So, alongside the forts, the domestic and commercial fabric of Bridgetown started to reflect these colonial economics. Although British chroniclers were always keen to emphasize the fact that this was no Baroque city, laid out on a grid-pattern like the vainglorious French and Spanish colony ports, Bridgetown started to be widely admired for its elegance. ‘The Bridge Town, or rather City, is certainly the finest and largest in all the Islands, if not in all the English Colonies abroad,’ noted John Oldmixon in 1708. ‘It contains 1200 Houses, built of Stone; the Windows glass’d, many of them sash’d; the Streets broad, the Houses high, and the Rents as dear in Cheapside, in the Bridge, as in Cheapside in London.’53
This was all the more surprising when one considers that the main focus of the sugar barons and slave traders was always the plantation house. One only has to visit St Nicholas Abbey in the north or Sunbury Plantation in the south to realize the time and energy which the planter class spent on exhibiting their prosperity in the drawing rooms, dining rooms and parlours of the great slave mansions. But what was so distinct about Barbados was that the plantocracy also had townhouses and took urban culture seriously. The diary of the prominent planter and member of St Michael’s vestry, Francis Ford, reveals just such a high level of both urban attachment and English combination of country and city, rus and urbe. ‘Early in the morning set out to Bridgetown,’ he writes of 12 January 1790. ‘Breakfasted with Beckles [town agent for Ford], attended the meeting of the Vestry … Saw Phillips about the sale of Codrington [estate], gave the paper to Beckles to prepare … Dined with the Vestry.’ On 18 January, ‘after breakfast went [to] Town, attended to Vestry, agreed to sign the sale for Codrington … returned home to dinner’. And on 27 January Ford only continued the pattern: ‘Went to Bridgetown … took the Bay Rents [part of his responsibility as vestryman].’ Numerous merchants, lawyers and professionals resided in Bridgetown to be close to the centre of judicial, military and political affairs, while the big planters retained a city residence. As the Royal Navy surgeon John Atkins described it, ‘Bridgetown, the principal of the Island … is the Residence of the Governor, Factors, and Merchants, who transact their Business here and at their Plantations alternately.’54 From a property list of 1706, for example, we know that Eliza Drax (of the Drax clan) kept a Bridgetown house, as did leading planters Richard Forstall, Samuel Hassall and John Blackman.
What is more, there emerged in the latter half of the eighteenth century a concerted attempt to beautify this civic environment. That Georgian vision of urban politeness – of neo-classical designs and uniform aesthetics – which was to refashion Bath, Newcastle and Edinburgh, also changed the face of Bridgetown, Barbados. Following a devastating fire in 1766, a series of ordinances were passed to promote the building of new homes in Bridgetown with ‘uniformity and gracefulness’. Houses were not to be constructed higher than three storeys, with any parapet walls carried two and a half feet above the eaves. And when it came to materials, the building code included strict precautions against further infernos sweeping the city.
The outside of all buildings within the limits of the said town, be henceforth made of brick or stone, or of bricks and stones together, except door-cases and window frames, which shall be made of any kind of wood and set four inches at least within the wall, and all buildings shall be covered with copper, slate, tile, sawed stone, or block-tin and not other materials.55
The townhouse style, meanwhile, was either Dutch-influenced with curvilinear gables, or a more classical Georgian aesthetic replete with tall windows, central entrances, minimal ornamentation and hip roofs with parapets (most of which would be blown apart in the hurricane of 1780).56
Alongside the Georgian townhouses, the commercial district of Bridgetown grew up around the Customs House on Cheapside. The same planters who took city residences, also owned storehouses for holding sugar between the harvest and its export. Cheapside, still lined today with three-storey, limestone warehouses built in the 1700s, was christened in a conscious declaration of Bridgetown’s commercial dependence upon London. Alongside it, Cornhill and Broad Street provided a West Indian answer to the financial sector of the City of London. And the dependence of Barbados on the markets, financiers and politicians of London was made even plainer with the naming of Milk Street, London Street and Maiden Lane in honour of the capital; when textile imports from Manchester, slave ships out of Liverpool and other manufactured goods from industrial England started to arrive in Barbados, Bridgetown was swift to respond with the naming of Manchester, Liverpool and Lancaster Lanes. The biggest hardware warehouse in Bridgetown even adopted the title of Britain’s metal-bashing metropolis: the ‘Birmingham Warehouse’. The colonial fealty remained, even if it was becoming as much industrial as financial by the end of the 1700s.57
THE SPIRIT OF ENGLISHMEN IN OUR HEARTS
Where did all this staggering sugar wealth end up? Barbados was by no means as bad as Jamaica and Antigua when it came to absentee landlords, but the profits from its plantations were always more likely to be found in Dorset, Surrey and Hampshire than in the parishes of St George, St Andrew and St Phillips. The history of the Lascelles family is telling. In the early 1700s, Henry Lascelles, son of a Conservative MP and part of a middling gentry family, left Yorkshire for Barbados to join his eldest brother George in the sugar-exporting and slave-importing business. Between 1713 and 1717, Henry Lascelles had shares in twenty-one slave ships, imported 1,101 Africans and used the profits to buy up plantations across the West Indies. He embedded himself further in the Barbados slavery business by marrying Mary Carter, the daughter of the leading Bridgetown slave-trader Edwin Carter. Together with his brothers Edward and George, Henry Lascelles established a London commission house, importing sugar from the West Indies, and also earning himself a lucrative income by landing the post of customs collector for Bridgetown in 1715 (a post he passed on to his brother Edward in 1734).
