Classifications of Race in Barbados

      Barbados was unique in the way they classified people by race in comparison with the French and Spanish colonies but identical to the other British colonies. The British wanted everything to be black and white, literally. The British censuses only provided columns for the enslaved black people and the white people on the island. Nowhere in the census is there a column for people of mixed race, such as people with one white parent and one black parent. Another interesting facet of the Barbados censuses was that the free people of color were not counted in them either. They did not fit into either of the categories used so they were simply left out all together. Although this was by no means an inclusive process, it fit into the way the British wanted to see the world, in black and white.

1680 Census

        The example of John Peers illustrates this fact very well. John Peers was a prominent white planter on the island of Barbados in the seventeenth century. The church on the island had records of Peers baptizing six children by two different enslaved women. In the 1680 census, there is no mention of the women or the children unless they were counted under the black column. Another example is the Daily family. The Daily family was a free family of color in Barbados in the seventeenth century, roughly the same time period as the John Peers example. There are baptismal records from the 1670’s and early 1680’s. Again, the census taken in 1680 held no mention of the Daily family. The bureaucrats in England made occasional mentions of the people excluded from the censuses in their written reports but it was not nearly as detailed as the statistics kept for the white and the enslaved black populations of Barbados.

There was a small group of people of European and African descent on the island. This is verifiable through the baptismal records that were kept for the churches on the island. Beckles believes that the group remained small because the white women on the island anchored the white men on the island in the domestic sphere (Beckles, 42). The same phenomenon took place amongst the white and black population of the island. As the island was still being settled, the population was predominantly men. As time went on, the population of women, both white and black, increased as the island transformed from settlement to colony. The seventeenth century was a time of immense population growth in Barbados. In 1645, the population of Barbados consisted of 11,000 white people and 5,000 enslaved Africans. In 1660, the population was evenly split with 20,000 white people and 20,000 enslaved Africans. By 1679, there were 20,000 white people and 82,000 enslaved Africans. In a thirty-five year span, the enslaved African population multiplied sixteen times as the sugar cane industry expanded by leaps and bounds.

The British were not concerned with the distinction between enslaved Africans and free people of color. They were also not concerned with the occurrence of people of mixed racial identity. The census takers wanted an account of their own, read white, people and the ‘servants’, read enslaved Africans. They wanted their records the way they viewed the world, with white people superior to the black people. Anyone who did not fit into the framework they had designed, they completely ignored. Luckily, the churches did not make any such distinction and through them, we are able to get a clearer picture of the demography of Barbados.

Bibliography:

Hilary Beckles, A History of Barbados: From Amerindian Settlement to Nation-State (New York: Cambridge, 1990), 40-48.

 National Archives London, CO1/44 no. 47xii