Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  Two hundred years later, on the eve of the island’s independence in 1966, the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor thought such fealty still very much in evidence. He described postwar Bridgetown as ‘a completely English town, a town on the edge of London, and the wide clean streets … almost as full of the white as of the coloured Barbadians’.9 In Leigh Fermor’s day, Bridgetown’s statue of Admiral Lord Nelson – built after the Battle of Trafalgar to stand opposite the Cage on Broad Street – looked out over a Trafalgar Square and a carefully codified imperial space of parliament buildings, an Anglican cathedral and a Whitehall-style Cenotaph. All of it was designed to celebrate the intimate connection with the mother country, and the intense colonial loyalties of the Barbadian or Bajan people.

  Today, much of that has changed. Trafalgar Square has become National Heroes Square (commemorating those Barbadians who died in the twentieth-century world wars), while shoppers along Broad Street barely give Horatio a second glance, his tired-looking plinth overshadowed by a bland, three-storey office block. Twenty-first-century Bridgetown is a crowded, commercial, traffic-clogged port, an American-flavoured, international metropolis of tax-free shopping and offshore banking, as well as one of the political and legal hubs of the Caribbean. The economy of Barbados is now almost entirely oriented around the tourists arriving on cruise ships chugging into Carlisle Bay and the flights touching down at Grantley Adams International Airport.

  Yet you only have to chart the number of British Airways and Virgin Atlantic arrivals to sense that something of the old Empire economics – the Caribbean dependency upon foreign capital – remains. Take a trip up the so-called Platinum Coast, lining the Caribbean Sea from Bridgetown to Speightstown, past the Four Seasons hotel complex, the Sandy Lane beach resort, the Cliff restaurant and up to the exclusive Port Ferdinand marina, and you see British investment in Barbados at work. Barbados itself is happy to exploit this empathy for the island and its ‘little England’ identity, with a well-managed series of historical attractions based around the Plantation House and a sepia version of the colonial past. Inevitably in this sun-drenched vista the gruesome history of Barbadian slavery is by-passed for a more palatable heritage of rum-tasting, plantation living and cricket. Today, Bridgetown might be a confident city of the Commonwealth, but in the fraying remnants of the garrison fort, St Michael’s Cathedral and Carlisle Wharf the colonial memory and its British money are still reverberating.

  THE ENGINE

  Just as with Winthrop’s vision of Massachusetts Bay as a ‘Garden of Eden’, Barbados was never the virgin isle which European chroniclers liked to imagine. In fact, it had been settled as early as 2000 BC by Amerindians, travelling northwards from the Orinoco River Basin out of South America (modern-day Venezuela), with a community that could have reached 10,000-strong on the island they called Ichirouganian. The Amerindians were the first to introduce pottery to the island and were still around in the 1520s to spy Portuguese and then Spanish explorers pass en route to Brazil. But increased slave-raiding missions by those Spanish conquistadores forced the ‘Caribs’ (as the Europeans christened them) to flee Barbados in the second half of the sixteenth century for more defensible outposts in the Windward Islands. So when in 1625 Captain John Powell arrived to claim Barbados on behalf of King James I, he found a deserted isle which he thought ideal for agricultural settlement. Two years later, his younger brother Henry Powell began the colonial process in earnest when he stepped off the William and John into the crystal Caribbean Sea and established a settlement in what is today Holetown. Backing for the expedition came from a City of London syndicate led by the financiers Sir Peter and Sir William Courteen, who were more interested in profits than any New England attempts at furthering Puritanism. Their plan was to fund some eighty pioneer colonists – hired as company employees-cum-tenant farmers – to begin producing crops on the island.

