Barbados: Colonial Period

The Barbados colonial period began in 1625, when Captain John Powell claimed the uninhabited island for England; a party of eighty settlers and ten enslaved Africans led by his brother Henry Powell landed in 1627 to found the first permanent colony. Early planters cultivated tobacco and cotton with a mixed labor force of English indentured servants and enslaved Africans, though yields from these early crops proved modest.

Everything changed by the mid-1640s, when planters introduced large-scale sugar cultivation, sparking what historians call the island's Sugar Revolution. Within a generation, sugar estates worked by enslaved Africans had displaced most other agriculture, and by the 1670s enslaved Africans outnumbered the free population by nearly ten to one. Colonial slave codes formalized this system, treating enslaved people as property alongside land and livestock, while Bridgetown grew into a major Atlantic trading port.

This Barbados colonial period also produced one of the oldest representative assemblies in the Western Hemisphere, established in 1639, though it served the interests of the planter elite rather than the enslaved majority. Slavery was formally abolished under the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, taking effect in 1834, followed by a transitional apprenticeship period before full freedom arrived in 1838; see the Barbados country profile for broader context, and further reading on colonial Barbados from EBSCO Research Starters.