From 1738, Lascelles was an absentee owner of a plantation at Holetown. But he was far more notorious as the innovator of the so-called ‘floating factory’, which sought to apply the logistics of military planning to slave trafficking, with vessels stationed off the Guinea coast at Anomabu used as holding pens in place of incarcerating the slave cargo in troublesome African forts. It proved a highly profitable operation, with the Lascelles and their backers moving into the shipping of ivory and gold, as well as Africans. By 1787 the family held more than 27,000 acres in Barbados, Jamaica, Grenada and Tobago and sent their money back across the Atlantic, commissioning the gorgeous Harewood House, outside Harrogate in Yorkshire, as testimony to their commercial success (although its range of Chippendale furniture, Old Master paintings and Chinese wallpaper carefully hid the sources of the Lascelles’ wealth).58 However, Harewood was just one of a number of West Indian planter palaces springing up over the 1700s – there was Dodington Hall in Gloucester, where the Codrington family (who also endowed the Anglican seminary Codrington College in Barbados and the library of All Souls College at Oxford) sunk their riches; Charborough House in Dorset, where some of the Drax family funds went; their fictional correlative was Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, where the wealth of Sir Thomas Bertram seemed always shrouded in Antiguan, plantation mystery. So remarkable was this influx of Caribbean cash that the former prime minister Lord Shelburne exclaimed in 1778 that ‘there were scarcely ten miles together throughout the country where the house and estate of a rich West Indian was not to be seen’.59
This ‘mercantile-financial complex’ also purchased the British establishment. It was not simply that the Lascelles and the Draxes from Barbados, or the Beckfords from Jamaica, the Martins from Antigua or the Stapletons from Nevis sat in the House of Commons; rather, the tentacles of plantation finance spread right through the British commercial, political and ecclesiastical classes. Following the death of Christopher Codrington, the Church of England – through its missionary arm, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts – ran the 980-acre Codrington plantation in Bar
bados, helpfully branding its slaves on their chests with the word ‘SOCIETY’. Junior princes of the royal family counted themselves staunch supporters of the slave-trading industry, with an equally large number of the British aristocracy heavily invested in its continued profitability. Industry, finance, faith and nobility were all bound into the West Indian trade.