  Among those first settlers accompanying Henry Powell in 1627 was one Henry Winthrop, son of John Winthrop, hoping to make his own fortune overseas. ‘I do intend God willing to stay here on this island called Barbados in the West Indies and here I and my servants to join in the planting of tobacoo which three years I hope will be very profitable to me,’ he wrote optimistically to his uncle in August 1627. The Courteens were offering new colonists £100 as an annual wage, and young Winthrop planned to import a few servants on £5 or £6 a year to run his own plantation. ‘The island is the pleasantest island in all the West Indies,’ he continued. Apart from his fellow Englishmen, it was deserted ‘save a matter of 50 slaves of Indian and black [heritage], we have a crop of tobacco in the ground and I hope with God’s blessing the next time I send for England to send over 500 or a thousand weight of tobacco’. Sadly, when he did send back the tobacco, his father was far from impressed. John Winthrop thought the rolls were so ‘very ill conditioned, fowle, full of stalkes and evil coloured’ that he could not unload them at even five shillings a pound. Clearly, Massachusetts would be a more promising prospect.10

  The Courteens had more immediate problems, however, than the wilting tobacco plants. As news spread of potential Caribbean riches, a London-funded land grab ensued – settling St Christopher’s (St Kitt’s) in 1624, Nevis in 1628, Montserrat and Antigua in 1632. (Jamaica was to follow under Oliver Cromwell’s anti-Spanish naval strategy – or ‘western design’ – in the 1650s.) In July 1627, King Charles I removed the Courteens from the Caribbean and, in a sign of a quickening appreciation of the Caribbean’s riches, granted letters patent for the settlement of Barbados and other ‘Caribee islands’ to his court favourite James Hay, the first Earl of Carlisle. Granted possession and title of ‘Lord Proprietor’ of Barbados, Carlisle ruled the island from afar through a series of governors, alongside an assembly established in 1639 to represent the growing number of planters on the island who had managed to buy their properties’ freehold. Until it was redesignated a Crown colony in the 1660s, this curious constitutional settlement shaped Barbados’s unique political ethos: a combination of high levels of self-government with adamantine colonial loyalty.11

  Every colony needed a capital and in 1630 one of Carlisle’s earliest deputies, Governor Hawley, chose the site of the ‘Indian Bridgetown’, down the coast from Holetown, as the legal and administrative centre for Carlisle’s possession. Hawley built a law court, after which arrived the House of Assembly, and then accompanying governmental and commercial establishments. The location was not particularly popular. ‘The Choice of the place to build this Town upon, seems to have been directed more by Convenience than Health,’ was how one 1700s visitor accounted for it. ‘For the Ground thereabouts being a little lower within Land than the Sea-Banks, the Spring-Tides flow over, and make a great part of the Flat a Bog, or Marsh: From which there us’d formerly to ascend noxious Vapours, that contributed very much to the Unhealthiness of the Place.’12 But the capital had to be on the western, Caribbean side of the island rather than the stormy, Atlantic littoral, and the natural harbour of what is today Carlisle Bay was an obvious attraction. It also enjoyed a navigable river point, where a primitive bridge had been erected, and was the site for the convergence of three major Amerindian island paths. But the swamps around the area, known as ‘the Bridge’ or ‘the Bridgetown’, made it a gamble. ‘A town ill situate, for if they had considered health, as they did convenience, they would never have set it there; or if they had any intention at first to have built a Town there, they could not have been so improvident as not to foresee the main inconveniences that must ensue by making choice of so unhealthy a place to live in,’ was how the first Barbadian historian, Richard Ligon, put it in 1647. ‘But one house being set up, another was erected, and so a third, and a fourth, till at last it came to take the name of a town; divers storehouses being there built to stow their goods in for their convenience, being near the harbour.’13

  By 1657 there were already 400 houses, some 2,000 residents and over forty streets, some of which are still recognizable in the city today – such as
James Street, Swan Street, Tudor Street and High Street. While the sewage unfortunately lingered, the city’s swamps were slowly drained and the ‘unwholesome fumes’ began to ease. Indeed, the elegance of Bridgetown became noteworthy. ‘Bridgetown is a fine large town and the streets are straight, wide and clean,’ was how the French Roman Catholic missionary Père Labat described it in the 1690s. ‘The houses are all well built in the English fashion with many glass windows, and are splendidly furnished. In a word, they have an appearance of dignity, refinement and order, that one does not see in the other islands and which indeed would be hard to find anywhere.’14 But it certainly wasn’t Henry Winthrop’s tobacco plant – or the cotton, indigo and ginger which other settlers had tried to harvest in the 1630s and ’40s – which was behind such wealth. Rather, it was the white gold of sugar.

