Barbados, 1636–1876 is essential reading for anyone interested in Atlantic history, slavery and the plantation system, and modern race relations.

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