Organisers: Dr Michael Bennett (University of Sheffield), Dr Misha Ewen (University of Sussex), and Dr Hannah Murphy (MMoR & CEMS, KCL)
Barbados is central to the global history of slavery. The island’s “sugar boom” in the 1640s made it the first and largest “slave society” in the seventeenth-century British empire, whose prosperity was underpinned by plantation-based chattel slavery. By the 1680s, approximately 40,000 enslaved African people were forced to labour in the Barbadian plantation economy, producing sugar and other tropical commodities for sale in European markets. Historians have long been aware that the ideas, practices, and institutions which emerged in seventeenth-century Barbados shaped the development of slavery elsewhere in the English empire, including Jamaica and South Carolina (Dunn, 1972; Roberts, 2016; Bennett, 2023). However, with some notable exceptions, the depth, extent, and strength of the connections between Barbados and English society in the formative period of the seventeenth century remain understudied (e.g. Amussen, 2007; Brewer, 2021; Newman, 2022).
This two-day workshop brings together scholars carrying out new archival research on the history of early Barbados and its reciprocal ties with early modern England, in order to share ideas about methodological approaches and explore whether foregrounding the formative period of the seventeenth century can advance our understanding of slavery, empire, and race-making. For example, we are particularly interested in using insights from histories of gender and intimate networks in the British Atlantic world to understand the role of women and families in these developments (Shaw, 2013; Fuentes, 2016; Livesay, 2018; Walker, 2020; Morgan, 2021; Ewen, 2022; Shaw, 2024).
We are also interested in examining how Caribbean slavery was “brought home” by Barbadian enslavers in the seventeenth century, by tracing their imprint on Britain’s social, economic, political, cultural, and institutional development. How does the presence and influence of Barbadian absentees and their wealth reshape how we think about important moments of political change in seventeenth-century England (e.g. the Civil War from 1642-46, the Restoration in 1660, the effort to centralise governance of the empire in the 1670s, the Exclusion Crisis in 1679-81, and the Glorious Revolution in 1688)? Did Barbadians reinvest wealth derived from enslavement into philanthropic organisations in England (e.g. hospitals, almshouses, schools, churches, and parish-level poor relief), and if so, what are the implications of this for our understanding of English social history in the early modern period? Was the geographical extent of the influence of Barbadians and their slavery-derived wealth confined to major port cities such as London and Bristol in this period, or did it percolate throughout the interior regions of England? What were the experiences of African and African-descended people in seventeenth-century England?
As well as workshop panels, time will be allocated for exploring KCL’s special collections, which includes a copy of Richard Ligon’s History of Barbados (1657) with unique marginalia, providing insights into how Barbadian ideas were consumed and interpreted in England.
Keynote speakers:
Dr Jenny Shaw (Alabama)
Prof Susan D. Amussen (UC Merced)