Colony of Barbados

The colony where the English plantation system was invented, and then written into law for everyone else to copy. England settled Barbados in 1627 and its first two decades were tobacco and cotton grown by English indentured servants on smallholdings. Sugar changed that in the 1640s, learned from the Dutch and from Portuguese Brazil, and within twenty years the smallholders had been bought out, the estates consolidated, and the island had a Black majority worked under conditions that had no precedent in English experience. The Barbados Slave Code of 1661 gave that system legal form - describing enslaved people as property, denying them any protection in law, and setting punishments without trial - and it was copied almost verbatim by Jamaica, Antigua and, decisively, South Carolina, whose founding planters came directly from here. So a small island's statute became the legal foundation of slavery across the English Atlantic. Bussa's rebellion in 1816 was the island's largest. The colony was governed throughout by an assembly of planters that first met in 1639 and never stopped, giving Barbados unusual continuity. Independence came in 1966. Bridgetown was the capital and its harbour a hub for the whole eastern Caribbean. The island covers only 430 square kilometres and is coral rather than volcanic. Codrington College, endowed in 1710 by a plantation owner, was staffed by enslaved labour belonging to the church. Barbadian settlers founded Charles Town in Carolina in 1670. The colony's assembly is among the oldest in the western hemisphere and has met continuously since 1639.

• Type: Polity
• Government: Colonial administration