Yet for all its political and economic intimacy with Britain, colonial Barbados was also involved in a different set of trade relationships that would – in the latter half of the eighteenth century – force the island to affirm its imperial identity. For the commercial traffic blocking up Carlisle Bay came as much from the ports of America’s Thirteen Colonies as it did from Bristol, London and Liverpool. Despite the failure of Henry Winthrop’s tobacco crop, another of Governor Winthrop’s sons, Samuel, decided in 1647 to leave godly Boston to start his own business shipping wine from Madeira to Barbados – before then settling there in 1648, ‘where in all probability I can live better than in other places’. Austere as ever, Governor Winthrop simply noted of that year, ‘it pleased the Lord to open us a trade with Barbados and other Islands in the West Indies’.60 That trade accelerated in the ensuing decades. The public wharf in Bridgetown was renamed ‘New England Row’, which itself led on to ‘New England Street’, as more than 100 ships carrying timber, rice, fish and other provisions annually docked in Barbados from New England in the early 1700s. ‘The commerce of the West India islands is a part of the American system of commerce,’ wrote the Boston lawyer John Adams. ‘They can neither do without us nor we without them. The Creator has placed us upon the globe in such a situation that we have occasion for each other.’61 Indeed, the building of the sugar plantations was dependent upon the import of timber, shingles, horses and cattle – as well as fish, beef, pork and cereal products – from the American north, while Boston, New York and Charlestown spent their export profits on West Indian sugar and molasses. On 3 November 1785 seven ships arrived at Bridgetown, including a schooner from Philadelphia. Its cargo was typical of the time: 38 hogshead of corn, 27 kegs and 29 barrels of bread; 53 barrels and 4 hogshead of apples; 236 barrels of flour; 1 wheelbarrow; 55,000 shingles; 3,000 hoops; 6 kegs of sturgeon; 1 horse and 1,600 staves.62 Similarly, the journey of the 40-ton barque Palm Tree provides an exemplary tale of commerce in the Georgian colonies. The ship set sail in October 1799 from Plymouth, England, taking the westerlies into the Channel, down the Portuguese coast to Madeira, then west along 13˚N latitude, round the southern edge of Barbados and into Bridgetown some eight and a half weeks later. She exchanged her cargo of biscuit, cider and serges for rum, sugar and molasses, before sailing for ports in Virginia (taking a further five weeks). She then returned to England with tobacco, after a regular, nine-month, 16,000-kilometre circuit.63
Few embodied this trade between the British American colonies more obviously than Gedney Clarke Senior, who succeeded Edward Lascelles as customs collector for Bridgetown and was, for some decades, one of the most successful transatlantic merchants, with interests covering South Carolina, Virginia, New England and Great Britain. His business life began in the late 1730s, exporting sugar and rum to Salem and bringing fish and whale oil back to Barbados. Clarke then developed a long-running business partnership with the Lascelles family, setting up a trading house in London specializing in sugar plantations, selling slaves and transporting military supplies, as well as investing in the coming Dutch colonies of Demerara and Essequibo in the West Indies. Operating out of Bridgetown, Clarke ran a highly successful trading corporation which took as much advantage of Britain’s imperial-mercantilist trading system as possible.64
Gedney Clarke’s close connections to the wealthy, landed Fairfax family of Virginia also meant that he was responsible for inviting a young Fairfax retainer and land surveyor, George Washington, to visit Barbados in 1751. Washington arrived with his half-brother Lawrence (who was hopeful that the blustery sea air might alleviate his tuberculosis) and spent a bucolic few months riding across the slave plantations, visiting the theatre, dining at the Anglophile Beefstake and Tripe clubs and generally taking in colonial society. He rented the house of Captain Crofton (at an exorbitant £15 per month ‘exclusive of liquor and washing’), just south of Bridgetown – on the edge of the Garrison district – and took advantage of his host’s military background to inspect the defences at James Fort and Charles Fort, guarding the entrance into Carlisle Bay. In the succeeding years, British soldiers would have a dual reason to curse Washington’s time in Bridgetown: first, for his detailed knowledge of the principles of British defence fortifications; and, second, because he contracted smallpox during his stay, which ensured his later immunity against the disease, to which thousands of his fellow revolutionaries succumbed.