  Along an unsigned, unpaved, bumpy road, set amid acre after acre of swaying cane plants atop the hills of the southern Barbados parish of St George, barely 11 kilometres from Bridgetown, sits Drax Hall. Whereas other plantation houses such as nearby Sunbury have turned themselves into tourist traps for plantation nostalgia, Drax is a private house at the centre of what remains a commercial sugar operation. Littering the outside of this austere, gabled mansion are tractors, farm tools, chemical drums and trailers – as well as the crumbling remnants of an old windmill and boiling house. The funds behind this plantation can be traced back to the 1640s, when the Barbadian pioneer James Drax realized that tobacco or cotton was never going to yield the riches he dreamed of. Cutting his losses, he set off for Recife, in Brazil, to see for himself the cultivation of a crop which was said to promise truly remarkable returns. For the planting and manufacturing of sugar cane had been taking place in Pernambuco, Brazil and the North Guiana coasts for many decades under Dutch and Portuguese management. What Drax brought back to Barbados was the skill of refining and – by working with Sephardic Jewish merchants, who were the early lynchpins in the international sugar trade out of Brazil – the networks to sell it into Europe. He imported the cane plant from New Guinea (where it grew naturally), farmed it on his Barbados estates and then copied the technology developed by Dutch planters in Brazil to make sugar. However, turning the cane into sugar was a slow, painful process, taking ‘divers yeeres paines, care, patience and industry, with the disbersing of vast sums of money’. And Drax’s early crops were ‘so moist, and full of molasses, and so ill cur’d, as they were hardly worth the bringing home for England’.15 Indeed, the early history of Barbados is a chronicle of fires, epidemics, wrecked harvests and hurricanes, a colonial economy being built up through arduous struggle a world away from today’s luxury island resort. But Drax stuck with it and, helped by the soil, climate and trade winds of Barbados (ensuring rapid export times to Europe), he began an agricultural revolution of profound significance for both Caribbean and British imperial history.

  Even now the production of sugar is a complicated and fraught endeavour. The sugar-cane plant needs to be harvested from the fields during the dry months of January–May, cut by machete and placed on to carts (drawn by donkeys in the 1600s), and then its juice extracted as quickly as possible. Today, this is done through vast, mechanized horizontal rollers, but in the seventeenth century it was crushed by pushing it through vertical rollers powered first by oxen and then, from the mid-1700s, by the 500 windmills which dotted the hills and peaks of Barbados. The pure cane juice had then to be siphoned off and taken to the boiling house, usually next to the mill, for a complicated procedure of heating, skimming of impurities, and boiling down to a dark, textured sugar base. At the end of this production line, involving a relentless cycle of cane deliveries, roaring furnaces, heavy machinery and intense heat, the planter was left with muscovado – a raw brown sugar – and a liquid by-product, molasses. The sugar was then dried out before being packed into hogshead barrels and taken to Bridgetown for export. The molasses would be sold, at home and abroad, to rum distilleries and for animal feed.

  All in all, it was a highly advanced industrial process for the early modern era, and the language of the sugar mill – engenho (Portuguese) or ingenio (Spanish), literally ‘the engine’ – hinted at its novel, mechanized nature. And it was by this process that a tiny, wild island on the outer reaches of the Americas was transformed into a well-cultivated market garden capable of offering up astronomical riches to a small, powerful planter class.16 By the mid-eighteenth century there were some 4,000 resident landowners in Barbados, but the wealthiest planters had intermarried and consolidated their plantations – with just thirty estates accounting for almost 80 per cent of the island’s 90,000 acres.17 Generally, the lead planters controlled estates ranging between 200 acres and 1,000 acres: Henry Drax boasted 880 acres; Sir Peter Colleton 700 acres; the sugar baron John Pierce enjoyed the largest with some 1,000 acres under ownership. As they entered into their third generation, in the early eighteenth century the Barbadian plantocracy – the Alleynes, Cumberbatches, Freres, Osbornes, Beckles, Powells and Haynes – formed a solid socio-political elite: Anglican, loyalist and fabulously wealthy. They dominated the Barbadian Assembly, controlled the professions and endowed schools and churches across England, North America and the Caribbean.

