Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados
Intending at first simply to do further research on the mid-seventeenth-century ìsugar revolutionî in Barbados, Russell Menard traveled to the island. But once there, he quickly found many discrepancies between the historical understanding of the way in which this ìrevolutionî fueled the institution of slavery and the actual, quotidian, records documenting the prominence of slavery on the island even before sugar spurred its economic growth. In\ Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and...
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"In Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados, Russell Menard reveals that black slavery's emergence in Barbados actually preceded the rise of sugar; in doing so he both reverses the long-held understanding of slavery as a consequence of the island's economic boom and repositions the impact that this surge of slavery had on America's slave trade." Based on fresh archival research conducted on the island and in England, Sweet Negotiations shows that Barbados was well on its way to becoming a plantation colony and a slave society before sugar emerged as the dominant crop. Menard sheds new light on the origins of the integrated plantation, gang labor, the slave economy, agricultural productivity, the organization of commerce, and the character of the planters who built the sugar industry. Despite its small size (166 square miles) and distant location, Barbados loomed large in England's American empire. With Menard's findings, the island's importance becomes that much more pronounced. Because Barbados was a major site for the development and dissemination of the slave plantation system in the Americas, Menard's correction of the historical record has implications that reach far beyond the tiny island's shores.
1The export boom in Barbados112Land and labor during the export boom293Who financed the sugar boom?494The growth of the Barbadian sugar industry over the seventeenth century675Origins of the Barbadian plantation complex916The expansion of Barbados106Epilogue : rethinking the sugar revolution123AppEstimates of the cost of establishing plantations and farms in the colonies of English America127
