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THE AFRICAN INFLUENCE ON BARBADIAN CULTURE
by Trevor G. Marshall
PAGE 2
So the Africans, some ten of them, came to Barbados with the Englishmen in 1627. Thereafter they became enslaved. Immediately they were made into slaves, not by reason of any judge made law, but by the simple situation of having been captured and forced into bond servant work in perpetuity. That was 1627. The society was not intended to be for Africans but it was supposed to be a racially homogeneous one. Therefore one finds that these bond servants coming into Barbados, the drawers of water, cutters of tobacco and cotton, and the planters of the initial crops in and around this area were working-class Englishmen - the "dregs of society" as one contemporary writer claims - and that went on for about ten years until 1637 when there was a problem in England. The main crop coming from these "plantations" as they were called, tobacco, reached glut proportions because Virginia exported a superior quality and quantity of tobacco, and all of England's Caribbean territories also produced and exported tobacco to England. There was not only a glut and a fall in prices, but these fledgling colonies then faced extinction. Then it happened, the event which changed forever not only the history of Barbados but the history of the entire Western hemisphere. I suppose we have forgotten about cane sugar a crop indigenous to New Guinea, which was known in India and in Europe. This extremely expensive delicacy, which apparently had been brought to the Caribbean by Columbus, now became exploited on a major commercial scale in this territory, Barbados. Sugar had been in Polynesia. Today Barbadians of all ethnic groups can be proud of the fact that the 'sugar revolution' as it was called, started here and that from 1637 onwards Barbadians experimented with the growing of a crop here and by 1645 they were exporting that crop to England. The experiment was conducted by a Dutch Jew resident in Brazil, Pieter Brewer who was brought over here to test the soil to see if the sugar cane would grow. These experiments were successful and from 1640 onwards one finds that the sugar cane plant is grown in Barbados on a large scale. Between 1640 and 1690, a period of 50 years Barbados became the single most valuable piece of real estate in the entire Atlantic world, bar none.
You must understand why I say that and how this happened. Sugar 360, 350, 340 years ago was as much in demand as today as (and if you will pardon me if I say so) marijuana and cocaine, except that sugar was legal but the demand for these crops which were exotic, stimulating, sweet to taste etc, was fantastic and the demand was higher than productivity. The entirety of Barbados' original forest was cut down, deforested to establish plantations, large commercial farms cultivating the sugar cane and exporting it to England. Out of that economic activity also came the rum industry and Barbados can also claim to have patented the production and export of rum from 1703. Certainly over a period of 50 years Barbados became extremely valuable because it was the first to produce sugar on a large-scale commercial basis and to export it to Europe. You will remember at that time England, under James 1 and Charles 1 and his successors, had become accustomed to the practice of taking tea, which is now a cultural signature of the English people and it follows therefore that the natural sweetener, sugar, should be available and when it became available the source of that sweetener was doubly valuable. This was Barbados and Barbados had a jump of 20 years on other sugar producers. Barbados started producing sugar and exporting it in 1640 - 1645. Martinique, Guadeloupe and other territories did not begin until after 1660. Persons seeking to discover the present-day prosperity of Barbados need seek no further. This country became the pristine, the quintessential, the archetypical sugar-producing territory and remained so up to just 40 years ago, when we underwent our second major revolution - the"Tourism revolution"
-- © Trevor G Marshall, 2000. This document is the property of the author. Quotation or reproduction without the permission of the author is expressly prohibited. |