  The engine at work. A detailed depiction of sugar production in the French West Indies in the seventeenth century, showing an evaporating furnace, grinding mill driven by oxen, dwellings for the slaves and a large plantation house. Histoire générale des Antilles habités par les Françaist … enrichie de cartes et de figures (Paris, 1667–71).

  As early as the 1650s, a land mass similar in size to the Isle of Wight was exporting some 8,000 tons of sugar a year to England, with a value of well over £3 million. The island was almost entirely given over to cane, with some 93 per cent of its total exports made up of sugar, rum and molasses. ‘Sugar has contributed more to England’s pleasure, glory, and grandeur than any other commodity we deal in or produce, wool not excepted,’ was the judgement of merchant and imperial enthusiast Sir Dalby Thomas in the 1690s.18 As a result, it was regarded as the richest spot in the New World, ‘that fair jewell of your Majesty’s Crown,’ as Barbadian Governor Willoughby described it to King Charles II. Others called it the ‘finest and worthiest island in the World’ and ‘the most flourishing colony the English have’.19’ John Oldmixon, in The British Empire in America (1708), was adamant that, ‘When we examine the Riches that have been rais’d by the Produce of this little Spot of Ground, we shall find that it has been as good as a Mine of Silver or Gold to the Crown of England.’20 The prospect of sharing in such riches might account for all the high-blown elegies offered up to Barbados. ‘The whole is a sweet Spot of Earth, not a Span hardly uncultivated with Sugar-Canes; all sides bend with an easy Declivity to the Sea, and is ever green,’ was what John Atkins, a surgeon in the Royal Navy, thought of it in 1735.21 Catching sight of Barbados on a trip to Jamaica, the attorney and man of letters William Hickey thought:

  this land presents to the eye one of the richest views that can be, one side being covered with the most luxuriant verdure, handsome buildings belonging to the planters, and windmills innumerable, the canes being ground by that machine. It did not appear to me that there was a single foot of uncultivated land upon the whole island. 22

  European society was drinking tea, coffee and chocolate in ever larger quantities during the 1700s and now adding sugar with even greater enthusiasm. As sugar made the transition from elite luxury to dietary staple, consumption in England rose from about 6lb per head in 1710 to over 23lb per head by the 1770s.23 In the process, British culinary habits were transformed. ‘Sugar achieved a revolution in eating habits,’ according to the historian Matthew Parker.

  Along with coffee, tea, and cocoa, jams, processed foods, chocolate and confectionary were now being consumed in much greater quantities. Treacle was spread on bread and put on porridge. Breakfast became sweet, rather than savoury. Pudding, hitherto made of fish or light meat, now embarked on its unhealthy history as a separ
ate sweet course … ‘Sugar is so generally in use, by the assistance of tea,’ read a 1774 report, ‘that even the poor wretches living in almshouses will not be without it.’24

  To satisfy this addiction, the British imported some 8,176 tons of sugar in 1663, almost 25,000 tons in 1710 and over 97,000 tons by 1775.

  All of this demanded a massive West Indies workforce for the planting of cane, its cutting, crushing, boiling and barrelling. But Drax and his fellow planters were not offering to do it themselves. Instead, between 1662 and 1807, British ships carried around 3.25 million African slaves across the Atlantic to America and the Caribbean to work the land.25 Around 40 per cent of these came from West Central Africa (Angola and the Congo); another 40 per cent from Benin and Biafra; some 15 per cent from the Gold Coast, Sierra Leone and Senegambia; and the remainder from other ports and slave forts in South-east Africa and Madagascar.26 One such piece of human cargo was Olaudah Equiano, aka ‘Gustavus Vassa, the African’, whose account of his journey across the Atlantic ‘middle passage’ remains one of the most compelling testimonies to imperial barbarism.

  The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time … The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us … This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable … One day, when we had a smooth sea, and moderate wind, two of my wearied countrymen, who were chained together, preferring death to such a life of misery, somehow made through the nettings, and jumped into the sea; immediately another quite dejected fellow, who, on account of his illness, was suffered to be out of irons, also followed their example.27