Beckles presents a political and economic history of Barbados from its founding as the paradigmatic “pure plantation” slave society to the post-slavery era marked by the labor rebellions of the formerly enslaved. Using an extensive array of original sources from archival holdings in Barbados, London, and New York, Beckles chronicles the systematic subordination of Blacks for two and half centuries, enforced by “military machinery” and the execution of the law, beginning with the Slave Code of 1661 (24). Beckles also demonstrates that from the earliest moments, the enslaved challenged the conditions in which “the administering of physical and mental violence was the norm” (28).
The bonded labor of whites, not unlike “slave-like relations” (32), formed a part of the early history of Barbados—particularly the governance of the Irish, who were subjected to laws modeled on the Slave Code of 1661. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the demand...