The First Black Slave Society: Britain's Barbados, 1636-1876

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In this remarkable exploration of the brutal course of Barbadoss 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 Britains 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 Beckless equally compelling Britains Black Debt, The First Black Slave Society: Britains Barbarity Time in Barbados, 16361876 is essential reading for anyone interested in Atlantic history, slavery and the plantation system, and modern race relations.