The small and remote island of Barbados seems an unlikely location for
the epochal change in labor that overwhelmed it and much of British
America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, by 1650 it
had become the greatest wealth-producing area in the English-speaking
world, the center of an exchange of people and goods between the British
Isles, the Gold Coast of West Africa, and the New World. By the early
seventeenth century, more than half a million enslaved men, women, and
children had been transported to the island. In A New World of Labor,
Simon P. Newman argues that this exchange stimulated an entirely new
system of bound labor.
Free and bound labor were defined and experienced by Britons and
Africans across the British Atlantic world in quite different ways.
Connecting social developments in seventeenth-century Britain with the
British experience of slavery on the West African coast, Newman
demonstrates that the brutal white servant regime, rather than the West
African institution of slavery, provided the most significant foundation
for the violent system of racialized black slavery that developed in
Barbados. Class as much as race informed the creation of plantation
slavery in Barbados and throughout British America. Enslaved Africans in
Barbados were deployed in radically new ways in order to cultivate,
process, and manufacture sugar on single, integrated plantations. This
Barbadian system informed the development of racial slavery on Jamaica
and other Caribbean islands, as well as in South Carolina and then the
Deep South of mainland British North America. Drawing on British and
West African precedents, and then radically reshaping them, Barbados
planters invented a new world of labor.