As Barbados celebrates 350 years of established parliamentary government, this concise and authoritative history makes a timely appearance, covering the period from the first human settlement by the Amerindians to the present day. Social, political, and economic themes run throughout the book, including detailed aspects of early English colonization, the emergence and eventual abolition of the slave trade, and the development and growth of the sugar industry. Professor Beckles emphasizes the struggles for social equality, civil rights, and material betterment, detailing their continuous flow through the island's history since 1627.

Highly acclaimed when it first appeared in 1990, this general history of Barbados traces the events and ideas that have shaped the collaborative experience of all the islands inhabitants. In this second edition, Hilary Beckles updates the text to reflect the considerable number of writings recently published on Barbados. He presents new insights and analyses key events in a lucid and provocative style which will appeal to all those who have an interest in the island's past and present. Using a vigorous approach, Hilary Beckles examines how the influences of the Amerindians, European colonisation, the sugar industry, the African slave trade, emancipation, the civil rights movement, independence in 1966 and nationalism have shaped contemporary Barbados.

In this eye-witness history of Barbados, Ligon gives perhaps the earliest account of attempts at sugar manufacture. His description of a plantation indicates the size and complexity of the estates acquired in Barbados by subtle and greedy' planters, even in the early days of the industry.

Historical and possible architectural links between the island of Barbados and South Carolina.

In the late 1630s, lured by the promise of the New World, Andrea Stuart’s earliest known maternal ancestor, George Ashby, set sail from England to settle in Barbados. He fell into the life of a sugar plantation owner by mere chance, but by the time he harvested his first crop, a revolution was fully under way: the farming of sugar cane, and the swiftly increasing demands for sugar worldwide, would not only lift George Ashby from abject poverty and shape the lives of his descendants, but it would also bind together ambitious white entrepreneurs and enslaved black workers in a strangling embrace. Stuart uses her own family story—from the seventeenth century through the present—as the pivot for this epic tale of migration, settlement, survival, slavery and the making of the Americas. As it grew, the sugar trade enriched Europe as never before, financing the Industrial Revolution and fuelling the Enlightenment. And, as well, it became the basis of many economies in South America, played an important part in the evolution of the United States as a world power and transformed the Caribbean into an archipelago of riches. But this sweet and hugely profitable trade—“white gold,” as it was known—had profoundly less palatable consequences in its precipitation of the enslavement of Africans to work the fields on the islands and, ultimately, throughout the American continents. Interspersing the tectonic shifts of colonial history with her family’s experience, Stuart explores the interconnected themes of settlement, sugar and slavery with extraordinary subtlety and sensitivity. In examining how these forces shaped her own family—its genealogy, intimate relationships, circumstances of birth, varying hues of skin—she illuminates how her family, among millions of others like it, in turn transformed the society in which they lived, and how that interchange continues to this day. Shifting between personal and global history, Stuart gives us a deepened understanding of the connections between continents, between black and white, between men and women, between the free and the enslaved. It is a story brought to life with riveting and unparalleled immediacy, a story of fundamental importance to the making of our world.