Even Washington’s enjoyable time in Barbados, however, could not alter the fact that by the latter half of the eighteenth century the mutual interests of the West Indies and the Thirteen Colonies were starting to dissolve. When the much larger French colonies of Martinique and Saint-Domingue entered the sugar trade and were able to use their economies of scale to drive down production costs, the Barbadian plantocracy found its American market drying up. By the 1730s, a gallon of molasses from Barbados could cost 10d but only 4d from Martinique – and the New England rum distillers wasted little time dropping British for French suppliers. The response of the Barbadian planters was not to cut costs or improve production, but to lobby the British parliament to impose a tax on foreign molasses. ‘Molasses was an essential ingredient in American independence,’ wrote John Adams looking back on the mercantilist Molasses Act (1733), which imposed an import duty of 6p per gallon on foreign molasses entering North America in order to protect the profits of the West Indian planters.65 It was the first step along the path toward the the Stamp Act and taxation without representation – and Boston’s merchants suspected the West Indian planters of egging on the British parliament. The next turn of the screw was the 1764 Sugar Act, which cut the duty on molasses but imposed a new tax on imported sugar and, in the opinion of many North American merchants, once more sacrificed the interests of the Thirteen Colonies ‘to a few West-India planters’. Costs were being piled up in Massachusetts and Philadelphia to enrich the already prosperous Caribbean planters. When the Barbadian Assembly accepted the 1764 Stamp Act, out of ‘a principle of loyalty to our King and country’ it was clear that there was a gulf between Boston and Bridgetown as to the nature of the British Empire to which they wished to belong. ‘Can no punishment be devised for Barbados and Port Royal in Jamaica, for their base desertion of the cause of liberty, their tame surrender of the rights of Britons, their mean, timid resignation to slavery?’ asked John Adams. Barbados’s exports were added to Boston’s growing list of non-importation goods, and the island was denied ‘the comfortable enjoyment of every delicious dainty from us … till they are brought to a state of despondency without anything but stinking fish and false doctrine’. The Barbados Mercury responded to Boston’s insolence with a castigating assault on the ‘set of men, who, under the specious name of asserters of their liberty, dare, contrary to all laws human and divine, break out into the most outrageous Acts of Rebellion against their Sovereign defender’.66
The tussle over molasses and money thus became a broader divergence of views between the North American merchants and the West Indian planters. On the one hand, the ethos of self-government was just as proud in Bridgetown as in Boston. The Bridgetown Assembly – established in 1639 – was the third-oldest parliament in the British Empire after those of Virginia and Bermuda, and the island only agreed to its status as a Crown colony in the 1660s after King Charles II had promised to safeguard its autonomy. But whereas in the Thirteen Colonies a more obviously ‘American’ identity emerged out of the struggle against the Sugar Act, Stamp Act, and Townshend duties, the Barbadians responded to this Atlanticist crisis of imperial authority by embedding themselves even deeper in Britishness. ‘British blood runs in our veins and the spirit of Englishmen in
our hearts,’ declared a local Bajan patriot.67 And as the African slave population increased on the island, identification with white Europe was an important means of both retaining separation and cementing a sense of cultural superiority. ‘It is to Great Britain alone that our West Indian planters consider themselves belonging,’ in the words of Bryan Edwards. The inchoate British Empire of the mid-eighteenth century – that collection of plantations, cities, Crown colonies and trading companies – was a highly lucrative consortium for the planters of the Caribbean. With their finances and families divided between Britain and the West Indies, they had few doubts about standing by the colonial system.
In turn, London looked after the interests of its loyal, Anglican and well-connected plantocracy. If there was to be a struggle between the North American colonies and the West Indian interest, the Caribbeans were going to win every time – as the passage of the Molasses Act and the Sugar Act and the exclusion of plantation goods from the Townshend duties proved. As, indeed, did the miserably slow passage of William Wilberforce’s Bill to abolish the slave trade, first raised in the House of Commons in 1789 and subject to relentless opposition by sugar- and slave-funded Members of Parliament. It also meant that when the Boston Tea-Party began the journey towards American independence, London proved more determined than ever to hold on to the West Indies. There could be no ‘domino effect’ in the Americas; the British Exchequer simply could not afford the loss of such a vital, colonial cash-cow.
THE GREAT CAPITAL
Yet by the time Washington was crossing the Potomac in December 1776 and the American Revolution was splintering the First British Empire, Barbados was in fact no longer proving quite such a lucrative possession for the Exchequer. It was still profitable, but more than a century of plantation farming and sugar cane monoculture had taken its toll on the island’s soil. And it simply could not compete against the economies of scale offered either by the enormous French colonies of Saint-Domingue and Martinique, or by the prospering British islands of Jamaica and Antigua. Indeed, as early as the 1750s Jamaican sugar production was exceeding Barbados’s output, while planters were having to expend ever more resources on labour, manuring and replanting in order to keep yields up. One solution was to refine further (or ‘clay’) the muscovado, providing the white sugar for the making of preserves which commanded a much higher price and smaller shipping costs. But it was only a stop-gap (as was a boom in prices following slave revolts in Saint-Domingue in 1794) in a trajectory of relative economic decline compared to other Caribbean colonies.
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